Once upon a time there was a wounded person lying in a ditch
How do we engage the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan beyond our familiar moral categories? What if the wounded person lying in the ditch wasn’t just a neighbor in need, but a deep wound within our own lives that we are challenged to attend to? What if we pause, de-center ourselves, get uncomfortable and face our own souls with honesty and authenticy, rather than trying to step over our wounds into busyness and conformity?
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Transcript
Give us eyes to see you, O God
Give us ears to hear you,
and give us hearts that can stretch into your dream for all of us.
Amen.
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
Sometimes the familiarity of a story can give us a false certainty that we actually know all there is to know about it, that we have squeezed all the wisdom out of it that there is to squeeze.
But it is hubris to limit the wisdom capacity of a story to the strength of our own squeezing minds. A deeper wisdom has to be invited out of a story.
We have to wait next to a fire and listen with different ears using our imaginations.
The deep call of spiritual practice is to engage our souls rather than merely support our mind’s grasping muscles.
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
When we hear the Good Samaritan story, perhaps we begin flipping through our notes of well-worn associations that we have accumulated over the years, with assigned roles to certain people in that story: the priest, the Levite, the Samaritan, the innkeeper.
Perhaps we already feel who we know we would be in that story.
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
Being a priest, that character is a loaded one for me. I think of all sorts of associations. What if she is so busy with meetings, planning and finance details, database and attendance records? What if he carries the pressure of maintaining the expectations of the community within a tumultuous political climate? Glad that doesn’t happen.
What if he still needs to make 40 follow-up phone calls for this year’s stewardship campaign in order to increase the budget because expenses have increased? What if she didn’t notice the person lying in the ditch because she also didn’t notice that she isn’t actually breathing herself? Pressures and expectations can be numbing in a market-obsessed culture where people feel entitled to receive a service they feel they pay for.
I think back to when I was first ordained almost 20 years ago. The local paper in my hometown ran an article because no one in recorded memory there had ever been ordained an Episcopal priest. The title of the article said this: “Higginbotham Appointed Curator of Smyrna, Georgia Parish.” Did you catch that? Did you get the reference? Did you feel the soul pinch of it like I did? Curator: A specialized organizer of a protected historic exhibit in a museum. Not a curate, a curer of souls, but a curator. I think about that article a lot, and I grimace every time at how close it comes to the actual pressures of church life. Church life is busy, demands are great, so the priest kept walking.
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
The Levite is a fascinating character as well. Levites were a particular class of people who claimed descent from Levi, one of the sons of Jacob. And they had particular associations with them that focused on rights within the community. Honestly, we could read it this way and get very close:
Once, there was a cradle Episcopalian, someone who was sort of born into a special category that once, at least, held social significance; someone who continues to coast, as it were, on the coattails of what their grandparents did in the church rather than doing their own work.
Perhaps they have their own meetings to go to or their own social obligations to attend to. So the Levite kept walking.
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
Then there’s the Samaritan. And here’s where, believe it or not, the story gets spicy. We can engage it this way: The role of the Samaritan will be played by, and insert the name or the category of whoever in your life and circle is your social or political nemesis. “Well, of course, you know about her.” I remember after September 11th hearing someone give a sermon that equated the Samaritan with a Muslim. That’s a true association. Someone whom you only grudgingly admit is also human. Today, we may pick a political foe, but please don’t name them out loud.
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
We can enter into the story in this familiar way, asking ourselves about associations with the characters with the hope that our moral compass would be challenged and we would recognize the worth of another human who is different from us. That is the moral approach to this parable.
That’s also the lesson that we learned this morning by including the owl, the ocelot, the lichen, and the whale in the prayers. It may seem odd to include these creatures in our prayers because we so often keep ourselves as the center of the story.
Why include an owl when I need to focus on getting what I want? What is an ocelot anyway? They are of no use to me.
So the parable of the Good Samaritan challenges us to de-center ourselves, which is very much the deep soul work that we are called to do these days.
If a common refrain that we find ourselves saying is, “I don’t like that,” or “I didn’t get what I wanted,” this is a clue that perhaps we have some de-centering work to do. Why does what we like have to be at the center of every story?
Yet there is also another way to enter into this story that is deeply symbolic and transformative and alchemical.
What if we re-imagined this story so that the person lying on the roadside embodies not a separate person, but a deep wound in our own life that we are challenged to attend to?
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
Once upon a time, we saw our own wounded self lying in a ditch.
Approaching the parable in this imaginative way challenges our assumptions around how we see our practice of faith. Do we even understand an authentic practice of faith is a call to engage our wounds so that we can nurture true healing? Or do we outsource our spiritual work and cling to dusty, curated exhibits that choke us with nostalgia?
We so often approach our faith as a functional means to plug the holes in the dams, in the structures that reinforce our sense of control and power. We do certain things that we feel will somehow place a spiritual stamp on our already well-defined pursuits, hoping that we can find peace—yet a strange sort of peace that never actually demands that we change any of our current behavior patterns, our busy schedules, our social norms, and our customs.
We crave a space that will somehow enrich the spiritual lives of our children, but we resist shifting any schedules to make their spiritual lives a top priority. We don’t want to say no to some things to hold space for our souls, even though such boundaries are essential in our spiritual lives.
We crave for something to change in our families with the stress and the anger that plagues any gathering, yet we avoid the practices that can only transform our hearts when we are vulnerable and honest.
We crave changes in our community life, yet we’re not willing to risk offending our networks of belonging even as we know many social patterns are warped and destructive and downright shallow.
We want to belong, but we are crippled by the patterns that only reinforce our privilege and entitlement. And we are saturated with privilege and entitlement.
So we keep carrying the deep wounds in our souls that have festered as we seek relief from the tension we feel. But the relief we seek can only be nurtured by deep engagement in our spiritual work.
We keep walking past the wounded person lying on the side of the road. We keep walking past our own woundedness and neglect the deep soul work we are called to do. We stick to the patterns we know. The devil we know, right?
We try to step over our wounds, but we forget that our legs aren’t that long, so we keep falling into them.
We seek to shore up the familiar structures, but we never ask why we need them in the first place.
Put in the context of today’s well-known story, we do everything we can to keep walking down the same paths that have reinforced what Father Thomas Keating calls our “emotional programs for happiness”—our habits that reinforce our need for power and control, for security, or the affection and esteem of what we call worthwhile society.
In a culture where some want us to be bold, to be warriors, and gild everything with gold that blows hot air into a hyper-inflated balloon of narcissistic greatness that will most certainly explode from the pressure of its own insanity, where cackling commentators lure us to the fatal rocks like the sirens they are, we learn once again that the boldest thing we can do is actually to stop and face ourselves.
See the wounded person lying there on the side of the road. See the wound in our souls that demands attention if we truly want to nurture healing.
For the storytellers in the room, this is the lesson of the myth of the Fisher King, of course: to name the wound.
It’s the boldest thing we can do, and it is absolutely terrifying. And it is absolutely essential if we truly want to experience healing.
Stopping to face the wounds, name the wounds, and seek healing is such a vulnerable thing, and the gravity of complacency, conformity, and avoidance tempts us farther down the road.
Carl Jung once said, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
As a young father in this parish told me a while back at lunch, “No one wants to be the first in our peer group to raise our hand and acknowledge that this is insane, so we just keep pushing ahead.”
Y’all, that is no way to live.
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
Once upon a time, there was a person who paused to pay attention to their own soul, and who opened themselves to transformation, to true blessing rather than shallow affirmation.
One last thing. To return to a theme that bears much fruit: Such a participation with divine blessing will most certainly make us feel weird. There’s our word. In the eyes of a culture that only wants us to conform and continue buying things to feel like we belong.
But here’s the thing about weirdness: The root of the word “weird” is ancient and fascinating. In Shakespeare, the Fates were known as the “Weird Sisters” because they touched on the deep truth of the word, that when you connect with your authentic purpose, knowing your wounds and your gifts, your destiny so to speak—when you connect to that space and live from that place of true awareness, it will differentiate you from the culture that demands numbness and distraction.
Originally, being weird meant that you were an authentic and whole person. Reflect on that for one moment.
Once upon a time, there was a wounded person lying in a ditch.
Once upon a time, there was a person who paused long enough and trusted the Spirit’s presence to kneel down and ask what it would take to nurture healing.
Once upon a time, there was a person who was fully alive.
Amen.
Rev. Dr. Stuart Higginbotham
August 16, 2026