“A few days later the university team gathers for a prayer meeting, as we do every Wednesday. We follow a consistent pattern: Joe prays, Craig prays, Chris prays, then all three pause politely, waiting for me. I never pray, and after a brief silence we open our eyes and return to our dorm rooms.
With the essay deadline looming, I join the team grudgingly for the requisite meeting. Joe prays, Craig prays, Chris prays, and they wait the usual few seconds. To everyone’s surprise—most of all my own—I begin to pray aloud.
“God…” I say, and the room crackles with tension. A door slams down the hall, interrupting me. I start again.
“God, here we are, supposed to be concerned about those ten thousand students at the university who are going to Hell. Well, you know that I don’t care if they all go to Hell, if there is one. I don’t care if I go to Hell.”
I might as well be invoking witchcraft or offering child sacrifices. Even so, these are my friends, and no one moves. My mouth goes dry. I swallow hard and continue. For some reason I start talking about the parable of the Good Samaritan, which one of my classes has just been studying. “We’re supposed to feel the same concern for university students as the Samaritan felt for the bloodied Jew lying in the ditch,” I pray. “I feel no such concern. I feel nothing.”
And then it happens. In the middle of my prayer, as I am admitting my lack of care for our designated targets of compassion, the parable comes to me in a new light. I have been visualizing the scene as I speak: a swarthy Middle Eastern man, dressed in robes and a turban, bending over a dirty, blood-stained form in a ditch. Without warning, those two figures now morph on the internal screen of my mind. The Samaritan takes on the face of Jesus. The Jew, pitiable victim of a highway robbery, also takes on another face—one I recognize with a start as my own.
In slow motion, I watch Jesus reach down with a moistened rag to clean my wounds and stanch the flow of blood. As he bends toward me, I see myself, the wounded victim of a crime, open my eyes and spit on him, full in the face. Just that. The image unnerves me—the apostate who doesn’t believe in visions or in biblical parables. I am rendered speechless. Abruptly, I stop praying, rise, and leave the room.
All that evening I brood over what took place. It wasn’t exactly a vision—more like a vivid daydream or an epiphany. Regardless, I can’t put the scene out of mind. In a single stroke my cockiness has been shattered. I have always found security in my outsider status, which at a Bible college means an outsider to belief. Now I have caught a new and humbling glimpse of myself. In my arrogance and mocking condescension, maybe I’m the neediest one of all.
A feeling of shame overwhelms me. Shame that my façade of self-control has been unmasked. And also shame that I might end up as one more cookie-cutter Christian on this campus.”
Philip Yancey from Where the Light Fell
Dear God, I was praying this morning about what I will preach about tomorrow. Nothing was coming to me. My wife was surprised I didn’t have football on and I told her I didn’t want the distraction. I wanted my mind to still be seeking you. Finally, I decided to lie in bed and read the memoir I’ve been reading by Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell. That’s when I came across this story, about 80% of the way into the book.
The set up is that Yancey lost his father to polio when he was one year old, and his mother raised him and his older brother in an ultra conservative version of being Baptist. Fringe enough that Southern Baptists in the 50s and 60s thought they were weird. His parents intended to be foreign missionaries, and his mother put enormous amounts of pressure on her two boys to fulfill their father’s ambition in life. It’s a long story that takes 240 pages to tell up to this point, but by the time we arrive at the scene above, Yancey is a sophomore at a Bible college he disdains, he is in a romantic relationship for the first time in his life, his older brother has left the college and experienced serious mental breakdowns, and he cynically realizes that he’s had enough of you, Bible college, and everything else. I don’t think he would put it this way, necessarily, but reading it makes me think he’s just completely burned out on structured religion and the games religious Christians play. Now he’s going to be smarter than everyone.
Then you show up. A professor he actually respects assigns his class to “write an essay about a time when God spoke to you through a passage of the Bible.” It’s the rolling around of this assignment in his mind that set the context for what I copied above. It’s almost like Job 38 when you’ve had enough of Job going on and on and you decide it’s time to set him straight. In fact, Yancey references Job in the report he gives to his class as a result of his experience: “In the words of Job, ‘I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear. But now mine eye seeth thee: wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.‘”
So I think this will be the core of my sermon tomorrow. When Jesus is describing the Samaritan who shows boundless compassion in his story, he isn’t only asking us to rise up and be better people. He is challenging us to be more like you.
Like me, Yancey made professions of faith and accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior several times as a child, thinking maybe he hadn’t done it right. For Yancey, this experience above was new. He describes it as follows:
Part of me–a rather large part–expects this, too, to pass. How many times have I gone forward to accept Jesus into my heart, only later to find him missing? I feel a kind of sheepish horror at regaining faith. But I also feel obliged to admit what has taken me unawares, a gift of grace neither sought nor desired [emphasis mine].
I think one of the things that frustrates me so much about the current American Evangelical church is that it is selling the wrong thing. It is selling some sort of puritanical life that, if achieved, will enable you to claim victory and then stand in self-righteous judgment over those around you. But that’s not what Jesus told us. Yes, he was harsh when he described how there would be a sorting that comes at the end of the age. Yes, he was harsh when he talked about separating parents and children and all kinds of people over himself. But he never called us to be judgmental or mean. He never called us to be unloving. He called us to love you with everything we have and then love our neighbor as ourself? Who is our neighbor? Well, that’s when he gave us this story of a man of a certain nationality beaten. The nationality is only important to set up that this man would have natural alliances and enemies. Two people who should have helped him didn’t, but a natural enemy did. A natural enemy cared for him extravagantly. Are you my natural enemy? Yes, I suppose you are since I am so insufficient in my sin. But–and I can’t believe I’ve never seen this in this story before–you chose to be extravagant with me, your natural enemy.
One unique thing about Jesus is that he didn’t see enemies in the usual way. He didn’t see a Roman centurion as an enemy. He didn’t see Caesar as his enemy. He saw anyone who misrepresented you as the real problem. And the stories he told about you are amazing.
So I am going to try to put an outline for tomorrow morning here.
- I. I think I am going to read the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)
- II. Set up Yancey biography and background
- III. Read Yancey’s telling of his story
- IV. Expound on this different way of looking at the Samaritan in the story as representing you and the beaten man representing me
- V. So we have to ask ourselves: in coming to church, reading our Bible, being on committees, etc. why are we doing it?
- VI. In honest self-reflection, how do we feel about envisioning ourselves as being the beaten man/woman and accepting God’s help
- VII. Is there anyone in our lives who God wants to use us to reach on his behalf, not by accomplishing righteousness so we can use it as a weapon against the unrighteous, but so we can be the Samaritan in their life?
- VIII. Read the CS Lewis quote by Yancey: “God sometimes show grace by drawing us to himself while we kick and scream and pummel him with our fists.” Is there anyone today who needs to stop resisting God, kicking and scream. Is there anyone here who would like to let go and accept the gift of Jesus?
Father, I consecrate this sermon to you. Holy Spirit, please use me. Love through me. Through my flawed delivery and possibly even flawed theology, reach those who need you and draw them to yourself. Oh, Lord, be merciful to us all.
I pray it in the name of Jesus, my Lord,
Amen
Emails to God 