It is a privilege and a pleasure to have been asked to preach for you here again today. Well, it always is, but especially so this Sunday because it allows me to preach on one of my favorite of Jesus' parables: the parable of the Good Samaritan. At first I was a little hard pressed to figure out what to say, since the most apparent meaning of the story is perfectly clear to even the smallest child. "It is nice to be nice to people." And that is its most important meaning. Regardless of anything else in this story, the most important thing is that the man who was beset by robbers was helped. The most important lesson we can learn is to imitate the work of the Samaritan in our own lives, helping those around us who are in need of help.

But like most texts in the Bible, this one has many layers of meaning. The deeper one goes into Scripture and the teachings of Jesus, the more depth one finds, realizing eventually that the well of its inspiration is fathomless and infinite. The meanings within each story or teaching and the connections between stories and teachings come together to offer us the most profound guidance on every subject that truly matters. Granted it won't tell us where to prospect for oil or how to engineer a better energy system than fossil fuels, but it will equip us spiritually and morally for a way of simple living that honors God's creation. It won't tell us lotto numbers, but it will tell us that true wealth is found in people and community rather than numbers. Scripture is the poetic love letter of a people to their Creator and Sustainer, sharing the beauty She has added to their lives with others so that they too may experience that beauty.

The parable of the Good Samaritan likewise has these deeper layers of meaning, and it is one of these layers that I wish to explore with you this morning. As I said, the first and most obvious and most important is that it is nice to be nice to people. But we also see in the exchange between Jesus and the lawyer a dialogue, or confrontation, between two radically different ideas of faith. This dialogue is extremely important for us in understanding what it really means to be Christian and how to experience the beauty of our Creator and Sustainer.

Our passage opens with a lawyer asking questions of Jesus. With being a lawyer comes a certain mentality that seeks scientific clarity and to dissect every word and punctuation point in order to arrive at a sound system of rules (which can then be ingeniously manipulated and worked around in every case to which it applies). In religious terms, this legalism looks at Scripture as the legal code of a Divine judge, in need of proper interpretation to figure out the right rules we have to follow and dogmas we have to believe in exchange for rewards or the avoidance of punishments handed out as a kind of contractual agreement.

So when the lawyer asks Jesus "what must I do to inherit eternal life", this is exactly what he is asking: what things do I have to do or dogmas do I have to assent to in order to acquire this particular reward. I suspect that he's not looking for some "spiritual" kind of answer, but rather the certitude and safety of rules that rely on anything except vagaries of grace. He wants to tie God down to a contractual agreement that dictates the conditions of what is "right". Or, like many, perhaps he's only looking for the morbid thrill of debate, the chance to exercise his mind running over legal complexities like a tongue exercising itself over a piece of candy.

Naturally, Jesus responds to a direct question with another question. It simply wouldn't do to just hand the lawyer the right answer... Perhaps because the right answer isn't something that can be neatly packaged up in doctrines and rules. Knowing that the man is a lawyer and that he would therefore know the Law, Jesus simply asks him what the Law says, letting him figure out the answer for himself. Snappily the lawyer gives the right propositional answer: love God and love your neighbor. Jesus tells him he's got it, and to go and do it.

The lawyer isn't done, however. Luke tells us that he persisted in his questioning in order to justify himself... That is, to look for the exemptions to the rule that can apply to himself. With a perfect analytical mind he is looking to pin the Great Commandment down to specifics, treating it as a rule to be obeyed rather than a way of life to be lived. I know that I can relate to the lawyer. On the one hand, there is something important and even pleasurable in carrying through doctrines and ideas to their logical conclusions. There is both a sincere interest in being true to God and to reality, and there is something just plain fun about this mental exercise. There is also a lot of pride to be gained in being able to figure out the rules and handle every objection with ease and style. Do so, and you have the authority of reason on your side. "God said it, I believe it, that settles it, and if you don't believe it, I can prove it to you." But with figuring out the rules comes figuring out how they don't apply to you. After all, there's no fun to be had in condemning someone else with one or two verses of Leviticus if it means that you can't eat pork and lobster yourself. The exceptions to the legal code are just as important to the individual as imposing the rules of it on others are.

So naturally, Jesus responds to another direct question with another question, this time prefaced with a story. That Jesus tells this story is as important as what's in this story itself, at least for this layer of meaning. Jesus could have simply told the lawyer that your neighbor is anyone in real need, just as Jesus could have simply told the lawyer that to inherit eternal life he must love God and love his neighbor. Simply telling someone the right legal or doctrinal answer doesn't have the desired effect, however. The act of debating by nature keeps the subject of debate at arms length, away from the more emotional and spiritual sides of a person and well insulated against by the walls of reason. Propositions can be debated and discussed, voluntarily agreed with or disagreed with, without ever genuinely affecting someone on a more meaningful, spiritually redeeming and life-transforming level.

To take a mundane political example, we can endlessly discuss the merits of war. We can debate security and preemption and Just War and the Geneva Convention 'till we are blue in the face. We can talk a fine talk about weapons of mass destruction and creating democracies around the world. But until we see with our own eyes - as in the new Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11 - two mothers, one white and one Arab, crying out to God over the loss of their loved ones, the former a soldier and the latter civilians, from opposite sides of the globe and the conflict, we will never understand war, its nature, its costs, or its ridiculous futility.

Had Jesus simply told the lawyer the right answer, the lawyer likely would never really understand it. He would have known it, yes, and it would have rested in his mind as an article of debate for future discussion in the halls of the synagogue with the other lawyers. Knowing and understanding are two different things. Accepting the right rules and right dogmas is a whole world away from living a way of life.

The lawyer may have recognized it... Most legally keen minds will notice that something is afoot when the person they are questioning does not give straightforward, legalistic answers in reply. If they have an open mind, it may introduce them to a whole new way of looking at the world beyond legal do's and don'ts. If not, then they may think that the witness is simply avoiding what the lawyer knows to be the only possible, rational, answer. I know that's the first thing I think. In case the lawyer is anything like me, Jesus' story brings home the lesson.

Not living in the same period in time as the priests and Levites, it is easy for us to arrive at the simple conclusion that these guys were just being jerks when they didn't help the man who was set upon by robbers. They saw a man in need of help, who was beaten and left for dead, and simply chose not to help. They saw inconvenience coming and, like so many of us when we see the same on our streets, crossed to the other side of the road to avoid the problem. It's easy for us to judge, even though we have no Divine law against helping people we meet. But the priest and the Levite did have perfectly good reasons not to help.

The rules for priests and Levites is recorded for us in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. Amongst these rules are the ones found in chapter 21, verses 10 and 11: "The priest who is the highest among his brothers, on whose head the anointing oil has been poured and who has been consecrated to wear the garments, shall not uncover his head nor tear his clothes; nor shall he approach any dead person, nor defile himself even for his father or his mother..." Numbers chapter 9 tells of the concern over several men who were being prohibited from taking part in Passover because of their uncleanliness at having come into contact with a corpse. To touch a dead person rendered even an ordinary Jewish person unclean. For a priest or Levite to do so was a disaster... Suddenly rendered unclean, they would be unable to perform their religious obligations and lead the community in worship and offerings until some time passed.

Thus, the priest and Levite weren't taking any chances when they came across this potentially dead person. Rather than risk becoming unclean by seeing if the man was still alive and in need of help, they got as far away from him as they could to keep their ritual purity. They were following the rules to the letter, fulfilling their legal obligations and responsibilities. This left the injured and dying man to the care of the Samaritan that came down the road later.

Again, our distance from this period in time causes us to lose the full impact of this turn of events in the story. Few, if any, of us have met a Samaritan. According to the last statistics I've seen, there are just over 4-600 ethnic Samaritans left in the world. Most of us only know of them from what the Bible says, with this parable as our primary example. If we were to play word association, the first thing that would come to our mind upon hearing the word "Samaritan" is "oh, good!" There are "Good Samaritan" laws in many American towns and states which make it illegal not to help people in need. One of the most publicly well-known charities is Franklin Grahame's Samaritan's Purse, which collects shoe boxes filled with presents for Third World children at Christmas. "Samaritan" has become synonymous with extravagant charity and self-sacrificing concern for our fellow human beings.

This was absolutely not the case in the first century, when Jesus was telling this story. The Samaritans were a part-Hebrew, part-Arabic race that adopted a form of Judaism that still retained traces of their traditional pagan beliefs. Over the course of time and several invasions by different empires, the Samaritan and Jewish people became bitter enemies. To Jews, Samaritans were loathsome and unclean heretics, usurpers of the sacred traditions and temptresses to Jewish husbands. Though often showing uncommon concern for Samaritans, even Jesus talks down about Samaritanism, telling a Samaritan woman "You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews." [John 4:22] Samaritans were considered even worse than Gentiles and Jews were prohibited from associating with Samaritans in any way, shape or form.

To get a better impression of how radical this parable Jesus told is, try to imagine the worst sort of heretic you can think of, the most offensive sort of person, and being told to imitate them. It wouldn't be out of place to compare, as many do, the Samaritans to the Mormons, and to have them upheld as a better model of righteous and faithful living than the highest holy men of the "right" religion... Say, the pastors and bishops of our own denomination. Imagine being told to imitate the goodness of a gay Anglican, tongues-talking Pentecostal or a Rosary-praying Catholic. That is how mind-blowing Jesus' parable is.

The lawyer can't escape the answer that Jesus forces him to figure out for himself. The neighbor was the one who showed mercy, regardless of their doctrines, regardless of the right rules. The one who ended up being the example to follow for obeying the Great Commandment was the one who's concern was not for figuring out and following a legal code, but for helping their fellow human beings in God's name.

It reminds me of the statement by James, the brother of Jesus, who said "Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." [James 1:27] Religion, in its true form, is not about following rules and dogmas because we have to stop God's anger, but to live a grace-filled way of life that cannot help but overflow to affect everything around us. Religion is to associate with the marginalized and disenfranchised. It is to help those in the most desperate need, to work for a world of equality and justice, to build community and strive for the betterment of society for all people. And we are to keep ourselves unstained by the world, meaning that we are not to conform to the deadening effect of the world's value systems. We are not to participate in systems of inequality and injustice or to view other people as objects of physical pleasure or economic gain. True religion is to experience the grace of Christ, and to react to our salvation by continuing to share and share in the experience rather than reduce it to nicely debatable propositions.

So here we have one of the lessons that Jesus is teaching us with this deeply layered parable about a man who was robbed and left for the dead, only to be helped by the most loathsome class of heretic in ancient Israel, as told in response to a direct question by a lawyer looking for a direct answer. Shall we live lives obsessed with rules and dogmas, with finding out the right things we have to do and right things we have to believe in order to force God to meet His end of the contract, and otherwise setting our eyes upon the law rather than upon grace? Or shall we live in freedom and joy, experiencing this grace and letting it inspire us to mercy and community, being the neighbors to one another that truly speaks to the love of God? Will we rest with debatable doctrines and rules to make other people's lives Hell, or will we be truly religious, sharing in compassionate deeds the grace and peace of God that transcends mere words?

Amen.