United Methodist Church Westlake Village

Stripping Away Stereotypes: Jesus' Radical View of Compassion

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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The parable of the Good Samaritan might be the most familiar story Jesus ever told—so familiar that we risk missing its truly radical message. Stepping into the pulpit, Guest Preacher Rev. Gary Keene offers a fresh perspective by reading this well-worn tale through a transliteration of the original Greek, creating just enough distance for us to hear it anew.

Through careful textual analysis, Gary reveals two profound subversions Jesus embeds in this simple story. The first is obvious: making a despised Samaritan the hero would have shocked Jesus' original audience, challenging their deeply held stereotypes about who could be "good." The second runs deeper: by stripping the victim naked and rendering him unconscious, Jesus removes all identity markers that would tell passersby who this person was—Jew, Gentile, friend, or enemy.

This nakedness completely transforms the lawyer's original question from "Who is my neighbor?" to "Who am I when confronted with human suffering?" The parable isn't about determining who deserves our compassion; it's about becoming people who show compassion without qualification. As Gary eloquently puts it, "This is the naked gospel—God's love stripped bare and offered to everyone."

Drawing connections to contemporary divisions—whether political, racial, or socioeconomic—Gary reminds us that we all create mental categories that determine who receives our care. Yet Jesus calls us to see past these artificial boundaries to the naked humanity beneath. We will all find ourselves "in the ditch" at some point, and what matters then isn't who we are, but whether someone will show us mercy.

What would happen if we treated everyone with the same unqualified care we show an infant at baptism, "for as long as we both shall live"? Neighbor, Jesus teaches us, is not a geographic concept but a moral one. When we embrace this truth, we don't just secure eternal life—we experience abundant life now, through relationships of genuine mercy and compassion.

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Speaker 1:

Good morning. My name is Gary. I'm privileged to be with you here this Sunday. I appreciate the opportunity to step back into the pulpit. I last served as senior pastor over in Camarillo but spent much of my ministry career working in the regional and national level. So it's always good to kind of just be back home and doing this thing.

Speaker 1:

I was particularly engaged when Darren invited me to see that the assigned lesson for today is the very familiar parable of the Good Samaritan. I thought, oh, that's going to be easy, and you know it's such a rich and dense story. I realized part of the story is to unpack it and find out what's really there and to try and get past our familiarity with it. To try and get past our familiarity with it. So the way I want to offer to you the scripture lesson and the reading of the story this morning is by we're going to show it in the common English translation in the text I believe you have we'll come up on just a moment but I'm going to read it in a transliteration of the Greek, to take literally each of the words from Greek into English. I didn't do this. You can get it all online, but it's a fun way to create kind of a gap in what we hear and what we see and what we think we know, so that we might hear it afresh. There are some tricks to it. It sounds like the pirate from the Lego movie or Yoda in Star Wars, reading from the King James version. There's a stiltedness to the grammar. That's what kind of unsettles it. I would also flag that throughout.

Speaker 1:

One of the motifs that we'll pick up later talking about it is everywhere it says a certain man you know went down to Jericho and a certain Levite and a certain priest the Greek, for that is really any. So it's really anyone, any person going down to Jericho, any Levite, any Pharisee. It's an interesting thread that comes through the story. The last one is that the keyword neighbor is rendered from the Greek, as in Old English we would think of someone who is nigh, someone who is near, and the bor part neighbor. Bor refers to dwelling place, so a neighbor is someone who lives nearby. So when we hear that, you'll kind of plug that in. So I think you don't usually stand for the gospel reading, am I correct? Right? Okay, good, stay seated so that we can hear and try and see and get this story.

Speaker 1:

It is the parable. You know it functions on its own. You can take just the parable Jesus tells and it works fine. But the way it's been given to us through Scripture is it's a story within a story.

Speaker 1:

So there's the setup of a certain lawyer comes to taunt and tempt Jesus what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says since he's a lawyer, that is a legal scholar of the Torah. He says how do you read the law? And he gives the very canned but correct answer, the Shema, what every faithful Jewish kid learns in their bar mitzvah Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. And Jesus says Thou hast answered correctly this do and thou shalt live. But he, the lawyer, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, and who is my neighbor? And the Jesus said A certain human downstepped from Jerusalem into Jericho and it is happening, robbers he falls among, who outstrip him and blows placing on him, came away, leaving him half dead.

Speaker 1:

By coincidence, a certain priest descended on the road and, perceiving him beside, came instead on the other side. Likewise, yet also a Levite, coming according to the place and perceiving him instead beside, came on the other side. Yet a certain Samaritan, being on his way, came according to him and, perceiving him, he is compassioned and coming toward him, he downbinds the wounds of him on pouring olive oil and wine, mounting yet him, on the beast of him, leads him to the con, every place receiving and was uncared of him. And on the morrow outcoming, he is extracting two denarii he gives to the conkeeper and said to him be you caring for him and which any ever you should be toward spending, I, in the coming back, shall be giving to you. Any of these three is seeming to you to have become the near one of the one falling into the robbers and the one yet said the one doing mercy with him. And the one yet said the one doing mercy with him said then to him the Jesus, be you going and be you doing likewise. Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God, amen.

Speaker 1:

Well, we know this parable and this teaching, perhaps a little bit too well. It leads to the possibility. I mean it's in the common vernacular. People beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition know this story of the Good Samaritan. As William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain at Yale, said it it is well-worn because it wears well. That said, its familiarity can lead us to not taking it seriously enough to really understand how radically it can challenge us always, but particularly today. So what I want to offer today is invite us into a very close Bible study of this text and see if we can find things we didn't know before. With that in mind, would you pray with me? Gracious God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of these our hearts be acceptable. O thou who art our rock and redeemer, amen. First premise Good Samaritan. Bad interpretations.

Speaker 1:

One of my early churches was helping to clean out the closet at the church and we found something that I found fascinating. This was an old church in Pasadena and it was a collection of black and white photos mounted on hardboard and it was obviously a teaching tool for Sunday school and youth groups, that sort of thing of this parable. There was a woman in the congregation who had been a photographer for the newspaper and instead of a flannel graph, somebody can tell the young folks what a flannel graph was instead of a flannel graph or the chalkboard. They went high-tech and used her talent and they staged the scenes of this parable and she took the photos and then you can imagine her. You know a teacher or youth leader like this, sitting with young people and going through the images of the story, almost like a graphic novel, beautiful black and white photos. Now, mind you, this was done in the 50s and it was interesting to me to see how they had tried to tell this very familiar story. So in this version of the story, where they had obviously engaged I mean it was a brilliant idea they engaged the youth, the young people, the kids, everybody was involved in taking these photos and creating this story. So they were living the story, if you will.

Speaker 1:

So in this story, the one going down to Jericho, he's the newspaper delivery boy. He's maybe eight years old, he's practically got a beanie cap on is the way I remember it but he's riding his bike down the street with his newspapers. Now, all of the photo cards are not there, there's some gaps, but we are instantly able to see who's the bad guy, who's the robber. So the kid is riding down the street with his papers and here, on the other side of some shrubbery, it's this guy with black slicked-back hair and he's wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up and he's smoking a cigarette. You know he's the bad guy. It's perfectly obvious. The next available panel shows the kid crashed out on the sidewalk, newspapers all over the place and the slick haired guy is walking away kind of smirking over his shoulder, probably took his newspaper money, something like that.

Speaker 1:

And then, sure enough, comes the Good Samaritan, and in this instance it's this tall blonde guy with a square jaw. It looks like Clark Kent. I found out later it was the choir director's son. So he's the good guy and he picks the boy up and he takes him, puts him in his car a 38 Hudson, I noticed, I just happened to know that and drives him to what apparently is Aunt Bea's house. She comes out, she takes the kid and there's the whole story. It was a brilliant idea, beautiful presentation. I thought it was fantastic, except for it's dead wrong. You know why it's dead wrong, don't you? Because the story that Jesus tells is a choir director boy driving the car sideswipes the kid on the bicycle and the slick-haired guy rolls up on his Harley, puts his cigarette out, loads the kid onto his motorcycle and takes him to the emergency room.

Speaker 1:

That's the parable of the Good Samaritan, not this one they put together on the cards. Because you see the point of the Good Samar. It's not what to do, it's the who. That's the question the lawyer asks. I know what to do. Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, neighbor as yourself. But who's my neighbor? So, heads up, jesus is not going to take this question as it is. He's not even going to answer the question. He's going to raise questions. He subverts the whole scenario, which that's the nature of his ministry. It's the nature of almost all of the parables to turn things upside down, to turn our expectations upside down. So he takes the lawyer's question, tells this story and starts asking questions that then the lawyer and we as the audience must answer. So there are two subversions, two flippings, if you will, in this parable. The first one is right on the surface. It's about stereotypes and it's the one we most know and we just talked about.

Speaker 1:

Jesus uses a very classic, typical three-phase setup. Most know and we just talked about. Jesus uses a very classic, typical three-phase setup. You know this from children's stories. There's three pigs, there's three bears, there's three bowls of porridge. We tell it in jokes A priest and a rabbi and a pastor walk into a bar. The function of the three is to set up a pattern so that the third one surprises you, tells you something. So he does that. The priest and Levite. People absolutely know who those are A priest, a Levite and a Samaritan.

Speaker 1:

Now we do not live in the Middle East at that time to understand the gut punch how that landed for those listening. Samaria at that time, if you want to go back into history, was after the Kingdom of Israel had divided. There was a difference between the two. It was kind of like the Civil War Confederacy, north and South. The real issue was that particularly the Samaritans in that area of Samaria they had, whereas some of the Israelites in the north had kept to themselves, the Samaritans had intermarried with non-Jews and Gentiles and they worshipped on a different mountain. They were hardcore about following the Torah. They saw themselves as Jews, but the Israelites in the north did not see them as such and didn't want to have anything to do with them, considered them dangerous and practically heathen. So the notion that a Samaritan would do the good thing was quite shocking to them.

Speaker 1:

He tells this story and everybody knows well, of course you're going to help the guy in the ditch, right? Of course you would do that. But a Samaritan Wait what? What? A good Samaritan is an oxymoron, so Jesus has flipped that stereotype as a part of further cracking open what they think they already know. So that's the first subversion for his audience. And what's our equivalent? I've preached this story over the years many times and every time I'm kind of looking for what's the story that would help us hear it. And it's in the news right now. Right now it's in the Texas flooding. Now.

Speaker 1:

A big part of my ministry was in camping ministry so I've been paying close attention because many of those impacted were kids at camps and I can't tell you the grief that is flowing through the camping community. All of my newsletters and feeds about that are just, you know, this is the worst thing imaginable. You know you send your kids to camp. As counselors and deans, we take our kids into camp and we have them for our own for that week, and to have that happen is just the most horrible thing in the world. So it has happened and the stories that are coming out about the response and the questions about that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1:

One of the stories that got tagged was a US Coast Guard rescue swimmer saved 165 kids. So I checked on that, because that's quite the story, isn't it? Of course you would expect a US Coast Guard person as well asa, trained swimmer to be a part of that saving. I would notice just to be accurate in the details, he was never in the water. That's not his involvement. He was basically the on-the-ground coordinator and triage coordinator for the choppers that were coming in and lifting kids out. So that's one of the stories of this tragedy and you kind of want to wave the flag. Great, he saved 165 kids. That's the person you would expect to do the saving right.

Speaker 1:

The story not told that's racing through the camping network, two camp counselors, two young gals college-age gals at another camp not the Camp Mystic, but another camp saved 20 of their girls by doing exactly what camp counselors are trained to do. They identified that they took seriously the problem that was coming. They gathered their kids ahead of time. They took some coloring books and games with them and their song books. They got them to high ground. They managed to be just above the water. They stayed calm, kept the kids calm, kept them a little distracted with the games. They did all of this and saved those 20 girls until they could be choppered out the part that's not made it into the news. Yet who were they? Two young Latinas who came across the Mexican border to work in that camp, which was multilingual. This is common in the camping community. We send counselors back and forth across state lines and conference lines, church lines, in order to kind of refresh and get new ideas, give them the opportunity of like an internship. Nobody's telling the story of two young Mexican girls who saved 20 children. Why is that? You just kind of have to ask the question, the same way Jesus' audience was asking how is it that a Samaritan would do the right thing? Jesus isn't done. The second subversion is deeper and very remote from us.

Speaker 1:

For a while I worked in Montana, wyoming and Colorado, and one of the first things I was told when I moved to Billings, montana, was don't miss the Saturday farmer's market. And you want to be there early because that's when you can get the Hutterites fresh bread. And I said what? So? The Hutterites, you may know, are kind of like Mennonites. They're kind of like the Amish, kind of like Mennonites. They're kind of like the Amish. They live in colonies. It's a very old school kind of community. They're excellent farmers, really excellent farmers, and man can they make bread. They make the best, freshest bread I've ever ever had, and that's what they. They would come into the farmer's market to sell their bread and if you got on the inside and you were polite and didn't help I mean it did help to speak just a little bit of German you might get invited to come around to the back of the truck and you could get their sausage. That was the good stuff.

Speaker 1:

So that's how I first encountered the Hutterites and then one day, as a part of an ecumenical thing, you know, a couple of us were invited to actually go to one of the colonies, which is usually closed to outsiders, and see how they're living, what they're doing, etc. And it was interesting. It was not totally unexpected. Where I grew up in Michigan, the Amish were nearby and you'd see the horse-drawn wagons and whatnot. The Hutterites are not quite so anti technology, but still very limited. The dining hall where they would eat is separated. The women eat on this side, the men eat on that side and they wear a relatively distinctive dress hats, dark clothes and the women wear a headscarf, usually with polka dots, and they might vary a little bit by color, but basically it's a polka dot scarf, and so it was all very interesting and I got a kick out of the fact that, as they were showing us through the egg sorting room right, it's a farm egg sorting room it was a very small room and so we had to kind of get in and then close the door and I saw behind the door some had to be a kid in chalk had written Deaf Leopard Rules, so somebody had a radio, anyway.

Speaker 1:

But this was not the only instance of a little pushback. In talking with the community leaders and hearing about what was going on, one of the things that they shared was there had just been a split in the colony and a whole subgroup of the people, of the families of the community, had been shunned out and had to go establish a new colony of their own. The cause of the shunning was that some of the women mostly younger but not all had decided to tie their headscarves not under their chin properly, but behind their ears, at the back of the neck. This was not proper, so they were excluded from that community. The next time I went to the farmer's market I was looking for how did they tie their scarves? I want to know where they ended up. That's how the folks knew who was who, who belonged to who. Which belonged to which colony? Right, how do you know where someone is from, maybe what they do? Dude rolls up in a Harley with a ZZ top, beard spit and tobacco juice you got ideas, right. The gal rolls up in a Range Rover wearing Lulaman yammering to her broker Same thing, you got some clues, you got some ideas. Her broker same thing, you've got some clues, you've got some ideas.

Speaker 1:

We see and we hear, and we do this subconsciously and consciously all the time, all the time. I am acutely aware that in this moment, my mother is spinning in her grave because I am preaching wearing jeans. I tell you my car's in the shop. I had to use the motorcycle and I'm not wearing my suit, pants on the motorcycle on the 101, right? So I needed to wear my jeans. Sorry, mom, and God forbid. Darren suggested ahead of time. Hey, it's summer, it's casual, I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt. If I wore a Hawaiian shirt, my mother's head would explode, whether or not I was in the pulpit.

Speaker 1:

No, we have pigeonholes for everyone and we have a science for it, called demographics. But what does Jesus say? A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers who stripped him, beat him and took off, leaving him half dead. In other words, this guy in the ditch is naked, probably comatose and unable to speak. He's got no ID, nothing to indicate who he is or where he is from or what he does. Zip, zero, nada.

Speaker 1:

And for that Middle Eastern audience not unlike the Hooterites, a highly stratified and dependent upon visual cues, including clothing and headgear and beards and hair shells, just like us today that means we don't know who he is. Is he one of us? Is he a good guy who deserves our help, whom we would be obligated to help because he's one of our tribe? Or could he be a Samaritan, a foreigner, a traitor, an enemy? We don't know. And because we don't know, an enemy, we don't know. And because we don't know, cross over on the other side, because there's literally nothing to see here.

Speaker 1:

This is how Jesus totally subverts the premise of the lawyer's question. The lawyer knows the law says to love thy neighbor. So he wants to get into the details, wants to know who is my neighbor, who is my nigh one, the one near to me. And can we just pause and note there, hear the conditionality of that who is my neighbor? That's how he circumscribes the compassion he might expend. That's how he circumscribes the compassion he might expend.

Speaker 1:

But Jesus takes all of that away by putting a naked man in the spotlight. A naked, wounded man, a purely anonymous, any man, a human being who is half dead and desperately in need of a good neighbor. With this man's nakedness, jesus flips the lawyer's question from who is my neighbor to who am I? Am I a good neighbor on this road of life? Not, who are they not? Do they qualify? Do they wear the right headscarf, the right way, wear the right clothes, live in my zip code, my county, my country? Do they have the right skin color? Do they speak the right language? Do they give to the right causes and vote for the right candidates? Do they believe in the same God or maybe not at all? All of those criteria, descriptions, stereotypes, qualifications, in this story are erased. This is just a guy in the ditch hurting.

Speaker 1:

Now, who are you? What are you going to do? This is the naked gospel. This is the naked gospel, god's love, stripped bare and offered to any and everyone, calling us also to be stripped bare, to be vulnerable with one another, to be stripped down to the core of who we are. The drag queen RuPaul said it this way beautifully we are all born naked. All the rest is drag and over there it's all the rest of the stuff that we put on ourselves and that we put on each other. You can make your own list Samaritan, illegal, patriot, libtard, All the names, all the costumes, all the bumper stickers that distort how we see one another and treat one another.

Speaker 1:

But God sees us naked, naked From day one, right? God invites us to look with those same divine neutral eyes. No, not neutral eyes, because what does it say? The Samaritan looked and was compassioned. He looked with eyes of empathy. First, he didn't need to see whether or not the guy was wearing the right clothes.

Speaker 1:

You know, here in the United Methodist Church we celebrate just two sacraments communion and baptism. And although we celebrate adult baptisms, it's more fun and it's easier to understand when we baptize an infant Little, naked, moist, squealing babies. We join together to see this infant as a child of God and we dedicate in the ritual I'm sure you've done it. In that ritual we promise ourselves to care for that child as a child of God. And perhaps we should add we promise to do that for as long as we both shall live. Wouldn't that be something if we treated one another, if we treated everyone with the same care, affection and respect that we feel for a child when it's all innocent feel for a child when it's all innocent doesn't have anything on it for us to get confused or distracted by. What would it be like if we did that for as long as they lived, from when they are little, through those teen years and all the way to when they grow up? How subversive would that be and how life-changing for all of us.

Speaker 1:

Because on the road to Jericho or Oxnard or Phoenix or Washington or wherever you are going on this road of life, we're all going to be in the ditch at some point. It might not mean going to the ER, but it might include a diagnosis. It might mean an unwelcome prescription with nasty side effects. It might mean foreclosure, a divorce, an estrangement. It could mean downsizing, unemployment, therapy. There are a lot of ways to be in the ditch and every Sunday you all pray about that.

Speaker 1:

There are a lot of ways to be in the ditch and every one of them needs a good neighbor, which is the genius of Jesus'. Answer to the lawyer the lawyer's question of who. He wipes that out. He says not only does it not matter who's in the ditch, it also doesn't matter who shows the mercy. It's their compassion that identifies and defines them, not anything else. It's only the one who shows mercy when you think about it. If that's true, if the one who can be your good neighbor could be anyone, it might be a Samaritan. I'd be ready for that.

Speaker 1:

There's so much in this story, I tell you. I've been chopping away at this for a week, trying to get it down to where it'll fit. We can get out of here on time. But let me just a few quick more before we go, and I'll let you go. When the Samaritan takes the wounded man to the inn, the word is kereven sarai, which translation means every receiving place. In other words, they'll take anybody. It's like a truck stop motel, which it was. It was a place for. It was designed, built and run for caravans, people with pack animals carrying trade goods through the country. That was the inn where he took the wounded man, and you can hear it coming, can't you? It's the inn that was so booked up that Mary had to give birth to the naked baby Jesus up in the stable. That alone is their clue to cross over and start talking about Jesus' incarnation, his babiness, his nakedness, his fleshliness, his mortality as a part of us. That's another sermon on theology. I'll leave that for Darren to take up another day.

Speaker 1:

A quick Methodist perspective on this. Very briefly, it's a very timely meme going around that says this Neighbor is a moral concept, not a geographic one. Neighbor is a moral concept, not a geographical one. That's the whole parable in a nutshell. For Jesus' audience. Their neighborhood was their world. It was small, it was defined by the limits of their capacity to travel. Not so for us. Today. We know instantly what is happening everywhere and we have the knowledge and the tools to be able to respond. Happening everywhere, and we have the knowledge and the tools to be able to respond. But do we have the moral concept of unequivocal empathy, of being a neighbor across cultural distances of race, nationality, gender, all that whole long list? What we do have for sure is John Wesley saying the world is my parish, no boundaries. Very big neighborhood, a big world that requires a big, naked heart ready to be compassionate.

Speaker 1:

The apotheosis of all this what does Jesus say way back at the beginning, right when the lawyer first gives the right answer to the love God neighbor himself. He says do this and you shall live. But he doesn't say. He doesn't say you're going to live forever. He doesn't say eternal life, the way the lawyer and the tech billionaires want. He says do this and you will live now, today, with your neighbors, in real life, the life that Jesus came into. So what does he say? So that you might have life and have it abundantly. That's the promise. And it all hangs on the lawyer's final. Don't you think it was a light bulb moment after Jesus has told this parable, messed with everything, turned it all upside down. Finally, the lawyer recognizes this. Oh, the near one is the one who showed mercy. So be ye going and be ye doing the mercy to the naked ones. Amen, amen.