Getting Unstuck with Playful Surprise

Colossians 1:1-18

Luke 10:25-37

Night blooming Jasmine flowers that fill the morning air with a delightful scent

One of my favorite short stories is Norman McClean’s A River Runs Through It, which chronicles the relationship between two brothers, one of whom struggles with both alcoholism and gambling. And he is ultimately killed in a drunken fight related to his debts. At the end of the story, the boy’s father – a Presbyterian minister – reflects, “For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us…it is those we live with and should know who elude us.” It’s a painful truth: the people and stories that we know best can be the most difficult to understand.

This is certainly true for our Gospel parable this morning from Luke. The “Good Samaritan” is so familiar it’s almost folklore. We have “Good Samaritan laws” in many states, and a multitude of organizations use the name to describe their mission to help the needy. So the term “Samaritan” is often used to mean someone who helps a person in trouble. If we remember that Jews and Samaritans hated each other like poison in Jesus’s day, the parable becomes a challenge to racism and religious prejudice too. But Jesus invites us to go deeper than moralism with this parable.

At the heart of Jesus’s exchange with the lawyer is a clash between two visions of what it means to be Israel. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?” He assumes God is the God of Israel – and “neighbor” means fellow Jews. But Jesus shows us that the God of Israel is the God of grace for the whole world. So Jesus doesn’t answer the lawyer’s question with a definition. Instead, he tells a story. And at the end, he asks a different question: Who turns out to be a neighbor to the Jewish man lying half-dead in the road? He does not ask, Who counts as your neighbor? Rather, he is asking: Who becomes his neighbor? Jesus’s challenge is much deeper than a moral reminder to help people in need. Jesus is pushing this lawyer to recognize that the hated Samaritan has become his neighbor through God’s sacrifice in Jesus.

Will we use the gift of God's love and grace to insulate ourselves – building up walls of security and purity – or will we extend that love and grace to the world? Yes, the whole world. That includes the people we can’t stand on the other side of the political aisle. That includes the relative or colleague who cheated us, stole from us, drank the last of our booze, or gambled away our money – just like the minister’s son in A River Runs Through It.

Embracing this Gospel of grace is most challenging when the roles we inhabit become rigid. Paradoxically, the more knowledge we have about someone or some group, the more those roles can harden. Our deepest prejudices are often born through intimacy rather than ignorance. This Jewish lawyer probably had real reasons to hate the Samaritans. Like the longstanding hatred between Jews and Palestinians today, so much innocent blood has been spilled that the anger on both sides is understandable. That’s what makes it so dangerous: it is rooted in real, brutal experiences – a hatred rooted intimacy rather than ignorance.

We are finite creatures, living in a world entangled by roles – mother and daughter, sister and brother, teammate and opponent, colleague and stranger, citizen and foreigner. We cannot escape the pressures and realities of these roles any more than Jews and Samaritans could. The roles that we inherit are inescapably part of how we make sense of the world, but they also limit what we can see. On one hand, our roles inform us. On the other hand, they veil us from the truth.

Religious scholar James Carse explores the idea of roles in his book Finite and Infinite Games. “Seriousness,” Carse writes, “is always related to roles…We are likely to be more serious with police officers when we find them uniformed and performing their mandated roles than when we find them in the process of changing into their uniforms…Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence.”  Carse proceeds to contrast seriousness with playfulness. He continues, “We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out – when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.”

Using Carse’s terms, Jesus is calling us to playfulness – not in the senes of frivolity, but as a way of being open within the roles we live in. Yes, Jew and Samaritan exist. Yes, citizen and foreigner exist. Yes, conservative and progressive exist. But the Gospel of grace transcends them all. Playfulness means that we know the roles that we inhabit, but we are not enslaved to them. Surprise is the hallmark of playfulness. And Jesus’s parable is meant to surprise us – to force us out of our scripts into openness. We are not expected to be amused by surprise; rather, we are expected to be transformed by it. Carse summarizes it in this way: “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained [into a role]. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated [into life].”

Let me give you a small example from my home: my wife has taken to gardening in Houston. She nursed the nearly dead jasmine vines along our fence back to health. Then one April morning, I opened the door, and I was stopped in my tracks by the overwhelming and beautiful fragrance of jasmine blossoms in the morning darkness. Months of her hard work had paid off, but at a time a place when I did not expect it. The unfolding of creation is defined by surprise – by growth and transformation that we cannot predict or control.

I was skeptical when Mary started to garden, but time and I again, either I have been delighted, or I have been able to witness Mary’s delight when the seeds she placed in dirt sprouted, grew, and bloomed. Creation allows us to be playful precisely because we cannot control its surprises.

This is why – I think – in the opening of his letter to the Colossians, Paul uses the image of a garden to describe God’s grace. He writes, “Just as [the Gospel] is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God.” Like my encounter with blooming jasmine, Paul is describing how surprise shows up in a life of faith. He tells us that Epaphras – a man from Colossae – has returned to Paul in Ephesus with news of their love in the Spirit. This isn’t just warm feelings. Paul isn’t interested in sentimentality. What matters is that the destructive behaviors of the world – lust, anger, lies – are being replaced by gentleness, forgiveness, and kindness. That’s what love in the Spirit does.

So let us return to the minister’s reflection in A River Runs Through It. He says, “For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us…it is those we live with and should know who elude us.” And then he continues: “But we can still love them – we can love completely without complete understanding.” That is the heart of Jesus’s parable: to embrace the surprise that only arrives at the edge of what we know. To play within the roles that we cannot escape. To trust in the Gospel of grace, which calls us forward into a future that is more beautiful, more loving, and more true than anything we can currently imagine.

So let us love completely – even without complete understanding – just as Jesus shows us. We may just be surprised.

Amen.

[1] This reflection on the parable of the Good Samaritan is drawn directly from N.T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 126–129.

[2] James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Free Press, 1986), 15–18.