Sermon-Sunday-July 15, 2007

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Brothers and sisters,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Who is my neighbor?? This is the question that Jesus is asked after confirming for this lawyer, that the way to inherit eternal life is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and to love your neighbor as yourself. That’s it. It’s that simple. Love God, love your neighbor, and you got it.
That’s it, that’s all you got to do. And the lawyer then wants to know who his neighbor is because he wants to be able to go out there and start justifying himself. But you see there is a problem with the lawyer’s first question. At first he asks what he can do to inherit eternal life. Well an inheritance is a gift. You get an inheritance because someone loved you and thought enough of you to put you in their will. You don’t earn an inheritance, it is a gift.
And yet, in spite of the problematic nature of the question that Jesus is asked, He answers the question. Jesus doesn’t point out the contrary nature of the lawyer’s question. He answers it. He confirms for the lawyer that he is right in thinking that the only thing that you can do to inherit eternal life is to love God with all your, heart, soul, strength, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.
Well that doesn’t sound too hard right? You can do that right? It’s just two things that you have to do to inherit eternal life; love God, love your neighbor. But there is the problem. You see, as soon as you start thinking of Jesus’ commands here as a means by which you can make yourself righteous before God, or a way to earn God’s love, grace and forgiveness, then you have already failed before you have even got out of the gate. You fail, because before you begin you are already thinking of yourself more than you are of your neighbor.
The lawyer’s question of who the neighbor was shows that. He wanted to know who his neighbor was so he could know who he needed to love. He just wanted to make sure he was loving the right people. Now if Jesus had said, everyone is your neighbor then maybe he would have gone out and tried to love everyone. But the point is, in his mind the possibility existed that there might actually be some whom he is not called to love, and, like the priest and the Levite in the parable that Jesus told, this lawyer wasn’t going to waste his time on those he didn’t think he had to care for, because, after all, that wasn’t going to earn him any points with God. So why bother???
And so it is with you. Be it through doubt or pride or whatever means the devil thinks he can exploit, you convince yourself that not only can you take this task on yourself, but you must. You convince yourself that you must do your part. And, maybe. you start to feel proud of yourself, or maybe you go the other way and you start to think that your just not doing enough, and you find yourself face-to-face with your complete inability to fulfill this task on your own.
So then why would Jesus answer the lawyer’s question in that way? Doesn’t He realize that He has essentially just set the lawyer off on an impossible task? Well, the answer to why Jesus would set this lawyer us off on an impossible task like that lies of course in the parable of the good Samaritan which He tells this lawyer.
Now, it’s probably in your nature and has been your tendency, to think that, with this parable, Jesus is saying that we must strive to become like the Samaritan who was so merciful. I don't think that really gets to the heart of what's going on here. It is probably also in your nature to see a little bit of yourself in the humble and merciful Samaritan. But by thinking so highly of yourself, you show that you are probably more like the priest and the Levite who walked right past the man in the ditch and didn’t feel that they should defile themselves by messing with someone who had been beaten and left for dead.
It would have been absolutely unheard of for a Samaritan to show mercy to an Israelite. Samaritans were considered half-breeds. They were part Jewish but it was believed that they distorted the Jewish religious practices. They interpreted the Torah differently, and as such they were looked down upon by the "real Jews." They were literally considered to be enemies of the "real Jews." And, it is presumed that the man in the ditch was a Jew. So A Samaritan showing mercy to a Jew would have defied just about every social and moral convention of the day.
They were enemies. The Jew in the ditch and the merciful Samaritan were enemies. They were enemies of each other, and we are enemies of God. Through sin, we are enemies of God. There is something to learn from every player in this parable, but first and foremost we are to identify with and learn from the helpless man in the ditch. We are to identify with the idea of receiving mercy from One whom we have made our enemy.
The problem is, we don’t see that we have made God our enemy. The lesson from Deuteronomy reminds us that the Word is very near to us, and in our mouths and in our hearts for us to observe. But we won’t have it. We ignore it, or we try to define it on our own terms.
We ignore God’s Word because it confronts us with who we really are. In the midst of the delusional images that we portray of ourselves, God’s Word confronts us with who we really are; helpless sinners and enemies of God. We lie helpless in the ditch of sin, pride, and selfishness. We are the ones who need to be rescued, and before we can be rescued, we need to know that we are in need of being rescued.
But along comes One who refuses to leave us in the ditch. And it is Christ Jesus, the very One whom we make an enemy with our sin. The very One whom we condemn and crucify with our sin is the one who comes to us in the ditch. That is how you come to the font, regardless of how old or young you were, you come to the baptismal font lying helpless in the ditch of sin and the law. And in those waters, the despised and rejected One comes to you and claims you as His own, in spite of the fact that you reject and crucify Him and make Him your enemy.
In Romans 5, Paul writes that when we were God’s enemies we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son. In sin we make ourselves enemies of God, but in Christ Jesus, our Lord refuses to remain an enemy and He refuses to leave us as enemies. He is bound to do whatever it takes to break down the barriers of sin and the law that we place between ourselves and our Lord, even, as we would find out, to the point of death on a cross, where He took your sin upon Himself.
And He continues to come to you in His Word bearing fruit, bringing to you the promise of the gospel; and He comes to you in the sacraments as He will in a few minutes when you come forward; coming to you once again in the bread and the wine, bringing you forgiveness, lifting you out of the ditch, giving you new life.
Christ Jesus came not to give you a pathway by which you could follow so you could justify yourself, rather He came to be your justification. In Christ Jesus you have been transferred from the ditch of the power of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son. In the mercy of Christ, you see that He meant it when He said that He came to bring release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.
So who is your neighbor? You no longer have to ask that, because Christ Jesus has rescued you from the ditch and He has given you new and eternal life and He has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light, and it is no longer you who live but Christ who lives in you. And we know that Christ Jesus shows mercy to, and treats as neighbors, even those who condemn and crucify Him, and now you have been freed to go and do likewise.
Amen