Neighbors in Need

WORLD COMMUNION SUNDAY

Text: Luke 10: 25-37

The questions were proceeding methodically.  The opponent had just asked Jesus to comment on the two most important commandments.  In that critical audience, it was a topic with as many minefields as today's topic of the national debt.

But Jesus affirmed his antagonist’s point—that love of God and love of neighbor were at the heart of the law.  

Hoping to highlight their differences and Jesus’s unorthodoxy, the lawyer probed further, perhaps ready with a well-rehearsed zinger in response. "Just how do you define 'neighbor'?" he pressed.

Never one for the oppositional thinking that debater and lawyers prefer, Jesus told a story instead, a risky rhetorical move aimed both at exploding their neat categories and finding common ground. The audience might have been hoping to hear a plan to reduce the requirements of the law of love, to allow them to love less, but here was Jesus, expanding the list of those covered under that law. 

Jesus began:  "A man was robbed and beaten and left for dead on a wilderness road.  A priest came upon him but avoided getting involved.  Another religious functionary also passed him by.  But a Samaritan--a man from a despised region and religion--went out of his way to rescue and care for the injured victim."

Then Jesus did the unthinkable: he turned the question back upon the interviewer. 

"In this story, whom do YOU think acts as a neighbor?" 

Like that, Jesus invested all his listeners with the moral responsibility to enter into that story themselves.

The opponent answered for all of them: "The one who showed mercy behaved as a neighbor."  By doing so he conceded Jesus's point.

Polls show Jesus won the debate.

What most of us hear in this familiar story is Jesus's insistence that we expand our sense of who is our neighbor in order to love and care even for people who are different from us.  "Love your neighbor," we hear Jesus saying to us, "and be especially sure you are, like the 'good Samaritan,' caring for those who are very different from you." We get that point.  At least on an intellectual level.

But what we sometimes miss in this story is not just our obligation to care for those who are very different from us--but also the realization that even the despised have something to offer us.  From the perspective of Jesus's listeners, the foreign Samaritan in the story is not the person needing care but the person who might be able to offer care.

Think about it. Jesus could have told the story differently if his sole point were to evoke love for those on the margins.  He might have recast the story so that the despised Samaritan was the victim rather than the hero.  Here's how that would have sounded:

A Samaritan was robbed and beaten and left for dead on a wilderness road.  First one and then another person passed him by, unwilling to stop and help.  At last came a Jewish priest--a man despised by the Samaritan and a man who'd been taught to hate him back.  But this priest put aside his obligations at the Temple, his religious purity codes, and his prejudice.  At great risk and personal expense, the Jewish priest took responsibility for the care of the injured Samaritan. Whom do YOU think acts like a neighbor in this story? 

Such a telling would have made very clear that the Samaritan in need--and others we tend to ignore--should receive our help. If Jesus had made the Samaritan the victim and the priest the helper, Jesus might have driven home the point that his Jewish audience needed to care for the foreigners whom their culture despised. 

But Jesus used the Samaritan as HERO to make two points: that we should help the marginalized--yes--but also to open up another possibility we rarely hear in this story.  The Good Samaritan shows us that the ones we are quick to disregard are actually the ones who might save us.

The folks on the fringes--like Jesus himself--are our saviors.

I wonder if you can recall some time when you were ostensibly in the role of rescuer, helper, teacher, guide or leader--yet you came away from that experience feeling that you had been the one who was saved, helped, taught, guided or led.  I can.  When I have visited you in the hospital and have come away with a deeper sense of the Holy.  When I have sacrificed precious time to read to a child and have had my spirits lifted.  When I have offered compassionate listening to someone struggling to come out of the closet, and I have clearly heard the voice of God in that encounter.  When I have lost track of time in some project for another and have experienced the blessing of self-forgetting.  The ones we go to save often become our saviors.

When we give money to the Neighbors in Need offering to support UCC efforts for justice in the world, we help fund projects that aid others through new literacy programs and food banks and environmental projects--but we are also creating opportunities for those sister congregations to be "saved" by the folks they are serving.

When we serve others in our community--through Family Promise, for example--we are also being saved in the process.

Saved from what?  you might ask.  Because it's probably clear from the context that I'm not using the word saved in the way television evangelists preaching hellfire mean saved.

I would say we are saved from whatever it is that is killing our spirits.  That might be self-centeredness.  Greed.  Isolation.  Fear.  Self-deception.  Ego.  The enslaving and dispiriting demons are many.  But we are saved, by God’s grace, by living a life in the way that Jesus demonstrated, by being followers of The Way. It is the way that offers eternal life.

If you think I’ve strayed a long way from the story by now, look back at how this Gospel reading began.  The lawyer began interrogating Jesus by asking what was required for “eternal life.”

Jesus led the lawyer to a conclusion that love of God and neighbor and self were the key.  The story of the Good Samaritan is really about the way to eternal life.

Our love of neighbors--neighbors barbequing across the wooden fences of our quiet subdivisions and neighbors praying at the mosques in Baghdad--are saving us for the "eternal life" Jesus offers. 

Some teach that eternal life begins after we die and on top of fluffy clouds behind golden gates.  Others say—more persuasively, in my opinion—that eternal life is always right here and now.  Otherwise, it’s not eternal.  Eternity has no beginning nor end, no past nor future.  Implicit in Jesus’s response to the learned lawyer is this key to eternity:  If you both give and receive care to those who are different from you, you develop within you a divine compassion that unites you to the One of all times and places.  National boundaries fall away when you can love with God’s love.  Past and future lose their distinctions.  When love is the only commandment . . .when another’s welfare is as important to me as my own. . . when worries about old failings or future security evaporate. . . then we are living a unbounded, eternal (what the Gospel of John calls "abundant") life, a life in union with Eternal God.  We have entered eternity.  Selfless love of neighbor--giving and receiving from the one we might otherwise despise--is a portal through which we experience Divine love.  So said Jesus.

Richard Rohr has observed (in The Eternal Now) that the only time Jesus talks about the future is when he said not to worry about it.  Jesus, according to Rohr, is not talking about some future event when he talks about eternal life.  Nor does Jesus talk about the past except to say the past is forgiven.  Let go of who you think you are and live now, say Rohr, interpreting Jesus.  Jesus calls us to live in the now.  Ironically, we have made Jesus into a punisher of our past and a gatekeeper to our future.

On this World Communion Sunday we have the joy of imagining all those human-made boundaries falling away at Christ’s Open Table.  It is a table that accommodates the whole world—including all people from all times.  It is set with bread that is the body of Christ, and as we internalize that body, we ourselves become part of that picture of the unitive way of God.  It is a meal at which Christ is both the host—and the guest—and the broken bread that feeds us.  We have to give up literal and dualistic thinking to enter this kind of unboundaried space and see Jesus as the one rejected and the one celebrated—the one who walked this earth long ago and the very same one who accompanies us on the way in this moment of time. 

When we gather around the Open Table, we recall the ministry of Jesus, the one who reached out to those on the margins.  We recall the death of Jesus, whose spirit lives on in ways that confound the lawyers and debaters.  When we share the communion bread, we are partaking of his life.  And we are identifying with the despised one who saves us. 

In fact, the deepest expressions of the love that God calls out in us are often experienced between people who had seemed to have no affinity. 

Thanks be to God for neighbors we might otherwise scorn—but who call to us across our differences with healing and help.  May we offer saving love to neighbors, far and near.  May we let them save us.  In the name of Jesus, neighbor to all.   Amen