I preached this sermon on July 10, 2022, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Luke 10:25-37, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.
As we speak, a deputation from our Diocese is in Baltimore at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. It is a major gathering that happens every three years for the discussion of important issues facing the church and the broader society and for addressing all the business of legislation and governance that pertain to our denomination. Some conventions are witness to monumental changes in the life of the Episcopal Church, and some are relatively less eventful. We will see how this one turns out, especially given the pandemic-related delays and cuts made to the agenda.
But I think it is safe to say that at every General Convention there is one question, often unspoken, that pervades all of the conversations and debates. It is a question that hovers like a ghost at the back of the meeting halls, and asserts itself implicitly in every resolution that is passed or defeated. It is the big, lingering question underneath all of the urgent questions of the day, in the Church as a whole and here at Trinity. And it is simply this:
In an era that feels so uncertain, so perilous, what must we do?
What must we, the Church, do to meet the moment? What must we do to survive, or even to flourish, when the challenges before us are so many? What must we do, right now, to be who and what God would have us be? What must we do to inherit and embody the fullness of God’s undying love?
Now, because we are an institution, we tend to think in institutional terms and so we might wonder, is it a new formation program that will save us? A new structure? A better marketing platform? A stronger response to the issues of the day? Undoubtedly all of these things will be discussed in Baltimore, and I commend those who gather there for their sincere and earnest investment in debating such things. The process is part of our shared call to build a more just and life-giving Church body.
But I must confess that none of those things feel like the whole answer. Because if we Episcopalians were redeemed and renewed by systems and programs and public statements alone, then we’d have reached the promised land a long time ago.
So maybe we’re a little bit like the lawyer who questions Jesus in today’s Gospel passage. He might be trying to ‘test’ Jesus, true, but maybe he is also looking at the world around him—perilous, turbulent, angry—and truly wondering: what must I do to inherit eternal life? What must I do to feel like things are actually going to be ok? What must we do to feel and know, deep in our souls, that God has not forsaken us?
What must we do?
Well, as our Lord has so effectively modeled for us today with the parable of the Good Samaritan, I will respond to this question not with a tidy answer, but with a story of my own.
About 17 years ago, when I had just graduated from college, I took off for Mexico with almost no savings and with a very flimsy plan. I had decided to get a certificate to teach English as a foreign language, and so I went to the Yucatan Peninsula and spent a month taking the necessary courses, interspersed with a lot of time on the beach and nights out with my classmates. I was not quite the prodigal son, lost in dissolute living, but I definitely had more optimism than good sense.
After the course I took a bus to a large city in central Mexico, Queretaro, where I knew no one and nothing. I had heard that it was a good place to find a job teaching English but I had no solid leads. I just showed up and stayed in a cheap motel near the center of town, unsure of how to actually find a job, still a bit rusty in my Spanish. As the days went by and I made little progress, and my funds started getting lower and lower, my sense of dread began to escalate. And it came to pass that one evening I found myself sitting on a park bench in the main plaza of the city with absolutely no money to pay for another night in a hotel and no easy way for me to reach my family for help. The shadows gathered around me, the night was quickly encroaching, and I felt a sense of panic. I had never been in such a precarious situation. In my naivety, it just hadn’t occurred to me that I would actually end up without any options. I wasn’t attacked by robbers or lying naked in a ditch on the side of the road, like the man in Jesus’ parable, but I was lost in a sort of wilderness, and the passersby did not know me, and did not stop, and I was alone.
And then, quite suddenly, a young man came walking past me, probably about my age at the time, dressed in a work suit. Why he stopped and approached me I will never really know. But he did, and he had a kind, gentle smile, and he asked (in Spanish—he spoke almost no English) “are you ok? Do you need anything?” And I greeted him in my broken Spanish, and we had a conversation.
Long story short, his name was Julio, and he was a law student from that city, and when I described to him both my reason for being there and my continued search to find a job, he said, without any hesitation: my family has an empty house on the outskirts of the city. It’s not very nice, but you can stay there if you want until you find what you need.
Now, mind you, I had not even told him about my financial straits. He just knew, somehow, that that was what I needed. And I accepted, with profuse gratitude, and I moved into that little dusty house and I lived there for almost two weeks until I was able to find a job teaching English and eventually get into a small rented place of my own.
I saw Julio once before I moved back to the United States and I asked him, why did you help me that night in the plaza? And he said, simply, “you looked like you needed a friend.”
My friends, I have traveled many places, I have seen many beautiful things both near and far, but I will tell you that few moments in my life were more miraculous, more mysterious, more salvific, than that moment when a man stopped what he was doing to help a lost stranger who had run out of options.
So while I am no expert in church governance or budgets or fancy programs for this initiative or that one, when I wonder “what must we do” as a Church, as followers of Jesus, to meet the uncertainties of this or any age, I keep coming back to that encounter.
And I think the answer, in the end, is as profound and as simple as it has been since the very beginning: we will be saved by kindness. We will be saved by the kindness that God has shown to us in Christ, and in this life we will experience God’s salvation in the daily, ordinary acts of kindness that we show to one another.
Not the flashiest answer, I know. It probably won’t make any headlines. It doesn’t even have a program budget attached to it. But still, I would guess that, at the end of our long journey through this life, it is those moments of kindness—the ones given, and the ones received—that will be the true measure of all things. And it will be the kind people, like Julio, who will linger in our memories long after more impressive figures have faltered and faded away.
So, what must we do to inherit eternal life? More than anything, we must simply be kind.
Because, when you think about it, the whole arc of Scritpure, the impenetrable mystery of grace and salvation might be summed up just like this:
That we were sitting on a park bench as the evening shadows stretched around us, and the night was encroaching, and we were out of options and didn’t know what to do. And suddenly a stranger with a gentle smile approached us, and sat with us, and gave us shelter, and when we could not understand how or why, he simply said, with infinite kindness, “you looked like you needed a friend.”
By Another Road 