Road Trips (Fifth Sunday after Pentecost)

Sermon Reflections

Sermons on YouTube…

So as you can tell by the artwork posted in the narthex and around the sanctuary, the theme of this year’s Vacation Bible School is “Road Trip.” Both the kids and the adults will be looking at 5 Bible stories in which people are “on the road.” Sometimes, they’re going someplace because God told them to go there. Sometimes, they’re going someplace because they have to go there for some reason that may or may not seem religious. And sometimes, they’re just on the road for personal reasons, but in that road trip, they unexpectedly encounter the presence of God.

And when you’re planning a VBS curriculum, you always try to find a theme that sounds fun and exciting! And for most of us – most of the time – the road trips we’ve been on have been fun and exciting. We often go on road trips because we want to see things we haven’t seen before. Because we’re in places we haven’t been before, we often have unexpected experiences that turn out to be some of the most memorable parts of the trip. And even when we encounter difficulties or problems on a road trip, those things can provide great stories for years to come! Road trips are memorable.

And that’s one of the things that made today’s parable memorable to Jesus’ first hearers. A lawyer – that is, a professional biblical scholar who studied the law of Moses – asks Jesus a question. And in response, Jesus tells a story. But the context of the story is a road trip. It’s a trip on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.

Now an important thing to know is that, while Jesus makes up the story, he doesn’t make up the road trip. This road trip was well known to Jesus’ first audience, as the road between Jericho and Jerusalem was ancient and was often used because it was, in fact, the shortest route between two ancient cities – Jericho in the Jordan River valley and Jerusalem in the hills of Judah.

But NOBODY wanted to be on that road. It was not a fun place to take a road trip because:

  • It was literally a winding road through harsh desert terrain with no water and no places to stop for help or supplies; if you got sick or injured, you were in a bad place to get help…
  • While it’s only about 20 miles as the crow flies between the two cities (and not even crows are dumb enough to fly there!) what you don’t realize until you’ve been there or seen a topographical map, is that the elevation difference is enormous. Jericho, in the Jordan River valley, is almost 1000 feet below sea level. Jerusalem, up in the hills of Judah, is at almost 2500 feet above sea level. It’s a long hard climb up, even if nothing else goes wrong, but…
  • The real reason you didn’t want to be on that road was that it was a hang out for the kinds of thieves and bandits that Jesus describes in the parable. Merchants traveled back and forth and were easy pickings for bands of thugs who did exactly what Jesus describes happening to this poor guy, and that part of the story wouldn’t have been unusual at all…

Often, as you read commentaries on this parable, commentators will wonder why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop to check on the poor guy by the side of the road. And often, there are dubious (and generally wrong) religious explanations which are proposed. But the reality is that the goal of any “road trip” on that road was to get the heck off that road as quickly as possible. And so the real question isn’t why the other two didn’t stop, but why anybody would stop at all.

And in fact, this is how Jesus flips the question! The question he had been asked was, “who is my neighbor” – that is, “who is the guy in the ditch?” But Jesus flips the question to “who IS the neighbor” – that is, “who are you if you’re traveling along on this road trip?”

So instead of the narrow limits of who might be worth stopping for on the road trip of your life, Jesus instead asks the question of who you’re going to be as you move down the road – regardless of whether the road is long or short or safe or dangerous.

And that means that Jesus is really using this road trip story to call each of us to consider NOT who our neighbor might be, but whether we’re willing to BE neighbors by living as children of God who:

  • Think of ourselves as being on a journey from God – that is, to see our lives as a journey with unknown opportunities instead of as a possession we keep in our pockets … (this is one of the differences between the Samaritan and the others – he sees the need and the opportunity instead of just seeing the danger to himself and his own interests…)
  • Have compassion for those who have been injured on the journey – that is, not only to recognize the dangers and perils we ourselves face, but to appreciate and empathize with those who have been the victims of those dangers … (it’s not about trying to find something inherently warm and fuzzy about others, which neither Jews nor Samaritans probably felt for each other…)
  • Are open to taking some of the detours that God may place in our journeys – that is, to be willing to adjust and change the way we thought our lives would go when God puts an important task before us … (which is, frankly, one of the hardest things for me whenever I’m on any kind of road trip – I got an agenda and I don’t want anybody messing with it…! But this Samaritan is willing to let his agenda be messed with…)

So it may be that loving your neighbor as yourself isn’t so much about your neighbor as it is about you. And the key is not to find something inherently lovable about your neighbor, but to understand yourself as a person God has put on a road trip.

And if you’re on a road trip from God, you’re a person gifted by God with opportunities and possibilities. You’re a person gifted by God with the ability to have compassion for those who get caught up in the same dangers and problems you face on your road trip. And you’re a person gifted by God with the freedom to make detours on your road trip so that you can be the neighbor God has called you to be.

Amen.