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Fifth Sunday After Pentecost

Proper 10C: Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82

Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

July 13, 2025

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.

This morning we have heard one of the most famous parables in all of Scripture: Luke’s Parable of the Good Samaritan. You are likely familiar with it. Prior to this story Jesus had sent seventy-two people to go out into pairs to visit surrounding towns, places he intended to go as well (Luke 10:1-10). They had returned and he was now teaching his disciples and others. Just before our story, he privately lauded the disciples, saying “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see!...many prophets and kings desired to see what you see but did not see it and to hear what you hear but did not hear it” (Luke 10:123). And then, puncturing the mood by a pointed lack of seeing, a lawyer stood up, we hear, “to test Jesus.” He asked a question: “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:25) A rather individualistic and transactional question – what must do, to receive the ultimate reward, to assure myself of my ultimate place amid all the uncertainties of this life. But Jesus is game. He responds in affirmation of his interlocutor’s standing. You know the law, basically replies. “What do you read there?” (10:26) At this point the man cites by combining what is known in Judaism as the Shema, expressed most famously in Deuteronomy (6:4-9) with a passage from Leviticus (18:18), together expressing a call to love God with all one’s heart, soul, and mind and one’s neighbor as one’s self.[1] Jesus affirms the lawyer’s answer – you have asked the question, you know what you should do. Do it. Live it. But the man was not done. We can’t know the tone of the question he then asks – was it sincere or of a gotcha variety? Either way, it is a serious one: who is my neighbor (10:27-29)?

Jesus’ response is not to list or define the qualifications that render someone a neighbor. If the man was anticipating an analytic reply, he was about to be disappointed, because Jesus’ response was to tell a story. This is the part that is likely familiar to us. Someone making his way from Jerusalem to Jericho is robbed, beaten, and left for dead at the side of the road. Two passers by fail to assist him, a priest and Levite, both of whom we might have expected to stop. By contrast, one who Jesus’ listeners would not have expected to stop, does: a Samaritan. The expectation would be that Samaritans and Jews would not have wanted to assist one another, being in significant theological disagreement and relational disconnect—as one commentator put it, between these communities “there was no love lost.”[2] A chapter earlier (9:51-56), Jesus and his disciples had passed through a Samaritan village and not been treated well.[3] Instead of responding in kind, Jesus had urged his disciples onward (Luke 9:51-56). All the more surprising, then, for the hero of Jesus’ story to be a Samaritan. As the theologian and pastor Howard Thurman commented in a sermon on this parable, while the priest and the Levite “passed by on the other side” when they saw the injured man, leaning into that phrase the other side, the side of the other, the Samaritan was viewed as himself one who “lived the other side of the tracks.”[4] He was the other. And he stopped, bound up the injured man’s wounds, took him to a place of shelter and paid two days wages to the innkeeper, promising more if needed, when the Samaritan returned. This turn was completely unexpected. Jesus’ question at the close of his story pointedly asks, “which of the three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The answer is obvious. As the lawyer put it, “the one who showed mercy” (10:37).

The one who showed mercy. The word mercy, this side of January 2025, now cannot but make me think of Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde’s plea to the President to have mercy on those who are living in fear. A plea that inspired a strong reaction – negative and positive.[5] The call to show mercy is the call that Jesus issues to each of us, to all of us together. It is Jesus’ way of returning the lawyer’s attention to the Shema that he had first quoted, reminding him of its ultimate theme: love. Love of God, love of neighbor, love of self. Who is one’s neighbor? The neighbor is one you love. To be a neighbor is to love. Even when it is hard. Even when it is unexpected. Even when that love calls us to cross accustomed borders.

I was moved this week to hear of firefighters and first responders from Mexico who volunteered to cross the border of the United States to assist with massive search and rescue operation in the flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas. In a context in which the United States government is fortifying the borders between the U.S. and Mexico – a border whose colonial imposition crossed the bodies and ancestries of peoples who have lived in the Southwest for generation upon generation – these firefighters responded as neighbors. In a Guardian article one of them, Ismael Aldaba, founder of Fundación 911 in Acuña, Mexico, said, “There’s nothing that’ll avoid us from helping another firefighter, anoter family. It doesn’t matter where we’re at in the world. That’s the whole point of our discipline and what we do.” Another member of the group, Jesús Gomez, said, “Sometimes people from the other side cross and help us… it’s time to give a bit.”[6] In a context where there are indeed “sides” – literal international borders as well as deeply politicized, often dehumanizing camps – the Fundación 911 is bearing witness to neighbor love. Like the Samaritan, they are crossing to the other side, joining in the yawning work of binding up the broken hearted amid a chasm of pain.

Their implicit answer to Jesus’ question, who is my neighbor, reminds me as well of the conversations that have been unfolding here at St. Aidan’s as we wrestle with the pain of this moment in the life of our country. Who is my neighbor and how do I answer the call to love my neighbor when that neighbor supports a political position that I do not, that I cannot, perhaps a position that undermines my well-being? How do we recognize and respond to such a neighbor when that neighbor is a member of our family, a longtime friend, someone who lives in our literal neighborhood, someone perhaps we thought we knew? Here Howard Thurman’s reflections on the work of love in our gospel passage offer a reminder of the relational heart of the matter:

When I love, I go beyond the good and the evil in the object of my affection. I deal with the person, not with the fact that [they are] lovable or unlovable – if there is such a word – not with the fact that [they are] gifted or not gifted, not with the fact that [they are] healthy or unhealthy, not with the fact that they are worthy or unworthy, that they are kind or unkind. All of that becomes secondary. The primary thing is that when I say, ‘I love,’ it means that I am involved in an encounter that leads from the core of me to the core of you, past all the good things I know about you, all the attractive things I know about you, beyond all the bad things I know about you. And it makes contact with the core of you, and standing there, it works back this way to deal with the goodness and the badness.[7]

It was and remains so important to wrestle with the pain of our questions, to express them in grief, to offer our lament and our longings to the God. For God unfailingly hears us at our very core and calls us to connect with one another with creation itself at its core. God calls us to depth of prayerful engagement, with God and one another, as the foundation of action.

Indeed being a neighbor in the expansive sense that Jesus evokes, is founded upon a life of prayer. The author of our reading from Colossians, writing in the name of Paul, speaks of unceasing prayer for the community to whom he writes, that they may be filled with wisdom and understanding, in the knowledge of God and of the kind of life to which God calls them. The purpose of this prayer, the reason for this emphasis is, he writes, “so that you may lead lives worthy of [God], fully pleasing to [God], as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God” (Colossians 1:10). Growth in the knowledge of God goes hand in hand with the what the letter calls “good work,” what Jesus describes as being a neighbor. Prayer fuels that work, asking God to equip and strengthen us to be neighbors to those around us. The author prays, “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from [God’s] glorious power.” That call for strength acknowledges the struggle of making one’s way in this world: “may you be prepared to endure everything,” even while also claiming moments of joy in the midst of everything, and giving thanks to God in the spirit of that joy, for all that God enables us to do and to share with one another, with our neighbors, and with those who have gone before us, “the saints in light” (1:12-13).

And so, dear friends, our call this day to be neighbors takes us to our core: to the place where God meets us, strengthens and assures us, invites us to rest and be received. And from that strength, from a joy unspeakable that the world did not give and therefore cannot take away, we are invited to be neighbors to one another, not knowing how, not knowing exactly what that will look like or where it will take us, except that it will be to a wilderness place, a place where God accompanies and leads us. A place from which God promises, and has shown, that the world can and will be made new.

[1] Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 2017), p. 136

[2] Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), p. 132

[3] Gonzalez, pp. 132-133

[4] Howard Thurman, Sermons on the Parables (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017), p. 50

[5] Elizabeth Dias, “The Bishop Who Pleaded with Trump: ‘Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?’” in The New York Times, January 22, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/trump-bishop-plea.html?searchResultPosition=4

[6] Cecilia Nowell, “Firefighters from Mexico aid Texas flood search and rescue: ‘There are no borders.’” The Guardian, July 8, 2025: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/08/mexico-firefighters-texas-flooding-search-rescue

[7] Howard Thurman, 55