Parable of Loving Kindness

 

Before we leave behind the Parable of Full and Authentic Life (aka ~ the Good Samaritan but since Jesus didn’t title it that way, neither do we have to accept or adopt that as the only title), I want to focus on the beloved in the ditch.  We live today in a world that has left too many bruised, battered, and on the fringe and fray.  We know that too many people are hurt by systemic racism, trapped in generational poverty because cost of living is too high, legislation continues to tell people who they can love and how they can identify.  I know that each person reading these words has pain that is unprocessed and grief that is shoved into the cobwebbed corners of your soul in cardboard boxes layered with dust (note the image from Ash Wednesday that there is dust and stardust in you).  And yet when someone asks us how we are doing, we quickly say, “Fine”.  Because we are not sure we can say truly or fully are we are doing.  Or better yet we say, “Busy”, because everyone loves to be needed and necessary.

 

But I know I am in the ditch of life.  I know that I sit by a pool of my own tears.  I know that there is a woundedness that needs more than good advice.  I need gospel medicine that tells me a different story.  I need to hear that sometimes the one who can provide a balm in the Gilead of my soul will be the least likely person, even my enemy.  Gulp and Zoinks…that doesn’t sound like something we want to accept.  If you hold the Parable of Loving Kindness close to your ear and heart you might hear the man in the ditch trying to get the attention of the religious folk.  Who is trying to get our attention today but because of compassion fatigue or busyness or our own dusty brokenness we can’t hear or don’t want to help?  Maybe the man in the ditch is afraid with the Samaritan stops.  I don’t know if the man was conscious (literally or figuratively) of who was helping him!  We don’t know if there was ever a reunion that could be featured on the nightly news where the two met up again to share life.  There is so much in this parable that tells us not just a different story but gives us a different script then we were taught in school.  And it is a script that will frustrate and flummox us, because we know our friends and family may not understand.  While the world continues to pass by, we are called to tend those who cross our path.  While the world justifies their behavior and doubles down on their righteousness, we tend the wounded in ourselves and others (seeking to be what Henri Nouwen called, “Wounded Healers” ~ imperfect as we all are and in our how dusty humanness).  I pray this story doesn’t just sit on the shelf of your soul but starts to rummage and roam around your life creating all kinds of good chaos that faith is about.  May you and I be open to the profound ways that we are both wounded and healers and passers-byers and sometimes silent spectators on the sidelines or color commentators on what others should do and sometimes, by the grace of God, people who have experienced loving kindness and share that force with others.  Amen.