July 13, 2025
Pentecost 5 Lectionary 15
Luke 10:25-37
Epiphany, Winnipeg
Remember the Prayer of the Day today? Let’s pray it again. Repeat after me:
O God, your mercy delights us,
and the world longs for your loving care.
Hear the cries of everyone in need,
and turn our hearts to love our neighbours
with the love of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord.
Amen.
O God, your mercy delights us,
and the world longs for your loving care.
Hear the cries of everyone in need,
and turn our hearts to love our neighbours
Being a neighbour, story number one:
You might have heard this week about six elected representatives from Wisconsin and Minnesota who wrote a letter to the Canadian ambassador to the U.S., making it known that they really think Canada should get its act together and stop having fires that make smoke that drifts south and ruins people’s vacations. Or something like that.
There were all these people whose homeland had had months and months and a year and more of drought, and all the forest was tinder dry. Lightning struck here, and a campfire wasn’t put out quite enough there. In another place an ATV’s brakes heated up the underbrush, and not too far from there old fires that smoldered underground through the winter flared up again. The place just started to burn. Twenty-thousand or more people had to flee their homes, and houses and cabins and businesses and lives were lost. And there just wasn’t enough help to go around.
A leader from another land, elected and respected by all, wrote a letter to the neighbours with the fires that said, “You people need to figure out how to stop having fires.” Some of their friends also signed the letter.
Another leader, a friend of that first one, suggested that they also point out that all that smoke is making them uncomfortable. So they all signed and sent the letter to the people whose home was on fire.
And then a firefighter from the same country as those ones who wrote those letters – well, actually, about a hundred and fifty firefighters – flew and bused and drove across the border to the land where everything was on fire, and they helped with the hard work of fighting fires and protecting people.
And Jesus said, “Now which of these was a neighbour to the people whose home was on fire?”
The ones who didn’t blame the victim, or make the story be about their own discomfort. The ones who didn’t complain about inconvenience. The ones who did something. The ones who showed kindness. The ones who showed up and showed mercy.
Being a neighbour, story number two. I might have told you this story before, but it fits again today.
About a year after I finished University I travelled through Scandinavia with a good friend. We had made plans to meet an old family friend in a small Swedish city named Uppsala. So one day, around nine in the evening, our train rolled into the station at Uppsala, and I went straight to the nearest phone booth to call my old family friend, but was informed that I had the wrong number. I assumed that I’d just dialed the wrong number, so I dialed again and was told again that it was a wrong number, so I realized that I hadn’t dialed the wrong number; I had just written down the wrong number, so now we had nowhere to go. I had also come down with a really ugly cold a few days ago and felt just awful. On top of all that, my camera had been stolen two days earlier in Hamburg. It was just a bad couple of days.
Then the station agent came and told us that the station was closing for the night and we would have to leave. So we left and plunked ourselves down on the front steps of the station and wondered what to do next.
We had no idea what to do, so we sat on the steps on a cool Swedish night while cars passed by at the end of the drive.
Around midnight, a Volvo station wagon – of course it was a Volvo – drove by and slowed a bit, did one u-turn and then another, and pulled up and stopped at the curb. A young Swede about our age, early twenties, got out of the car, walked over and said, “You have flags on your packs. Are you Canadian?” “Yes, we are.” “Where in Canada?” “You wouldn’t have heard of it. Saskatoon.” “Saskatoon? I lived there for a year when I was a kid!”
So we talked a bit more there on the steps of the station, and we explained our situation, and soon we were sitting in a Volvo station wagon driving through Uppsala in the middle of the night to the apartment of someone we’d never met and whose name was Anders. Anders saw how lousy I felt, so he made me a big mug of hot milk with honey, and for a moment I felt so much better and I knew something about what it might mean when God promised to lead the Israelites into a land of milk and honey. That stuff was sooooo good.
Anders cleared off room on the living room floor for us and our sleeping bags, and the next day he fed us a yummy breakfast and helped us track down our Swedish friend with the wrong phone number. Then he said a fond farewell and went about the rest of his day, never to be seen by us again.
It was probably not a good idea for him to stop that night, because you never know what someone who looks like they need help might really be up to, right? Maybe their friends are around the corner waiting to pounce. Maybe, even though they look like cute blond wholesome boys they might not be that at all – they’re Canadian criminals running from the law. For all kinds of reasons, Anders didn’t need to stop; and who can blame all the other drivers who didn’t stop at midnight to pick up a couple of strangers? We all know not to talk to strangers, and to keep our distance just in case, but Anders took a chance, took the risk, and stopped. Like a traveller in a story Jesus told about someone who stops to help the one lying by the side of the road.
Now my friend Kris and I hadn’t been beaten and robbed, and Anders wasn’t some kind of outsider who we tend to make the Samaritan be. He just stopped, and that’s what really mattered. For us lost Canadians, that made all the difference. Someone stopped and got us back on our feet again. Anders stopped and helped us find our friend and we were welcomed into a community there. Anders helped to set us off on our journey again.
A stranger in a Volvo station wagon was a neighbour to us.
It wasn’t until much, much later, that I realized that all those times I’ve preached on this Good Samaritan story I’ve talked about the ones who passed by and the one who stopped to help, but I haven’t thought much at all about the one who received help, or about the joy, or the relief, of being cared for and put back on your feet, and being in a place where someone shows mercy and kindness.
We call this old familiar story The Good Samaritan, but you know, Jesus never calls the Samaritan “good.” And he never calls the ones who pass by on the other side of the road “bad.” It’s not about being good or bad. Jesus just calls the Samaritan a neighbour, and then he says, “so go be a neighbour.”
That’s who we are called to be.
He’s just saying “Go be a neighbour.” And he’s imagining a world where people are neighbours to each other, and nations are neighbours to each other. Where churches are neighbours to each other and neighbours to their neighbours; where races and orientations and income brackets are neighbours to each other; where the ones the world calls bad and the ones the world calls good are neighbours to each other. The way that works out can be complicated and sticky. It’s not always easy, but it’s really quite simple: Be a neighbour. And neighbours show mercy and care.
Maybe the other thing Jesus is doing is simply painting a picture for us of the way that God deals with the world: As a neighbour; as one who shows mercy, as one who shows care. As a neighbour, as one who shows mercy and as one who comes to live among us. As one who comes into the world to be a neighbour, and as one who even becomes the neighbour on the side of the road, who loses everything so that neighbours will become neighbours again.
In a weird sort of way, isn’t that kind of a delight? Remember how we prayed, “O God, your mercy delights us”? See the big smiles in the picture on the screen? We can make all this religion and these stories from the Bible and our life together seem like such serious business. But beneath all of this is simply God’s delightful vision of a world full of neighbours. God’s delightful will, and God will give everything, God is giving everything, God has given everything, to see this delightful will come true.