Leave it to a good lawyer to ask the juicy questions. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Yeah, I know the answer from Sabbath school: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and your neighbor as yourself." But, who is my neighbor?

Leave it to a master teacher to tell a great story. A man was mugged by thieves who left him for dead. A priest and a Levite passed him by, but a Samaritan stopped to help. Which one was a neighbor to the man in need?

(Gasp!) A Samaritan!? You can almost hear the shock in the courtroom . . . if you live in the first century. The surprise in this parable is all but lost on modern ears. To us, a Samaritan is necessarily good, someone who performs CPR on a stranger or helps a lost child to find her parents. But to our ancient ancestors in faith, a Samaritan was a half-blood step-cousin, the kind you'd purposely lose touch with because they were an embarrassment to the family name. To the Jews of yester-year, the Samaritans were a lesser class who betrayed their bloodline, you remember, by intermarrying with foreigners while the "pure Jews" were in captivity away from their homeland. A Good Samaritan was, to them, an oxymoron.

Our typical subtitle for this story is inadequate at best. You can't single out one as good and do justice to the parable. Are all of the other Samaritans still bad? Certainly that's not what Jesus intends to convey.

Perhaps we hear the sting of the misnomer a little better in Paul Barrett's recent book, The Good Black. I haven't yet read it, but the title alone captures immediate attention. It's the true story of "a young African American boy from an inner-city neighborhood [who] makes good and goes to Harvard Law School, then on to a prestigious law firm." [Editorial review, amazon.com.] Once employed, he is degraded, humiliated, and harassed by his superiors, who he finally takes to trial for racial discrimination. [Paul M. Barrett, The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America (Plume Books, 2000).]

I read the following lay review from a fellow African American: "The title appropriately characterizes the feeling that all of us have had at some point, that if we just do the right thing, go to the right schools, wear the right clothes and speak the king's english, we will be the exception, the good black. Usually along the way, we figure out that it just doesn't matter." [A reader from USA, amazon.com.]

I want to respond to that anonymous reviewer: It matters. Your life, your efforts, your frustration-it all matters. It matters to us. Isn't that what Jesus would do?

When we hear the story of the Good Samaritan, we tend to identify with the Samaritan, because we want to be good, too. But with all the evidence on the table, let's admit that we probably bear more resem-blance to other characters in the story. For us to feel the parable's full impact, we need to sit in the seat of the Jewish lawyer who tested Jesus, hearing the story as he did, identifying with our own heroes, the priests and Levites . . . who crossed to the other side of the road. We probably have more in common with the Pedigreed Lawyer than the Good Samaritan or the Good Black.

In a general sense, we've understood the moral of the story. Jesus makes it pretty clear that everyone is our neighbor. There is no "in crowd" or "out crowd" when it comes to showing neighborly love. But we've missed the scandal of the story-that element which calls into question our most personal prejudi-ces. The hero of the parable is the bane of the lawyer's purebred existence. Not only does Jesus redirect the lawyer's line of questioning, he turns it into a cross- examination, a teaching moment, by casting a Samaritan in the role of good neighbor, modeling precisely the kind of compassion the lawyer seeks to evade.

If all of us in this room were lawyers, and Jesus were responding individually to you and me, who would he cast in the role of the Samaritan? Southern Baptists? How about Episcopalians, Catholics, . . . Muslims . . . even Democrats or Republicans? You get the point. See, prejudice is not solely a black and white issue, though it is still that, I'm afraid. In a broader sense, prejudice is an evil spirit that entitles us to dehumanize others in any number of ways, replacing sacred, individual character with unholy, biased caricatures. It is akin to that spirit that justifies us when we dismiss others outright with our one-dimensional portraits, be they of public figures, like presidents and candidates, or entire populations, like convicted felons or the homeless.

To relate to the world around us in a Jesus way is quite a challenge in a culture that thrives on sound bytes, where we think we know the essence of a person from 20-second clips on the airwaves or have an accurate sense of a particular people group from one isolated interaction. With the lawyer, we are quick to narrow the playing field of our Christian duty and seek a stamp of approval from the divine Rabbi, who surely understands our logic. In the cautionary words of novelist, Anne Lamott, "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."[Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 22.]

We make this mistake as individual people, of course, but we also do it in groups, where our views are shaped and reinforced by others, whether in churches, school cliques, or even regional and national alliances. As Christians, we need to be attuned to the ways our contextual tide turns, so that we are not coaxed into adopting attitudes, behaviors, or policies that run counter to the teaching of Jesus.

Personal and large-scale tragedies, for example, change our world-but they do not change our way of being in the world. We run a danger in saying that an event like September 11^th, 2001 "changed everything," because then we're tempted to believe that the gospel needs to adapt to us rather than the other way around. We don't get a pass from Christian character because the world suddenly appears more threatening. No, we are fundamentally shaped by the life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. If we ascribe to any other event the power to alter everything, our worldview will lead to fear and suspicion rather than embrace, and that is incompatible with the mandates of our faith. Love God. Love everyone as your neighbor as yourself.

This interaction between Jesus and the lawyer takes me back to my early experience among Baptists in the youth group at First Baptist Church, Dickinson. An Episcopalian from birth, I was introduced in my junior high years to new language and concepts, like "professsion of faith" and "salvation," that Baptists like to talk about a lot. My youth group friends and I became preoccupied with whether or not we would get into heaven. We learned verses like Romans 10:9, "if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." That was always a comfort; but with our teen-aged curiosities and flair for rebellion, we were still left to wonder if we could lose our salvation, or if there were certain things we could get away with and still be "safe." What must we do to inherit eternal life? Who is our neighbor? Haven't we all asked these questions?

The parable of the Good Samaritan holds the answers my adolescent friends and I sought. This is no side point in Scripture. It is the story Jesus tells to illustrate the great commandments of Judeo-Christian faith . . . an example, according to Jesus, of what we must do to inherit eternal life. You see, Jesus won't let us spiritualize the deep questions of faith. We must actualize them. Love is as love does.

Jesus' response is firmly planted on solid ground-complete with thieves, religios, and innkeepers-as if to remind us that Christian faith is not just about the afterlife; it is profoundly earthy, too. When we ask Jesus about eternity, he might just point our eyes back in the direction of the here and now and tell us to stop gazing at the stars when we have life-tangible life-right in front of us.

This, incidentally, is my primary contention with the Left Behind book series by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins: they focus our attention so completely on the "end time" as to de-emphasize Christian living in the present world, which is our daily charge. They feed our temptation to get caught up in spiritual curiosities, which ultimate-ly serve to distract us from the life of faith rather than helping us to fulfill it.

Jesus reminds us that our time on earth is what matters now. This life is not inconsequential to the next. Indeed, eternal life has something to do with God's will being done on earth as it is in heaven. A heart that is transformed by God does not cease to care about the world but cares more deeply for it.

Consider the reflection of Thomas Merton: "It is by living his life that the monk finds God, and not by adding something to his life which God has not put there. For wisdom is God Himself, living in us, reveal-ing Himself to us. Life reveals itself to us only in so far as we live it."

It is a caricature of American Christians that we care for people's souls but couldn't care less about their lives here on earth, much like the priest and the Levite in the parable. Wilshire is trying to change that perception, as are other Christian communities across the country, by following the example of Christ and ministering to the whole person in all of our mission efforts. Among our members are people who take summer vacation to offer dental care in the Amazon region and attend camp with teenagers, who move to China in order to work with handicapped children in an orphanage, who build homes for low-income families through Habitat for Humanity, and who donate their time and money to visit the incarcerated and help Dallas children learn to read.

These Samaritan-missionaries are not simply rescuing souls for the world to come, they are living the love of Christ in flesh and blood. To those of you who are involved in such endeavors, Well done. And for those of you who are interested, come and join the movement. And together, we'll fall more in love with the world.

The confrontation between the lawyer and Jesus and the ensuing parable of the Good Samaritan carry the thrust of much of Jesus' teaching. But we can't simply take away a list of Christian principles and give ourselves a check-mark. Only if we hear the story as the lawyer and walk away as the Samaritan have we truly understood. And they'll know we are Christians by our love. Amen.