Brothers and sisters,
This week, Robin and I got a reminder of what it means to be the church. This week has been a busy one up at Hope Valley. We’ve had meetings to prepare for and attend, special documents to print up for services, a funeral service to plan, and then the day-to-day stuff that comes with working at a church.
For myself in particular, I know that I’ve had pastoral care meetings this past Monday. I led staff meeting on Tuesday morning, where we started looking ahead to things like Graduate Sunday, the first Sunday of July, and VBS. I met with a family to plan a funeral service for their mother and have coordinated with another pastor who will be participating in the service. As I write this article, I’ve worked with Robin to get a prayer list together and sent out, proofread the rest of this Illuminator (if there are any typos, I’m sorry), and started prepping for a committee meeting I have this afternoon. In addition to that, we’ve had our usual Wednesday foot traffic at the church.
I say all that to say that just as Robin and I were get-ting to a place where we could really get into a groove and work on the things we needed to, a man rode his bike up to the church and told us that he needed help. We sat in my office and talked for a little bit. And I must confess, my mind was racing through a thousand other things I “needed” to be doing in that moment. Prayers needed to be written. Volunteers needed to be contacted. Paperwork needed to be reviewed. And again, I’m going to confess, there was a part of me that thought, “Just tell this guy you can’t help and you can get back to the stuff that needs to get done; the stuff that matters.”
Then, I remembered something I’d literally just read Wednesday morning. When preaching about the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that the Good Samaritan “will always stand before us as a nagging reminder that we must … see men as men.” He goes on to talk about why the Priest and the Levite may have passed by the injured man on the Jericho Road and argues that they may have had perfectly valid reasons to keep going — be it religious duties, civic duties, or just fear of bandits on the road. He says the question of the Priest and the Levite is, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” Dr. King writes, “Then the good Samaritan came by, and by the very nature of his concern reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’ … The good man always reverses the question.”
So, Robin and I helped him. We stopped doing all the church things that needed doing. We went and got a gift card to help pay for some medicine. We gave him some water to drink. We took him to Burger King to get some food. And, amazingly, when we got back, the church had not fallen apart. Emails went out. Prayers got written. Volunteers were contacted. Paperwork was reviewed. And a man who needed help was seen and helped. I’m grateful for Dr. King’s sermon and his conviction to call me out of my own selfish preoccupation and attend to this man. Dr. King asked both Robin and I, “If you do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” Thanks be to God, we saw past the day-to-day and were able to do the work God called us to do.
Grace and peace,
Pastor Ben