“The Wrong Question”

A Sermon for Sunday, July 13, 2025 (P10C) for Emmanuel Church, Dublin, NH.

The Rev. Gideon L. K. Pollach

This is a well-known reading to many of us. It’s one of those parables that Jesus tells that many of us immediately recognize and those of us who have spent any significant time in church  have all probably heard a dozen sermons on it.

Now, I  wish I had time to answer the many questions posed by this Gospel reading completely, but I've overrun my time in prior weeks, so instead I'll answer the question: "Why are summer sermons, particularly the ones I preach, naturally better than winter ones?" I think it has to do with the way natural light streams through these windows, creating an atmosphere more conducive to spiritual reflection.

[Beat. Smile.]

Did you notice it? Did you love it? I just pivoted. I learned that in my media training while running for bishop. It’s designed to help me avoid tough questions. Particularly questions I don’t want to answer, or whose answers don’t play to my strengths. If you don’t like a question, I was taught, pivot.

We all do this. We avoid tough questions that have troublesome answers. We pivot away.  Not just with homiletical timing, but with the weighty burdens of God's call to discipleship.

Like Amos in the first reading, we also try to avoid doing what we know is right because it's costly. We ask and answer questions in proximity to God's call, while staying distant from the cost, because we know the spiritual, psychic, or political impact of truly hearing what God is asking of us will be costly.

The lawyer in today's Gospel does exactly this. He pivots. He pivots away from discipleship and toward intellectual safety.

I often wonder, what was his name? I mean, names teach us so much about personality—especially in the early Christian era. Take Barnabas, which means "son of encouragement," or Simon Peter, whose name captures both his stability and his impulsiveness. Surely this lawyer's name would reveal something profound about his character, his motivations, his—

[Beat. Grin.]

See? I did it again. Another pivot. The lawyer’s name doesn't matter—what matters is what he does with the answer he already knows is right.

He knows the answer to his first question about eternal life: love God with everything you have. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Jesus affirms he's got it right. But then comes the pivot: "And who is my neighbor?"

We are just like this unnamed lawyer—let's call him Pivot Pete. He's mastered the art of deflecting away from what he knows God is asking of him because it's too expensive."

It's too expensive.

We're tempted to draw intellectual boundaries around the concept of "neighbor" to limit our exposure—the expense, the inconvenience, the costs of actually loving."

Jesus refuses to let our lawyer friend Pivot Pete stay comfortable in the theoretical. Instead, he tells the story of the wounded traveler—beaten, broken, and bleeding by the roadside—a mirror of our own wounded hearts that cry out for the grace that comes through costly love. And then he flips the whole question.

Not "who do I have to love?" but "would you choose to love the person right in front of you?" The Samaritan shows us that neighboring, the act of living the proximate other, the one in front of us who is in need, is expensive, inconvenient, and exhausting—it requires energy we don't always have—but it's a transformational way to live.

Like our lawyer-friend, Pivot Pete, we perfect our instinct to deflect. We ask "How much is enough?" when we could ask "How can I be generous?" We ask "What's realistic?" when we could ask "What would love do?" We ask "Who else is helping?" when we could ask "How can I help?" We ask "What will people think?" when we could ask "What does God require?" We pirouette toward personal protection rather than dive down to the ditch of discomfort.

Like Pivot Pete, we know in our hearts what to do, but we redirect to process questions: We know the call, but we question the timing. We know the need, but we question the method. We know the love required, but we question the cost.

But here's the secret we whisper in waiting rooms, keep hidden in our hearts, and barely breathe when we've depleted our diet of pride, desperate enough to ask for help: sometimes we're not the ones passing by.

Sometimes we are the wounded traveler—broken and bleeding by the roadside, stripped of our certainties, lying half-dead in the dust of our own undoing.

At many points in our lives we all ache for someone to see us, to notice us, to help us—but something, maybe pride or learned self-sufficiency,  gets in the way of calling out. We'd rather suffer silently than rely on asking for mercy.

We'd rather bleed quietly than admit we need neighboring.

The beautiful irony is that learning to receive grace when we're wounded teaches us how to offer it when we're whole.

Helping the vulnerable sometimes means being the vulnerable. We learn generosity as we receive generosity.

The person who has been tenderly cared for while wounded knows exactly how to care for someone else's wounds.

And here's another hard truth: sometimes it's difficult to see the proximate other because we've grown so accustomed to their being in the ditch. We are so used to them there that we hardly notice anymore.

The homeless person we see each trip on the same corner in Keene becomes part of the landscape. The coworker who's struggling with grief, depression, or aimlessness becomes background noise. The neighbor who's been isolated since their spouse died fades into the familiar scenery of our daily existence.

Proximity and familiarity doesn't always breed compassion. Instead, it can often encourage a kind of spiritual blindness that makes us invulnerable to the invisible.

Like Pivot Pete before us, it's not that we don't know. It's that acknowledging and acting will cost us something.

Here's what makes Christianity countercultural: we're called to address precisely the intractable, hard things that we would, without the grace of God's love, companionship, and support, otherwise avoid.

The corporal works of mercy—feeding the hungry, visiting the imprisoned, caring for the sick. The refusal to scapegoat—to blame on prior generations the problems that we have inherited but want to avoid: intractable poverty, an abundance economy that favors the wealthy and punishes the materially poor, ready access to beauty and serenity reserved to a privileged few but robs those burdened by the grind of grueling work the opportunity for the refreshment many so easily enjoy. The resistance to our tendency to embrace violence as the easy answer to intractable international problems, even when we know it's ultimately empty, because the alternatives seem impossibly slow.

None of these are pleasant weekend activities that refresh. They're the costly calls that require us to move beyond the boundaries of our comfort,  loyalties, and natural inclinations toward self-protection.

The Samaritan in Jesus' story doesn't help because it's easy or convenient. He helps because someone needs help, and he sees them period. He will not pass on to others the challenge right in front of him.

Instead, our man Pivot Pete crosses ethnic boundaries, he risks ritual contamination, he spends his own money, and he makes himself vulnerable to the same bandits who attacked the traveler. Without embracing neighborliness, Pivot Pete may avoid the issues that stand in front of him, the costs of intervening- AND the grace of God that will accompany him as he embraces the hard right against the easy wrong.

Amos understood this. When the priest Amaziah tried to redirect him—"Go prophesy somewhere else, this isn't the right venue"—Amos refused the pivot. "I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son; but... the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel.'" He couldn't stay a comfortable shepherd once God called him to the hard work of speaking truth to power.

Our Collect today prays for grace. Grace not just to know what we ought to do in challenging times, but also that we  receive the "grace and power to accomplish" the hard things faithfully. That's the prayer of people who've stopped asking the wrong questions and who want not just to know what is right, but also to do what is right.

Paul writes to the Colossians about growing "in the knowledge of God's will"—not comforting knowledge that assures us that we are good, but transformative knowledge that changes how we live.

Jesus ends the parable with no escape route: "Go and do likewise."

No more pivots.

No more boundary-drawing. No more clever questions designed to limit the cost of love. Be like the Samaritan. Be like Pivot Pete.

The good news is that the God who calls us to costly love is the same God who gives us grace to accomplish it. We don't have to manufacture the strength to neighbor—we just have to stop asking questions designed to avoid it and respond to the needs in front of us. We dont have to be perfect, we just have to try.

Now, as a certified neighboring consultant, let me share my proprietary secret: the five practical and memorable steps for transformational neighboring. I've created a helpful acronym to make this easy to remember: P.E.T.E.

[pause, slight grin]

That's right— Pete.

Step one: P: Pause and see the person in need

Step Two: E: Empathize with their situation

Step Three: T: Take concrete action

Step four: E: a second E. um... E. This seemed much easier earlier. Oh, I know  - E: Hold space for healing

P. E. T., um H. Peth. No, wait.

Thats nonsense, and it's just one last well-placed pivot away from the simple, costly call of love toward something more manageable, marketable, and, maybe, memorable.

This week and every week, when you feel yourself reaching for the redirect, the dodge, the pivot away from what love requires, to do in public what we pray for in private, don’t be pivot Peth. Instead may we all remember the Samaritan who saw someone in need and simply responded. May we find the courage to stop asking "Who is my neighbor?" and start asking "How can I be a neighbor?"

Because, truth is: we probably already know who our neighbor in need is.  We also know how God invites us to live. We're just afraid of what it will cost us to do it. Amen.