Week three of the fall vision series, and the one taught out of order. One person, one place at a time. Then Madison. Now together. Abbie says they did it backwards and that it made more sense that way. It opens in 2013 with a story she tells on herself. Eighteen, first week of college in Minneapolis, too proud to admit she could not parallel park, so she drops a car full of brand new friends at the Sculpture Garden and promises to find parking. She never comes back. She circles downtown until her phone dies, screaming and praying with the windows down, and prays for one light. One bar is open. She walks in, tells the bartender she is lost, and he pauses and asks whether she wants to go wash her face first. That is when she remembers the cat whiskers, and the word she let somebody write across her forehead for Capture the Flag. He gave her a charger, lemonade, breadsticks, and a pizza delivery driver to follow back to campus. Her Good Samaritan was a bartender who said go wash your face, honey. Then Luke 10:25-37, read in full. An expert in the law asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, answers his own question with love God and love neighbor, and then tries to narrow the second half by asking who counts. The argument runs in three moves. Community is required, and it goes back to Genesis, where God says let us make man in our image and then looks at the one man He has made and says it is not good for him to be alone. Community is risky, because rejection registers in the brain the same way physical pain does, which is why so many of us outsource the ask to a search bar. And community is rewarding, but only if you go back in after the first time it costs you something. The fresh read is the middle of the parable. Abbie has preached this passage as loving the stranger many times. This week she noticed the order: the man was hurt by people, rejected by people, and then healed by people. We are hurt in relationship and we heal in relationship, and most of us stop halfway. She spends real time on the two who crossed the road. The priest and the Levite were not villains. They had rituals they could not afford to trigger, so they kept walking, and a man stayed in the ditch for reasons that were perfectly defensible. The Samaritan had a better reason to keep walking and did not. A study she saw the same week: the top two uses of AI right now are therapy advice and connection. Another one, out of Harvard, tracked men for seventy years and found the ones who stayed in close relationships lived longer and healthier than the ones who did not. Isolation is killing us faster than the thing everybody is worried about. None of the tools are evil, and she says so plainly. The question is who rules whom, and what we give up quietly when we stop having to ask a human being for directions. She closes on the oil and the wine. Oil to heal, wine to cleanse, and a Samaritan who had to get close enough to the wound to use either one. That is what Jesus did. He did not shout it from a distance. So What: We are hurt in relationship and we heal in relationship. Stopping at the first half is how a person ends up alone with a search bar and a list of reasons. Now What: Receive the love of Jesus first, then go first with a person. Community groups start Tuesday. Scripture References: Luke 10:25-37 (The expert in the law, and the parable of the Good Samaritan)Luke 10:27 (Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself)Luke 10:37 (Go and do likewise)Genesis 1:26 (Let us make man in our image)Genesis 2:18 (It is not good for him to be alone)1 Corinthians 12:20-21 (Many parts, one body, and the eye cannot say I do not need you)1 Corinthians 13:1 (A resounding gong or a clanging cymbal)1 John 4:7-21 (Let us love one another, for love comes from God)1 John 4:10 (Not that we loved God, but that He loved us)
