Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

1 Cor. 1:1-14, Luke 10:25-37

Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.

Growing up, I was very active in my church’s Sunday School, confirmation and youth group as many of you already know. I have so many fond memories of late evenings at church (a great excuse for avoiding homework!) hanging out with friends, eating pizza and singing camp songs in the church basement.

I especially loved the part of each youth group gathering on Wednesday evenings where there was a time of prayer and reflection. Our youth group leader would play softly on his guitar to encourage meditation and reflection. My favorite song was called “Sanctuary.” It involves slow calm chords, some harmonized humming for good effect, and can be sung in a round if you’d like. I loved it for its musicality. It’s a beautiful song.

The lyrics go something like this:

Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary,

pure and holy, tried and true;

and with thanksgiving,

I’ll be a living sanctuary for you.

Nowadays, with what I call my “pastor ears” I hear that song and I think: Did we really sing that song in our Lutheran church?!?

It’s a purity hymn that, although it has a beautiful melody, instilled in all of us kids a sense of unworthiness. It’s impossible to really know if we are ever actually “pure and holy” or “tried and true” enough for God. Nor can we determine with certainty if we are ever a “living sanctuary” whatever that means. It’s a song that can eat you up if you spend too much time thinking about what it’s asking you to do and who it’s asking you to be.

In short – it’s a song that is based in what is called the Law or works-righteousness. When I say, “the Law” I mean something that gives us a nice and tidy set of instructions or a list of works or things to-do to gain God’s attention or be good enough for God. The Law is an instruction manual.

My favorite camp song is the modern-day equivalent to the Law. This song is demanding the same thing the lawyer does in our gospel text today (Luke 10:25-37). This lawyer stands up to question Jesus asking: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The song “Sanctuary” asks this very same question but with a beautiful melody.

In other words, the song centers the self - me - I am one who must be obedient and behave in a particular way as proof of my faith. The only way I can justify myself is to increase my “pureness and holiness” by somehow refining my understanding of what is right to do. This is how the Law is applied.

Theologian and ethicist Paul Lehmann says this kind of ‘legal’ thinking, as exemplified in my favorite song and in this Lawyer’s testing, is seeing the Law as Gospel.[1] When we believe that our lives must be behavioral proof of our obedience this is the law being applied.

The Lawyer in our Gospel is probably well versed in the idea of the Law – he is after all a lawyer - and it’s why he presses Jesus to define exactly who the neighbor is that he’s supposed to love according to the Law which states: “You shall love the lord your God …and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Under this Law the most logical question for a lawyer is: who is my neighbor? Because you need to know this answer to follow the law correctly.

And here is where Jesus flips the Law is Gospel narrative on its head. He tells a story about a man who was beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. In this story, two learned men of faith – two people who also know the Law - a priest and a Levite avoided the man by walking by on the other side of the road. Jesus continues by saying a Samaritan came by who saw the man, stopped and helped him.

It appears that the questioning Lawyer interpreted this tale neatly by saying: “We are supposed to stop and help a suffering person in light of God’s commandment to love the neighbor. This is what God asks of us and so we do it.”  Yet, remember, the two learned men of the Law a priest and Levite walked by and didn’t help. Perhaps these two men were following another Law, one that says you are not to touch a dead man – the text does say the injured man was left in the ditch for dead. So, I don’t think the priest and Levite are terrible people, they were doing what they thought they were supposed to according to the Law.

This shows the limitations of the Law.

And yet, I have deeper a question: Where is the eternal Good News, the Gospel message, in a legal interpretation of the story like the Lawyer has given us - That it’s all about God’s command to help a suffering stranger?

This interpretation gets my head spinning! What if we fail to abide by that legal interpretation? What if we can’t give the man exactly what he needs and we end up doing more harm than good? What if we only get him to a hospital but we don’t pay the bill? Are we doing it right? God, are we doing this ‘love the neighbor thing’ correctly? Is just doing something for this person, good enough? I’m not sure!

Instead of this interpretation, I wonder if Jesus tells this story as a means to set the Lawyer free from the Law – to set me free from the bounds that my favorite camp song placed on me all those years ago! To make the Gospel as law rather than the Law as Gospel.  Let me explain.

When Jesus has the Samaritan stop to help a suffering Judean it’s not just to amplify the so called “goodness” of the Samaritan, or to give us instructions for life. It’s to show what living the Gospel looks like. Because the Samaritan, to any Jew at the time, would have been perceived as one who does not understand the Law. Samaritans were ethnically and religiously different from the Jews of Judea and would have been considered outside of the Law. So, I think this story is to exemplify something totally new and outside of the Law: the Gospel. And in this story, the Gospel looks like is this:

Seeing humanity as God sees humanity. In love.

Being moved by that love into compassion as God is moved into compassion.

Acting on that compassion - not out of a commitment to a sense of necessity or instruction but as God acts on compassion freely and abundantly pouring out grace upon grace for creation.

This Samaritan saw the suffering man as God does, felt for him as God feels, was moved for him as God is moved, and had compassion for him as God does – so, the Samaritan acted.

Notice that the Samaritan’s action is not framed as an act of commitment to the Law – it’s not part of his “do-good-so-God-notices-me” checklist. His actions come through his very seeing, feeling and being moved to compassion toward this fellow human being. Jesus is saying that this is how God sees the world. How God sees all the people in the world.

This is how the Gospel frees us from the Law and inspires us to act. Because when we see our neighbors, our fellow human beings and our created world as God sees it – in love and compassion – then the only possibility for us is to serve our neighbor, help our neighbor, clothe our neighbor, feed our neighbor, welcome our neighbor and to do it all to the best of our ability and to the Glory of God because we love our neighbor not because we are trying to fulfill a “Godly checklist.”  

When we see the story about the Good Samaritan as a story that bears the Gospel message – that is, God’s love and compassion for all – it flies in the face of the Lawyer’s question about the law. Because when we see our fellow humans as beloved children of God, as our beloved neighbors, our service to our neighbor is no longer about justifying ourselves to God, it’s no longer about what we should do to gain God’s love… it’s about living into God’s love that is already poured out.  It’s about seeing all people as God sees all people: in care and compassion.

May the Holy Spirit come among us to help us be compassionate as God is in His love for all people. The world desperately needs this kind of love and compassion.

May it be so.

Amen.   

The Rev. Ryan Heckman | July 13, 2025

[1] Lehmann, Paul. The Decalogue and a Human Future: The Meaning of the Commandments for Making and Keeping Human Life Human.