Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
July 15, 2007
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
The Reverend Peter R. Carey
Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Psalm 25
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

 

     “Whenever you did it for one of these the least of my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:45)

     In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

     The familiar text from the Bible that begins “Whenever you did it to one of these the least of my brethren...” is not taken from today’s Gospel, but it does give us a way--a good way I think--to understand today’s Gospel, which is the equally familiar story of the Good Samaritan.

     The way I would like to suggest that we understand the story of the Good Samaritan is to focus not so much on the the priest who passed by or on the Levite who passed by or even on the Samaritan who stopped and helped the wounded traveler, but rather on the wounded man himself: the poor soul who fell among robbers, the man who was stripped of his clothing, of his dignity, and beaten and left half dead by the side of the road.

     Who is the wounded man? Today’s Gospel tells us that he is my neighbor. And the Gospel tells us that it matters not if I like him or if he is the same race as I am, or if he belongs to the same political party or the same religion or the same class as I do. It matters not. He is my neighbor and as such he has a claim on me. He’s hurting and I need to help him. He’s lying there on the side of the road. He is bleeding to death. It’s as simple as that.

     It doesn’t even matter whether he thanks me after I help him. There’s no record in today’s Gospel that the wounded man thanked the Good Samaritan. Perhaps he did; perhaps he didn’t. So when we help the wounded traveler whom we encounter along the way, it doesn’t matter at all whether we get thanked afterwards. It doesn’t alter the fact that the wounded traveler remains my neighbor.

     I have a friend who likes to say, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Yes, that’s often true. All of us have helped or tried to help our neighbor and then found ourselves paying a price for it.

     But still, it matters not. Our Lord tells us in clear and simple language in the beautiful story of the Good Samaritan: we have to stop and we have to help the battered man--or woman--or child. He--or she--is in extreme danger. That is the unambiguous message of the story of the Good Samaritan: that we really have to stop and help.

     Mother Teresa of Calcutta is the modern example par excellence of someone who heard and who understood this story in a literal way. Her moral imperative was simple and clear and urgent and deeply Christian. In fact, that’s how her great ministry began: with the untouchables who literally lay dying, ignored and alone, and half naked, in the filthy gutters of Calcutta. She gathered them into her arms, she carried them to her hostel, she washed them and dressed them decently, and enabled them to live, or often to die, with dignity.

     There are lots of examples of people who have understood and applied to themselves the story of the Good Samaritan. Mother Teresa was a Good Samaritan in the literal sense. But there are other ways. Many of them.

     I met someone a few nights ago, a woman who works in the field of microlending. Microlending involves making tiny loans, some smaller than $100 to impoverished people, usually women, in the third world, to start small businesses. The microloan was invented in 1974 by the Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yumus, who in fact received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work.

     The woman I met was a lay person, not a nun, and she worked in a spotlessly clean office not in the filthy streets of Calcutta, but to my mind she was every bit as much a Good Samaritan as was Mother Teresa. She’d been drawn to this new area of microlending because it helps people who desperately need help and who are, as it were, lying on the side of the road starving to death. She too felt the need to stop and help.

     The desire and the need to help our neighbor in trouble can also cut across time and space. I spent a whole morning a month or so ago with Frank Alagna, a priest of our diocese who now lives in Hong Kong with his partner, who is the director of the Hong Kong ballet. We talked about a lot of things that morning and finally our conversation turned to the subject of how wearying and exhausting and discouraging the struggle for full inclusion in our church can sometimes feel.

     I asked Frank why he stays at it. Why he felt the need to remain engaged in the struggle, even when he lives so far away from the front line, which these days is mostly in our own country and in our own church.

     His answer was startling and deeply moving to me. “I do it,” he said, “for Matthew Shepherd.”

     Many of you know the story of Matthew Shepherd, but perhaps some of you don’t. He was born in Casper Wyoming in 1976 and was a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church there. He was smart and good looking and outgoing.... and somewhat effeminate.

     Yet at 21 years of age, probably few people had as bright a future as Matthew Shepherd. He had wonderful loving parents. His last two years of high school had been spent in Switzerland, at The American School. He had learned German and Italian. He loved to travel. He came back to Wyoming to go to college and so he enrolled at the University of Wyoming at Laramie as a political science major.

     He went to a bar one night. Not a gay bar, but a mixed bar. There were straight kids there too. Two young straight men offered to drive him home, which wasn’t far away. But instead of driving him home they took him down a lonely rural road. They tied him to a barbed wire fence, they tore off his clothes, and then they pistol whipped him. They took his wallet and his house keys with the idea that they would burglarize his apartment, but they were too drunk to do so. Instead they went home and left him there, hanging on a wire fence on a back road in Wyoming, arms outstretched like Christ on the Cross.

     Matthew Shepherd was found by a cyclist eighteen hours after he was beaten and robbed and left hanging on the wire fence. He was still alive, but he lived only a few hours more. There was nothing the doctors could do.

     They buried him from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The Episcopal bishop of Wyoming at the time wouldn’t attend the funeral. He disapproved, he said, of the “homosexual lifestyle.” Like the priest in the story of the Good Samaritan, he chose to pass by his fellow traveler who now lay dead on the side of the road.

     Outside the church, as they carried out the body of Matthew Shepherd, a group of fundamentalists from the Westboro Baptist Church stood with signs. One read: “No Tears for Queers.” Another said, “Fag Matt in Hell.” A third sign read: “God Hates Fags.” Perhaps they symbolically represented the Levites from the story of the Good Samaritan--respectible religious people who hardened their hearts to the man on the side of the road.

     So, Frank Alagna does it for Matthew Shepherd, a man he never met. He does it because in Matthew Shepherd and in all the people Matthew Shepherd represents, Frank sees the wounded and excluded traveler on the road from Jerusalem to Jerico. And he feels he has to stop.

     And Mother Teresa did it for the dying homeless untouchables on the streets of Calcutta. And as she held them in her arms, she too saw the face of the battered traveler on the road from Jerusalem to Jerico.

     And the banker I met at the party. She too. She too will probably never personally meet the poor women of India and Bangladesh who, because of her work, will receive a loan of a hundred or two hundred dollars to start a little business to feed their families. But my banker friend knows who they are. They are, for her, the wounded traveler on the road from Jerusalem to Jerico.

     The banker, the priest, and the nun are all, each in their own way, Good Samaritans. Each has stopped and each has tried to lend a hand to a fellow traveler who desperately needed them.

     But their helpful response is more, much more, than mere human kindness and generosity. Their care for the wounded traveler is, in a deep and mysterious and yet real way, a type of collaboration with God’s work of salvation in the world. They are carrying out and completing the work of Christ in history and thereby hastening the coming of God’s kingdom. They are honoring and imitating Jesus Christ himself, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; the man of peace and reconciliation. They are caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, burying the dead as Christ himself did and would have us do.

     The First Epistle of Peter puts it this way: “To this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21)

     Who then, for us, is the wounded traveler?

     He is--she is--my neighbor. Yes! For sure. But even more. That person, that bloodied, wounded, abused and abandoned person is Christ himself.

     “Whenever you did it for one of these the least of my brethren, you did it to me.”

     To Christ himself and for Christ himself.

     Amen.