[Sermon] Grace in the Ditch

Pastor Hector Garfias-Toledo + July 13, 2025

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost / Lectionary 15

Drawing from the Good Samaritan and Colossians, Pastor Hector reflects on the grace that meets us when we’re at our lowest. Whether we find ourselves in the ditch or watching someone we love suffer there, God’s unconditional love reaches in and lifts us up. Rather than striving for perfection, we’re invited to acknowledge our brokenness and receive God’s healing. From that place of being restored, we are sent into the world—not to perform or prove ourselves, but to live lives that provoke wonder and reveal Christ. These are the questionable lives we’re called to: ones that challenge the world’s values with quiet courage, deep compassion, and unexpected joy. In a fractured world, grace is still the most surprising story.

Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.

Grace to you and peace from Abba—Father, Mother, Creator—and the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Lord, our friend, and the Lord—no, I already said the Lord Jesus Christ. And we say: amen.

Now I understand why I don't get those... but anyway.

It is hard to start every day, isn't it? We're afraid sometimes—uh—to just either turn on the news, whether you listen to podcasts or radio or TV or newspaper or magazines.

Many of us start the day asking questions:

Where can I find real hope when the world feels so broken and I feel so helpless?

How can I overcome burnout, cynicism, and compassion fatigue when needs are endless?

Where do I find my true identity and worth in a world of performance and comparison?

How do I deal with guilt, shame, and the feeling that I am not good enough?

Or maybe: How can I bridge deep divides—political, racial, religious—when hatred seems so strong?

I think that these questions are not questions that are specifically for us today, because these have been existential questions for all humans in all times, from the beginning of eternity, I guess. And I believe that those were the questions that the writer of the letter to the Colossians, and the Christians and the church of Colossae, were asking every day in their lives.

However, the writer of the letter to the Colossians begins with the words: “We have heard of your faith, and we have heard of your love.” And as I was reading this passage, I was thinking of the passage of the disciples that Jesus sent to bring peace and to focus on Jesus' mission—as David was reminding us last Sunday.

The writer of this letter to the Colossians has seen and has experienced, through the lives of the early Christians, that answers to these questions are possible. But maybe the answers to those questions are found not necessarily in human effort or in human righteousness.

The writer rejoices and commends the early Christians and encourages them to continue to live that life that has evoked curiosity to know the God of life, and the new life that is given in the grace of God through Jesus Christ.

So as I read the passage—and maybe this happened to you—when I was reading this passage in the book, in the letter to the Colossians, a couple of questions came to my mind:

What caused joy in Paul and the others?

And what caused fulfillment in their lives and their ministry—for Paul and the others who were reading this passage?

And the only question—the only answer—that I come back to, after and after and after asking these questions to myself, is that these Christians that they are talking about are living lives that are questionable. As I have said before: lives that are questionable.

How many here are living—how many of you are living—lives that are questionable?

A few of you. Everyone says, “Dare.” Everybody should be living lives that are questionable.

Now don't get alarmed. I'm not going to get to those places that you are thinking when I talk about questionable lives. Bear with me and see, at the end of this—this reflection together—if we are living lives that are questionable.

The disciples, the early Christian church members—they were live, they were rescued and restored. Their lives evoked hope and the desire to know the God who enters the deep and dark ditches into which they had fallen.

As you know, a couple of weeks ago I was in Guadalajara. I had to travel as an emergency to be with my parents, especially with my father, who was in the hospital—at a time when he had come out from a comatose state where doctors had said that he wouldn't end the day. And yet, when I got there, he was okay.

In those days that I was spending in the hospital with him, I was sitting, and he was laying down on his bed. He was unable to do anything—even to move a finger in his hand.

In other words, I almost—when I recall the picture of him being in bed—I remember also the image of the man who was in the ditch in the story of the Good Samaritan.

I wanted to do anything that I could—or anything that I couldn’t—in order to help him. And I realized that anything that I did was not helping. And yet, inside me, I thought: “Father P,” as I call him, “the only thing that I ask you right now is that you want to be helped. That you allow me to help you.”

Was I going to make him walk or talk or move? I don't know.

But I needed that connection, and I needed—and I learned about myself in that moment—because perhaps he was not the one in the ditch, but I was the one in the ditch, with hopelessness and helplessness.

Today we come here, and perhaps you are feeling like that. Perhaps you are feeling that you are in the ditch, or that a loved one is in the ditch—where he or she cannot be helped, where you are wondering if it is even worth trying anything.

I believe that God, in the same way that I was longing that day when I was in the room with my father, is what God wants from us—as a parent, as Abba, as Mother, as Creator.

The only thing that God wants from us is to allow him—allow God—to touch us, to rescue us, to enfold us in God's arms, and to remind us that it's only in God where we can find life, strength, peace, and restoration.

And yet, in this world that I was describing earlier, maybe the questions are for us:

What are the ditches that we are digging in our lives by ourselves?

Or what in life has robbed us of our dignity, integrity, and identity?

Or maybe, where are the ditches that are dug and created by the systems and the structures and the powers of this world, in which many people have fallen, and in which many people have to live?

Today's gospel sheds some light on what gave the Colossians the strength and the will to live these questionable lives.

I invite you now to look at your bulletin—the cover page of your bulletin—and take just a few moments.

What does it tell you?

What do you see?

What comes to your mind?

Who are you in that picture?

Traditionally, we as Christians have heard and listened and read and interpreted this story of the Good Samaritan as an ethical lesson—a call to do like the Samaritan, only to rescue others.

But I invite you, my siblings in Christ, to think a little bit differently today.

And what if—what if—the story is about us being the ones in the ditch?

And what if the Good Samaritan is God's unconditional love that reaches out—reaches out to us where we are?

Jesus, in this story, reframes who we are and whose we are. And this story evokes a deeper conversation and self-reflection of who we are in our journey—in our faith journey—and in our daily lives.

We only need to be—to want to be—healed, and to accept the mercy that is extended by this God that crosses, that is bound and—um—boundary-breaking grace that goes against the world’s patterns of division and separation and segregation.

In essence, this story is a countercultural narrative for modern life—against self-sufficiency, performance-based worth, cynicism and despair, tribalism, and burnout.

Go and do likewise.

We put more emphasis on the word do—maybe because it is easier. Maybe because it's something that I can do, and I want to do.

But Jesus goes deeper and tells you to do—tells us maybe something that is more difficult and more challenging—which is to accept the help, the hand, the arms of someone who we would never accept in our lives.

Many people do things. But Jesus says:

"Do likewise. Allow the grace of God to reach out to you when you are down deep in that ditch."

I believe that this story—these two stories in the Scriptures today—really address three major points:

1. To acknowledge our helplessness.

2. God rescues us unconditionally.

3. This rescue creates a renewed life in each one of us.

   
   

Seeing ourselves in the ditch—and recognizing God's unexpected channels or means to reach out to us—reshapes how we engage with today’s fractured world.

We stop trying to be heroes.

We embrace being rescued.

We let the grace restore our identity, our strength, and our ability to join God’s mission in this place.

And we recognize our spiritual brokenness—like the man in the ditch who was powerless to save himself from the guilt, from the despair, or from the dominion of darkness, as the writer of Colossians says in verse 13.

And all of this humbles us in a polarized world—exposing the failure of self-reliance and systems and superficial identities that make us feel even deeper in the ditch.

My siblings in Christ, I believe that this perspective reorients us from statements like:

• I must save the world

into:

• God’s grace saves, and we participate in God’s saving work;

from:

• judging who is deserving

to:

• embracing everyone as broken and loved, as each one of us is;

from:

• acting out of duty and guilt

to:

• acting in response to the received grace, so that we live a life in gratitude and generosity;

and from:

• fear of the other

to:

• openness to God’s grace, who works through what we call “the other”—the stranger, the people that we don’t like, the people who think different, the people who I would never engage with;

and from:

• despair at the world’s brokenness

to:

• a hope in the God who enters ditches and is making all things new.

Do we live a questionable life?

Do we want to live a questionable life?

Do we want this congregation to live a ministry and a life that is questionable—that will evoke the curiosity and the desire of any person in this community?

To know this God who loves us in such a way that will come down to the ditch to reach out to us, to give us new life—through our relationships, through our accompaniment, through the walk together.

Do we want to live a questionable life, my siblings in Christ?

Because God rescues us unconditionally, and he crosses every barrier that we may erect in front of us—because of God's compassionate character—out from darkness into the order of life, purely by God's grace.

Our worth is sealed by God's act, not by our performance, but by a simple act of allowing God to reach out to us, to embrace us where we are.

The renewal, the growth, the fruitfulness, the strength, and the Christlike living described in Colossians—in the passage of Colossians—is the outcome of the ongoing work flowing from that reckless, radical, and unexpected power of God's grace, who is our strength within us.

We have heard of your faith and your love.

And you know what, my siblings? I personally have heard it—out there on the streets of Lynnwood and Edmonds and other cities around here.

The people—we have heard of the love and faith and welcoming and embracing love of the people of Trinity Lutheran Church.

I guess you are starting to live some questionable lives now. I encourage you to continue to do it boldly—because we go from despair at the world's brokenness to the hope in the God who enters ditches and is making all things new.

Let’s go. Let’s continue with the party of Pentecost and living questionable lives.

What type of advice am I giving to this congregation?

I am glad.

And thanks be to God.