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Free(ing) Joy

...the man on the side of the road was always going to be healed. The story Jesus tells us reminds us of this: the promise of God has always been that God would bind the hearts of the brokenhearted, the ones on the margins, the ones who have had violence done upon them and bear its scars.

Free(ing) Joy

  • It was a real joy to be with our youth this week, and if there's something I can say about the collective lot of them, it's that they're big hearted.
    • They really feel a lot.
    • And that's just something to behold - they get very concerned about each other, about what they're feeling themselves
    • That's always interesting too because as they get tired, that big heart tends to show through more
    • Eventually, there's moments of frustration and then having to reconcile
    • There was a moment in the week with a couple of them that had gotten on each other's nerves, but to watch them work it out - it was something I wish more adults were capable of.
    • But, you know, what that requires is to allow our vulnerable hearts to be exposed.
    • We've of course had plenty of times when that hasn't happened.
      • During the week, the pastor mentioned a time when her child was being unruly in service.
      • Any of us as parents know how that can be - you worry about what folks will say. This story ended positively, but plenty don't.
      • Sometimes between youth and adulthood, we keep asking ourselves what might happen if we're a disruption: our hearts are rejected...
      • And that rejection or acceptance is not just for the one whose heart is on the line...
  • The Samaritan
    • In this story, our befallen friend on the side of the road is all sorts of both disruption and disrupted.
    • The world had done its violence to him, and he's left to bear the consequences, literally on his body.
    • Christ then begins to tell us the story of the others who go by
    • It's interesting because it should be these folks - the priest, the Levite (like the ultra priest) - they are the ones who it make sense to reach out. But instead, they seem to go out of their way to avoid the man.
    • Finally, it's the one who's different - the one who doesn't quite make sense to the scene - the Samaritan - that ends up caring for the man.
    • The question begs: who is healed here?
      • Yes, of course, the man on the road, but it's not just him. It's the Samaritan who is healed too. We can call him "good," but that can be a patronizing. For a group of people who would have heard this story and have hated Samaritans, what might be more appropriate is that we see the Samaritan exemplifying heart - love - connecting to the other.
      • It's that action - being for the other - that is liberating for both of them, and it would seem to give them both a new joy.
  • So it's interesting then to think about how being for the other - in Galatians, going as far to saying we need to be in bondage to the other - becomes liberating.
    • The other two - the ones who went out of their way to not move towards the other quite literally - the have no access to that liberating joy. Instead, they found themselves imprisoned, limited by the self-imposed bans of the flesh.
    • Instead, the abundance of joy is if we're willing to get out of our own cells...
      • So let's go back to our youth - one hurts the other, their big hearts open and waiting to be healed... we could discourage that. But what does that mean for them? Would you all think we adults were doing our jobs if we didn't work to help them reconcile - to feel like they are liberating each other? And I'll tell you - when you watch the work of two youth binding up each other's wounds in love, doing the equivalent of the Samaritan's payment to ensure recuperation, you feel the liberating joy.
      • Love the way EP puts it in the message:
        • It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time [or, maybe put another way here, the life that develops as you avoid going to meet the other]: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on. This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom.
        • Is that the life we want for them? For ourselves?
  • So, liberating joy - freeing joy - is a willingness to go out to be for the other and their hearts.
    • There might very well be people waiting on the roadside, left for dead, somehow finding their way inside our doors pained and broken.
    • And we have a choice - walk away and into the prison of our own design scoffing the whole way, or walk out of their, and instead towards the other with a freeing, shared, healing joy?
    • Here's the honest truth of the whole situation - the man on the side of the road was always going to be healed. The story Jesus tells us reminds us of this: the promise of God has always been that God would bind the hearts of the brokenhearted, the ones on the margins, the ones who have had violence done upon them and bear its scars.
    • Let's not be shy here: The immigrant will be healed. The members of the GLBTQ community will be healed. The people whose skin and its color have meant it carries the scars of violence done by the world will be healed.
    • But, friends, will you? If you cross the street because it's better to get your own way, better to live in the supposed comfort of an enfleshed cell, will you be healed? Will you find freeing joy, so abundant, so liberating?