Go and Do

July 11, 2010

Psalm 82 and Luke 10:25-37

An amazing thing happened in New York City on January 2, 2007. As Wesley Autrey stood on a subway platform with his two little daughters, he saw a man have a seizure, stumble, and fall onto the tracks. Leaving his daughters, Autrey jumped down onto the tracks, intending to lift the man up to safety. But a burst of onrushing air, the rumble of metal wheels, and sight of a headlight racing toward on him told him there wasn’t time. So Autrey pressed the man down into a drainage ditch, and threw himself over the convulsing man’s body.

The train operator saw it and hit the brakes, but five cars passed before it squealed to a halt. Screams of despair went up from the crowd, and stopped only when Wesley Autrey called out: “There are two little girls up there. Let them know their Daddy is okay.”

Within a day, that Daddy was a national hero. David Letterman, Charlie Rose, and others booked him to be on their programs. Time magazine picked him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world – with the write-up done by Donald Trump. Three weeks later, George W. Bush had Wesley Autrey as a guest of honor at the State of the Union address … and talked about him in the speech. Game show appearances and gifts followed. There’s a Wikipedia article about him. And newspaper headlines trumpeted his bravery by calling him the “Hero of Harlem,” “Subway Superman,” and best of all for our purposes today: “The Subway Samaritan.”

* *

That moniker fits. Just as Samaritans and Jews did not associate with each other in Jesus’ time, Autrey and the man he saved, Cameron Hollopeter, should never have crossed paths. They weren’t likely to associate with each other.

• One was 50 years old, the other 19.

• One did construction, the other studied film.

• One worked in an elementary school; the other was off to college.

• One is black, while the one saved is white.

But for a split second of decision-making, none of that mattered. People marveled at Autrey’s bravery and were astounded by his selflessness. All kinds of reasons might have kept him on the subway platform – starting with the two daughters beside him. No one would have blamed him for staying where he was. A man’s got to look out for family, after all.

No doubt, the first two characters in Jesus’ parable had reasons to keep their distance too. So why do the priest and Levite always get the bum rap? They did what most of us would’ve done (preachers included) … and what everyone else did – except Wesley Autrey.

* *

At the end of the parable, Jesus told the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.” But would we? Could we?

When circumstances demand, can we be a Good Samaritan to others? In Romans 5:7, the Apostle Paul confesses that, “rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.”

He understood that Autrey and the Samaritan are the exception to the rule. What they did is not the norm … even for Christians with the best of intentions.

Wesley Autrey stands out – and is a legitimate hero – precisely because he is different. No matter how much we might wish to imitate his example, he alone saw another human being in desperate need, had compassion, and risked life and limb.

Psalm 82 – today’s first reading – doesn’t exactly let us off the hook. It’s not aimed at us, but at the other gods and idols of the world. Yahweh, the God of Israel, puts them on trial and demands that they:

Give justice to the weak and the orphan;

maintain the right of the lowly …

rescue the weak and the needy;

deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

But if the other gods and idols of the world can’t, how can we?

“Go and do likewise”? Don’t we wish it were that easy!

There’s another famous story out of New York. In March, 1964, “thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens” (New York Times, 3/27/64) heard the cries of Kitty Genovese as she was stabbed and left bleeding in the night. And not a soul reacted to help. When the police arrived – too late – only three people were on the street. After the ambulance took the body away, they came out in droves.

A couple weeks later, the New York Times interviewed those same neighbors. One said casually, “We thought it was a lovers’ quarrel.” A husband and wife declared, “We were afraid.” A third, who saw enough to describe the attacker, was asked, “Why didn’t you call the police?” He answered, “I was tired. I went back to bed.” Someone else offered the age-old excuse: “I didn’t want to get involved.”

As Jesus points out in the parable, being religious is no guarantee of right behavior. Some years ago, seminary students were given an assignment to record a talk about the Good Samaritan. But, due to scheduling, they were told, it had to be done right away in another building across campus.

What they were not told, however, is that an actor had been planted between buildings to play the part of a man in distress. What would happen when a Good Samaritan moment presented itself to the seminary students? Would they rise to the occasion? It turned out, they would not. One actually stepped over the man’s body in his rush to complete the assignment!

* *

If what you and I profess to believe isn’t enough, what does it take to “go and do” as Jesus commanded?

I suggest two things: (a) Preparation and (b) Compassion or Mercy.

Preparation certainly helped Wesley Autrey. He is a Navy veteran and member of a trade union; so he was trained to respond in emergency situations. He knew what to do when something unusual and unexpected came up. Later on, he reflected on his quick reaction, saying, “We work in confined spaces a lot. So I looked, and my judgment was pretty right” (Wikipedia, “Wesley Autrey”). For you, it might be knowing that you know how to use jumper cables when somebody’s car battery is dead … or that you’ll patch up the skinned knee on the kid who falls off her bike on the sidewalk in front of your house. At least it’s a start. Preparation.

But preparation only takes you so far. Any number of people in the world know what to do, but make snap judgments not to.

So preparation needs to be accompanied by compassionand mercy. A person needs to be able to relate to the victim, and see oneself in that person’s plight. This is the way Martin Luther King approached the parable when he preached on it. He suggested that most of us – like the priest and Levite and 38 people in Queens – ask ourselves, “What will happen to me if I stop to help?” But the great moral question – which King thought the Samaritan asked – is not about me, but “What will happen to him if I don’t stop?”

The only way to stand in the other person’s shoes like that may be to remember times when we were vulnerable and hurting and somebody came to our aid. When were we beaten and abandoned by the side of the road, and someone stopped to help? When was I sick, and someone came to visit? Or hungry, and someone gave me something to eat? Or naked, and someone clothed me? (Sound familiar? Matthew 25.)

If we can picture ourselves in that ditch (as Rick and I tried to tell the parable today) maybe we are capable of showing compassion and mercy. That’s also the way Jesus tried to get the lawyer to hear the parable. He wanted to “justify himself.” He wanted to know how he could be a good neighbor to somebody else. But Jesus turned the question completely around, suggesting you first have to consider, “Who has been the right kind of neighbor to you?”

Only by knowing that – only by recalling times when someone reached out and took a risk on your behalf – only then can you get beyond whatever is holding you back.

* *

I don’t know what Wesley Autrey would say about others showing compassion to him. But I do know we Christians believe that is what Jesus has done for us. We have been rescued by someone who is utterly unlike us, someone that we ordinarily would expect to have nothing to do with us. After all, this rescuer is God, who knows our sins and shortcomings, our failures and foibles, and might well condemn us for them.

And, our rescuer is Jesus – the peasant from Nazareth, a Suffering Servant described by the prophet Isaiah this way (53:2-5) –

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,

nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by others;

a man of suffering, acquainted with infirmity …

he was despised, and we held him of no account …

But he was wounded forourtransgressions,

Crushed for ouriniquities;

Upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

And by hisbruises we are made whole.

In Philippians 2, the Apostle Paul builds on that image in reference to Christ:

Though he was in the form of God,

he did not count equality with God as something to be exploited,

but humbled himself, taking on the form of a slave …

and became obedient … even to death on a cross.

Who’d want to be saved by someone like that?

But the gift of compassion and mercy is such that even when we are lying wounded in a ditch, God does not look down on us. God becomes one of us – putting God’s own self in human sandals – sharing our plight and rescuing us … picking us up and putting us on a beast, taking us to safe shelter, sparing no expense on our behalf, but offering to do whatever more may be needed.

* *

My sense of the church is that this is what God expects us to do for Cullen, whom we baptize today. We will show him the same compassion and mercy that found us in Christ Jesus, so that, when the situation arises, he is prepared to “go and do likewise.”

Sure, we will prepare Cullen with skills and character to be a bearer of God’s grace and healer for the wounded. We’ll equip him with practical skills and emotional courage so he can do the right thing when the situation demands.

But more than that, we will fill him with stories of compassion from scripture and surround him with acts of mercy from us. To paraphrase Wesley Autrey, we’ll help him say, “I’ve been in some tight places, but I always looked and saw there was someone or some way to get out.”

When Cullen is able to say that for himself, we’ll know God has another disciple – one who can “go and do likewise,” knowing that Jesus first “came and did.”

To the glory of God.