“Who is Your Neighbor?”

Sermon Series: “The Heart of the Matter”

Luke 10:25-37

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

July 11, 2004

University Baptist Church

First Congregational Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            This is the second in a series of sermons in which four of us preachers from our two churches will struggle with the heart of our own person al belief systems.  Last week, we heard how Dea DeWitt has at the center of his belief system and sense of hospitality.

            The center of my belief system is summed up by the commandments espoused by Jesus: “love the Lord, you God with all you heart soul and mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”  But if I had to bring it down to one word it would be compassion: the compassion of God toward us and our compassion with our sisters and brothers. 

Hear what Ched Myers wrote in his book, Who Will Roll Away the Stone?: p.71 about this scripture:

“A central criticism of…Jesus was the biblical illiteracy of his listeners.  He understood that literacy in the texts of scripture can facilitate literacy in the texts of our world.  He took “revered” visions of Moses and the prophets off the dusty shelves and threw them like a Molotov cocktail into the middle of the power struggles of his time.  The stories of how Jeremiah or Ezekiel unmasked oppression, “decontextualized” by the scribes, were “recontextualized” by Jesus, kick-starting the narrative of biblical radicalism back to life in the minds and hearts of his listeners.  By undomesticating these texts, he wrested them from the grip of the powerful and put them into the hands of the poor; they became the fundamental interpretive code used to delegitimize discourses of domination and legitimize radical practice.”

It is radical to show compassion.  It is Christian to show compassion.  It is hard work to show compassion, but it is holy work, too.

            About 20 years ago, I was evangelized by an American Baptist Minister in a bar.  That sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it’s the truth.  We were talking about activism, particularly as it related to the situation in Nicaragua.  She told me of her involvement in prayer vigils on the Nicaragua/Honduras border.  Now I could understand standing for justice and everything, but I didn’t understand this prayer thing.  It was then that she told me, “Doug don’t you know that the entire Old Testament is the story of a people’s liberation from slavery and that Jesus ministry in the New Testament is to bring social justice to those considered outcasts?”  I said, “that’s in the Bible?”  She said, “Yeah, you may want to read it some time.”  I did, and that was my first awakening to the fact that the core of Christianity is the creation of a just world, aptly summed up in today’s scripture:  Love God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.

            She encouraged me to go to Nicaragua and I did for the first time back in 1984 with a group from my home church in Cleveland, Ohio.  We had gone down to be with missionaries and we were used to doing the things that good US citizens do, go down, build a house or dig a latrine and go home.  But American Baptist Missionary Gustavo Parajon said, “if you really want to help the Nicaraguan people, then let me take you around the country.  Take pictures and hear their stories.  Then take those stories back to the US and change US policy.  That’s what we really need. That will save our lives.”   So that’s what we did.  I was again evangelized by the Nicaraguan people.  They introduced me to liberation theology.  This is a theology that looks at the world and the scriptures through the lens of a poor suffering people.  And we need to remember that God is always on the side of the poor and the outcast.

            I saw a depth of spirituality I had not seen before in the US.  These people were in love with God and God was making a difference in their lives.  It was not simply an intellectual assent or even a non-thinking spiritual sense of being swept away.  Rather it was them loving God with all of their heart soul and mind and strength and at the same time loving their neighbor as themselves.

            It so happened that we were in a Bible study one Sunday at the First Baptist Church of Managua.  We were studying the Good Samaritan story.  We talked about how we are to love our neighbors and even to love our enemies.  We talked about how wonderful the Samaritan was.  We talked about how we could imagine who the other players in the story were: the preacher, the lawyer, those too busy to take care of someone else.  We talked about how the lawyer didn’t really want to love his neighbor as himself as much as he wanted to trap Jesus.  We’ve looked at this story enough to know the predictable ways it might go.  Then one man stood up toward the end of the lesson.  He was wearing the fatigues of the Sandinista army.  He said with tears in his eyes, “I am a Sandinista, but my cousin is a Contra.  We have our guns pointed at each other.  We love each other and we believe we are doing what is right.  In this context, who is my neighbor?” 

The people in the Bible study responded with many compassionate responses.  But he nailed it.  He pointed out the real life conundrum, the life and death context of faith.  I realized how shallow my faith had been.  And I left that study vowing never to settle for platitudes in the face of dire reality. 

            Who is my neighbor?  It’s easy to love your friends.  It’s easy to do things for people from whom you can expect a reward of some kind.  But the Gospel is that our neighbor is someone from who we ought to expect nothing in return.  Compassion is about loving our neighbors. 

            But it’s hard sometimes.  Hearing the words of Luke again this morning, my mind went back to my first church in Hartford, Connecticut.  It was early in the AIDS epidemic back before the three drug cocktail.  Back when people with AIDS were ostracized from churches and families.  Our church joined with a number of other congregations by holding monthly AIDS healing services.  We would hold these prayer services and invite people with AIDS and their family and friends to come forward to have hands laid upon them and receive the assurance of God’s love and care.  One of the people I met there was Robert Burton.

            Robert was the cousin of one of my church’s members and had fallen away from church.  He found his way into drugs and eventually into one of the local AIDS hospices.  I visited with him many times over the last year of his life.  He kept telling me that he was going to join my church, so that he could know he was going to heaven.  I told him he didn’t have to join a church in order to do that, that God loved him regardless of his church membership.  But he was insistent.  I chose not to inform him of all of the steps required to becoming a member: the classes, the approval of the deacons, the church vote.  In his African-American Baptist understanding, all he needed to do was to come forward during a worship service and he would be a member.  I knew it would take a lot for him to get to church physically.  But the real hurdle was a spiritual one.  He wanted to witness to his own sense of resurrection. He wanted to have this church community accept him as a changed person.  He wanted to get right with God.  One Sunday, as church began, I saw some familiar faces from the hospice.  With great effort, there they were wheeling a weeping Robert into the church.  Robert rolled up to the front of the sanctuary where I welcomed him.  I introduced him to the congregation and they replied by their approving applause.  Relieved, Robert wheeled out of the sanctuary and four hours later out of his earthly life.  I was so proud of the congregation for having welcomed Robert into its community. 

            But even the most welcoming and well-meaning of communities can get caught up in the worldly assumptions that cloud our better judgments.  Days after Robert’s death came the arguments over whether Robert should be able to hold his funeral in the church building.  After all, he wasn’t technically a member.  Judgmentalism mingled with racism, homophobia and ignorance threatened to thwart compassion.  It’s hard to be a good neighbor when we are used to not trusting the Samaritans out there, when we have our prejudices in place.  And yet, that is the gospel.  It is the heart of the matter.  Compassion is really what it’s about. 

There’s a comic I saw once that said “When the Bible says the first people were Adam and Eve that’s what it means, but when Jesus said love your enemies, that’s not what it means.”

            One of my theological teachers is the rock star Bono.  He recently said at the Africare dinner in Washington, DC:

“So you’ve been doing God’ work, but what’s God working on now?  What’s God working on this year?  Two and a half million Africans are going to die of AIDS.  What’s God working on now?  I meet the people who tell me it’s going to take an act of God to stop this plague.  Well, I don’t believe that.  I think God is waiting for us to act.  In fact, I think God is on His knees to us…waiting for us to turn around this supertanker of indifference…waiting for us to recognize that distance can no longer decide who is our neighbor.  We can’t choose our neighbors anymore.  We can’t choose the benefits of globalization without some of the responsibilities, and we should remind ourselves that “love thy neighbor” is not advice: it is command.” (quoted by Jim Wallis in a commencement address at Stanford June 12, 2004)

            The Religious right has called upon churches to use this Sunday, as a day to defend marriage from the unclean shackles of the GLBT community and their allies.  We’re not going to do that in the same way here.  They are not letting compassion show through.  They are using God to oppress.  We are to oppose them.  BUT.  They are also our neighbors.  We are called by Jesus to love our neighbors which means even our adversaries.

Our conservative sisters and brothers are often better at focusing on the love God portion of the command.  Us liberals are better at the love thy neighbor portion.  But the reality is that none of us are whole until we integrate both of them.  We need that spiritual connection in order to make our loving of our neighbors sustainable.

Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all of your strength, soul, mind and heart and love your neighbor as yourself.”  We need to do that.  And possibly that neighbor we need to love the most is that part of ourselves that is intolerant, that part of ourselves that is judgmental, that part of ourselves that has all of the easy answers and has everyone else so compartmentalized that we no longer recognize them as our neighbors. 

May we, like Jesus embrace the audacious, threatening and ultimately liberating work of compassion.  May we by our attitudes and actions truly love God and our neighbors.