Streams of Mercy

While I didn’t preach on the Parable of the Good Samaritan this time around in the lectionary texts, I’ve been thinking a lot about the story, and remembering what writer Frederick Buechner has to say about it all.

In Christ’s parable, a third man finally did come along. “I prefer to think that the difference between the Samaritan and the Levite and the priest was not just that he was more morally sensitive than they were, but that he had, as they had not … an eye that was able to look at the man in the ditch and see in all its extraordinary unexpectedness the truth itself, which was that at the deepest level of their being, he and that other one there were not entirely separate selves at all. Not really at all,” writes Buechner. (Listening to Your Life)

I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be a neighbor – to share life in a community and belong in a neighborhood where folks care for one another. “I’m just helping a neighbor,” I find myself saying from day to day. In ways beyond our understanding we are not our own, but we belong to one another, created by God to live in relationship with God and with one another.

Frederick Buechner goes on to say, “Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality – not as we expect it to be, but as it is – is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily: that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.” (Listening to Your Life)

“I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?” asks Mother Teresa. St. John says we lie if we say we love God and we don't love our neighbor. How can we love God whom we do not see, if we do not love our neighbor whom we see, whom we touch, with whom we live?

Giving thanks for good neighbors, for opportunities to be a good neighbor, and for those streams of mercy, never ceasing.

Elizabeth