(As I surveyed scripture readings for this sermon on MCC United Church of Christ’s 42nd anniversary, I was reminded that I asked all who preached on our anniversaries to imitate the last lecture series popularized several years ago. I just made it the criteria: imagine and preach your last sermon—the sermon and message that you would want to pass on to folks with your last words.)
I would like to describe myself as a heart specialist: not in any medical definition, nor in one of the match making or dating services online. A heart specialist functions to bring healing to the world or to channel to others what has been abundantly and excessive given to me. I do actions for others. Why do I try to be compassionate and loving?

Each Sunday as I take communion, I practice a meditation from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition—called tonglen. It means “taking and sending” or “receiving and giving away.” I take on the burdens and sufferings of others, and I send out what graces I have received from God for others. These are the words you hear as I take the host—Christ’s body and God grace to us. “I take this communion and offer the grace for those who are hungry, for the homeless living on the streets, those suffering from war and oppression, and for the Earth which has been oppressed and ravaged by humanity. I offer this grace for healing.” I vary my words occasionally.

My tonglen communion practice is a meditation to connect myself and yourselves with suffering —our own and the suffering of the world that we livein. It is a heart practice that dissolves the tightness in our hearts and opens our hearts to the suffering around us. It unites the suffering and death of Christ whose words at the last supper form the core practice and in fact spiritual participation in his own death and resurrection. “This is my body broken and given for you. And this is cup of my blood, shed for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.” Whenever we remember the words and Christ’s inclusive hospitality at table, we are connected to the suffering and death of Christ and more.
My communion practice of tonglen connects the suffering and death of Christ with the suffering of people, other live, and the Earth. It is meant to awaken our compassion that we experience with God, who experiences the death of Christ and experiences the suffering of the world. It is the flow of God’s grace offered to us through Christ but that flow does not stop within our hearts or within us. What we receive we send to the suffering in the world. We never keep any gifting from God for our own but pass it on to those in greater need.

I chose Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. It most exemplifies my opening words about tonglen communion practice. The story incarnates Jesus words in his sermon on the plain in Luke’s gospel: “Be compassionate as your Abba God is compassionate.” The context of the parable is the question to Jesus: “who is my neighbor?”

Jesus’ parable is an example that answers the question of neighbor. There ia man who travels from Jerusalem to Jericho but is mugged by robbers—who strip him, beat him, and leave him for dead. A priest is traveling the same direction sees the stripped body and deliberately goes out of his way to avoid the body. He does not even approach to see whether the man on the ground is still alive. Similarly, a Levite passes by the unconscious body as well; he disregards the body as well.

A Levite is a religious functionary who serves the priests in the Temple with their religious duties. They are like deacons, assisting the priests in their purifying hand washings and sacrificial role of killing and offering a portion of that animal to God.

Both priest and Levite are required by religious regulations to avoid occasions of impurity or defilement. Coming into contact with a dead corpse or nearly dead body would generate defilement so that they could not perform their religious duties in the Temple.

The third traveler–a Samaritan—despised by the Jews ethnically and religiously—sees the beaten body. He is moved to compassion, he treats the beaten man’s wounds with oil and bandages his wounds, places him on his own mount and brings him to an inn.

And the next day the Samaritan took out two denarii and the gave them to the innkeeper and said: “Take care of that man and whatever more you spend, when I return will give back to you.”

The details of the story have more depth when we look closely at the story. When I ask which character in the story I most identity with? I hope first for the Samaritan, but certainly not the priest and Levite, and perhaps most with the innkeeper. I will explain why momentarily.

The Australian poet, Henry Lawson, wrote a poem about the Samaritan. Listen to the third stanza:

He’s been a fool, perhaps, and would
Have prospered had he tried,
But he was one who never could
Pass by the other side.
An honest man whom men called soft,
While laughing in their sleeves —
No doubt in business ways he oft
Had fallen amongst thieves.

Lawson describes the Samaritan’s giving a foolish type exchange. From a business perspective, the exchange is not even an investment, it is a squandering of monies spent on someone already half dead and probably a sinner. How often is charitable giving is enclosed in businesss language of investment? Donations are given with strings attached. Or it is considered throwing the investment away unless it brings a return to the giver. Here Lawson characterizes the gifting of the wounded man by the Samaritan from a sense of compassionate care as an act of foolishness. From a business perspective, it is foolish giving with no return, squandering valuable capital on a poor investment.

On one level, the Samaritan in the parable is the Abba God of Jesus who attempts to compassionately love us. The Samaritan represents the God, who reaches out compassionately to the wounded man and relates to us as the good Samaritan. God compassionately offers extravagant life-giving care and hospitality to the wounded man left half dead.

When I reflect upon my experience of God’s love for myself, for you, and all life, I come up with: “extravagant hospitality” as the Father in the prodigal son parable rushing out to greet his returning son, “abundant love and unconditional love, and excessive compassion.” All these phases describe Hod’s giving to myself and yourselves.

What God gives us is excessive—more than we need or can use. We have life, the givenness of the world, friends, a community, companion animals, and more even if we think we have less.

God’s giving is not random—that is, a hit or miss display of love. It is prolific and wanton and directed at each of us. Its excessiveness generates our own giving. In the parable of the prodigal son, the son asks for inheritance and his father bestows upon himself. He goes away and squanders it on himself. The father gives the prodigal son his share of capital and property even knowing that his son will squander it. When he has lost everything, he returns home. And his father runs to meet him throwing his arms around him to welcome him. What the father has still is his son’s. The son not only learns about profound forgiveness and compassion from his father, but also learns that the joy of his father’s giving and giving again..

Excessive acts of kindness encourage more giving away. God’s giving always precedes us giving. God is love, and God’s love directed at us occurs before we are even aware of that divine gifting. But God’s giving always means that we who receive God’s excessive compassion and extravagant hospitality need to pass the gift on. When we pray in Lord’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” It is not merely prayer for daily bread for ourselves, for it is a prayer to receive bread to share with others. Whatever God gives to us, God gives for us to share and pass on.

Let’s go back to my identification with the innkeeper. The Samaritan gives the innkeeper a small subsidy or down payment in advance. The Samaritan entices the innkeeper to give more and provide generous care for the wounded man. The innkeeper gives again because he has received a gift. Is that not what God does with us? God call us to be innkeepers. God gives excessively and abundantly, and we as innkeepers are shaped by Good’s bountiful and over generous giving. In passing on God’s giving to us, we participate in God’s gifting by passing it onto others. God’s excessive acts of kindness are encouraged by a promise of repayment provides the opportunity to the innkeeper to pass the gift along to the wounded man.

Jesus holds up the Samaritan as a model of surprising generosity as Samaritan. It startles and shocks his Jewish audience. What Jesus intends to teach us is that God’s gifting creates a community of givers who empower others to give and in their cultivation of generosity and in gratitude to give again.

Stephen Webb, in his book, The Gifting God, writes:

Passing the gift along transforms the static and ambiguous obligation of gratitude into a joyous participation in the life of that gift. What we most give to others is to help them discover, develop, and deploy what they have to give, and sometimes this means that we must give up our own gifts, as did Jesus Christ, and learn how to receive.
For learning to receive God’s excessive gifts, God’s extravagant welcome and hospitality, God’s unconditional love is to learn not to hold onto the gifting but to pass the gifting away. We become channels of God’s gifting and, in turn, that gifting is passed on to others.
It stretches our imagination, for giving as God extravagantly gives to us becomes a goal and ideal for Christians. Religious sociologist Robert Wuthnow writes, “Helping others may not lead to a better society, but it allows us envision a better society.” We understand what Jesus’ parable presupposes: a new world where not only the barriers between us and them are dissolved, but that we realize that a stranger or even a supposed enemy can come to aid of one of us.
I believe with my whole heart and being in that dream of God for a better world shaped by God’s extravagant giving. Such actions in serving others, living and fighting for justice of people, other life, and the Earth