DO THE BEST THINGS IN THE WORST TIMES

 A Sermon given September 21, 2025 

At High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

Macon, Georgia

Guy’s walking down the street not paying attention so he trips on something and he falls in a hole. Sprains his leg good so he can’t stand up, and that wouldn’t do him any good because the hole is deep. The sides are sheer, and he can’t get a handhold. 

So he’s lying there and a priest walks by. Guy shouts, “Hey, Father, can you help me? I’m down in this hole and I can’t get out.”

Priest looks over the side, sees he’s in there deep and says, “I’m on my way somewhere but I’ll pray for you.” He prays over the hole, goes on.

Guy’s getting cold and he’s feeling desperate. Doctor walks by. Guy yells, “Hey, Doc, can you help me? I’ve fallen down this hole and I can’t get out.”

Doctor looks over the edge, says, “This isn’t really my area so I’ll write you a consultation.” So he writes it up, throws it down. He goes on.

Now’s it’s getting darker and the guy’s feeling pretty hopeless. He’s cold and his leg hurts. He starts crying and he’s not sure if he’s ever getting out.

Homeless guy walks by and looks down in the hole, sees the guy crying, and he jumps in and sits in the dirt next to him. 

Guy just about explodes, says, “What are you doing? I need help getting out of here and instead you jump down with me! What’s wrong with you?”

Homeless guy takes off his coat and puts it over the other guy’s shoulders. Says, “You looked like someone who could use a friend, and here I am. Besides, I’ve been down here before and I know how to get out.”

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is so ubiquitous in American culture most of us can probably tell it off the top of our heads. Admittedly, this version owes more to Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing than to the New Testament, but like theologian Karl Barth said, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both,” but nobody gets a newspaper anymore, so we’ll go with a TV show

Here's a real life version from theologian Diana Butler Bass. In a sermon from 2022 she writes about riding a steep escalator when an elderly man ahead of her collapsed, tumbling down the steps, bleeding. People came running and they lifted him and found a bench to lay him on. A waiter from a restaurant brought paper towels and someone else had a water bottle. Blood running down his face, the elderly man tried waving them off, saying it was all right, he was fine. Someone called for an ambulance and the crowd waited with him until the ambulance arrived and he was wheeled out by EMTs. She says, “We all shook hands and went on our separate ways.” 

That’s great, isn’t it? A spontaneous act of help, a crowd of people coming together to make themselves useful and remaining with the injured until he’s tended to by professionals. Great story. 

Then she goes on. “About three weeks later, I was crossing a street…and I tripped, landing spread-eagle in the crosswalk. My purse flew one direction, my glasses another. My hands were scuffed and bleeding from my feeble attempt to break the fall. And my knee hurt.” She was goggle-eyed and cried because she knew she was in danger.

Butler Bass was 62 when this happened. “A car stopped, and a woman opened the driver’s side door…[but] instead of helping, she began to yell at me. ‘What’s wrong with you? Get up! You’re blocking traffic!’ When I didn’t answer, she shouted, ‘Are you deaf?’ and she leaned on her car horn. I crawled across the street to the far corner. ‘Idiot!’ she shouted as she drove away. I sat on the curb sobbing. No one asked me how I was; no one helped. Several people walked by without comment, turning their gaze from the rattled, bleeding woman on the sidewalk.”

She concludes, “Occasionally, you get to be the Samaritan. But sometimes you’re in the ditch.” 

Friends, we are in the ditch. 

Fred Rogers’ mother famously told him in an emergency, look to the helpers. But what if there aren’t any helpers around? Butler Bass writes, “sooner or later, we’ll all be in the ditch…Splayed on that road, I didn’t care who helped me. I just needed help.” That’s the real point of the Parable, she points out, citing Amy-Jill Levine, a scholar of parables. Where most of us associate with the Samaritan Levine insists that Jesus’ hearers, Jewish hearers, would have identified as the wretch in the ditch. “’I’d rather die than acknowledge that [a Samaritan] saved me’; ‘I do not want to acknowledge that a rapist has a human face’; or ‘I do not recognize that a murderer will be the one to rescue me.’” Jews of Jesus’ time were certain that the Samaritans weren’t, in the phrase popular today, sending their best people. That Samaritans were the descendants of rapists and murderers and worshipped at a corrupt Temple. Levine writes that “a contemporary version of the parable would turn the Good Samaritan into the ‘Good Hamas Member.’” The real message of the parable is that “Whoever shows up—even your enemy—especially your enemy—is your neighbor.” 

Let me give you a for instance from my own life. My wife and I work with dog rescue groups. We’re currently fostering two blind chihuahua pups and we go to a lot of foster events. One of the most visible members also appearing at these events are this guy I'll call Frank and his wife. Now, there’s no question they’re good fosters or members in good standing. But I’m leery of Frank. Very white, overfed, bluff, he appears at every event wearing an unconcealed gun at his hip. Like the Paiutes will race over the hill to rustle the dogs any minute. I’ve strongly suspected he has a MAGA hat he only wears around the house.

I know where my antipathy toward him comes from. I’m afraid of guns. I was shot at once and I don’t like firearms anywhere near me. I don’t trust the people with them, even cops, even my wife’s family, even my own family, not to suddenly take a potshot at me. 

A couple months ago at one of the adoption events, I drove over a curb and got a flat tire. Jayne went in with the pups and I tried to change the tire. In vain. It turned out my car, having originated in the wintry central Midwest, had acquired an accumulation of rust on the underside that in retrospect I’m surprised I hadn’t put my feet Flintstone style through the floor when braking. 

While I was mismanaging my solo tire changing, I saw Frank out of the corner of my eye. I hoped he’d go on but he came over to the side of the car and said, “I bet you can use some help.” I swallowed what little pride I still had invested in doing this and said, “Thanks.” We tried this and that, none of which worked, but in the process we both worked up a good sweat. That’s when he said, “You’re wearing patchouli, aren’t you?” Yes, I was. I like the smell of patchouli. I even wash our clothes in patchouli-scented detergent. I espected grief from him.

Frank said something like, “Boy, that takes me back to my hippie days. I used to always get the evil eye from the guys I went to school with, and when we moved out of the commune my wife made me stop wearing it in public.”

Shock can’t begin to suggest the look on my face. You could have driven a Toyota in my mouth my jaw dropped so much.

Butler Bass concludes, “Down [in the ditch] we feel helpless, hurt, afraid, and angry. We stare in shock at those who threaten to run us over if we don’t get out of their way. In the ditch, we have the chance to learn the most radical truth of all—even our enemy is our neighbor.” 

Find the helpers. Would Donald Trump or JD Vance be acceptable helpers? That’s stacking the deck because, while they could have a change of heart and offer their hands, the scenario itself is so unlikely as to be a joke. Let’s make it more probable. Do you accept help from the guy wearing a MAGA hat? From the woman in the Marjorie Taylor Green tee-shirt? From the local Republican Party chair? 

It’s a hard question to answer, I know, and it’s their own extreme actions that make it hard. Keeping people accountable to their words and their deeds are an important part of keeping each other honest.

There’s a meme I’m sure you’ve seen, a New Yorker cartoon where one person says to another, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” We might be tempted to subscribe to the solution offered by Rabbi Bob Alper who quipped when he moved his family to Vermont, “We’re too remote for cable so we have a satellite dish. We can pick up some pretty obscure stations, including a Jewish Cable Channel. Every hour a guy meanders on the screen and says, ‘You don’t wanna know.’” 

Okay, so maybe that’s not really a good solution. An apocryphal story about Margaret Mead says the first sign of civilization is a human femur that’s been broken and then healed. In the animal kingdom, you don’t heal from injuries like that. You become lunch. Let me acknowledge the other Bible allusion in my story. I’m talking about the part where the homeless guy takes off his coat and puts it around the guy’s shoulders and says, “You looked like you could use a friend.” I took that little bit from a comment in the Book of Job, specifically the end of chapter 2. 

These are the three friends of Job who, when they hear of the tragedies that befall him and his family, go to comfort him. He’s so changed they don’t even recognize him from a distance, and when they do, they weep, “they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads.” These three get a bad rap in most analyses because in the next chapter they try convincing Job that he’s somehow brought all his problems on himself. 

But let’s stay with the end of chapter 2. There, they do what a lot of people won’t do. “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw his suffering was great.” They get down in the dirt and the dust and ashes with my man for a week—a week!—imagine that. And they keep their yaps shut because they know the only thing that will come out will be recriminations and poppycock about how you, my good friend Job, brought this all on yourself even if you don’t know how, but in my heart of hearts I know that isn’t going to give anyone anything but agita for Job and a smug feeling for me. 

There is a reason they would have done. Per psychology researcher Steve Taylor, for most of human history we’ve lived as tribes, and certainly the Bible qualifies as a tribal testament. Taylor writes, “There’s no reason why early human beings should be competative or individualistic. That would not have helped our survival at all. It would have actually endangered our survival.” He concludes, “There’s such a strong association between well-being and altruism that it would be foolish not to live altruistically.

This jibes with something I’ve observed, which is there are more “good” people than ones who take advantage of someone. In seminary I was taught Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s practice of the non-anxious presence, the guy just there in the house where tragedy has happened to provide support. Visit the lonely. Do the dishes or the laundry. Mow the lawn. Hold the baby. Stand quietly by, available.

In my title I call these The Worst Times, but make no mistake, these aren’t the worst times in world or even American history. To the contrary, everything considered, these are good times. Many of us have enough money to see to our needs if not our wants. Here. People aren’t being shot in the streets. Here. People aren’t dropping dead from preventable diseases. Here. Yet.

Some of us have seen some really bad times, some of our parents and grandparents lived through them. Maybe that’s what stings the most about these times. We’ve seen things get better. In my lifetime little black girls had to be escorted to school by US Marshalls. Black churches were bombed. The National Guard fired live ammunition into students protesting at Kent and Jackson State Universities. It was a long slog getting past a lot of that and some of us are in danger or have already lost the rights others worked and died for. In the annals of the 300,000 years homo sapiens have existed, these troubled times don’t even merit a footnote, let alone being called the worst. But these may qualify as the worst times many of us will live through.

The saddest part of all this that’s happening, the chaos, the pulling back of the smiling mask of bigotry and repression that many of us are seeing for the first time, but that has lain dormant underneath, is that there is no Samaritan coming to save us. We’re lying in the ditch or in the hole or creeping across the street. We’re on our backs like turtles. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, in the words of poet June Jordan, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We are the homeless guy, the woman on the escalator, the gun-guy ex-hippie in the rain, the non-anxious presence. This is what we must do. Hold up the hurt and disillusioned. Feed the hungry. Shelter the unsheltered. Raise your voice for the voiceless and afraid. Don’t expect anything in return except the feeling of having done right. Do the best things in these worst times.