In one of the churches I used to serve, the women's circle would gather once a month in the church library and roll bandages for the Red Cross. They would collect old sheets and white cotton fabric remnants and they would tear them across the selvedge into long strips, cut them to different sizes, box them up, and donate them to the local Red Cross. The strips of cloth would be then be sent across the world to become bandages. They started doing this during WWII and have continued that ministry for over 50 years. Walking down the hall on those afternoons I'd hear the unusual sound of fabric being torn and women laughing and talking. (tear fabric strip)

I kept hearing echoes of that sound this week as I worked on this sermon. So, finally I got up from my computer and went upstairs to my sewing room and made some bandages. You will find one in your bulletin and if you would like to, I invite you to hold it and think for a moment about the wounds in your life and a time when a stranger unexpectedly reached out and offered a healing touch. Or perhaps your mind goes instead to a place where you interrupted your life to respond to the urgent needs of someone you barely knew. Or maybe it wasn't a stranger but a friend or a family member. Whoever it was, and whether you were the giver or the receiver, in that moment, you found the arms of Christ and the power and presence of God also there.

So, I guess I'm encouraging you to let your mind wander during the sermon! Or perhaps later this afternoon you will find yourself recalling a Good Samaritan story that is sacred for you.

Every couple of years a Good Samaritan story makes the news. Any time someone risks their life to help a stranger even secular culture makes the connection to this passage in Luke. There is even a law called the Good Samaritan law that protects anyone who voluntarily offers emergency assistance to someone in distress from being sued if his or her efforts are unsuccessful. Even folks who don't know other bible stories can probably give a decent summary of the Good Samaritan story.

Clearly, the Good Samaritan story is not just a Christian bible story; it's a cross over hit. It is like a country music song that refuses to stay put there and crosses over to climb up the pop chart too; or like when Bono of U2 crossed over from being a rock star to lead a global humanitarian movement to end poverty called the ONE campaign. Sometimes though a cross over hit is a step down—like when Beatles songs cross over to be sung in television commercials. And how many of us had our first exposure to classical music crossing over from public radio stations to become background music during the chase scenes in Ben and Jerry cartoons?

(cue organist)

Can anybody name that tune?

Ok, be honest, how many of you first remembered that as the theme song for The Lone Ranger? And how many of you thought of a cartoon chase scene? And how many of you remembered it as the classical piece titled the William Tell Overture, composed in 1829 and the last of Rossini's 39 operas? News announcer Dan Rather once joked, "An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger".

That is the downside of cross over hits—they can become connected with content that has nothing to do with their original meaning. I am sure that John Lennon would roll over in his grave if he heard his music being used to promote Nike sports apparel and Luvs diapers. On one hand, it is wonderful that the Good Samaritan story has a well understood meaning shared by both churched and un-churched folks; on the other hand it is so familiar it is easy to tune it out because we assume that we already know what its about. Be nice, be helpful, do good deeds not just for friends but for strangers—we know, we know... It's like bible story elevator music...

But just as a Beatles song cannot be understood by listening to it promote buying stuff and a piece of classical music cannot be fully appreciated when it's been reduced to the song that sets the tempo for cartoon mice to chase each other, the Good Samaritan story also has an original context and meaning for the listeners of that time and place.

So I wonder, what did the first listeners to this story know that we don't? What emotions might they have felt as they listened—what connections would they have made from this parable to issues in their world and their lives? The lawyer who approaches Jesus is not a lawyer in the current way the word is used; instead, in that time, lawyer meant he was a biblical scholar, an expert in Jewish law, who served the community by interpreting the Torah so its wisdom could be applied to specific situations. The lawyer here is a sort of trained ethicist and moral advisor to the Jewish community.

Is the tone therefore one of mutual respect and collegial debate or one of hostility and confrontation? Christians often read the bible forgetting that Jesus was a faithful Jew, a rabbi even, and that many of the quotes highlighted in red as direct quotes from Jesus, are also found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus frequently quotes his Hebrew bible and faith wisdom, as any rabbi would do. Jewish tradition also includes the ancient practice of Midrash: religious leaders for centuries have debated and pondered together the meanings of scripture passages which were written down to create a vast collection of theological conversations that continue today. What changes for us in this passage if we hear this story as two religious leaders debating in the Midrashic tradition, the most essential Jewish commandment of loving neighbor?

I've preached and taught this story many times, but it never fails to amaze me how the bible always seems to offer something new, something I hadn't noticed before. The setting for the story is a high crime area. People avoided traveling through there and if they had to they would go in groups—never alone. So, if the victim in this story had made it onto the evening news, people might have nodded and commented that he should have known better than to be there in the first place. The story is set up for victim blaming; but where the world reacts with callous indifference God moves with mercy and compassion. As I thought more about this, a question surfaced for me that I had never thought about before: what are the priest and the Levite doing here? Why are they passing through this high crime district, this seedy and this rough part of town?

I have always read that the priest and Levite didn't stop was not because they were indifferent but because they were afraid of touching the victim and being made unclean and therefore unable to carry out their responsibilities in the temple. Or that they didn't stop because they were already afraid as they took a risky short cut to get where they needed to go? But, what if they didn't stop because they didn't want to have to explain what they were doing there?

Perhaps there were people like some televangelists and self-righteous politicians in Jesus' day too—those who rage against their version of immorality and call other people "unclean" but then find themselves caught in their hypocrisy. Perhaps the priest and the Levite walking through the scene in this parable would be like a fervently anti-gay pastor who encounters someone in distress but keeps walking because he is with his same sex lover, or what if a school board president and Christian women's retreat leader sees someone bleeding on the sidewalk, but she doesn't stop to help because she is on the drug dealing side of town buying a bag of cocaine.

Or perhaps they are like me, maybe like you, and have a policy that they give at the office, they tithe to the church, they volunteer for the homeless shelter and VIM. Isn't that also being a Good Samaritan? I don.t know about you, but I don't give money to people who beg on the street; instead I donate to food pantries and other helping agencies. We spent 16 years living in the Chicago area, and in the city we would often see people slumped in a doorway or coughing and shivering in the winter stretched out on benches in the park. It made us sad, but we didn't stop, offer to take them somewhere warm and get them medical care—we just kept walking. To be honest, we didn't know what else to do. Does that make us like the priest and the Levite? The victim in the Good Samaritan parable is beaten and bloody and has been left for dead; the homeless are just dying more slowly and less urgently I suppose.

In 1973 two researchers recruited several seminary students for what they were told was a research project in Christian Education. They then assigned some of the students the Good Samaritan parable to and the others random bible passages and told them to prepare a sermon on their scripture to be given in another building. As each one crossed the campus to give their talk, they would encounter a man slumped in an alleyway; it is unclear whether the man was hurt or drunk. Their hypothesis was that the students who were about to present a sermon on the Good Samaritan would be more likely to stop and offer aid. The result was that 40% of them offered some sort of help to the man regardless of the bible story they were thinking about. The factor that made the most difference was how much of a hurry they were in. CBS repeated the study but had a man sitting on a path in a city park crying. Few people stopped to help and there was a media frenzy about how cold and uncaring people have become. If you do an internet search on Good Samaritan research of study you can read the details.

I think there are many flaws in both studies. A man sitting on the path crying in a city park could be interpreted several ways: a trick that could put the helper in danger, mental illness in which case the person may not feel they know how to help, an attempt draw a passerby in and then beg for a handout or worse set them up for a hold up. These research studies do not show whether or not someone is helpful; only that people are less likely to help if the need is unclear.

Do you think most people are helpful? I believe the real question we are so often faced with is not whether to help, but how to help. Many times it is not that people don't want to help; it is that people don't know how best to help. If the crying or slumped over man in the experiments would have been severely wounded, unconscious, or if there were a fire or an accident and someone was crying for help, if the need was clear and urgent, as in Jesus' parable, do you believe most people would have stopped to help and called 911?

Side note: studies show that if you are ever in an emergency instead of yelling "Help!" pick someone out of the crowd and speak them directly, "You, call 911!" Or point at someone when you call for help. This is not because being directly asked makes people more moral and willing to help; it makes them less confused about what to do and who should do it, looking around waiting for someone else to take action.

Other research on helping behavior has proven again and again that the most powerful way to influence people to help is by modeling helpful behavior. Darn it. If we want to create a caring world, we have to act in caring ways. It seems Ghandi was right when he said, "Be the change you want to see in the world".

When people observe someone throwing money into a Salvation Army kettle, they are more likely to do the same. When people have just seen someone helping a stranded motorist, they are more likely to stop and offer assistance if they drive by a stranded motorist. When people see others putting large bills in the collection plate at church...there are lost of implications here! Research also shows that most people who have experienced help are eager to help others—compassion seems to be contagious. There have also been some interesting studies done about a behavior as simple as a smile. People are more likely to extend help to someone if someone else has just smiled at them! So, change the world this afternoon—look at the person next to you and smile at them!

I have one final reflection about this passage: what changes in the story if we experience it not from the perspective of the Good Samaritan, but from the perspective of the injured and dying person lying in the ditch—what if we are the wounded and dying traveler in the story and God is the Good Samaritan? Most of Jesus' parables were told to communicate what God is like, what God's power is like, and what is possible in the world when God's ways become ours. If we listen to this parable from this perspective, what is Jesus telling us about God?

What if Jesus. question "and who was neighbor to this man" is not only a moral guide for us as helpers, but also a shocking promise and hope: that God's salvation, God's help, God's healing, God's message, God. love may manifest itself before us through people who are not what we expect? What if this story reminds us that heroes and heroines are around every corner and within the hearts and souls of even the most unlikely characters? Like Martin Luther King once said: "Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love". Maybe this parable was told to open us up to the gifts around us that God is constantly sending, but that we miss because they are not what we think we need or want or from people we are comfortable or familiar with?

The victim in this passage is stripped of all that could identify him—no clothes, no identification, no ability to speak his name or offer a prayer from his faith tradition. The victim is therefore universal—anyone. And did you hear it? He was not asked to say the Jesus prayer in order to be saved. He was not asked if he was gay or straight, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, respectable and responsible or living with consequences of too many bad choices. None of that figures in to the Good Samaritan's decision to offer help.

The moral imperative embedded in this story is deeper than "help others"; it challenges us to consider a God who saves without conditions or requirements or exclusionary clauses or by first assessing merit or assigning value other than "you are worth saving". Jesus tells this story not just to provide a moral example, but to proclaim that gospel of God's unending compassion and extravagant grace.

Jesus also shows us here that God doesn't stay within human made boundaries, religious or economic or cultural when calling and equipping someone for ministry. The lawyer who evokes this parable from Jesus is Jewish and the Good Samaritan is, shockingly, for that time and place, Samaritan. Samaritans and Jews did not associate, did not even speak to one another; they had different places they considered holy and although they were of Jewish heritage, they had different scriptures. Wow. It would be like telling an Israeli that the Good Samaritan was Palestinian, or a Rush Limbaugh fan that the Good Samaritan was a feminist lesbian humanitarian environmentalist, or Pat Roberston that the Good Samaritan was a Muslim...you get the picture. Who we may hate or condemn, God just may call and bless.

The Good Samaritan story asks us to consider not only who our neighbors are and how we might reach out to them, but also challenges us that to love our neighbor also just might mean accepting help from them too, recognizing that someone who is not only strange to us, who we have strong biases against, just might be the one sent by God to help us, to teach us, to humble us, to grace us, to bless us. When we fail to see God's face in the faces of even those we consider so different from us, outside of our faith and therefore could not possibly be working for God's team, we deny ourselves in two ways: we miss the joy and contentment that comes from serving God by serving others and we also deny ourselves the possibilities for healing and wholeness God sends to us as through them, when we humble ourselves to receive their gifts and blessings for our lives.

May we find ourselves crossing over whatever barriers are in our way preventing us from both being and receiving the blessings of God. Amen.