The Convalescent Inn

Well, good morning again, my fellow encouragers. You know, there’s a hymn we love that speaks of the great Physician near, and I’ve had it running through my mind all week as I’ve sat with these lessons. Because the lesson of our gospel this morning is exactly that. There’s a Physician on the road, and there’s an inn at the end of the day, and both of them turn out to be far more than we bargained for when we started reading.

Let me name where we’re going before we walk it. Eternal life comes by promise, and not by our striving. And the Church, the very room we’re sitting in, is the inn where the still-wounded are healed by the grace that also, quietly, enables whatever service we offer. That’s the whole thing. Let me say it again, because it will run against the grain of how we usually think. The service is the fruit of the gift, and never the price of it.

Now begin where our Lord begins. A certain lawyer stands up and asks the question we would all like answered plainly. Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And notice what Jesus does. He doesn’t lower the bar. He hands the man the whole Law back and asks how he reads it. And the answer is right, exactly right. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And Jesus tells him, This do, and thou shalt live.

You know, the honest reading of that word, this do, and thou shalt live, is that none of us has done it. Not once. Not for a single morning. Love God with everything, with all the heart, all the soul, all the strength, all the mind, and the neighbor thrown in beside. Hold that command up against your last twenty-four hours and it stops you in your tracks. It should stop us in our tracks. Paul says it as plainly as it can be said in the epistle this morning. If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law. And there is no such law. There never was.

So the command works like a diagnosis. That’s what it’s for, at least in part. It shows us the wound before it ever shows us the cure. The lawyer wanted a program, a thing to go and do. What he got was a mirror. And the mirror is honest. The mirror is not cruel, but it is honest.

Then the Lord tells the story we know so well we can nearly recite it. A man goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho and falls among thieves, and they strip him and wound him and leave him half dead in the road. And Augustine, reading this ancient story, saw in that man lying half dead our own fallen nature, all of us, stripped of what we were made for and unable to rise. And the Samaritan, whose name Augustine reminds us carries the sense of keeper, is Christ himself, who passes down that same road and does not pass by.

Look at who does pass by. A priest and a Levite. Men who could see the wound. They could name it. They could not heal it, and here’s the thing, neither could the lawyer, and neither can we. We can’t do it. We can’t do it from the outside in. You cannot bind up your own wounds while you’re lying in the ditch half dead. That’s precisely the condition. That’s why the Physician has to come to you.

And Paul rests the whole covenant on one small word. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. Singular. One man. The inheritance was always meant to come through one, and not through our record. Not through our accumulated good deeds. Through him. So when the Samaritan pours in the oil and the wine, binding up the wounds by the way, that is grace poured in from outside. Count it true. The very One who commands the mercy is the One who first works it in us. He is the mercy before he is ever the command.

Now here’s the turn I want you to hear. The Samaritan doesn’t heal the man and set him back on the road cured and finished. He sets him on his own beast and brings him to an inn, and takes care of him, and leaves money with the host, and says, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. The rescue on the road leads to a place of ongoing care. And Augustine said, if you recognize it, that inn is the Church.

Let that sink in. This is a house for people still in the way. Still passing through. Still mending. We are not, beloved, a company of the sound. Let me rephrase that. We are not a hospital ward of the healthy showing off their good health. We are a house of the convalescent, every one of us brought here by the same rescue, laid in the same beds, tended by the same host. And that should change how we look down the pew this morning. The person beside you is not your rival in righteousness. He’s your fellow patient.

Because here’s a distinction that matters. If your baptism blotted out the guilt, and it did, the infirmity is still in the process of being healed. The pardon is complete. The healing is ongoing. And that slow work, that mending that takes years, is exactly what the inn is for. This is why we come back. This is why we return week after ordinary week to this room, to this rail, to one another. The healing outlasts the pardon. Mercy keeps the door of the inn open, and the host has been paid to keep taking care of us until the Samaritan comes again.

Now someone will ask, then what about our serving? What about all the things we’re supposed to go and do? Go, and do thou likewise, Jesus tells the lawyer at the end. Doesn’t that put us right back on the road, straining? Look at what the Collect confesses. It is of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service. Of his only gift. The service we render is a gift he gives us before it is anything we give him. It is the fruit of the healing, and never the fee for admission.

Go back to Shechem for a moment. Joshua gathers the people and lays it out. Choose you this day whom ye will serve. And they answer bravely, we will serve the Lord. And Joshua, of all things, tells them, Ye cannot serve the Lord: for he is an holy God. You can’t do it in your own unaided strength. That’s the lawyer’s lesson under a different sky. The honest question was never how do I try harder. Let me say that again. The honest question was never how do I try harder. The question is whether I’ll take God at his word about me and let him work the good in me that I could never work in myself.

I’ll tell you plainly, I’ve stood at this rail with something unhealed in my own heart, knowing I hadn’t loved as I was commanded, knowing the command was true and I had not done it. And the mercy of it is that I don’t come to this table as a man reporting for duty. I come as a man still on the mend, brought in off the road, set down where the host has been paid to keep me. And so do you. And so do all of us.

So come to this table as one still being healed. If the inheritance is by promise, and if the promise is Christ, and if even our service is his own gift, then we come here with empty hands and we go out with willing ones. Come as the convalescent you are. Come and let the oil and the wine be poured in again. Come and be tended by the host who was paid in full at the cross, and go out from the inn to do thou likewise, not to earn the room, but because the Physician has already made you well enough to walk.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.