November 9, 2025 – Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 6.4-9
Leviticus 19.17-18, 33-34
Luke 10.25-37
Imaginary Innkeepers
Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
One Sunday many Advents ago, I preached a sermon about an imaginary character in the Bible. It was called, “The Innkeeper’s Wife,” imagining the spouse of the innkeeper at whose inn Joseph and Mary sought a place to stop and rest as she was about to deliver. The gruff old innkeeper himself growled that the inn was full and he had no room for the holy couple. We likely have a mental image of him peering suspiciously thorough a crack in the door at the holy family, an unmarried pregnant teenager and her sketchy husband-to-be, guessing they had little means of paying for a room, and intoning the memorable line, “There’s no room at the inn!” ready to send them away. But his wife was insistent and refused to turn such an obviously vulnerable pair away into the cold and dark of night. Surely they could find some place for them, she insisted. So she gathered up some warm blankets, found enough food for them in the larder, and proceeded to fix a makeshift bed from the straw and hay in the barn. She wished them a good night, retired to her room, and we all know what happened next. We can picture the encounter in our minds eye, and when we hear the word “innkeeper” from the pulpit, the nativity is probably the story it conjures.
Except there is no innkeeper’s wife in the the nativity, and most of us recognize this. What we may not remember is that neither is there an innkeeper in the story. He too is imaginary, and the words, No room at the inn, belong to the narrator, not a character in the tale.
However, there is an innkeeper in this morning’s parable of the good Samaritan, yet at first glance he seems more a secondary character than anything else. Our focus is usually on the other actors in the story: the man who fell among thieves, the priest who failed to come to his rescue, the Levite who passed him by, and of course the Samaritan, the hero of the story, who interrupted his journey to help him. But I would suggest the innkeeper is as much the hero as the Samaritan. Here is a man who owned his own business, and was asked by a complete stranger, not only to lodge the injured wayfarer, but to do so with little more than a couple denarii and an IOU promising some indeterminate future payment. As someone who has had to arrange temporary housing for folks and families in crisis, I assure you, this would never happen today. “Hello, Comfort Inn? I need you to house a family of four who don’t speak any English for a week or so until I can get them into affordable housing, I can give you twenty dollars now and pay off the balance at the end of the week. Hello? Hello?” Like I said, this innkeeper was every bit the hero as the Samaritan was, possibly even more so.
And yet even he is but an imaginary construct. This is a parable Jesus is telling, not a news report. He created the story in response to the situation Bill read for this morning; a lawyer proudly demonstrated for Jesus his familiarity with the Hebrew scriptures – You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and [you shall love] your neighbor as yourself. Jesus replied: “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But the lawyer, being a good lawyer, had a follow-up question, and it was a good one: “And who is my neighbor?” It is this question that prompted this morning’s parable.
So Jesus, as he so often does, creates a story with a twist. His hearers were familiar with the pattern he used because historically, the Jews of Jesus’ day fell into three general categories: priests, Levites and Israelites. The priestly families were descendants of Aaron; Levites were descended from the children of Levi, one of the twelve sons of Jacob; and Israelites are those descended from Jacob’s other eleven sons. So Jesus’ hearers were used to hearing stories that involved a priest, a Levite and an Israelite. It’s like when we hear the setup of a joke about a priest, a minister and a rabbi who walk into a bar. But when Jesus tells it, he throws in a twist no one expected; it wasn’t a story about a priest, a Levite and an Israelite; rather it was about a priest, a Levite and a Samaritan, the sworn enemy of the Israelites. And to add insult to injury, it is the hated Samaritan who is the story’s hero! It would be as though I told you the joke about the priest, the minister and the electrician who walked into a bar – an electrician? Where did that come from? A Samaritan? Where did that come from? We can be certain, at this moment, Jesus’ had his hearers’ attention.
St Augustine was a 4th century bishop in the city of Hippo in what is now Algeria – the Florida city of St Augustine is named for him. He was a theologian, a philosopher, and a leader of the church whose writings to this day remain a foundation of western Christianity. Augustine had this to say about the parable of the good Samaritan: “Every human being is a neighbor to every other human being.” But in a twist of his own, he describes the parable as an allegory: Jerusalem signifies the realm of heaven; the thieves or robbers are the devil and his angels; the priest and the Levite represent Old Testament way of thinking which has been superseded by the life of Jesus; the Samaritan is the Christ figure of the story; and the oil of anointing is the comfort of good hope. I was particularly taken however, by his take on the innkeeper. The innkeeper, Augustine suggested, is the church. This is the thrust of this morning’s stewardship message in our bulletin insert, The Church as Innkeeper. “St Augustine,” the second paragraph reads, “reflecting on this parable, highlights the unique role of the innkeeper, who provided a place where healing could happen. What would it mean to understand our congregation as an “inn” for Good Samaritan work? Can we see our community as a place where healing happens?”
This is the third of our three imaginary innkeepers this morning – not that our church is imaginary but rather that the image invites us to imagine ourselves as innkeepers and our church as an inn, a place of hospitality a place where healing and restoration and hope can be found. And even if we do not recognize this in ourselves, I promise you – I promise you, others do. It is why I get phone calls from folks who have no place to live, asking for help with emergency temporary housing. It is why people show up in our church office when they can’t afford groceries. It is why I hear from families I have never met when someone is in the hospital, or when a loved one passes away. Our church is a place where our neighbors are welcome, where we don’t have to ask Who is my neighbor, because we know that we are neighbors to anyone who has any kind of need. And not just the neighbors we know, or just the neighbors we like. I’ve told you before one of my go-to resources for biblical research, is The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler. In a long discussion of our lesson from Luke this morning, Dr Levine writes about Jesus’ surprising replacement of priests, Levites and Israelites with priests, Levites and a Samaritan, saying this:
“The parable shocks [us] by making the third person not the expected Israelite but the unexpected Samaritan, the enemy of the Jews. It evokes II Chronicles 28, where enemy Samaritans care for Jewish victims [of war], even as it reframes the lawyer’s question. The issue is not “who is my neighbor?” but “can we recognize that the enemy might be our neighbor [as well] and can we accept this disruption of our stereotypes?”
This is great example of what we said two weeks ago, that the Bible often gives us the answer and asks us to find the right question for it: can we recognize that the enemy might be our neighbor and can we accept this disruption of our stereotypes? Here is what the enemy Samaritans did for the Israelites in II Chronicles: “They clothed them, gave them sandals, provided them with food and drink, and anointed them; and carrying all the feeble among them on their donkeys, they brought them to their kindred at Jericho, the city of palm trees. Then they returned to Samaria.”
Shades of the Samaritan and the innkeeper, who fed and clothed and anointed the robbers’ victim, the victim who, Jesus reminds us, was headed for Jericho. Can we recognize that the enemy might be our neighbor? If as Augustine said Every human being is a neighbor to every other human being, then perhaps the enemy is not the enemy at all, but only another neighbor.
Are we ready to become innkeepers? Can we imagine ourselves and our church as the people and the place where food and shelter and healing and hope may be distributed unconditionally? In this stewardship season, can we be good stewards, not just of our time and our talent and our treasure, but of the people God sends to us as well? The lawyer’s trick question to Jesus, Who is my neighbor, bears the inference of another question, Surely you can’t expect me to love everyone without reservation!? But he already had his answer; when he quoted from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and [you shall love] your neighbor as yourself;” he had his answer.
When you and I talk about stewardship, often the things we think about are maintaining our church building, paying our staff, funding our outreach programs. And this is true, to a point. The story of the Samaritan reminds us that we are also a shelter for the stranger, a table for the hungry, a help for the homeless, a salve for the hurt and grieving, a refuge for the immigrant, and a house of joy for every searching soul. We are the innkeepers, and we are bold to say Yes, there is room at the inn. Come on in.