Jack Hardaway
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Our lives are parables that reveal God.
Every day, every breath is the story of God showing up.
Like parables, life has these moments when we feel the surprise, the contradiction, the whiplash change of perspective when at the end of the story we change, from death to life.
God is like that unexpected twist in the gut that comes with the twists and turns of the story in the parables.
Life is like that. God shows up in the twists and turns of our lives and we suddenly realize that we have been sleeping and are just now waking up.
Eventually we wake up to the harsh truth that life is about suffering.
Life is brutal. We try to sugar coat that fact, but ultimately life is fatal.
Life can be like robbers attacking an innocent and unsuspecting stranger, unexpected and violent.
Sometimes we survive…for awhile.
Sometimes we don’t.
What do we do about it?
Do we hide from the suffering?
Do we walk on by?
Do we use pain as an excuse to lash out?
Or, does suffering become the invitation to experience mercy, to show mercy, to reach out?
The issue always before us is whether we let the suffering in our lives twist us or transform us.
Christianity is a religion of the Cross, it is about suffering and the response to suffering.
The Gospel is that we are offered the promise of resurrection rather than the continuous treadmill of more of the same damn thing, of lashing out over and over, spreading and multiplying the suffering.
The mercy of resurrection transforms the god forsakenness of a suffering world into the Kingdom of God coming near.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a parable of the cross, a parable of brutal suffering being transformed by mercy.
So, who is my neighbor?
Turns out that is the wrong question.
Jesus asks the real question, “How will you respond to the suffering in the world?”
The question is not , “Who is my neighbor?” The question is, “Will I be the neighbor?” Will I do the neighborly thing? Will I give mercy to the suffering?
It turns out neighbor is a verb.
We want to draw lines of responsibility. Boundaries. Borders. Where does my responsibility end? We do this because there are other things we would like to do. Otherwise my whole life will be consumed by mercy. And what kind of life would that be?
What if my whole life were consumed by mercy?
What kind of life would that be?
Jesus is God’s consuming mercy anointing the world, God doing the neighborly thing, God being the neighbor to our stripped, beaten half dead world.
How will I respond to the suffering in the world?
Walk on by?
Draw boundaries and borders for some to be inside or out, on my side or the other side?
Or will I pour wine and oil on the wounds and carry the pain to where it can be healed?
Will it cost me?
Will mercy consume me?
So often those who show us the mercy of God are the least expected, not the priest, not the Levite, but someone I really don’t like, someone who is offensive to me, like a Samaritan …of all people.
Eighteen years ago, I preached my first sermon here at Grace on this parable of the Good Samaritan.
In the past eighteen years I have grown as a priest and as a person because of you. I have learned much about mercy from you. I feel like I have become more like myself.
And I feel like Grace has become more and more like itself as well.
Grace does not ask “Who is my neighbor?”, but rather, “How can I be the neighbor? How can we do the neighborly thing? How can we be God’s anointing mercy to a broken world?”
The world needs our witness to this mercy. The world needs the parable of Grace.
How will we continue to be consumed by the mercy of God? How will we continue to respond to the pain that fills our lives and our world?
Who has been the neighbor to us in the parable of our own lives?
Thank you for being the neighbor to me.
Our lives are parables that reveal God.
Every day, every breath is the story of God showing up.
Like parables, life has these moments when we feel the surprise, the contradiction, the whiplash change of perspective when at the end of the story we change, from death to life.
Live the parable of Grace.
Go and do likewise.