I walked into Ms. Ruth Ann’s funeral – my first Episcopal funeral – and it was the moment that I knew that Episcopal Church was my spiritual home. As a relatively new Episcopalian, I was surprised that the vestments and altar hangings were the same color that were used for baptisms or high holy days, and I even noticed that some of this parish’s traditional baptism hymns were sung at the funeral with tearful joy. I immediately understood the connection: that, as we say in our burial rite, for Christians, life is changed, not ended. I also remember the first time I seriously questioned if the Episcopal Church was the right fit for me: the foot washing on Maundy Thursday. I don’t know if this is something y’all do here or have experienced elsewhere, but my first experience was deeply moving, washing the feet of the person in front of me, but when it was my turn to have my feet washed, I found the action highly uncomfortable and vulnerable. I did not like to receive the same service I gave. Ultimately, it was all incredibly moving and valuable, and didn’t cause a crisis of faith, but has seen been a tangible example for me about how hard it is to give and receive in vulnerable moments.
When I read scripture, especially the parables, I try to spend time imagining myself as each of the characters in the story that Jesus is using to get his point across. I do this because I have found I tend to settle into a comfort zone, and there are times when I tend to avoid the vulnerable character, just as I sometimes avoid the vulnerable parts of life. Today, we hear the story of the Good Samaritan after Jesus responds to a lawyer who wants to test him about the greatest command and Jesus tells him to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Then the lawyer wants further clarification about just who exactly is his neighbor, so Jesus opens one of the most well-known parables today.
A man is going down a road from Jerusalem to Jericho, is stripped, beaten, and robbed. By chance three men pass this bloody and beaten man, first the priest who passes to the other side of the road and continues, then the Levite who does the same, then, finally the Samaritan. The Samaritan man cleaned and bandaged the wounds, hoisted the man upon his animal, transported him to the next inn, and took care of him. The next day, he paid the inn keeper two denarii, two full day’s wages, and promised that he would return to pay the remainder of the bill so that the man could continue to heal.
I can almost see Jesus coming out of his parable story-telling voice to ask the lawyer: Who, then was the neighbor? And I can just near hear the remorse in the lawyer’s voice as he says, the one who showed mercy. “Go and do likewise,” Christ says. And I wonder who the lawyer saw himself as in this story? Because I doubt he would have at first seen himself as the Samaritan, it’s part of why Jesus tells this story, because, for a man from Jerusalem at this time there was not a person either less “deserving” or less capable of this kind of radical mercy.
When I hear this passage, I try to put myself in each role, but a danger of such a well-known parable is that we lose the context and the texture of this story that Jesus told. “Good Samaritan” is such a well-known turn of phrase that whole organizations have adopted this phrase as a title of their whole identity. We are at a particular danger when it comes to parables and letting them shake us up in the ways in which Jesus meant for them to; by very nature of the centuries of them being told over and over again they begin to lose their hard edges and no longer become quite so convicting.
But, friends, if we are willing to have ears that hear, this parable asks us to join in the radical, expansive mercy of God’s hope for the world. The state of the world today, with all its painful chaos and fearful interactions between groups of people, natural disasters, and known and unknown wars isn’t far off from the world into which Jesus spoke this parable.
In a world that asks you to neglect everyone but those who look, sound, and act like you do, God through Christ invites each of us to a different way. In a time where disaster and despair is all around and it seems that everyone is need, and so many of us are weary both in our capacity to ask for help and to give help, Christ taps us on the shoulder and asks us to lean into refreshing water of our baptism, and to not only extend, but also to receive a type of mercy that defies all expectations and norms, offering healing and grace.
My friends, there is little that hasn’t been said about the parable of the Good Samaritan from pulpits across the centuries since Christ first used it as a way to illumine the mind of the lawyer who sought either clarity or a way out or maybe both, so what I offer isn’t terribly unique, but I do hope you hear me when I say I find the parable of the Good Samaritan not a story of a way to be a good Christian, but a gauntlet of what it means to be live authentically into your faith in a time when it is easier to ignore the tricky bits and to put on the name of Christian only. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a call to action; it is a call to get to work, it is a call to make sure that every bit of your life is full of the love, and that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and that we never forget to love all our neighbors as ourselves.
A sermon on delivered July 13, 2025 to the people of Christ Episcopal Church in Harlan, Kentucky for Proper 10C on Luke 10:25-37.
Becca Kello 