Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

The Good Samaritan

This Saturday, a group of 32 youth and adults will load up in three big passenger vans to make the 14 hour drive to Loveland, Colorado for our weeklong mission trip. We will join with 50 more youth and adults once we get there, and spend the week at various work sites finding different ways to serve and love our neighbor.

One of the most important things we do during these trips is try to prepare our youth for the work they are stepping into; we never know what might lie ahead. Often times, our youth sign up for these trips hoping for a genuine one-on-one moment with someone in need. They want to know their work is making a difference and like most of us, they might even expect to be thanked. However, because we’re willing to do whatever job is in front of us, the job that ends up being assigned is often work being done in the background like boxing up food for the hungry, organizing storage rooms for service sites or cleaning up a mess that has been left behind. Often enough, we won’t even meet the people who are served by our visit, but the work still needs to get done and that is the mission of these trip experiences.

Sometimes the work isn’t satisfying in the ways we’d expect, it can actually be quite heartbreaking. We once arrived at People Serving People in downtown Minneapolis, to find that our job for the day would be cleaning an apartment to prepare for a new family to move in. We learned of what great work People Serving People does, helping families when they have no home, and assisting them in finding their own independence, helping them move into their own home when they are ready.

We were excited to be offering this new opportunity for someone in need, but were surprised at the apartment we were assigned to clean. A family had left behind good food rotting in the fridge, messy diapers on the floor, broken glass in places… We learned that the people living there trashed the apartment after being asked to leave for not abiding by the policies. This was hard for all of us. In this cleaning project, we discovered the many layers of the hard work that goes into providing help, and the complex, multiple challenges within it. We try to prepare the youth for this kind of experience, but sometimes when stepping in to help clean up a mess, that messiness ends up showing us a heartache people are living with that no clean-up job can truly fix.

We did spend the day cleaning the best we could, sometimes jamming out to good music and sometimes exploring deep conversation of how God is working in a mess like this. There is often heartbreak in serving others, most often our own as we come to see the heartache in the people we serve. A lot of us don’t expect when we signed up to do good that it could show us a world where it’s hard to see the grace we know we have from God. It’s usually one of the biggest lessons within a youth mission trip, the lesson of who is my neighbor, and how can I help in their hurt.

The Samaritan likely was not planning to step into anyone’s heartbreak that day, wasn’t planning to help in the hurt but he saw a person in need.  It didn’t matter who the person was, their religion or where they were from, that Samaritan, on that day, stopped to help. He not only stopped to help the man who was hurt by bandaging him up, he took him to the inn where he could be cared for. He stayed connected and involved, offering to pay whatever was needed to get the man back to health. That is a commitment, even more than just stopping and putting on a band-aid. He wanted a big fix.

This story Jesus tells of the Samaritan man was shocking in its own time. It was a story for the Jewish people to hear, who would never expect a Samaritan to help.

But it is just a story, a parable, some words on a page, not even a real historical event yet it has had the power to change history where now, when you Google the word “Samaritan”, you see it being used to name food pantries and non-profit agencies.

The parable of the Good Samaritan has us asking who we would be within the situation. Would we be the priest or the Levite, simply walking by?

In this parable, God calls us to love our neighbor, even those who we don’t expect. Our neighbor is not always someone we love, or may think we have the time for. Our neighbor may think differently than us, act differently than us and vote differently than us. These days, the story of one person helping another who they are not expected to help may resonate more than ever.

Each day brings us new headlines with conflicting issues having us choose sides and pointing the finger at whomever we think is wrong. This parable makes me wonder what I would do if I saw someone needing help on the side of the road. I know all the things I tell myself when I see someone I think is in need of help. “There’s probably not much I can do, they may not want my help, someone else will figure this out for them…”

This is not a simplistic thing, helping the neighbor. There are a lot of layers in exploring what it all means. Maybe it is just easier to drive by and not engage in the possible complications. The story might not be about stopping on the road but about holding up a really hard issue, that still needs our work and attention.  We have yet to finish the work of paying for or truly providing for the healing of that man on the road. He’s still there in so many ways.

I used to think we didn’t have enemies, but the current state of our world scares me into realizing we may. We can see the differing opinions and the distaste we have for things happening in our country. Our teenagers are feeling that state of the world and what their future may be leading into. Youth are caught in these same forces and they are struggling, too. Growing up is hard enough and it’s really hard right now. While we are fighting our best to create a better future, some days it feels more hopeless and hard than ever.

On the other hand, it’s stories like the Good Samaritan that continue to inspire us, lifts us up, helps us to keep going, while challenging us all the same. The mission trip is an example of help and service that is set into motion not only by this parable, but by our group of 32 people from Gloria Dei who want to help and serve.

32 youth and adults are giving up a week of their summer, to spend hours upon hours in an uncomfortable van, sleeping on floors and worshipping with strangers, all so we can serve those who are in need. That is the gospel, that is God at work right there. God is still putting people in our path who help us see a bigger world and inspire us to compassion and mercy. It might not be someone bleeding on the street, but it’s going to be someone who helps US.

We think we are going to help someone who is in need. Turns out, we end up being the ones who are helped. We give, but we might end up receiving even more than we would ever expect.

Each night in Colorado, we will gather together in worship, share stories of our experiences from the day. Each morning, we will spend time in scripture, preparing our hearts for what lies before us. Each person we meet will be a new neighbor, with different personalities, different views and different beliefs, but it is not only the non-profits we will serve that week that will teach us about our neighbor and how we are called to help. It is the relationships formed that sometimes make the biggest difference.

My very first mission trip was in Galveston, Texas, after Hurricane Ike had hit in 2008. Two of our teenage boys were assigned the job of replacing shingles on a roof, a job they had just learned and were working on together. Jonathan and Tony did not know each other well and were each quite shy in opening up to the group and to one another. I can only imagine the uncomfortable silence as they worked on this new assignment together, shingle by shingle, on a hot Texas rooftop in the middle of July.

That’s when a young man stepped off the side of the road and offered to help. He was a skilled roofer, who had come to Galveston after the Hurricane to offer his help, and find work. This man did not hesitate to jump on that roof and help these boys do the job, for free, all day. He not only helped our boys fix the roof, he showed them the way, complimenting them when they got it right and telling them stories of his life and his experiences, asking them questions and making them laugh.

This man felt called to serve by relocating to city after city, disaster after disaster. That day he felt called to serve by fixing a roof with our boys, but did so much more than that. Both Tony and Jonathan named their time with him as their God moments for the day and for that entire week. That young man supplied the God moment for most of us that day, giving up a possible day’s wages to show two teenage boys how to fix a roof and showing them how God calls us to serve, in not only the work we do, but in the relationships made while we do it. The neighbor that we really have to work on loving may not be the one of the opposite of issues but the one walking in off the side of the road and it is on these trips, where we are often called to be serving others when we find we are truly served as well.

I could tell a heartwarming story from every trip I have taken a group of youth on.

God moves in incredible ways during these mission trip experiences, where we hope to be somewhat of a Good Samaritan. All we can do is get ready to go, prepare for what might happen, load up in a van, and head out. Along the way, there is no doubt that Jesus will come alongside, probably heal a few wounds, love us, challenge us, and keep the story going. Pray for us because, no matter what, we’re on the way.