RCL Proper 15C [i]
13 July 2025
Saint Anselm’s Anglican Church
University Endowment Lands
Throughout my career as a pastor, priest and teacher, I have always been interested in what words have meant in the past and what they mean in the present. Just recently I finished reading a short book re-visiting the question of whether Christians in the first three hundred years of our history owned or modified or built buildings for worship and prayer. [ii] One of the ways the author re-visited the evidence was by tracing how the word ekklēsia or ‘the assembly’ changed from referring to the Christian people gathered for worship to meaning the building in which Christians worshipped. I remember well teaching David, our oldest, who first worshipped in this building, to say ‘We are going to where the church worships’ rather than ‘we’re going to church.’
Over the past few years I’ve been pondering the different ways we can interpret the word ‘meantime’. Most if not all of us hear this word and think, ‘the time in between’ or ‘a time of waiting’. But lately I’ve been hearing this word differently. I’ve taken to putting an intentional pause between the first and second syllables – ‘in the mean-time’.
I don’t think that it’s very difficult to explain why I’ve been doing this lately. All any of us need to do is to read whatever news source we tend to read, and what will jump out at us is how ‘mean’ our times seem to be. Whether we understand ourselves to be on the left or on the right or caught in the middle of contemporary partisanship and social issues, it’s very hard to find people speaking well of those with whom they disagree. We seem very skilled these days at finding scapegoats for all our ills – political leaders, scientists, radicals of one form or another, immigrants, refugees – the list goes on and on. So it’s quite apt to hear this familiar parable from the Gospel according to Luke during this ‘mean-time’.
For example, we can quickly criticize the expert in the law. He should have stopped asking questions after Jesus praised him for knowing the right answer to his own question: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself.” [iii] Then he asks that fateful question: “And who is my neighbour?’ [iv] Yet, how often do we want to know the precise meaning of a commitment we’re making? Perhaps the legal expert would have fared better if he’d asked, ‘How shall I love my neighbour?’.
We can also quickly condemn the priest and the Levite. That’s what Luke, a non-Jewish believer in Jesus, wants us to do. But it becomes a little more difficult to be critical when we realize that they’re doing what all of us do from time to time – they don’t want to get involved. Robbers along the Jerusalem to Jericho road often had one of their members play ‘possum’ at the side of the road to lure travellers into an ambush. Why should either man take the risk? Both men have religious duties to perform that require them to avoid any contact with blood or with the dead. If they stop to take care of this man, will they be abandoning their traditional obligations to God?
Then comes the Samaritan. It is very hard for contemporary Christians to understand the visceral dislike, even hatred, that existed between Samaritans and Judeans. Both are descendants of the tribes that God brought into the land of promise. Both suffered at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians and the destruction of their holy sanctuaries at Bethel and Jerusalem. Both accused the other of failing to be faithful to the law that God gave them through Moses at Mount Sinai. To Judeans the Samaritans were non-Jews pretending to be Jews. To the Samaritans the Judeans were Roman collaborators willing to bend the knee to non-Jewish rulers. Yet Jesus dares to tell a predominantly Judean audience a story with a Samaritan hero.
Knowing something about the context in which this parable was originally told can help us understand what it may be saying to us – non-Jewish followers of Jesus who live at a time when the ekklēsia, the people called to follow Jesus, are an institution more than a movement, a cultural phenomenon more than a revolutionary challenge to the status quo. We are living in the ‘mean-time’.
When we are living in the ‘mean-time’, do we dare to take risks? When we are living in the ‘mean-time’, do we dare to lay aside our long-standing traditions to respond to an unexpected need? When we are living the ‘mean-time’, do we dare stop demonizing the ‘other’, whomever the ‘other’ might be, and see only a neighbour? These are the questions that confront us and trouble us, but that cannot be ignored.
We cannot ignore them because God expects us to measure up to the challenges of our times and places. That’s what’s behind the enigmatic reading from the prophet Amos this morning. We use plumb lines to make a straight, vertical line, essential information if you want to make sure your walls and foundations are properly built. God is telling the people of the northern kingdom of Israel that they need to measure up; otherwise they are doomed to destruction at the hands of the Assyrians. We have to be ready and willing for transformation.
During my second year in theological college, I went through a very ‘mean-time’. Most of my friends and all of the faculty either did not see the crisis or crossed to the other side of the road. The only two people who didn’t were two women who were studying at the college. My theological college was not a friendly-place for women; Barbara and Anne faced subtle discrimination within the college and not so subtle hostility from some of the alumni. They both knew that I had more than ambivalent feelings about the ordination of women. But they stopped. They bound up my wounds. They stayed with me, both in times of silence and in times of conversation. My ‘mean-time’ was turned into a season of grace in which the loving compassion of these two ‘Samaritans’ transformed me and set me on a path that I could not have imagined.
This is a ‘mean-time’ for Christians such as we who are committed to doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God. In such a time as this we find ourselves playing many roles – a legal expert seeking precision, a priest or a Levite focused on our traditional roles and duties, a Samaritan travelling on the road – sometimes we are even the traveller on the side of the road, fallen among thieves and ruffians, wounded by the times in which we live and dependent upon the care of others to recover.
But the good news is this – we are not imprisoned by this ‘mean-time’. As the writer to the Christians in Colossae says, “God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” [v] We have hope in a world that is coming into being through us, in us and even despite us, a world for which we wait with endurance and patience and even joy. [vi] We live in both the ‘mean-time’ and in the ‘meantime’, the ‘meantime’ between the world as it is and the world as God is loving into existence.
Glory to God,
whose power, working in us,
can do infinitely more
than we can ask or imagine.
Glory to God from generation to generation,
in the Church and in Christ Jesus,
for ever and ever. Amen. [vii]
[i] Amos 7.7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1.1-14; Luke 10.25-37.
[ii] Alexander Turpin, Did the Early Christians Build Churches? Revisiting the Evidence, Joint Liturgical Studies 100 (Norwich, England: Hymns Ancient and Modern, 2025).
[iii] Luke 10.27 (NRSVue).
[iv] Luke 10.28b (NRSVue).
[v] Colossians 1.13-14 (NRSVue).
[vi] Colossians 1.5, 11 (NRSVue).
[vii] The Book of Alternative Services (1985), p. 214.
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