Neighbors

I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you.

I have always wanted to be in a neighborhood with you.

-Fred Rogers

The Good Samaritan parable, for which our congregation is named, is not really what people think it is.  It is not a prescription for exceptional charity (although that is not the worst misreading one might come to).  It is rather an answer to a question: "who is my neighbor?" The question is posed by a "lawyer," who is "seeking to justify himself," which essentially means an expert who wants to prove himself right, and also a person who wants to make excuses for not doing something they clearly know is right.

It starts with Jesus' summation of the law, which was not original to him, nor was it considered a matter of debate: love God, love your neighbor.  All of the Ten Commandments and indeed the majority of the law can rest under this simple statement of how to live.  The lawyer knows this formula well, and thus has the path to the Kingdom of Heaven laid out right before him.  But as with so many religious folks (and make no mistake a "lawyer" was not a personal injury guy, he was a scholar of the Law of Moses, and thus a religious expert as much as any priest), they are uncomfortable with the simple yet difficult path of love.

Love requires vulnerability, and most of us do not like the feeling of being vulnerable.  Thus we tend to "justify ourselves" in all sorts of attempts to love without vulnerability.  Unfortunately, this can only lead to unhealthy and potentially abusive relationships.  Jesus demonstrates that God is willing to be vulnerable to us, to our rejection, our betrayal, our violence, yet many who claim to follow Jesus, insistently try to reinstall the cosmic monarch on a throne they have purposefully abandoned.  The only god that will sit on that throne of the all-powerful, all-knowing ruler is a monster of our own creation.  Jesus will not climb into that seat, no matter how much we might want him to.  Jesus rather takes his place in the midst of the crowd, with children, lepers, and all manner of unclean people rubbing up against him, he insists on vulnerability.

In Matthew 25 he makes this known to his disciples: "Just as you have done to the least of these, my brothers, you have also done to me."  That means Christ is in the place of the naked, the hungry, the imprisoned, those who suffer, those who are vulnerable, those who are in the ditch.

A book I keep always close to my desk is Jesus and the Disinherited, by Howard Thurman, it is a slim little volume that bears reading and re-reading.  In it Thurman says: 

The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed.  That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. "In him was life; and the life was the light of men." Wherever his Spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.

Authentic Christian faith always seems to bubble up from the cries of the oppressed and the lives of the poor, and it seems to mutate into something detestable when it walks the halls of power.  In the developing world, the Christian faith is strong and vital, in the "West" it is struggling and dying and perhaps even worse flourishing as something that actually denies the very essence of Jesus as a vulnerable incarnation of divine love and substitutes a holy warrior type messiah. This is a very old mistake, and it why the Kingdom still hasn't fully come to be, "on earth as it is in heaven," despite the most powerful and wealthy people in world regularly praying for it.
It is no accident that Jesus presents, in perhaps his most famous parable, an injured victim as the test of love for neighbor.  He purposefully presents a scenario that offers a challenge to the lawyer's legal presumptions: blood and dead things or even possibly dead things made one ritually unclean, and thus the priest and the Levite (very much kin to the lawyer himself) have valid professional and religious excuses for passing by.  It is also no accident that Jesus chooses a Samaritan, a symbol of the "other," to Jews of that day, as the one who shows mercy and thus becomes an example of love for the neighbor.  The one who ignores the boundaries, who makes themselves vulnerable, who takes the risk and pays the price is the neighbor.
Religious people, in their desire to be "pure," or even "holy," often prioritize the rules or the preservation of institutions over the suffering of their neighbor.  It was true in Jesus time, it is true now.  In the lectionary, the plumb line vision of the prophet Amos gets paired with the Good Samaritan story, the parable of the Good Samaritan is indeed a plumb line that can tell us how true we are being to the Gospel.  Are we trying to "justify ourselves," by defining the scope of who our neighbor is too narrowly?  Especially relevant is the question of whether we are allowing ourselves to truly love or not.  Are we willing to love those that are particularly oppressed: the poor, the refugees, the ones who are maybe not entirely safe to love and care for?
Too many "Christians" seem willing to ignore the obvious suffering of people in the ditch for reasons that are clearly based on fear, hypocrisy and hatred (Thurman's hounds of hell). In doing so they turn away from the narrow gate of Jesus Christ and enter by some other gate.  I am honestly grieved to see this happening in American Christianity at this very hour.  People giving in to all three of those hounds of hell, often in the same moment.  Instead of trying to exclude others from the blessed category of neighbor, if we follow Jesus we should always be asking that question that Mr. Rogers taught my generation so patiently and kindly: "Won't you be my neighbor?"