This morning I’ll begin by telling you about when I first moved back to Connecticut after my first teaching job in Delaware. 

It was a Friday in late June. 

For the first time, I rented a truck – I was driving some things up to my parents’ house, most of which I haven’t thought about since. 

Anyway, the truck they gave me in Delaware was a lemon. 

I also didn’t really know that there are roads in our great nation where you’re not supposed to drive trucks. 

And this turned out to be kind of a pickle. 

Because the truck was about two thirds up the length of  the Garden State Parkway when it decided it was done. 

Somehow, I still managed to make it to the Montvale rest stop (now it’s named after James Gandolfini). 

I went a pay phone and called the emergency breakdown number. 

Eventually, someone came on. 

I explained that the truck was dead, I was at a rest stop, I knew it was 9 o’clock at night on a Friday, but when could someone come help me…etc.

There was a pause.  You could hear the clickety click of a keyboard. 

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the person after a moment.  “We can’t provide service at a Garden State Parkway rest stop.  The truck should not be there.”

“Right,” I said.  “But the truck is here, and it’s not going anywhere else, so someone needs to come help me.”

It went around like this for a bit. 

Not having any new facts to offer into evidence, I kept saying the same thing over and over. 

“I’m sorry, but that’s not possible,” they said definitively.  But then they added, “If a truck is not disabled in the roadway or shoulder then we do not provide service.”

I paused.  “O.k.,” I said. 

And then I had a flash of inspiration. 

“So you’re telling me that if I go into the service area right in front of me and get ten guys to push the truck out into traffic on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, and then I call you back, you’ll have to come get me? I mean, like, assuming I live?”

And you know what they said?

“Please hold.”

A minute later they came back on.

“Mr. Grant, we will have tow truck there in 20 minutes.” 

And they did.  And they put me up for the night in a local motel on their dime.

And the next morning they drove me to the truck depot, where a group of guys were on hand to transfer my belongings into a new truck with great care. 

And they mapped the route I was supposed to take with a highlighter and handed it to me. 

It was all very nice. 

Clearly, I must have scared the bejesus out of someone at U-Haul. 

But that’s it.  That’s the end of the story.  I had my adventure in moving and got on with my life.

II.

This morning’s Gospel seems to imagine a different, and certainly a more serious kind of story. 

Now having said that, let’s acknowledge that, for some, it really wasn’t all that serious. 

The priest and the temple functionary each notice a body lying by the side of the road, and their instinct is to keep on walking. 

This may not have been as heartless as it sounds – the road was notorious for the very kind of bandits who had attacked the poor man, and a traveler had to stay alert. 

What if it was a trap? 

And yet, can’t you just hear them back in the office the next morning, talking about their trip?

“How was Jericho?”

“Oh, it was great.  We had really good weather…my mom cooked enough food to feed an army…the kids were splashing around the whole day with their cousins…we actually got to sleep in. 

The only bad part was when I was coming back yesterday afternoon and saw a body on the road. 

Thank God it was just me, and the rest of the gang isn’t coming back until next week. I hope someone will take care of it by then.”

Like so many events in our lives, somebody’s catastrophe is somebody else’s minor detail—an adventure in moving, of sorts, after which they (we) get on with their lives. 

But in a way, that’s a luxury, isn’t it? 

The man left half-dead by the side of the road would say it was. 

His version of that story would certainly be different, wouldn’t it?

Imagine him arriving in Jericho, four days late and without any word to those who’d been waiting for him there. 

What would he have looked like when he walked through the door? 

For him and for anyone who loved him, this would have been a dividing line straight through the story of his life—before the attack or after. 

What was the story when he went back to work?

III.

It’s clear that, thanks to the Samaritan, he escapes with his life. 

As anyone who has been in a bad accident can tell you, making sense of it would have taken far longer.

It would have meant, also, working through the realization that for one dangerous moment, he hadn’t been a person caught in a terrible situation, but just an inert body lying in a ditch. Literally, roadkill. 

Or maybe his body was being used as a prop for the “real” attack.

In any case, he hadn’t been a person to help, but a problem to take care of, particularly before it started to smell and make the road gross for everybody. 

At least, so it was for the first two people who came by. 

Except that God, in His mercy, seeds the world with people who see differently.

God places among us people capable of seeing a person instead of a problem, and who approach the world, not from how it neatly fits into their own story, but in terms of how they might fit into someone else’s. 

In those moments when a life divides between before and after, there are those who are willing to step forward and be the healing hands of God.

As Goethe once observed, “It is the nature of grace always to fill spaces that have been empty.”

In moments of our most significant need, when it seems like the emptiness or uncertainty or pain are about to swallow us whole, there are those who step forward to find and fill such spaces.

They bear the grace of God, the transforming love that always sees us as children to care for, not problems to avoid. 

And Jesus has a name for the people who see like that and respond like that: he calls them neighbors. 

In our time, there are those who are quick to say how important it is for their neighbors to be Christians. 

This morning reminds us that for Jesus, the far more important thing is for Christians to be neighbors. 

As he tells us, “Go thou and do likewise.”

Amen.