Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, by the abundant power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

"You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself."

The Good Samaritan. This is a story that is so familiar to us. And unlike the story of Naaman, this text is one I have used many times in the past. And still it offers new depths to be plumbed.

The central question, of course, is the one Jesus addresses to the lawyer who is seeking to know what is necessary to the inheritance of eternal life: "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?"

The answer is as profound as the question: "The one who showed him mercy." And the process of getting to the answer is a fascinating one—one we might characterize as a lateral spirituality.

Perhaps you have heard of "Lateral Thinking"? It is a mode of thought that I first encountered about twenty-five years ago with what were called "Minute Mysteries". These were simple descriptions of circumstances that could be presented to people as a challenge. Any number of questions can be asked, but only "Yes" or "No" answers are permitted. The object is to come up with the scenario that led to the scene as described. I used to keep track of these "Minute Mysteries". There are lots of them.

Here is an example: "A woman is lying, murdered, in her bed. It is winter. An empty glass stands on the bedside table."

Those are the only clues. Each is essential. But there are, of course, many possibilities for how things came to be as they are. The hearers must explore those possibilities, use their imagination, and seek carefully to eliminate them until only one remains. What, if any, are the wounds on the body? Why is there mention of the season of the year? What is it with the empty glass? And if it's empty, how can it be significant.

You get the idea.

Oh, and you probably want to know the answer. All answers seem obvious once they're known. In this case, the woman was stabbed with an icicle, which was placed in the glass once its job was done. Some time has elapsed, so all evidence of the icicle has evaporated.

A fellow by the name of Edward De Bono claims to have invented "Lateral Thinking." In fact, he established a school in New York, and started giving seminars on how to think laterally.

He explains what he means by "lateral thinking" from an experience when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. One night he attended a party in London and got back late after the gates had closed. He had to climb two walls to get to his room. He said, "I got over the first wall without too much difficulty. I came to the second wall and noticed it was exactly the same height as the first one. So I had no difficulty with that one either, except when I hit the ground, I discovered I was back outside the first wall."

He had climbed over and across a corner. So he tried again, this time paying more attention to the second wall. He noticed that there was a gate in the second wall, and that the gate was lower than the rest of the wall. It also had foot holds on it, so he decided he would climb over the gate. Which he did. When he was astride the top of the gate it slowly opened. It hadn't been locked.

He said he learned a lesson from that. "No matter how good you are at climbing walls, you should always pick the right one." And this lesson. "Some walls don't have to be climbed. You can enter through a door no one ever imagined."

There's a neat little story about a solution he found for a corporation that had its offices in one of the New York skyscrapers. The building, it turned out, had too few elevators. The office workers were getting impatient, even angry, waiting at the beginning and the end of the day for an elevator.

The head of the corporation and the managers of the building tried several suggestions: staggering the work hours, speeding up the elevators. They even looked at the possibility of installing more elevators. De Bono offered this ingenious suggestion. Install mirrors around the elevator doors. The people will see themselves in the mirror and become so interested, they won't notice they are waiting for the elevator. And it worked. (Mark Trotter, First UMC, San Diego)

That is "lateral thinking." Instead of attacking the problem head-on, you move to the side until you find the open gate.

It occurs to me that this is what Jesus does with parables. Biblical scholars call them metaphors, using the familiar, something that is common to enable us to see something that we had never seen before.

But Jesus uses parables to get us to see something that we often did not want to see before. Instead of confronting us head-on, letting us see what's coming, and building resistance, a parable moves to the side, finds the unlocked door, and enters into our lives with a surprise. It is a lateral approach to the spirit.

There is no better illustration of this than the parable of the Good Samaritan. The usual interpretation is as an illustration of common decency—the importance of helping those who are in need. In fact, "Samaritan" has become part of the English language to mean just that, a person who will stop and help.

That's what the parable teaches, on the surface. But if we read the parable carefully, it is a lateral challenge to the spirit that surprises us.

After the man is assaulted and left half dead, along come, in succession, a priest and a Levite. If anyone would know what to do in that situation, if anyone had a reputation for righteousness, it would be a priest or a Levite. The clear expectation of anyone hearing this parable was that one of these two religious leaders would stop to help. But they didn't. Jesus says that they pass by on the other side.

Those hearing the parable in first century Palestine would have been shocked. And if this parable were simply an illustration of the decent thing to do, then these two exemplars of morality would have stopped to help. They knew the law, and they obeyed it. But they don't.

Jesus clearly is not taking people where they expect to go. He is moving laterally. And here's the catch: "But a Samaritan, while traveling came near him."

Now if you're a Jew, the expectation is that the Samaritan will be far worse than the priest and Levite. Rather than pass by, it might be anticipated that he would see if there is anything more of worth on the fellow and then finish him off. That's the kind of people Samaritans were, as far as the Jew was concerned. Samaritans were the outcast, the foreigner, the heretic, the enemy.

Everybody knew it. You could ask anyone. Samaritans are immoral, unprincipled, opportunistic, mercenary, rapacious, and violent. People would never trust a Samaritan.

But Jesus moves laterally. "When he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, 'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.'"

There it is. Jesus isn't telling the Jews to obey Leviticus, "Love your neighbor." They knew they were to love their neighbor. Jesus is telling the Jews, "The Samaritans are not your enemies, they are your neighbors." This is brought home by Jesus throwing the question back to the lawyer who asked the question originally. Jesus asks, "Who is your neighbor?" The lawyer answers, "The one who showed mercy."

The scene ends with Jesus saying, "Go and do likewise." In the end, he brings it back to a moral lesson. But that's all right. We need to hear it. But what I want you to see is that on the way to the conclusion, he moves laterally, takes an unexpected turn, and makes another, much more radical point. The Samaritan, your enemy, is really your neighbor.

Jesus says, "If you follow me, you can no longer divide the world between Samaritans and neighbors. If you follow me, there are only neighbors, to whom you have an obligation for compassion."

Perhaps you know some Samaritans. A Samaritan is someone you detest, a person with whom you will have no dealings. They come in all shapes and sizes. And their numbers grow daily.

I'm sure you know how it works. First we have opinions. Then we share those opinions with other people. We learn that they agree, and then it becomes fact. Pretty soon we will have no dealings with them. That's when the barriers go up, and we've decided who the new Samaritans are. And eventually, we begin to think that we are virtuous, because we have no dealings with them.

But if we take the gospel and this parable seriously, there are no longer any Samaritans. Not according to Jesus. With one lateral move Jesus sweeps away that entire class of people. All of the outcasts, every person or type of person we have defined as worse than we are, Jesus brings back to us again. We are all neighbors.

Theodor Herzl is the founder of modern Zionism. He was a European Jew, who founded Zionism even before the Holocaust, because he saw the pervasive anti-Semitism that had been a part of European civilization for a thousand years.

The biography of Herzl reveals something that is true about all of us. The biographer notes that Herzl refers to the Palestinians as "a mixed multitude of beggars." That's it. That's all he had to say about the Palestinians who were living in the land, "a mixed multitude of beggars." As if they weren't even there. Then the biographer says this. "It is the faculty of idealists to overlook the visible."

It might be more accurate to say, "It is the human faculty, the nature of human beings, to overlook the visible if it contradicts our prejudice." That's why Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, and it's why he tells it laterally. He wants to challenge the way we see the world. If we see the world as a world of "us" and "them," where we can believe that we are "righteous" and they are "immoral," then Jesus confronts us and says, "It is no longer us and them, we are now one family with God as our Father."

An elderly rabbi once asked his students how one could recognize when the night ends and the day begins. One student raised his hand, and said, "It is when, from a great distance, you can tell a dog from a sheep." The rabbi said, "No, that is not it."

Another student raised his hand, and said, "It is when from a great distance you can tell a date palm from a fig tree."

He said, "No. It is when you look into the face of another human being and see there your brother and your sister. Until then the night is with us."

A lateral spirit is one that seeks to move beyond the obvious, that doesn't accept the status quo, the cultural norms, the prejudices and blindnesses of the world. A lateral spirit sidesteps them all, in search of the way of the cross, the way of the gospel, the neighbor. Even in those who obviously are not. Even those we already know to be otherwise.  —  Amen.