Close to home. Text: Luke 10:25-37

Preached by Rev. James Murray at Dominion-Chalmers United Church, July 14 2013

A torrential rain storm hit Toronto on Monday, knocking out the electrical system. Flooding shut down the transit system and the major highways. Tens of thousands of people were stranded with no way to get home. The storm set a record for the most rain to fall in a single day. The previous record was held by Hurricane Hazel, which hit back in 1954. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford spent the storm sitting in his air conditioned SUV since the hydro was off in his home.

By contrast, when heavy rains sent flood waters into downtown Calgary a few weeks ago, their mayor Naheed Nenshi worked tirelessly to make sure people were safe and the city was secure. Those heavy rains caused the biggest flood in Alberta history. The Calgary flood is going to be the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, with over $5 billion dollars of damage to property.

Just over a week ago a different kind of disaster hit the small town of Lac Megantic, which is in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Negligence on the part of the train’s crew led to the unattended train of 72 cars carrying crude oil rolling away. The runaway train travelled over 11 kilometres before it derailed in the downtown core of Lac Megantic. Over 50 people are presumed to have died in the fiery crash, making it the fourth worst train crash in Canadian history. Hundreds of homes and businesses have been damaged and destroyed.  The mayor of Lac Megantic Colette Roy-Laroche has been working hard to take care of the people displaced by the fire. She admits it will take many years for them to rebuild the the downtown of what was once a very picturesque tourist town.

This has not been a good month for news here in Canada. We are used to hearing about troubles in other parts of the world. It doesn’t really upset us when there is a revolution in Egypt. We don’t get riled by the civil war in Syria. We don’t get flustered when an unarmed teenager is shot by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer in Floriday. Flooding in China which has killed over 100 people and forced the evacuation of over 100,000 people barely gets mentioned here. But such things are far away. Such things are someone else’s suffering. Such things are not our problems. These recent events here in Canada are different. We have family and friends in Toronto and Calgary whose lives are being affected by these natural disasters. We have vacationed in places like Lac Megantic. This is not happening someplace else to people we don’t know. We all know someone who has been touched by these tragedies.

When tragedy strikes close to home, how shall we respond? Should we do nothing, and expect people to take care of themselves? Or should we open our hearts to them. Should we open our hands, and help them?

A man once asked Jesus what he needed to do in order to be saved.

Jesus asked the man if he knew what the Bible said on the matter.

The man replied “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

This was a popular bible verse which was part of the prayer which every devout believer said every morning. It was a prayer which everyone memorized when they were a child. Everyone knew this.

Jesus tells the man he has got it right. Now all you have to do is Just do it.

The man isn’t happy with that answer, because it does ask a lot of us. So he looks for an escape clause. So he asks Jesus “well how do you define who is my neighbour?”

Jesus replies by telling him the story of the good Samaritan. At the end of the story he asks, ‘so who do you think was a neighbour to the man in the ditch?” Jesus has set the poor fellow up on this one. Of course everyone knows Samaritans aren’t good people.  The Jews had been looking down their noses at the Samaritans for 800 years. They were so hated that if you killed a Samaritan you wouldn’t even go to jail for it. They were less than human. Yet it was obvious that all the good people had not stopped to help. The man bites his tongue, and has to admit that the filthy Samaritan has done the right thing and has acted as a good neighbour.

Again, Jesus tells the man he has got it right. Now all you have to do is Just Do It.

I feel sorry for the man asking Jesus these awkward questions. There are lots of people we don’t think are our neighbours. There are the people who live in far-away countries. There are people who belong to different races and who speak different languages from us. They smell different than us. There are people who follow different religions from us. There are those people who have different understandings of what is the right way to do politics, economics and sexuality. And here is Jesus telling us to be a good neighbour to them anyway.

A lot of people try to find excuses for the people who walk on by past the man in the ditch. They try to defend them by appealing to different legal and moral justifications. The truth is there is no law which would have convicted them for walking on by. They simply saw the man in the ditch as someone else’s problem. And Jesus dares to tell us to look past everything within us which tells us we are good, that we are right, that we are somehow better than them. He tells us the man in the ditch is our problem.

I feel sorry for the man asking Jesus these awkward questions. The man is obviously a devout believer. He knows his Bible. He knows how to pray. He wants to share in God’s gift of salvation. He is an insider. He is one of us. Jesus dares to tell him, and us, that we need to get over our self-importance, and humbly learn to open our hearts and our hands, and help our neighbour.

Parables are Jesus’ way of turning our way of looking at the world upside-down. They are extreme, exaggerated examples of what God’s kingdom looks like. When we look at the story of the Good Samaritan, we identify with the person who helps others. Because we like to see ourselves as the one who is powerful. We like to be in control.

When my son Peter was born, he had a ventricular septal defect. In plain English he had a hole in his heart. At the age of two, we went to the Children’s Hospital in London Ontario for open heart surgery. The surgeon, Dr. Moc Dock Lee had one of the best reputations in the field of pediatric surgery. One thing Dr. Lee was famous for was how he helped the parents understand what was going to happen. Dr. Lee would often ask a set of parents whose child had just gone through an operation to sit down with the parents whose child was about to undergo the same operation. The parent to parent sharing gave us all a lot of support and encouragement. One day I saw Dr. Lee out in the corridor setting up one of these parent to parent meetings. And it was an odd pairing. One couple were bikers. I’m talking Hells Angels patch bikers with long hair and leather jackets. The wife had more tattoos than her husband. The other couple were Old Order Mennonites. Their horse and buggy were parked outside. The husband had the full beard, and plain black clothes. His wife wore the traditional bonnet and the lace collar on her plain cotton dress. I thought this meeting could go off the rails since they were so different, but it didn’t. I was close enough to listen in, and it was a very helpful meeting. The Mennonite couple were not familiar with all the technology, so it was all very bewildering to them. The biker couple were very patient and spent a lot of time helping the Mennonite couple understand how their child would get through this surgery.

We often think our role is to always be the one who does the helping, since we are so good and so right with God. But sometimes, sometimes we are the one in the ditch. Sometimes we are the one who has been beaten up by the world and left for dead. And sometimes, when we feel completely hopeless, God sends someone to help us. But it’s not always the person we were expecting. Sometimes God sends someone who is not like us. Sometimes  it is  a person we would normally dismiss as unworthy. Sometimes it is a person we dislike because they are so different from us.

I have often felt sorry for the man in in the ditch in Jesus’ story. Imagine the humiliation of having to tell other people that he owed his life to a SAMARITAN.  Some people would have rather die in the ditch than face the shame of allowing a dirty Samaritan to touch them. They would rather spit on a Samaritan than allow the Samaritan to bind their wounds. Yet God was at work in that Samaritan. Can we look past the labels we put on others, and see how God is at work, doing good in them? Can we let go of our own prejudices, in order to open our hands to accept the gifts God is giving us through such people?

Open your hands. Open your hearts to God. Open your heart to God who is present in the unexpected people who are all around you. Accept the gift of grace which is being offered to you. And may we all learn to share this gift where ever it is needed.