3 I will hold the Christ-light for you in the night-time of your fear;
I will hold my hand out to you, speak the peace you long to hear.
4 I will weep when you are weeping, when you laugh I'll laugh with you;
I will share your joy and sorrow, till we've seen this journey through.
The Servant Song Voices United 595
Canadians who are involved in Christian faith communities, especially those from mainline churches, tend take a "no more sanctuaries, no more books, no more pastors' dirty looks" in the summertime. I won't argue the merits of this, but while we are away we miss a lot of the good stuff when it comes to the ecumenical lectionary, the schedule of scripture lessons which are used from Sunday to Sunday.
This past Sunday is an example. The story in Luke which has been called The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a favourite, even amongst those who aren't particularly religious. A traveler is waylaid by robbers and beaten, two religious people pass him by, and an outsider -- the Samaritan -- rescues him from the ditch and does everything possible to restore him to health. The message is usually: be like the Samaritan, not the phoney pious people.
This got me thinking about an incident in our neighbourhood on a chilly morning ten weeks or so ago. As I observed a stop sign I glanced over at two elderly women in conversation. one of whom was kneeling beside her dog. As I drove on it dawned on me that she wasn't kneeling, she was on her keester, on the sidewalk. It was a long block before the next stop but by the time I got there I knew I had to go back and check, so I pulled a U-ie. Sure enough, the woman was still seated and it turned out the other person had stopped her vehicle to help but wasn't sure what to do.
"How are you today?" I blundered. "Well, I'm good other than I fell on my ass and can't get up!" she offered rather cheerfully, considering the circumstances. We assessed the situation and she assured me she wasn't hurt. So, on three, I hoisted her to her feet without much difficulty. She caught her breath and insisted that she didn't need a drive, although the other woman wasn't so sure. I think she'd got her cane tangled in the dog's leash and fell boom. We watched her toddle away.
Was I a Good Samaritan? I suppose I was a Dozy Samaritan at first, and a Mediocre Samaritan at best. My response wasn't exactly heroic, but I showed up. By the time I'd arrived at the second stop sign I knew I had to go back to check on her.
I like the "take" of Diana Butler Bass on this passage in her Sunday Musings. First she tells a childhood story of the flannelgraph Sunday School lesson of the Good Samaritan and the question asked by their teacher "who would you like to be?" She held up the flannel priest and the Levite and there were no takers. All hand shot up for the Samaritan, of course.
Then Butler Bass fast-forwards several decades to an incident in the subway where an elderly man tumbled down the escalator and lay crumpled at the bottom, bleeding. Although she responded first, a bunch of others immediately helped. While they waited for an ambulance the man asked for prayer.
A few weeks later Diana was crossing a street at a light and pranged herself, losing her glasses momentarily. She cried as she lay on the roadway, but no one helped, and one motorist yelled at her for blocking traffic!
She points out that we would all like to see ourselves as altruistic or even mediocre Samaritans, not as the person on his/her/their ass on the sidwalk (my interpretation of her thoughts.). She turns to Jewish commentator Amy-Jill Levine who insists that Jesus' Jewish audience would have identified with the battered and bleeding traveller.
Butler Bass offers this truth: "And that's the thing about this parable. Occasional you get to be the Samaritan. But sometimes you're in the ditch."
Ain't that the truth? We're all pratfall people at some point, dependent on the grace of others, and of God. Amen, and amen.
We're going to do a study of Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi by Amy-Jill Levine at Trenton United this Fall. Here is the link to the Diana Butler Bass piece:
https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-840?s=w&utm_medium=web
Dinah Roe Kendall
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