Everyone Knows a Jericho Road

7-14-19

Grace and peace to you from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.

If you haven’t noticed by now, this past week, over thirty kids from all over the community blasted off to Mars for an adventure in learning about all the awesome power of God in our lives. Each day had a “power up word” and a Bible story - and imagine my excitement when we got to Wednesday’s word – kindness, and Wednesday’ story – The Good Samaritan.

This parable is perhaps one of Jesus’ best known and best loved stories… but, much like the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark it’s not really a story to tell children. Jesus tells this story to a lawyer who wants to figure out the minimum “amount of work” for loving your neighbor as yourself.

 

In the story itself, we have two high-status members of Jewish society, the priest and the Levite, encountering a man so injured to appear on death’s door. Their rational for not helping this man was based on their strict observance of the Law of Moses, which prohibited them from touching the bodies of dead people. If they stopped to help, and he WAS dead, neither of them would be able to perform their duties. Logic told them not to take that chance, so they passed by on the other side.

The Samaritan, on the other hand, was from a shunned ethnic group, a group considered “mixed” from the long-ago mingling of Israelite and non-Israelite families, which settled in a place called Samaria… a place no one went if they could help it. Samaria also happened to be the only way to get to Jericho. This was one of the most dangerous 17 miles of that existed…so much so it has been called the Red Road or the Blood Road. And yet, it is this Samaritan, who live near this road, who helps the injured man, who goes about and beyond the call of duty in loving his neighbor as himself.

During seminary, I was on my internship year as a student pastor in a town in MN, about the size of Easton, PA. Two main industries powered the economy: Agriculture with the help if migrant workers from central America, and a company called Federated Insurance. When I preached on this text, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to recast the story, and so this is how I told it:

“A man was traveling on the highway to Minneapolis when his car blew a tire. A pastor, traveling in the same direction, sees the man pull over, breaks for a moment, but then keeps going. This pastor is on her way to preside over a wedding in Minneapolis and is already running late. Next, a Federated executive drove by. He too sees the man pulled over, struggling to change his tie, and considers stopping. However, the executive is on his way to the airport to fly to a meeting that might lead to a big promotion, so he keeps going.

A rusty sedan pulls over next to the man. Out time a very obviously pregnant Hispanic woman, with three curious children looking on from the backseat. In heavily broken English, she says that her uncle owns a tow truck company just beyond the next exit. The uncle arrives 5 minutes later, tows the man’s car to a repair place, and refuses payment when the man offers him $200.”

The week after I preached that sermon, a member of my internship committee was chatting with me in my office. He offered, what he thought, some very helpful feedback: he warned me to be more mindful about who I used in my stories and what kind of example they were being used for. He told me what I already knew - that most of the people in this town are employed by Federated, including here at the church. Apparently, ‘Some people’ were upset and offended by how I talked about Federated, and he was sure I would not make that error again.

What I didn’t tell him was that I knew exactly what I was doing, and that conversation told me I had been exactly right on the money with my examples.

The truth is, every town and city in the United States has their own version of this story. We all have our own version of Priests, Levites, Jericho roads, Samarias, and Samaritans. The truth is, Jesus’s listeners were terribly offended by his story, and if Jesus would have had an office and an internship committee, he would have heard some “helpful advice” about it too. And the truth is, if we ourselves are not terrible offended by it, we’re not reading it right.

Traci Blackmon, a pastor in Ferguson, preached on this text at the Festival of Homiletics, and she told the story from the prospect of the Jericho Road. We all know a Jericho Road, she told us, and most of them have been renamed “Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.” On Jericho Road, you don’t park on the street, and you clutch your purse…. schools are underfunded, hospitals are understaffed, services are hard to find, and life expectancy is shorter. Pastor Blackmon told us there are thirty-three thousand zip codes in America. Sixty-six hundred zip codes are home to eighty percent of the children living in poverty. Twenty percent of the zip codes are home to eighty percent of the kids in poverty. These are the places Jericho Road runs through, in every city in the United States.

The Jericho Road runs through all those parts of Philadelphia that have “changed over the years,” and we all know exactly what is meant by that phrase. It means that black and brown people live in those parts now because we certainly won’t welcome them here in the suburbs. So, they are stuck by poverty and prejudice, trapped living along the Jericho Road, because of things like redlining, white privilege, and institutional racism.

For too long the church has walked by on the other side of the Jericho road, avoiding the wounded bodies of our brothers and sisters in Christ. Too long have we locked our car doors and sped through the Jericho Road, and instead ask ourselves why we ran away and turned our backs on our local Samarias.

Too long have we looked askance at the 17 miles of Jericho Road…. The 17 miles we want to build a wall on to keep immigrants out. The 17 church bullies who have harassed their female pastors this last week. 17 rooms in the nursing home with dementia patients who have no one to visit them. 17 buildings containing children on the border without parents or toothbrushes.

When we ignore the Jericho Road, we are no better than the robbers who beat up the man and left him to die in the first place.

I think Mr. Rogers, of the beloved children’s show Mr. Rogers Neighborhood says it best: “We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not my child, not my community… not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”

The good news is that this is a parable, a story Jesus told, and so we get to change the ending… IF we really want to. Jesus invites us into the story. Jesus is in the ditch with us when that’s where we are… but Jesus also calls us to GET INTO the ditch when that’s where his beloved children are. And maybe next time, we can prevent our fellow human beings and fellow children of God from ending up bleeding in the ditch in the first place.  There is still time… there is always time… to prevent another person form falling victim to the Jericho Road.

The Samaritan claimed what little power he had to take care of someone in need, even though he himself probably did not have the resources to spare to spend it on medical care of someone else. 

All week with the kids from the community who joined us for VBS, we talked about learning to trust God’s power at work in us. ALL of us!

What are we thinking??? 

What a dangerous message to be telling powerless children! That they could use the power that God has given them to change the world…. But what if they ACTUALLY believed it? 

And what if we actually believed it? What if we harnessed the power that God has given us… faith, boldness, kindness, thankfulness, and hope…. To quote the theme song for the week: “We are on a mission, we have seen a vision, this is where the journey starts.” And the truth is… if we don’t to it, thank goodness for these kids. Because they will. Thanks be to God. Amen.