Who Is My Neighbor?”

A sermon based upon Luke 10: 25-37

By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership, 

October 6th, 2019

I’ll never forget it was one of our first Sunday’s as a pastor of a Baptist Church in Germany.  We stayed after the service to have an extended prayer meeting.  During the prayer time, while prayer requests were being voiced, we heard someone crying in the street.  My wife and I both looked at each other.  Being new in town and unfamiliar with the surroundings, we didn’t know if it was normal or not.  We looked for signs in the faces of the others.  Everyone was preparing to pray and paying it no attention.   No one seemed concerned.  The cries got louder and louder.  Finally, my wife spoke up and asked the prayer leader, 

       “Shouldn’t we go and see what’s the matter.  Someone sounds as if they are hurting.”   

       “Oh, it’s just the children next door.  It’s nothing.”

We were submissive to our new, more experienced church members.  We didn’t get up and go to the window.  We didn’t want to disturb what we were doing, or what they were teaching us.  We tried to block the screams from our ears and get on with the prayer meeting.  After a while, it finally stopped.   We kept on praying.

The very next morning, opening the German newspaper, I read that a child had been struck by a car in the street that ran along beside the church.  The paper said that the child lay their awhile before anyone came to his aid.   Fortunately, the paper did not say that it happened right beside the house where we were having church---where we kept on having church, ignoring the screams of an injured child.  It’s good that the world didn’t even know we were there.

In today’s Jesus story from Luke’s gospel, people who should see, and should respond to a human being in need, don’t.   This is the very difficult point of Jesus’ story that is still hard for us to hear:  The most memorable story Jesus ever told casts religious people as the bad guys, and casts a bad guy as the good guy. 

Because of the political and religious edge in this story, Jesus could not directly tell the truth, but he had to tell it as a parable.  A parable is a imaginative story, told alongside our human story, to hopefully teach us how to live our lives with more insight and understanding.  By telling the hard, difficult truth, Jesus hoped to bring about healing and hope for everyone, without anyone getting hurt.   Those who heard the truth indirectly, by overhearing its implications, could figure out the implications, and learn how to rightly respond.  A parable transferred the responsibility of the truth of the story from the teller of the story to the hearer of the story. 

At the center of this parable is the answer to one of the most basic human questions: ‘Who is my neighbor?”  This question is made clear, while the answer is not always clear in life.  Some of the main characters in this story, including the expert, does not realize how he should answer this question.   The one person who does know is the surprise in this story.  The person most of Jesus’ audience would call ignorant, or worst, bad, is named ‘good’; the ‘good Samaritian’.  The one person no one wants as their neighbor, is the only true and good neighbor in Jesus’ story.    

WHAT MUST I DO?

Why did Jesus make this Samaritian good? Wasn’t it because his people, the so called ‘good’ people, the experts, the religious, his own people Israel, were missing what was happening right around them, under there very noses?   They could not see what they needed to see and would they would not hear what they needed to wake up and hear, so Jesus told them this story.  Why did Jesus have to do this?  It was for a similar reason the church in Germany would not respond to the the cries of the child in the street.  The heard, but didn’t respond because they were preoccupied.  They were preoccupied with what they were doing and they were missing what needed to be done, in the moment.  In carrying out their responsibilities, they overlooked or lost touch with the more immediate need of their neighbor. 

Recently, I read in a religious, denominational publication, a report on how and why many urban churches were closing their doors.  Church membership is in decline.  Some churches had over built buildings and could no longer afford the maintenance costs.  Other churches had problems they couldn’t recover from, and lost too many members.  Church neighborhoods had changed.  There were many reasons, but the common thread throughout was this: these urban churches closing their doors had lost touch with their neighborhoods.  They had forgotten that the most important key to their existence was not to answer who they themselves were, but to answer this one, critical, question; who is my neighbor?

I didn't see the finale of the hit TV show Seinfeld, but I know how it went.  In the conclusion of the Seinfeld Series, the show assumed that everyone knows, even people who have never been to Sunday School or Church----about the GOOD SAMARITAN.  In that final show, the four main characters, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, find themselves stuck in a small town in Massachusetts.  At one point, they make their way along a sidewalk, and they end up standing by and watching as a very fat man gets robbed.   Rather than help the man or call for the police, they look on and laugh at the chubby fellow’s plight.  As a result, the four of them get arrested, charged with violating the town’s Good Samaritan Law, a law that requires people to do what the Good Samaritan did---the have compassion and to show with a deed of mercy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Finale_(Seinfeld).

How did Seinfeld and his friends neglect what they should have done?  How do churches miss what they should be doing, not just to stay alive, but to do what they should be doing, and should have been doing all along to be a church?   How does anyone miss being the Good Samaritian?  Doesn’t it happen when we fail to realize who is our neighbor and what it means to be a good neighbor? 

How exactly does this happen?  How did the church in Germany, the urban churches in America, or the characters on Seinfeld get off track?  How do any of us get off track?  Isn’t the same way this expert in this gospel story got off track?   He was never on track.  He was constantly asking the wrong questions, so he was always getting the wrong answers.

In this story, the good question being asked wasn’t wrong, but it still wasn’t enough.  The answer he sought wasn’t bad, it just didn’t fit the situation.  The expert was wondering how he could gain eternal life, when people around him were struggling to live in this life.  It’s like asking a Fireman to stop and consider his personal faith while he’s rushing into a burning building.  It’s not that the fireman shouldn’t ever think about life, death or his personal faith; he’d most certainly better.  His dangerous job demands it.  But in that moment, when a fire is burning, when lives are threatened, because it is his job, there was an even more immediate need to help someone. 

The parable of the Good Samaritian is preceded by the Great Commandment.   The expert asks about eternal life, and Jesus answers with the two greatest imperatives from all of the Scriptures: Love God, Love Neighbor.  Asking which command is most important misses the point.  What Jesus makes clear is that while loving God gets you into heaven, it is by loving your neighbor that makes heaven worth getting into.  Can you see this important point?  What’s the point of God’s love unless there is someone to receive this great love. This God who is love, can’t be God  unless he gives love to someone who needs love.  And because this God of love, lives to love and loves to live, Jesus tells this legal, religious expert, to ‘go and do likewise’.  If life is what you want, love is what you must give.  You must give love to have life.  For just as life is found in loving, loving is ‘fountain of life’ in this world, and for finding life in the world, God’s world that is still to come.  Without love, there is no life, and no life worth having. 

WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?

But if life, here and now, earthly and temporal; and life that is still to come, then and there, which is both enduring and eternal, is about love, who is it we are supposed to love, both now and then? 

We all have to draw a line somewhere, don’t we?  You can’t write a word or draw a picture without making a line.  Lines make us who we are and aren’t.  We define ourselves by distinguishing ourselves from others or with certain others!  Some deserve to have special, lines of life and privilege drawn for them.  Others don’t deserve to receive love at all.   They deserve to live lesser lives, or even to die.

Since God draws the line of rightness and justice, so can we, right?  It certainly can seem clear and simple, can’t it?  This is how life goes and it’s how life is.  It’s the hard facts of life.  You know how it goes.  You might not want to think about it, but you are given that privilege every Sunday morning—to think about what it means to be right or wrong, or to be in and out, to deserve to live or to deserve to die.  And you don’t just think about this for yourself.  You are given the opportunity to think about this for others who can’t, who don’t, or who won’t think about it at all.  

And especially because you and I follow this Jesus who came from the God who is love, we must think about what love means.  What we can’t do, is not think about it.  And especially thinking about who to love and how to love can be hard; real hard. Some people are hard to love. But as Jesus tried to tell his listeners in this story, tried to show with his life, and especially to put on display in his death: loving is not just about easy.  Loving is also about what is hard.  It is about asking and answering the right, and most difficult, complicated questions, about who to love and how to love?  And like all hard questions, Jesus had to teach it with a story to move people beyond the normal ways of seeing and understanding.

The story Jesus told, is most familiar too us, perhaps too familiar.   To highlight this story is to point to who the neighbors were, and who the neighbors weren’t.   This is the very complication Jesus’s story seeks to moves us beyond.  When ‘a certain man fell into the hands of robbers…” he became the neighbor in need as the Samaritian became the neighbor who broke through all the complexities of life to have compassion and to show love.  He is the true neighbor.  The Samaritian broke through all the unanswerable questions with the loving right answer.  He did this not because of what he figured out in his head, but by following what he felt in his heart.  He answered the most complicated by answering the question about love by doing love. 

As we consider this story again today, is to ask ourselves what is it that makes still makes love most complicated?   One thing that still complicates love, just as it did in that world,  in this world, is race.  It not accidental that Jesus made this Samaritian ‘good’.  A Samaritian was certainly not a Jew.  A Samaritan was  halfbreed, a half Jew, who, according to the book of Ezra, was of a people who were one of the greatest threats to Jewish life and existence.  When the Jews came back to rebuild Israel, they wanted to do everything right this time. Since their prophets blamed half-heartedness for Israel’s destruction, only whole-heartedness would suffice. 

These Samaritans who were simply living and surviving the best they knew how, were caught in the crosshairs of Israel’s ambition for doing what is right for preserving and protecting Israel’s future.  A Samaritian was understood as a person getting in their way, but Jesus made this Samaritian as a person showing the way.  But to see this, to have this way made clear, Israel would have to move beyond their racists complication.  To see who their neighbor was, Israel would have to be willing to admit who the wouldn’t allow to be their neighbor.  This is why Jesus made the Samaritian the hero of his story.  Only by allowing this ‘good’ Samaritian to be the hero, would God’s people become the good neighbor.  And only by throwing out the ‘race card’ could Israel learn what it means to love like God loves. 

But of course, race is not the only way people still complicate love.  We still try to complicate love with religion too.  The religion card can be double trouble.  Both the Priest and Levite were religious heroes.  Jesus does not make them villains, but he does imply how the best, most respected people, can complicate what needs to happen.  Both these religious leaders should have stopped, and helped, but they didn’t.  They complicate the simple question, not because they don’t feel, or have feelings, but because the didn’t look.  If they had stopped and looked, would they have stopped and helped?  Perhaps, but the point is they didn’t look.  It was because the didn’t even look, but were too busy minding their own business, which they claimed to be God’s business.  This is what incriminated them.  It wasn’t that they simply missed seeing, but that they missed looking and then seeing.  And what complicated their seeing, was thinking they were doing God’s will and doing God’s work.

We all still know, that not only can the right kind of religion make you a good neighbor, the wrong kind of religion can make you a very bad neighbor.  I. It’s not because the religion is bad, or you are bad, but because you’ve made things more complicated than they should be.  I once heard a missionary tell of a church in Africa that was growing so fast, it needed a new, larger building for worship.  When the new church building was finally finished, everyone wanted to worship, and there was not enough room, so they had to have the same worship service several times each Sunday morning.  People were so hungry and excited to worship in the new building, that they pushed to get in, and some people tried to stay and worship in the next service too, even though people were still waiting outside to get in the first time.  When the church ushers caught on to this, they would confront the would-be-repeat worshipper: ‘How dare you stay and hear the gospel twice, when some have still not heard the gospel once!’

Of course, to have a religious problem is not always about an official religion.  Eric Lomax, was an British army officer in WWII, who was captured and spent time in a Japanese prison camp.   I don't think any neighbor would be harder to love than the one who has tortured and tried to kill us.  That was the problem Lomax had.  He was unmercifully tortured by his enemy, and one particular Japanese guard.  After the war was over, he still had nightmares about the ordeal and was unable to forgive, wanting to go back and confront the Japanese man who submitted him to torture.   Possessed by hate, Lomax finally went back and to find, face and kill that Japanese.   He found the man, put him in a cage, just like the man had done to him.  While he was ready to take the knife and kill him,  and began to see this man humbled and shaking in fear,  something inside of him told him, that if he killed this Japanese, the hate would never stop.   Instead of killing him, he let his enemy out of the cage, and they became close friends, and the hate and hurt was healed in them both.   

What did Lomax realize?  He realized what true religion always discovers.  If he did not pay the debt of hurt, and choose love over hate, he would always be empty, and his own soul would die.  Only by paying the debt of ‘love’, even the strange debt of loving our enemies, can we pay a cost that gives us more than we could ever imagine. 

This is why we must hear Jesus; in the church, in the world, in our nation.  Unless we overcome the complications of race and religion, and unless we overcome the complication of loving our neighbor, simply because they are in need of our love, we will loose our soul too.  For only the choice of love, even when it is hard and complicated, gives us the promise of life and love in life now, and in life that is promised beyond this now in which we live.

WHO PROVED TO BE A NEIGHBOR?

There’s more being said in this story than can be expressed, because this story points to all our stories and everyone’s need of love, somewhere along the journey of life.  But what we must all take away from this story, is to answer Jesus’ final question in every person we meet: ‘Who proves ‘to be a neighbor’? 

Did you notice that Jesus didn’t ask, ‘who proves to be a good neighbor’, or a bad neighbor.  Jesus takes all the complications we put as labels on people and  simply asked: who proved to be a neighbor?’  He sounds a lot like Mr. Rogers, doesn’t he?  Or Mr. Rogers sounded a lot like Jesus: “Wouldn’t you like to be a neighbor?”  Wouldn’t you like to be my neighbor?

Of course, the other less complicating truth about neighborliness Jesus implies is that to answer who is your neighbor is less about where you live, or who you live beside, but the right answer has much more to do with who needs love than it every does with geography, religion or race. 

Here again, Jesus wants to simplify, rather than complicate.  Jesus simplifies all our questions of who, what, and how to be a neighbor by showing how neighborly love, which reflects God’s love, is always based on compassion and showing mercy.  The more the person we see, know, or meet, needs love, no matter who they are, the more we should have compassion, show love, and be a neighbor.  It just doesn’t get any more complicated than this.  If it does, your not being the right kind of neighbor everyone needs. 

A neighbor is anyone we see in need.  Being a neighbor never gets anymore more complicated than this: ‘He took care of him’.  Go and Do the same!  Amen.