The story of the good Samaritan suffers a bit from overexposure. Who here has not heard this story told over and over again, and not only in church? This is one of Jesus’ stories that is well known by all Christians, and by more than a few nonbelievers as well. It seems that the story of the good Samaritan is always particularly well known by those who don’t get exactly what they want, and then throw the good Samaritan back into the face of whatever good Christian person they’re trying to swindle.

This story, like much of what Jesus’ had to say, is an intensification of the old law of Moses by which the people of Israel organized their lives and society. A person’s neighbor was not just the guy next door, and a person’s neighbor was not just a member of his extended tribe of kinsmen: a person’s neighbor could even be a member of a group with which historic relations were poor.

Every few years, the Pew Research Center conducts what it calls the “Religious Landscape Study,” polling thousands of Americans on their religious and devotional commitments. The researchers regularly flesh out the results with more targeted studies, which investigate particular questions in detail. The most recent one of these such studies to catch my eye was released three years ago, when Pew asked a sample of several thousand adults their top reasons for attending religious services. The response was overwhelming. Eighty-one percent of respondents cited “becoming closer to God” as the major reason for going to church.

This is an absolutely timeless impulse, so of course it trumps all of the other causes of religious devotion. Blaise Pascal famously described a hunger in every person to know God, deriving from a God-shaped hole at the center of every fallen human heart, and the gospels are littered with accounts of men and women, from many and varied backgrounds and experiences, seeking Jesus Christ, knowing him – even in sometimes inarticulate ways – to meet that need to become closer to God.

This is a sermon on the topic of Christian courage. Courage is one of those things that we think we know a lot about. It is, of course, one of the cardinal virtues, so from the time our parents or teachers first tell us to “be brave,” or we first hear a quotation of Lady MacBeth telling her husband, “screw your courage to the sticking-place,” we assume that courage involves some fortitude or sang froid which we may or may not happen to possess. We assume that it means ignoring danger and soldiering blindly ahead. But courage, real courage, Christian courage is something different entirely.

So I will say something about that courage, about what it looks like in practice, and how we can cultivate it in our lives.