Rev. Gary Keene: Good morning.
Rev. Gary Keene: My name is Gary.
Rev. Gary Keene: I'm privileged to be with you here this Sunday.
Rev. Gary Keene: I appreciate the opportunity to step back into the pulpit.
Rev. Gary Keene: I last served as senior pastor over in Camarillo but spent much of my ministry career working in the regional and national level.
Rev. Gary Keene: So it's always good to kind of just be back home and doing this thing.
Rev. Gary Keene: I was particularly engaged when Darren invited me to see that the assigned lesson for today is the very familiar parable of the Good Samaritan.
Rev. Gary Keene: I thought, oh, that's going to be easy, and you know it's such a rich and dense story.
Rev. Gary Keene: I realized part of the story is to unpack it and find out what's really there and to try and get past our familiarity with it.
Rev. Gary Keene: To try and get past our familiarity with it.
Rev. Gary Keene: So the way I want to offer to you the scripture lesson and the reading of the story this morning is by we're going to show it in the common English translation in the text I believe you have we'll come up on just a moment but I'm going to read it in a transliteration of the Greek, to take literally each of the words from Greek into English.
Rev. Gary Keene: I didn't do this.
Rev. Gary Keene: You can get it all online, but it's a fun way to create kind of a gap in what we hear and what we see and what we think we know, so that we might hear it afresh.
Rev. Gary Keene: There are some tricks to it.
Rev. Gary Keene: It sounds like the pirate from the Lego movie or Yoda in Star Wars, reading from the King James version.
Rev. Gary Keene: There's a stiltedness to the grammar.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's what kind of unsettles it.
Rev. Gary Keene: I would also flag that throughout.
Rev. Gary Keene: One of the motifs that we'll pick up later talking about it is everywhere it says a certain man you know went down to Jericho and a certain Levite and a certain priest the Greek, for that is really any.
Rev. Gary Keene: So it's really anyone, any person going down to Jericho, any Levite, any Pharisee.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's an interesting thread that comes through the story.
Rev. Gary Keene: The last one is that the keyword neighbor is rendered from the Greek, as in Old English we would think of someone who is nigh, someone who is near, and the bor part neighbor.
Rev. Gary Keene: Bor refers to dwelling place, so a neighbor is someone who lives nearby.
Rev. Gary Keene: So when we hear that, you'll kind of plug that in.
Rev. Gary Keene: So I think you don't usually stand for the gospel reading, am I correct?
Rev. Gary Keene: Right?
Rev. Gary Keene: Okay, good, stay seated so that we can hear and try and see and get this story.
Rev. Gary Keene: It is the parable.
Rev. Gary Keene: You know it functions on its own.
Rev. Gary Keene: You can take just the parable Jesus tells and it works fine.
Rev. Gary Keene: But the way it's been given to us through Scripture is it's a story within a story.
Rev. Gary Keene: So there's the setup of a certain lawyer comes to taunt and tempt Jesus what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
Rev. Gary Keene: And Jesus says since he's a lawyer, that is a legal scholar of the Torah.
Rev. Gary Keene: He says how do you read the law?
Rev. Gary Keene: And he gives the very canned but correct answer, the Shema, what every faithful Jewish kid learns in their bar mitzvah Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.
Rev. Gary Keene: And Jesus says Thou hast answered correctly this do and thou shalt live.
Rev. Gary Keene: But he, the lawyer, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, and who is my neighbor?
Rev. Gary Keene: And the Jesus said A certain human downstepped from Jerusalem into Jericho and it is happening, robbers he falls among, who outstrip him and blows placing on him, came away, leaving him half dead.
Rev. Gary Keene: By coincidence, a certain priest descended on the road and, perceiving him beside, came instead on the other side.
Rev. Gary Keene: Likewise, yet also a Levite, coming according to the place and perceiving him instead beside, came on the other side.
Rev. Gary Keene: Yet a certain Samaritan, being on his way, came according to him and, perceiving him, he is compassioned and coming toward him, he downbinds the wounds of him on pouring olive oil and wine, mounting yet him, on the beast of him, leads him to the con, every place receiving and was uncared of him.
Rev. Gary Keene: And on the morrow outcoming, he is extracting two denarii he gives to the conkeeper and said to him be you caring for him and which any ever you should be toward spending, I, in the coming back, shall be giving to you.
Rev. Gary Keene: Any of these three is seeming to you to have become the near one of the one falling into the robbers and the one yet said the one doing mercy with him.
Rev. Gary Keene: And the one yet said the one doing mercy with him said then to him the Jesus, be you going and be you doing likewise.
Rev. Gary Keene: Word of God for the people of God.
Rev. Gary Keene: Thanks be to God, amen.
Rev. Gary Keene: Well, we know this parable and this teaching, perhaps a little bit too well.
Rev. Gary Keene: It leads to the possibility.
Rev. Gary Keene: I mean it's in the common vernacular.
Rev. Gary Keene: People beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition know this story of the Good Samaritan.
Rev. Gary Keene: As William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain at Yale, said it it is well-worn because it wears well.
Rev. Gary Keene: That said, its familiarity can lead us to not taking it seriously enough to really understand how radically it can challenge us always, but particularly today.
Rev. Gary Keene: So what I want to offer today is invite us into a very close Bible study of this text and see if we can find things we didn't know before.
Rev. Gary Keene: With that in mind, would you pray with me?
Rev. Gary Keene: Gracious God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of these our hearts be acceptable.
Rev. Gary Keene: O thou who art our rock and redeemer, amen.
Rev. Gary Keene: First premise Good Samaritan.
Rev. Gary Keene: Bad interpretations.
Rev. Gary Keene: One of my early churches was helping to clean out the closet at the church and we found something that I found fascinating.
Rev. Gary Keene: This was an old church in Pasadena and it was a collection of black and white photos mounted on hardboard and it was obviously a teaching tool for Sunday school and youth groups, that sort of thing of this parable.
Rev. Gary Keene: There was a woman in the congregation who had been a photographer for the newspaper and instead of a flannel graph, somebody can tell the young folks what a flannel graph was instead of a flannel graph or the chalkboard.
Rev. Gary Keene: They went high-tech and used her talent and they staged the scenes of this parable and she took the photos and then you can imagine her.
Rev. Gary Keene: You know a teacher or youth leader like this, sitting with young people and going through the images of the story, almost like a graphic novel, beautiful black and white photos.
Rev. Gary Keene: Now, mind you, this was done in the 50s and it was interesting to me to see how they had tried to tell this very familiar story.
Rev. Gary Keene: So in this version of the story, where they had obviously engaged I mean it was a brilliant idea they engaged the youth, the young people, the kids, everybody was involved in taking these photos and creating this story.
Rev. Gary Keene: So they were living the story, if you will.
Rev. Gary Keene: So in this story, the one going down to Jericho, he's the newspaper delivery boy.
Rev. Gary Keene: He's maybe eight years old, he's practically got a beanie cap on is the way I remember it but he's riding his bike down the street with his newspapers.
Rev. Gary Keene: Now, all of the photo cards are not there, there's some gaps, but we are instantly able to see who's the bad guy, who's the robber.
Rev. Gary Keene: So the kid is riding down the street with his papers and here, on the other side of some shrubbery, it's this guy with black slicked-back hair and he's wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up and he's smoking a cigarette.
Rev. Gary Keene: You know he's the bad guy.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's perfectly obvious.
Rev. Gary Keene: The next available panel shows the kid crashed out on the sidewalk, newspapers all over the place and the slick haired guy is walking away kind of smirking over his shoulder, probably took his newspaper money, something like that.
Rev. Gary Keene: And then, sure enough, comes the Good Samaritan, and in this instance it's this tall blonde guy with a square jaw.
Rev. Gary Keene: It looks like Clark Kent.
Rev. Gary Keene: I found out later it was the choir director's son.
Rev. Gary Keene: So he's the good guy and he picks the boy up and he takes him, puts him in his car a 38 Hudson, I noticed, I just happened to know that and drives him to what apparently is Aunt Bea's house.
Rev. Gary Keene: She comes out, she takes the kid and there's the whole story.
Rev. Gary Keene: It was a brilliant idea, beautiful presentation.
Rev. Gary Keene: I thought it was fantastic, except for it's dead wrong.
Rev. Gary Keene: You know why it's dead wrong, don't you?
Rev. Gary Keene: Because the story that Jesus tells is a choir director boy driving the car sideswipes the kid on the bicycle and the slick-haired guy rolls up on his Harley, puts his cigarette out, loads the kid onto his motorcycle and takes him to the emergency room.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's the parable of the Good Samaritan, not this one they put together on the cards.
Rev. Gary Keene: Because you see the point of the Good Samar.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's not what to do, it's the who.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's the question the lawyer asks.
Rev. Gary Keene: I know what to do.
Rev. Gary Keene: Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, neighbor as yourself.
Rev. Gary Keene: But who's my neighbor?
Rev. Gary Keene: So, heads up, jesus is not going to take this question as it is.
Rev. Gary Keene: He's not even going to answer the question.
Rev. Gary Keene: He's going to raise questions.
Rev. Gary Keene: He subverts the whole scenario, which that's the nature of his ministry.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's the nature of almost all of the parables to turn things upside down, to turn our expectations upside down.
Rev. Gary Keene: So he takes the lawyer's question, tells this story and starts asking questions that then the lawyer and we as the audience must answer.
Rev. Gary Keene: So there are two subversions, two flippings, if you will, in this parable.
Rev. Gary Keene: The first one is right on the surface.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's about stereotypes and it's the one we most know and we just talked about.
Rev. Gary Keene: Jesus uses a very classic, typical three-phase setup.
Rev. Gary Keene: Most know and we just talked about.
Rev. Gary Keene: Jesus uses a very classic, typical three-phase setup.
Rev. Gary Keene: You know this from children's stories.
Rev. Gary Keene: There's three pigs, there's three bears, there's three bowls of porridge.
Rev. Gary Keene: We tell it in jokes A priest and a rabbi and a pastor walk into a bar.
Rev. Gary Keene: The function of the three is to set up a pattern so that the third one surprises you, tells you something.
Rev. Gary Keene: So he does that.
Rev. Gary Keene: The priest and Levite.
Rev. Gary Keene: People absolutely know who those are A priest, a Levite and a Samaritan.
Rev. Gary Keene: Now we do not live in the Middle East at that time to understand the gut punch how that landed for those listening.
Rev. Gary Keene: Samaria at that time, if you want to go back into history, was after the Kingdom of Israel had divided.
Rev. Gary Keene: There was a difference between the two.
Rev. Gary Keene: It was kind of like the Civil War Confederacy, north and South.
Rev. Gary Keene: The real issue was that particularly the Samaritans in that area of Samaria they had, whereas some of the Israelites in the north had kept to themselves, the Samaritans had intermarried with non-Jews and Gentiles and they worshipped on a different mountain.
Rev. Gary Keene: They were hardcore about following the Torah.
Rev. Gary Keene: They saw themselves as Jews, but the Israelites in the north did not see them as such and didn't want to have anything to do with them, considered them dangerous and practically heathen.
Rev. Gary Keene: So the notion that a Samaritan would do the good thing was quite shocking to them.
Rev. Gary Keene: He tells this story and everybody knows well, of course you're going to help the guy in the ditch, right?
Rev. Gary Keene: Of course you would do that.
Rev. Gary Keene: But a Samaritan Wait what?
Rev. Gary Keene: What?
Rev. Gary Keene: A good Samaritan is an oxymoron, so Jesus has flipped that stereotype as a part of further cracking open what they think they already know.
Rev. Gary Keene: So that's the first subversion for his audience.
Rev. Gary Keene: And what's our equivalent?
Rev. Gary Keene: I've preached this story over the years many times and every time I'm kind of looking for what's the story that would help us hear it.
Rev. Gary Keene: And it's in the news right now.
Rev. Gary Keene: Right now it's in the Texas flooding.
Rev. Gary Keene: Now.
Rev. Gary Keene: A big part of my ministry was in camping ministry so I've been paying close attention because many of those impacted were kids at camps and I can't tell you the grief that is flowing through the camping community.
Rev. Gary Keene: All of my newsletters and feeds about that are just, you know, this is the worst thing imaginable.
Rev. Gary Keene: You know you send your kids to camp.
Rev. Gary Keene: As counselors and deans, we take our kids into camp and we have them for our own for that week, and to have that happen is just the most horrible thing in the world.
Rev. Gary Keene: So it has happened and the stories that are coming out about the response and the questions about that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Rev. Gary Keene: One of the stories that got tagged was a US Coast Guard rescue swimmer saved 165 kids.
Rev. Gary Keene: So I checked on that, because that's quite the story, isn't it?
Rev. Gary Keene: Of course you would expect a US Coast Guard person as well asa, trained swimmer to be a part of that saving.
Rev. Gary Keene: I would notice just to be accurate in the details, he was never in the water.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's not his involvement.
Rev. Gary Keene: He was basically the on-the-ground coordinator and triage coordinator for the choppers that were coming in and lifting kids out.
Rev. Gary Keene: So that's one of the stories of this tragedy and you kind of want to wave the flag.
Rev. Gary Keene: Great, he saved 165 kids.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's the person you would expect to do the saving right.
Rev. Gary Keene: The story not told that's racing through the camping network, two camp counselors, two young gals college-age gals at another camp not the Camp Mystic, but another camp saved 20 of their girls by doing exactly what camp counselors are trained to do.
Rev. Gary Keene: They identified that they took seriously the problem that was coming.
Rev. Gary Keene: They gathered their kids ahead of time.
Rev. Gary Keene: They took some coloring books and games with them and their song books.
Rev. Gary Keene: They got them to high ground.
Rev. Gary Keene: They managed to be just above the water.
Rev. Gary Keene: They stayed calm, kept the kids calm, kept them a little distracted with the games.
Rev. Gary Keene: They did all of this and saved those 20 girls until they could be choppered out the part that's not made it into the news.
Rev. Gary Keene: Yet who were they?
Rev. Gary Keene: Two young Latinas who came across the Mexican border to work in that camp, which was multilingual.
Rev. Gary Keene: This is common in the camping community.
Rev. Gary Keene: We send counselors back and forth across state lines and conference lines, church lines, in order to kind of refresh and get new ideas, give them the opportunity of like an internship.
Rev. Gary Keene: Nobody's telling the story of two young Mexican girls who saved 20 children.
Rev. Gary Keene: Why is that?
Rev. Gary Keene: You just kind of have to ask the question, the same way Jesus' audience was asking how is it that a Samaritan would do the right thing?
Rev. Gary Keene: Jesus isn't done.
Rev. Gary Keene: The second subversion is deeper and very remote from us.
Rev. Gary Keene: For a while I worked in Montana, wyoming and Colorado, and one of the first things I was told when I moved to Billings, montana, was don't miss the Saturday farmer's market.
Rev. Gary Keene: And you want to be there early because that's when you can get the Hutterites fresh bread.
Rev. Gary Keene: And I said what?
Rev. Gary Keene: So?
Rev. Gary Keene: The Hutterites, you may know, are kind of like Mennonites.
Rev. Gary Keene: They're kind of like the Amish, kind of like Mennonites.
Rev. Gary Keene: They're kind of like the Amish.
Rev. Gary Keene: They live in colonies.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's a very old school kind of community.
Rev. Gary Keene: They're excellent farmers, really excellent farmers, and man can they make bread.
Rev. Gary Keene: They make the best, freshest bread I've ever ever had, and that's what they.
Rev. Gary Keene: They would come into the farmer's market to sell their bread and if you got on the inside and you were polite and didn't help I mean it did help to speak just a little bit of German you might get invited to come around to the back of the truck and you could get their sausage.
Rev. Gary Keene: That was the good stuff.
Rev. Gary Keene: So that's how I first encountered the Hutterites and then one day, as a part of an ecumenical thing, you know, a couple of us were invited to actually go to one of the colonies, which is usually closed to outsiders, and see how they're living, what they're doing, etc.
Rev. Gary Keene: And it was interesting.
Rev. Gary Keene: It was not totally unexpected.
Rev. Gary Keene: Where I grew up in Michigan, the Amish were nearby and you'd see the horse-drawn wagons and whatnot.
Rev. Gary Keene: The Hutterites are not quite so anti technology, but still very limited.
Rev. Gary Keene: The dining hall where they would eat is separated.
Rev. Gary Keene: The women eat on this side, the men eat on that side and they wear a relatively distinctive dress hats, dark clothes and the women wear a headscarf, usually with polka dots, and they might vary a little bit by color, but basically it's a polka dot scarf, and so it was all very interesting and I got a kick out of the fact that, as they were showing us through the egg sorting room right, it's a farm egg sorting room it was a very small room and so we had to kind of get in and then close the door and I saw behind the door some had to be a kid in chalk had written Deaf Leopard Rules, so somebody had a radio, anyway.
Rev. Gary Keene: But this was not the only instance of a little pushback.
Rev. Gary Keene: In talking with the community leaders and hearing about what was going on, one of the things that they shared was there had just been a split in the colony and a whole subgroup of the people, of the families of the community, had been shunned out and had to go establish a new colony of their own.
Rev. Gary Keene: The cause of the shunning was that some of the women mostly younger but not all had decided to tie their headscarves not under their chin properly, but behind their ears, at the back of the neck.
Rev. Gary Keene: This was not proper, so they were excluded from that community.
Rev. Gary Keene: The next time I went to the farmer's market I was looking for how did they tie their scarves?
Rev. Gary Keene: I want to know where they ended up.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's how the folks knew who was who, who belonged to who.
Rev. Gary Keene: Which belonged to which colony?
Rev. Gary Keene: Right, how do you know where someone is from, maybe what they do?
Rev. Gary Keene: Dude rolls up in a Harley with a ZZ top, beard spit and tobacco juice you got ideas, right.
Rev. Gary Keene: The gal rolls up in a Range Rover wearing Lulaman yammering to her broker Same thing, you got some clues, you got some ideas.
Rev. Gary Keene: Her broker same thing, you've got some clues, you've got some ideas.
Rev. Gary Keene: We see and we hear, and we do this subconsciously and consciously all the time, all the time.
Rev. Gary Keene: I am acutely aware that in this moment, my mother is spinning in her grave because I am preaching wearing jeans.
Rev. Gary Keene: I tell you my car's in the shop.
Rev. Gary Keene: I had to use the motorcycle and I'm not wearing my suit, pants on the motorcycle on the 101, right?
Rev. Gary Keene: So I needed to wear my jeans.
Rev. Gary Keene: Sorry, mom, and God forbid.
Rev. Gary Keene: Darren suggested ahead of time.
Rev. Gary Keene: Hey, it's summer, it's casual, I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
Rev. Gary Keene: If I wore a Hawaiian shirt, my mother's head would explode, whether or not I was in the pulpit.
Rev. Gary Keene: No, we have pigeonholes for everyone and we have a science for it, called demographics.
Rev. Gary Keene: But what does Jesus say?
Rev. Gary Keene: A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers who stripped him, beat him and took off, leaving him half dead.
Rev. Gary Keene: In other words, this guy in the ditch is naked, probably comatose and unable to speak.
Rev. Gary Keene: He's got no ID, nothing to indicate who he is or where he is from or what he does.
Rev. Gary Keene: Zip, zero, nada.
Rev. Gary Keene: And for that Middle Eastern audience not unlike the Hooterites, a highly stratified and dependent upon visual cues, including clothing and headgear and beards and hair shells, just like us today that means we don't know who he is.
Rev. Gary Keene: Is he one of us?
Rev. Gary Keene: Is he a good guy who deserves our help, whom we would be obligated to help because he's one of our tribe?
Rev. Gary Keene: Or could he be a Samaritan, a foreigner, a traitor, an enemy?
Rev. Gary Keene: We don't know.
Rev. Gary Keene: And because we don't know, an enemy, we don't know.
Rev. Gary Keene: And because we don't know, cross over on the other side, because there's literally nothing to see here.
Rev. Gary Keene: This is how Jesus totally subverts the premise of the lawyer's question.
Rev. Gary Keene: The lawyer knows the law says to love thy neighbor.
Rev. Gary Keene: So he wants to get into the details, wants to know who is my neighbor, who is my nigh one, the one near to me.
Rev. Gary Keene: And can we just pause and note there, hear the conditionality of that who is my neighbor?
Rev. Gary Keene: That's how he circumscribes the compassion he might expend.
Rev. Gary Keene: But Jesus takes all of that away by putting a naked man in the spotlight.
Rev. Gary Keene: A naked, wounded man, a purely anonymous, any man, a human being who is half dead and desperately in need of a good neighbor.
Rev. Gary Keene: With this man's nakedness, jesus flips the lawyer's question from who is my neighbor to who am I?
Rev. Gary Keene: Am I a good neighbor on this road of life?
Rev. Gary Keene: Not, who are they not?
Rev. Gary Keene: Do they qualify?
Rev. Gary Keene: Do they wear the right headscarf, the right way, wear the right clothes, live in my zip code, my county, my country?
Rev. Gary Keene: Do they have the right skin color?
Rev. Gary Keene: Do they speak the right language?
Rev. Gary Keene: Do they give to the right causes and vote for the right candidates?
Rev. Gary Keene: Do they believe in the same God or maybe not at all?
Rev. Gary Keene: All of those criteria, descriptions, stereotypes, qualifications, in this story are erased.
Rev. Gary Keene: This is just a guy in the ditch hurting.
Rev. Gary Keene: Now, who are you?
Rev. Gary Keene: What are you going to do?
Rev. Gary Keene: This is the naked gospel.
Rev. Gary Keene: This is the naked gospel, god's love, stripped bare and offered to any and everyone, calling us also to be stripped bare, to be vulnerable with one another, to be stripped down to the core of who we are.
Rev. Gary Keene: The drag queen RuPaul said it this way beautifully we are all born naked.
Rev. Gary Keene: All the rest is drag and over there it's all the rest of the stuff that we put on ourselves and that we put on each other.
Rev. Gary Keene: You can make your own list Samaritan, illegal, patriot, libtard, All the names, all the costumes, all the bumper stickers that distort how we see one another and treat one another.
Rev. Gary Keene: But God sees us naked, naked From day one, right?
Rev. Gary Keene: God invites us to look with those same divine neutral eyes.
Rev. Gary Keene: No, not neutral eyes, because what does it say?
Rev. Gary Keene: The Samaritan looked and was compassioned.
Rev. Gary Keene: He looked with eyes of empathy.
Rev. Gary Keene: First, he didn't need to see whether or not the guy was wearing the right clothes.
Rev. Gary Keene: You know, here in the United Methodist Church we celebrate just two sacraments communion and baptism.
Rev. Gary Keene: And although we celebrate adult baptisms, it's more fun and it's easier to understand when we baptize an infant Little, naked, moist, squealing babies.
Rev. Gary Keene: We join together to see this infant as a child of God and we dedicate in the ritual I'm sure you've done it.
Rev. Gary Keene: In that ritual we promise ourselves to care for that child as a child of God.
Rev. Gary Keene: And perhaps we should add we promise to do that for as long as we both shall live.
Rev. Gary Keene: Wouldn't that be something if we treated one another, if we treated everyone with the same care, affection and respect that we feel for a child when it's all innocent feel for a child when it's all innocent doesn't have anything on it for us to get confused or distracted by.
Rev. Gary Keene: What would it be like if we did that for as long as they lived, from when they are little, through those teen years and all the way to when they grow up?
Rev. Gary Keene: How subversive would that be and how life-changing for all of us.
Rev. Gary Keene: Because on the road to Jericho or Oxnard or Phoenix or Washington or wherever you are going on this road of life, we're all going to be in the ditch at some point.
Rev. Gary Keene: It might not mean going to the ER, but it might include a diagnosis.
Rev. Gary Keene: It might mean an unwelcome prescription with nasty side effects.
Rev. Gary Keene: It might mean foreclosure, a divorce, an estrangement.
Rev. Gary Keene: It could mean downsizing, unemployment, therapy.
Rev. Gary Keene: There are a lot of ways to be in the ditch and every Sunday you all pray about that.
Rev. Gary Keene: There are a lot of ways to be in the ditch and every one of them needs a good neighbor, which is the genius of Jesus'.
Rev. Gary Keene: Answer to the lawyer the lawyer's question of who.
Rev. Gary Keene: He wipes that out.
Rev. Gary Keene: He says not only does it not matter who's in the ditch, it also doesn't matter who shows the mercy.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's their compassion that identifies and defines them, not anything else.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's only the one who shows mercy when you think about it.
Rev. Gary Keene: If that's true, if the one who can be your good neighbor could be anyone, it might be a Samaritan.
Rev. Gary Keene: I'd be ready for that.
Rev. Gary Keene: There's so much in this story, I tell you.
Rev. Gary Keene: I've been chopping away at this for a week, trying to get it down to where it'll fit.
Rev. Gary Keene: We can get out of here on time.
Rev. Gary Keene: But let me just a few quick more before we go, and I'll let you go.
Rev. Gary Keene: When the Samaritan takes the wounded man to the inn, the word is kereven sarai, which translation means every receiving place.
Rev. Gary Keene: In other words, they'll take anybody.
Rev. Gary Keene: It's like a truck stop motel, which it was.
Rev. Gary Keene: It was a place for.
Rev. Gary Keene: It was designed, built and run for caravans, people with pack animals carrying trade goods through the country.
Rev. Gary Keene: That was the inn where he took the wounded man, and you can hear it coming, can't you?
Rev. Gary Keene: It's the inn that was so booked up that Mary had to give birth to the naked baby Jesus up in the stable.
Rev. Gary Keene: That alone is their clue to cross over and start talking about Jesus' incarnation, his babiness, his nakedness, his fleshliness, his mortality as a part of us.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's another sermon on theology.
Rev. Gary Keene: I'll leave that for Darren to take up another day.
Rev. Gary Keene: A quick Methodist perspective on this.
Rev. Gary Keene: Very briefly, it's a very timely meme going around that says this Neighbor is a moral concept, not a geographic one.
Rev. Gary Keene: Neighbor is a moral concept, not a geographical one.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's the whole parable in a nutshell.
Rev. Gary Keene: For Jesus' audience.
Rev. Gary Keene: Their neighborhood was their world.
Rev. Gary Keene: It was small, it was defined by the limits of their capacity to travel.
Rev. Gary Keene: Not so for us.
Rev. Gary Keene: Today.
Rev. Gary Keene: We know instantly what is happening everywhere and we have the knowledge and the tools to be able to respond.
Rev. Gary Keene: Happening everywhere, and we have the knowledge and the tools to be able to respond.
Rev. Gary Keene: But do we have the moral concept of unequivocal empathy, of being a neighbor across cultural distances of race, nationality, gender, all that whole long list?
Rev. Gary Keene: What we do have for sure is John Wesley saying the world is my parish, no boundaries.
Rev. Gary Keene: Very big neighborhood, a big world that requires a big, naked heart ready to be compassionate.
Rev. Gary Keene: The apotheosis of all this what does Jesus say way back at the beginning, right when the lawyer first gives the right answer to the love God neighbor himself.
Rev. Gary Keene: He says do this and you shall live.
Rev. Gary Keene: But he doesn't say.
Rev. Gary Keene: He doesn't say you're going to live forever.
Rev. Gary Keene: He doesn't say eternal life, the way the lawyer and the tech billionaires want.
Rev. Gary Keene: He says do this and you will live now, today, with your neighbors, in real life, the life that Jesus came into.
Rev. Gary Keene: So what does he say?
Rev. Gary Keene: So that you might have life and have it abundantly.
Rev. Gary Keene: That's the promise.
Rev. Gary Keene: And it all hangs on the lawyer's final.
Rev. Gary Keene: Don't you think it was a light bulb moment after Jesus has told this parable, messed with everything, turned it all upside down.
Rev. Gary Keene: Finally, the lawyer recognizes this.
Rev. Gary Keene: Oh, the near one is the one who showed mercy.
Rev. Gary Keene: So be ye going and be ye doing the mercy to the naked ones.
Rev. Gary Keene: Amen, amen.