Proper 10C – July 13, 2025
“Come, thou Fount of every blessing; tune my heart to sing thy grace; streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.”
Earlier this summer, I attended my fiftieth reunion at Williams College out in the Berkshires, another beautiful part of this state, equal in beauty to the Cape, but mountainous instead of sandy. And as is natural in such milestone moments, I have found myself doing a good bit of life review.
And in that life review, I have been awed with a renewed awareness of how blessed I have been in the many teachers – both formal and informal – whose lives intersected with mine, whose influence has gifted me with enduring life lessons, lasting lessons that have continued to shape me long after I have forgotten classroom details about the bloody history of the wars of religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or in what circle of hell Dante placed the merciless. For valuable as substantive classroom material was, the deeper value I gained from these teachers was not so head-oriented. It was earthier, and practical, wisdom that came from their way of being. One might call it heart or soul or gut wisdom.
Among many memorable life lessons, one in particular stands out from my days in seminary. And from that teacher, I learned just how life-giving unexpected mercy can be.
The well of divine mercy is bottomless and is always overflowing in fountains of mercy here among us, when we get to experience the refreshing life-giving gift of embodied mercy that someone risks to offer us. Have you been the recipient of such unexpected mercy sometime in your life? I devoutly hope so. Perhaps my story will help you call to mind some such moment of unexpected mercy that you have received in your life.
It was my second year in seminary. For two and a half years I was the seminarian intern at Christ Church, an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish in downtown New Haven. The rector was my supervisor, a priest by the name of David Boulton, a preacher of deep erudition and sparkling wit. It was David’s opinion that the most important way to learn how to preach was not through homiletics courses, but by preaching itself. And so, in a parish with more-than-a-few Yale academics, I was placed in the regular Sunday rotation of preaching along with Father Boulton and the curate. To put it mildly, I felt stretched and challenged each time I had to preach in front of such an intellectually exalted group of parishioners, and in rotation with the rector and curate who were both superb preachers.
It was Eastertide of my middler year and I was assigned to preach on one of the more abstruse and heady passages in John’s Gospel. I worked hard all week on various approaches to the text, and tried out various ways of shaping a sermon, but to no avail. Nothing was coming together. {I imagine the preachers among us will know what this feels like.}
In a panic on Saturday, I began paging through books of sermons in the hope that one of them would help me make my way out of the swampy quicksand where I felt stuck. And to my great relief, I found a sermon by the great preacher and writer Frederick Buechner on the very Gospel text assigned for the next day! I found the heart of Buechner’s take on the passage from John, penned my own introduction and conclusion, and voila! I had a sermon!
On Sunday morning, I left my seat to climb the seven or eight steps up into the pulpit, and delivered my/Buechner’s sermon, without attribution, and climbed back down out of the pulpit, and sat down next to Father Boulton, relieved that the whole ordeal was over. My rector/supervisor, in the silence for reflection that was always left before the intoning of the Creed, leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Bill, why did you leave out the part of his sermon where Buechner says…” and then proceeded to quote to me WORD FOR WORD, a part of Buechner that I had not stolen for my sermon. David then said to me, “Come and see me in the rectory after coffee hour.”
You can imagine the agony I went through during the rest of the service and coffee hour. My imagination conjured up horrible consequences: namely, that the rector would report my egregious performance to both the dean of the seminary and my bishop, and that my journey towards ordination was about to come crashing down all around me. I tried to concentrate through clouds of incense during the consecration at the altar, and through giving the chalice (‘The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ given for you’….Oh God, I’m about to be bloodied because of what I’ve done!), and tried to smile and seem relaxed during the chit chat of coffee hour. And then coffee hour was over, and I needed to face to music.
I went to the front door of the Rectory and knocked, expecting the worst. David threw the door open, and with his usual joyful smile, looked me right in the eye and said, “Bill, you are too good a preacher to steal someone else’s words. Go home and think about it.” And closed the door. In my imagination of disaster and judgment, I had not noticed how bright the spring afternoon was, nor how fragrant the blooming trees were. But David’s gift of mercy re-opened my senses to the life-giving beauty of God’s Creation – and the life-giving joy of receiving unexpected mercy instead of judgment. I pray that you have had such Samaritan moments that have revived your life, and brought you back from a time where you felt beat up and left in agony along the side of the life’s road.
I wish I could simply close this sermon with that happy story and let you go out into the beauty of this day basking in awe-struck joy at the ways God’s infinite loving-kindness gets expressed among us by unexpected mercy. But I can’t. For you see the parable of the Good Samaritan is much more complex than that. The mercy shown in that parable is even more unexpected and much more costly than the mercy I was shown by the priest who was my mentor. The Good Samaritan story and its costly mercy has a twist to it that, because we have heard the story so many times, we can easily miss.
In everyday life, Jews and Samaritans were mortal enemies. Each thought the other profoundly wrong, headed in the wrong direction. Each group judging the other as wrong about God, wrong about what was sacred and what was profane, and assuming that their perspective was not only correct, but was holy, that God was on their side, and against the other. For a member of one group (a Samaritan) to show mercy to a member of the other group (a Jew) would have been profoundly shocking to the average members of BOTH GROUPS. If word got out that something like this had happened, the merciful one would likely have been ostracized from his own group, and likely would have been regarded with suspicion by members of the group whose wounded member he had taken care of. Can’t you just hear it? The whispers: Well, he must have had an ulterior motive. He must be expecting some sort of kickback for doing good. Or maybe he was just virtue signaling so others would praise him. Is he really one of us? Or has that Jew-lover just been pretending to be one of us all along?
The Samaritan could easily have become a “man without a country.” To show mercy to someone on the other side was risky. And costly. Not just in terms of time and money out of his pocket, but in terms of his future standing among his own people.
And so we might better hear the parable with its wake-up call and the startling power that Jesus must have intended it to stir in his listeners, and to hear just how costly such unexpected mercy can be, come on a journey with me while we update the parable to our own time and circumstances.
Imagine Jesus is alive in our own day and time, and is journeying with his little band of twelve followers through God’s country in Texas, towards his final days in the capital city of Austin. Imagine that they have just passed through Kerr County in the Texas hill country, a county that voted solidly red in last fall’s election, with over 75% of the county backing Trump for President. As he passes through their county, most of the people there show no patience or openness for Jesus’ message of a new way into life, a new way to love God and one’s neighbors. They hear Jesus as one more “woke” prophet, so his message falls on deaf ears. And in anger at the rejection of Jesus’ message, the fiery brother pair of James and John – living up to their nickname as so-called sons of thunder – ask Jesus if he wants them to call down fire from heaven to destroy the folks of Kerr County. And living out just how serious he is about this “love your neighbor as yourself” message he’s been preaching and teaching Jesus says, in effect: “No way, boys. That’s not the way into the life God wants for all of us. SO BACK OFF!”
And so they move on, passing beyond the edge of the hill country, as they draw nearer to Jesus’ final destination and final days in Austin, the state capital. Meanwhile, a devastating rainstorm sweeps through the hill country they’ve just left, killing countless people, and leaving others traumatized and without home, food, or the medical care they need in the wake of the storm.
And along the way, Jesus stops by a big Episcopal church, a solidly blue one in a prosperous Austin suburb, for a brief rest. While he’s there, the Chancellor of the Diocese – an expert on all things church law – happens by the church, and quizzes Jesus: “What do I need to do to be part of the good and lasting life that I’ve heard you’ve been preaching and teaching about?” Jesus smells a potential rat, wondering if the Chancellor is trying to tempt him, and trap him with a question that has no one right answer. But out of respect for this lawyer, and like a good teacher, Jesus goes the Socratic route and volleys the question back at the lawyer, saying: “Well, what do you hear God say about good and lasting life in Scripture? AND, how do you interpret what you read there?”
And the lawyer, lifelong Episcopalian that he is, gives the good and safe answer straight out of the Rite One Eucharist in the Prayer Book. “You shall love the Lord your God with every ounce of your being: your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole strength, and your whole mind. And your neighbor as yourself.” And the verb for love that the lawyer uses is the word the Gospels use for God’s all-out, no holds-barred, unselfish lovingkindness, the verb agape. And Jesus looks him in the eye, and with a sincere and loving smile, says: “Bingo! Right answer!” {And then I imagine with both an intent eye-to-eye sparring look, and a gentle wink, Jesus continues:}“So now all that’s left is for you to go and do that. And if you do, then you’ll have truly good and lasting life.”
OUCH, I imagine the lawyer thinking, so this Jesus is really serious about this all-out, no holds-barred, unselfish lovingkindness. High stakes. He doesn’t just mean agape love as a sort of “thoughts and prayers” nice idea we politely speak about during the liturgy, he means we are actually supposed to live this way. As he begins twisting in the wind, I imagine the lawyer trying to narrow the scope of this all-out love by his next question, for certainly (he hopes) Jesus can’t mean he’s supposed to love EVERYONE with all-out unselfish lovingkindness. So in the hope of narrowing the scope he asks, “Okie dokie, I get it. So now we have to determine just who is my neighbor. Towards whom do I have to live out this agape love? Who is my neighbor?”
But Jesus won’t let the lawyer off the hook, so he plays a new card, and ends their Socratic dialogue about the meaning and scope of love, by telling a story.
Just last week, when the Guadalupe River flooded and inundated Kerr County, a certain lifelong Episcopalian by the name of Earl – an ardent fan of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris who always wore a t-shirt that said “If Hillary or Kamala were in the White House, things wouldn’t be such a mess!” – well, Earl got swept off his front porch, and dumped on a hillside miles from his now-destroyed home. He was badly banged up, looked frightful, was barely alive in fact.
Now several prominent blue-voting Episcopalians were out surveying the damage in the area, and when the Bishop of the Diocese by chance happened upon Earl, he shook his head sadly and texted a note into his cell phone about finding yet another body in the quadrant he’d been assigned to survey. The Bishop said to himself, “Well, I’m no doctor, not even an EMT, and if I tried to help this frightful looking man, I’d probably do more damage than good.” And so he passed Earl by saying a “God bless you” prayer from a distance while making the sign of the cross in the general direction of Earl’s body.
Later that day, the chief of staff of an area clinic for the poor and downtrodden – another staunchly blue Episcopalian – happened to pass by where Earl’s mangled body had been dumped by the flood, and she too, texted into her cell phone a note about the coordinates for Earl’s body so it could be found by the staff of her clinic. But as she passed on to continue her survey of the area, she also dictated into her social media account the following: “May all visitors, children, and non-MAGA voters and pets be safe and dry. Kerr County MAGA voted to gut FEMA. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for.” [Directly quoted from an article in The Guardian about Dr. Probst and her social media post.] And then she went on her way continuing to survey for other bodies.
Just about sundown, yet another person happened upon Earl’s mangled body. This guy was not out surveying. He was out to offer hands-on help. He was an EMT from deep in the heart of Trump voting, red Kerr County, and he proudly wore a red MAGA hat on his head. (By the way, he was also a member of a Bible-thumping Pentecostal Church.) When he caught sight of Earl, he jumped out of his canoe in a flash, and came running towards the poor guy as fast as the thick mud allowed. Noting Earl’s very blue T-shirt and its slogan didn’t slow this EMT down one whit. He began checking Earl’s vital signs, and felt heartbroken for Earl when he saw how badly injured he was. He radioed his follow EMTs that he needed a helicopter ASAP to airlift Earl to the nearest triage center. This EMT stayed in the triage tent with Earl all night, personally attending to Earl’s wounds because the nursing staff was stretched too thin to attend to all the folks who had been brought in that day. At daybreak, as a new shift of nurses arrived, the EMT took the time to give a personal and very full report of Earl’s condition to Earl’s new nurse, and made the nurse promise him that she’d call him later that day with an update about Earl’s status. And our EMT’s departing words to Earl’s new nurse were, “I’ll be back in person as soon as I’ve found and reported about Earl to his nearest and dearest. I’m on my way to try to find them now.”
Then Jesus turned to the lawyer and said, “So which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to Earl.” The lawyer was so undone that he couldn’t bring himself to choke out the words “the MAGA nurse,’ so all he could manage to say was “the one who showed Earl mercy.” To which Jesus simply replied; “Go and do likewise.”
Our too-often-blinkered and self-assured ideas and assumptions about who deserves mercy, and who is likely to show mercy are far too limited, aren’t they? The Jesus who came not just to proclaim but to embody and give himself completely to living out to his very last breath the soul and world-changing unlimited lovingkindness of God – the agape love of God – invites us into a journey with him down the gutted roads of life’s Kerr Counties so that our heart’s might be broken open like that MAGA EMT’s heart was broken open by Earl’s wounds. So that we might risk the challenging, life-changing and life-giving joy of becoming mercy-living and all-out-loving neighbors to all who cross our path, without judgment. If and when we do this, then the streams of divine mercy keep flowing and never cease, and the love of God that we know in Jesus the Christ will keep this messed up and broken world alive – and make us more what we profess to be, Christians, little Christs, embodying in our own small but vital ways the all-encompassing love and everlasting mercy of the Holy One who made us and all Creation. To that Holy One’s name be all praise and glory, this day, throughout our lives, and unto the end of the ages. Amen.
St. James the Fisherman
Wellfleet