Sermon: Your Road to Jericho

St. Columba's Inverness, CA

July 13, 2025

5th Sunday After Pentecost

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When I met you a little over a year ago, I was deep in the work of my Doctor of Ministry project—an exploration of contemplative life in community. That journey led me to you, and the winding road since has taken me places I never expected. You welcomed me with the kind of hospitality that defines this place, and today I return not just as a visitor, but as a distant staff member of this beloved community. I now have the joy and privilege of sharing your story with the wider world, as you shine your beacon of light here in West Marin and far beyond.

I stand here at the end of one road—and I carry deep gratitude for the part you played in helping me walk this stretch. On July 1, I defended my dissertation and heard the words I had been longing to hear for years: “Welcome, Dr. Walters.”

This summer, as I’ve had time to breathe and reflect, I’ve been revisiting essays I wrote over the last six years in a series I’m calling The Road Between Worlds. They trace a journey I’ve been on—from living Bangladesh back to Georgia, my move from evangelicalism to the Episcopal Church, from vocational uncertainty to the threshold of ordination. I’m still on that road, discerning a call toward Holy Orders in the Diocese of Atlanta, preparing for ordination to the diaconate this December and, God willing, to the priesthood next year.

A few weeks ago, I looked at the gospel assigned for this Sunday and texted a friend: “Looks like I’m preaching on the Road to Jericho—the Good Samaritan. Of course I am,” I said.

You see, she and I had been talking for a few days about journey imagery—the road that keeps showing up in my life and work. We were also talking about how helpless we’ve been feeling in the face of the horrors playing out in our world, the pain we can’t seem to fix. I told her how small I feel in the face of so much suffering, how inadequate. She replied gently: “What’s your Jericho Road right now?”

In other words, what is the path I walk every day—and who is lying along that path in need of mercy?

I have a confession to make. That wasn’t the answer I wanted. “Love those right in front of you.” Because some of those people on my Jericho Road, they’re not easy to love.

And this isn’t the sermon I wanted to preach today either. I had hoped to come here and offer the message I’ve carried for years—the call to expand our understanding of who counts as our neighbor. To preach about how Jesus places the outsider—the Samaritan—at the center of his story, and how we are called to do the same. That’s the message I’ve staked much of my life and work on: building bridges across racial, cultural, and religious lines, advocating for immigrants and refugees, lifting the stories of the forgotten. And it’s a message that’s needed right now, maybe more than ever.

But the message I needed, and maybe the one you need, is more personal. More uncomfortable. Because the hardest roads are often not physical but relational. They’re the roads into the lives of people we’d rather avoid.

Two weeks ago, Father Vincent spoke about what it means to take up the mantle of Christ—the summons we each must answer: to love our neighbor as ourselves. He reminded us that this isn’t an easy call. It’s both a gift and a burden, a deep responsibility to live out love, even when it costs us something.

Why is it such burden to love our neighbor? One reason is because Christ calls us not to just love those in our beloved communities and our families. This call to love is not just about those we like, or those we agree with. Christ calls us to love even those who hurt us. Who challenge us. Who hold views we find offensive or even harmful.

This week, the gospel of Luke gives us a story most of us have heard many times before, one that has found its way into popular culture and our expectations of what it means to be a good neighbor, the story we know as “The Good Samaritan.”

It begins with a question from a lawyer: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus, as he so often does, replies with another question: “What is written in the law?” The man answers correctly, quoting from Deuteronomy and Leviticus: “Love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself.”But then, seeking to draw a boundary around that command, the lawyer presses further: “And who is my neighbor?”

Here Jesus offers a story. He often taught through stories like this—brief, moral tales used to illustrate a deeper truth. In first-century Roman rhetoric, these forms were common tools of persuasion. They typically followed a familiar structure: a character is introduced, a short narrative unfolds, and a clear lesson emerges by the end. This story is no exception.

The setting would have been quite familiar to Jesus’ audience: the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This road was notoriously dangerous, both for its geography and the people who frequented it. It was a steep, rocky 18-mile descent through the Judean wilderness, dropping over 3,000 feet in elevation—which is why we hear people say they were going “down” from Jerusalem. In Jesus’ time, it was known for its danger. That rugged terrain made a perfect place for robbers to hide. Jerome, writing in the 5th century, called it the “Bloody Way.” But despite its risks, it was often traveled—by traders, Roman soldiers, pilgrims avoiding Samaria. The road was dangerous, yes—but necessary.

So, a familiar scene is set, and the narrative begins predictably— a man was robbed, beaten, and left for dead on the side of the road.

However, this is where storytelling as usual goes astray. First, a priest walks by. Then, a Levite. These are religious leaders, people charged with care, people who knew the law. Surely, they would help someone in need. And yet—they cross to the other side.

Some have speculated they feared ritual impurity– that if the man is dead or dies while they are attending to him, they would become ritually unclean. But Amy-Jill Levine, a Rabbi and New Testament scholar, reminds us that this interpretation doesn’t hold. The purity law of not touching corpses didn’t extend to Levites and she notes also that the priest was going down from Jerusalem, so he had already concluded his temple duties that would have required purity.

Finally, the Mishnah, the earliest compilation of Rabbinic law, shows that saving a life trumps all other laws and insists that even a high priest should attend to a neglected corpse. Levine says those who heard this story and knew the law would have been shocked – that those who had a call to care for others by the law, passed by instead. Their failure was not legal—it was moral. A failure to love.

In good storytelling fashion, the characters enter the scene in a pattern that was common. Typically, Jews in the first century were either Priests, Levies, or Israelites. Think of a common pattern you know just how to anticipate. If I say, “knock, knock,” you know to say…(“Who’s there?”) If I begin a joke with, “a priest, a rabbi, and an imam”…you expect me to next say next… (“walk into a bar”). So, these first two figures—a priest and a Levite—set up the scene for an Israelite to enter next.

But Jesus disrupts the pattern. The third man is a Samaritan. This is where the story is shocking. This unlikely character enters the scene and gets our attention. Why is he here? He couldn’t possibly be the hero of the story, the first century Jew thinks. Why is that?

Samaritans were regarded as outsiders within Jewish society. Though their religion shared ancestral roots with Judaism, it had diverged significantly—in sacred texts, holy sites, and religious authority. Jews and Samaritans did not speak to one another, did not eat together, and did not offer help to each other.

But it was more than that, Samaritans were considered the enemy. Just one chapter earlier in Luke’s Gospel, a Samaritan village rejects Jesus, and his disciples suggest calling down fire from heaven to consume them. The Jewish historian Josephus tells of Samaritans killing a great many Galilean pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem.

So, for a Samaritan to be the hero? It’s unthinkable. And yet, this is exactly how the story unfolds. This man who is the enemy is the one who stops. Who sees. Who feels compassion. Who binds wounds, lifts the man, and pays for his care.

The shock here is not just who fails to love, it’s from whom love comes. The one least expected. The enemy becomes the neighbor.

This story challenges the listener to think about the boundaries this man overcame to love, and if they would accept love from such a person they’ve been trained to distrust. 

Who is the person you could not imagine being the hero of the story?

We all have someone we’d place in this story. Perhaps yours is, “a Republican while traveling came near him…” or a democrat.A white evangelical Christian. An Arab Muslim.An undocumented immigrant. An ICE agent.A Zionist. A Palestinian.A family member who voted differently.Or one who deeply wounded you.

We all have someone we’d rather not see in the role of hero here. And yet, here is the challenge of Jesus’ story. Not only to be the neighbor, but to give and receive mercy from the most unexpected places.

I think we often approach this story considering how Jesus points to the religious leaders who know the law but fail to show mercy, offering a critique of legalism. We can focus on how compassion here is embodied, not abstract—it requires time, effort, and sacrifice. It tells us love demands risk – the Jericho Road is not a safe one. We must choose to see someone’s suffering as our responsibility.

These are all important lessons woven into this short but robust moral story. But what stood out to me reading it in these last few days was this: the danger of limiting our compassion. How a cheap understanding of mercy makes our love for others shallow.

The lawyer tries to limit his responsibility to love by asking for a definition: Who is my neighbor. Jesus flips the question: not “Who is my neighbor?” but “How can you be a neighbor?” The neighbor in the story is the one who helps, the one who crosses a deep chasm between himself and the person in need. The boundary between him and the person who considers him enemy in this moment is irrelevant. Love goes wherever need exists.

Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy.”

That word, mercy, can seem soft, even sentimental. But in Scripture, mercy is anything but weak. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful forces in God’s character, and it speaks more than one language.

In the Greek of the New Testament, the word is eleos, a word that implies practical compassion. Eleos is mercy with its sleeves rolled up. It’s not a feeling, it’s a response. The Samaritan didn’t just feel bad. He bandaged wounds, poured oil and wine, lifted the man, paid the cost.

But in Hebrew, we also find two other rich dimensions of mercy. One is chesed—steadfast, covenantal love. Chesed is the love that binds God to God's people. It is loyal, enduring, and not dependent on the worthiness of the one being loved.

The other is rahamim, a word that comes from the same root as the Hebrew word for womb. It is mothering, visceral, gut-level compassion, the kind of mercy that turns your insides when you see someone suffering. It is tender, embodied, deeply human and divine all at once.

In this story, the Samaritan, this unexpected figure, embodies all three.He acts with eleos, doing what others would not. He practices chesed, showing covenantal love to someone who shared no covenant with him. And he reveals rahamim, allowing himself to be moved deeply, not to pity, but to care.

And maybe this is the most astonishing part: the one who fulfills the law of love, the one who acts as neighbor, is the one who was supposed to be the enemy.

There is no such thing as a good Samaritan, the people would have thought. And yet, here he is, the merciful one.

This is the twist Jesus leaves hanging in the air. What happens when the mercy we need comes from the person we least expect? Can we receive it? Can we learn from it? Can we return it?

And then Jesus does what he always does: he turns it back on us: “Go and do likewise.”

Not, go and feel pity. Not, go and love your neighbor once. Not go and love the person it is easy to love. Go and do likewise. Live it. Risk it.

As I’ve been working on this series of essays this summer, one reflection brought me back to my time living in Muslim-majority countries—both in Egypt and Bangladesh. I remembered the call I felt to move there in the years following 9/11, at a time when many in the West began to view Muslims with suspicion, fear, and even hatred.

In that piece, I wrote: “Sin is the rejection of the beauty and goodness of God’s image in every person,” says historian and author Diane Butler Bass. This rejection has allowed us to do horrible things to one another. It has turned us against one another—not just Muslim against Christian, but American against American, progressive against conservative, church member against church member. It has given us what we feel like is permission to call ugly what God calls beautiful. It has given us permission to stop seeing the image of God right there inside someone else’s eyes.

For me, loving my Muslim neighbor has come easily because I’ve been given the gift of knowing them. I’ve built deep, loving relationships with people across cultures and faiths. And it can be tempting for me to stand in judgment of those who haven’t, those who respond with xenophobia or racism, who’ve never crossed the street to meet their neighbor.

But then I realize, I can be quick to notice the speck in their eye, while ignoring the log in my own.

Because when I ask myself who I’d rather exclude, who I’m tempted to walk past on my own Jericho Road—it’s not the outsider. It’s often the insider. It’s those who use religion to exclude. Who confuse Christian faith with nationalism. Who glorify in the suffering of others, especially those already marginalized—those who, like all of us, bear the image of God.

Recognizing this propensity in myself, I concluded that essay with this simple confession:

“Even there, I believe the image of God resides. Even there, I’m called to love. So, I keep asking: Lord, help me love like you do. In this country. In this neighborhood. In this moment. In this mess. Because I still believe this is where the Kingdom takes root.”

If you’ve been baptized in the Episcopal Church, or stood witness to a baptism, you’ve heard the questions we ask in our baptismal covenant. In that sacred moment, we make vows that call us to live the gospel not just in thought, but in practice. We promise to live lives that bear the fruit of love for our neighbor—no matter who that neighbor might be.

We are asked: Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

The answer is always: I will, with God’s help.

Because we can’t do this alone.We cannot live mercy, cross chasms, break boundaries, and love this way without the Spirit’s help. But with that help, we can begin.

So, I leave you with this:

The Jericho Road is not only a path through the desert. It’s the one we walk every day—to the market, to the polling place, into our extended families living rooms, into hard conversations.

The Jericho Road runs through your life and mine. Who is lying there today, and will we cross the road?

Even there, especially there, the image of God resides.

The road isn’t safe. Mercy will cost you something. But the Spirit equips us.And the image of God meets us in every encounter.

So, go now, in the language of mercy, and walk your Jericho Road boldly—with God’s help. Amen.