May the words of
my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O
Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Our
world is a very busy place. When I moved
my family to Cape Breton from Vancouver I was hoping we would get away from
that. And to some extent we did. At least here it was not frantic. But it was still busy. There was never enough time to get everything
done. I still heard the words “I don’t
have time” far too often.
This
business is a fact of life. It is
neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It
just is.
Many
of the things that keep us busy are very important and truly need to be
done. We have to work. We have to pay bills. We have to see that our children get where
they need to be. And somewhere in there
we definitely need to have some social interaction.
Life
is just busy.
In
our Gospel today we have the story of the Good Samaritan. In this story, we have three people all
passing a badly injured man. All three
of these people make decisions as they pass.
They look at what rules they have to live by and weigh their priorities.
For
the priest and the Levite, the need for ritual purity outweighs the need to
help the poor, the needy, and the sick.
For both of them, if they were to touch or even come to close to the man
and he turned out to be dead, they would have to go through a long process to
once again be ritually clean and to return to their jobs in the temple.
For
the Samaritan, the priorities are different.
For the Samaritan, there is a long history of his people and the Jews
being enemies. He does not have the same
religious reason to help the sick and needy.
Since he was traveling deep within Judah and had the financial means to
help, he was probably a merchant. He
would probably know at least something about the Jewish rules of
cleanliness. For him, if the man turned
out to be dead, it could mean that his profits for his current trip could be
drastically reduced or he might even lose money.
All
three passers-by had nothing to gain and much to lose by helping the man. All three had to look at their priorities and
make a decision.
All
of the priorities that I have listed are personal. They are all about how helping the man will
affect their day to day lives. What
these priorities leave out is their relationship with God.
That’s
what our Gospel today is really about: our relationship with God.
We
don’t have the same problems facing us that the three men in our story
did. None of us is going to have our
livelihood damaged by helping someone on the side of the road. None of us will be kept from going to work
because we came near someone who was “unclean.”
I
think our problems today are even greater.
In our Gospel today, none of the passers-by had any difficulty seeing
the need. They all saw and they all made
their decisions about how to respond.
Our problem goes much deeper.
We
are too busy.
We
are not just too busy to help. We are
too busy to see the need.
We
have so much going on in our lives that we walk right past the need without
ever noticing it. We never even get to
the point of looking at our priorities and making a decision.
We
are just too busy.
I
am going to put out a challenge today, both to myself and to all of you.
For
the rest of the month, I challenge us all to make time for God. I challenge us to do something every day
which is not for ourselves. It doesn't matter if it takes ten minutes or two hours, just that it happens every day.
There
are so many things that we could do that it won’t be hard to find
something. It might mean spending some
extra time praying for someone or something in need. It might mean walking down the street and
picking up any garbage that you see. It
might mean dropping in on a neighbour we don’t know well and finding out how
they are doing. It might even mean
taking a walk and looking for things that remind us of the glory of God.
At
the end of the month I’m hoping that this will have become a habit which we
can’t break. After all, we are all here
today not because we've dedicated our Sundays to God but because we've dedicated our entire lives to God. Let’s
not keep God waiting any longer.
