Who is My Neighbor

Introduction

So I want to start my time here at LPC with a series on Questions.

So many people run away from questions.

They feel like to have questions or doubts or uncertainties are a display of a lack of faith.

That’s really not true!

A quick study of the scriptures will show us that lots of people asked lots of questions of God, of Jesus, of each other.

So this series is going to be 8 questions that either someone asked of Jesus, or that Jesus asked of someone.

Lucky for us in this one, we get both!

Flyers Players

I love hockey, like more than anyone should naturally love a thing.

One of my favorite things was (when we used to have a thing called Summer) the free agent period.

Anyone who had an expiring contract could sign with another team, if of course the price is right.

And the Penguins, being the best hockey team on the planet, are a team that right now a lot of players want to play for.

So every summer, it’s a who’s who of who might be joining the team for the coming season.

And I’m a welcoming guy, so I always welcome everybody who joins the team, especially if they have a twitter account.

Unless...

Unless of course that person is previously from the Philadelphia Flyers.

To the uninitiated, the Flyers are the bad guys.

Rivals doesn’t even begin to cut it.

So even when a player is willing to hop teams, switch jerseys, and join the good guys, I still have one eyebrow raised a little bit.

Can we trust this person?

Are they as obnoxious as I though they were when they wore orange?

What if they’re just here to steal all our plays and go back to their coach, snickering like dastardly muttly all the way.

I have this bias that works against anyone who might actually be wanting to play for my team, just because of who they used to associate with.

And this is cute if it’s hockey, a silly (allbeit lucrative) pastime to relieve (or cause) stress.

But don’t we do that to each other in other areas of our lives?

Luke 10:25-37

Far be it for me to show up on my first Sunday and announce that everyone is wrong but...

A lot of people read the Good Samaritan story incorrectly.

If you come away from the story thinking that it’s important to be kind to everyone, even those who lie near dead on the street, we might have missed something.

Place

This story is situated in a particular place in the Gospel of Luke

Jesus has just sent out 70 of his disciples

He specifically sends them to the “lost sheep of Israel”

They are charged with announcing the coming Kingdom of God.

It goes, really really well!

The disciples come back and say “Man, even the demons submit to us!”

They find out pretty quickly that this whole Jesus movement has power and ability to change the world through their actions.

And they’re pumped!

A test

Out of this, “Just then,” a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.

A lawyer in Jesus day was like an Edgar Snyder type person.

A lawyer was someone who studied the Torah inside and out, knew every line in the Law of Moses as deeply as a person could know it.

And we should see something fishy going on here, because this lawyer is specifically trying to “test” Jesus.

I have a hunch, though who can be sure, that this Lawyer was one of the 70.

If I’m right:

He’s just gone out specifically in to Isreal to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom.

He’s seen demons submit to him, and feels the weight of power.

As anyone who has been on any kind of mission trip or experience knows, he’s got a bit of a Jesus-high right now. He’s feeling good!

The Lawyer’s question has to do with “eternal life.”

We think that he’s talking about an afterlife kind of experience, and while that’s a good question, it’s not really what the Lawyer is talking about here.

For that, Pharisees and Sadducees usually talked about “the Resurrection.”

Eternal life in this context is “the most, or best possible life in this moment.”

Which is a question that makes sense when you’re feeling good after a mission trip, right?

This feels great Jesus. How do I get to feel like this forever?

Questions and Answers

Jesus does what he almost always does: he answers the question with a question.

Hey lawyer! What does the law say?

The lawyer answers with two of the most important texts in the Torah.

Leviticus 19 is where we get Loving our Neighbor as ourselves, and we heard the SHEMA earlier, which is widely regarded as the most important text in Judaism today in Deuteronomy 6.

And Jesus says “Nailed it!” Do this, and you will live.

This should be the end of the story, thanks be to God, let’s pass the offering plate.

But the Lawyer has to justify himself.

This guy had an agenda from the start.

“Who is my neighbor?”

Who knows what is going on in the Lawyers heart right now, but I think I can take a stab at it.

This guy has just been doing mission work to the people of Israel.

Isreal at this point is an occupied territory, and they’re not exactly thrilled about that.

There are those who would suggest that this Lawyer is really trying to get Jesus to say that only the Jews were their neighbors.

This guy wants to draw a big ole fence around who might be his neighbor, and who might not be.

He wants as small an answer to that question as possible.

My neighbors are my tribe, my clan, my people, my party.

A parable

It’s at this point I think Jesus smiles.

Everything up until this point is actually what you’d expect from a lawyer and a rabbi.

Lawyer asks question, rabbi asks question back, lawyer answers, rabbi pats him on the back.

Were it not for what follows, I don’t think Luke would have even bothered to write down the story. This probably happened ten times a day.

But now, a story.

We’ve heard the story a thousand times before right?

Dude gets beat up.

Priest, and Levite pass by on the “other side of the road.”

Which is actually a bit of preacher humor, because the road between Jerusalem to Jericho was so narrow that there really wasn’t an other side of the road.

And it’s at this point that you’d expect to hear “A lawyer” as the third character, the hero.

Because then Jesus could just say “Be nice to everyone, that’s who your neighbor is!”

And that’s how most people read and hear this story.

But instead, we get a Samaritan.

To put it lightly, Samaritans were the Flyers of Jesus’ day.

They were those who stayed behind after the Exile.

While most of Judea was in Exile, the Samaritans made nice with the oppressors, intermarried, and became this sort of half-breed in the eyes of many Jews.

You might have heard a gasp from the crowd when Jesus named a Samaritan.

Change the Question

Jesus does all of this, and as he wraps up the story, Jesus asks a question to the lawyer.

“Who do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

Super critical: Did you notice Jesus changed the question?

Not “Who is my neighbor,” like a statement of being, but who is being a neighbor, a statement of doing.

And the lawyer can’t even put the word “Samaritan” on his lips.

“The one who showed him mercy.”

Who is my neighbor, it turns out, is the wrong question.

Who could be my neighbor is a different ball game all together.

Practical Applications

Expanding Vs. Contracting

It is clear that the lawyer has, and in fact wants to be justified in having, a contracting view of the neighbor.

He’s ready to admit we have to love our neighbors.

He’s ready to admit that there is a base level of kindness he has to offer the world.

He may even be happy about offering it!

But he wants to shrink who it’s available to.

My tribe.

My people.

My group.

We are as a culture doing the exact same thing on a daily basis, and with disastrous results.

Take for example news media.

If you tell me which channel you watch for news, or if you’re an old timer like me, what paper you read, I’m willing to bet now that I could tell you who you voted for in the last election without much hesitation.

We have shrunk our tribe down to only those who agree with us, so that we only hear the facts that fit our world view, we only hear from people who share our opinions, and we never venture far out from our echo chambers.

What’s worse, that leaves us in a position where everyone who is outside that echo chamber get’s labeled as “they.”

“They” want to ruin America!

“They” have a toxic agenda

“They” have been talking.

In a very real way, the political landscape in our country is such that those in our particular tribe are neighbors, and everyone else isn’t.

This is not a partisan statement. Both sides are doing it, and it is a disaster for both sides.

Jesus is calling us to an expanding definition of neighbor, not a contracting one.

Jesus doesn’t want us to draw circles around who’s in with an ideological or theological purity test.

Jesus wants us to expand the circle to include people we never ever imagined sharing the table with.

Put at it’s most simple, Jesus tells us that we ought to love our enemies.

Not tolerate.

Not endure.

Not humor.

Love.

Speaking of enemies...

Who’s name can’t you say?

In the popular Harry Potter series, Harry finds himself in a time right after a disastrous season.

The people have been haunted by a dark wizard who killed a whole bunch of people, including Harry’s parents.

No one will say this Dark Lord’s name, they just keep referring to him as “he-who-shall-not-be-named.”

Maybe because they don’t want to give this wizard too much power by saying his name.

Maybe because they’re afraid they can call him back in to existence.

Or maybe, just maybe, because the hurt is too great.

Harry won’t have any of it.

He calls his enemy Voldemort from the beginning, and never looks back.

And again, that’s a children’s story, so it’s probably pretty easy to write off.

But don’t we do that?

Is there someone in your life right now who you’re so angry with, so wounded by, or so offended by that you don’t dare speak their name?

Is there someone in your life right now who you haven’t texted in months, because they “deserve it?”

Is there someone in your life right now who is just outside the bounds of your forgiveness?

Jesus is being quite clear:

We are called to love our neighbors.

Neither Jesus nor the Lawyer disagree on this point, and neither should we.

Jesus seems to think that the fastest way to identify who your neighbor might be in that situation is to identify who’s name you won’t say.

Who makes you the angriest?

Who can’t you stand?

Who makes your blood boil?

That’s exactly the person that Jesus is inviting and challenging us today to go out and love.

I would submit not love in a superficial “Ok, I’ll say ONE prayer for that person and be done with it...”

But boots on the ground, tangible, recognizable, honest to goodness love.

There is a warning here:

Some people are in fact, quite toxic.

Some people wound us again and again and again and again.

And while yes, even they, deserve to be loved by us, for our own sense of health and well being, it might be best to love that person from a distance.

But love them, all the same.

Love from the Gut

Now, I promise not to be the kind of preacher that just throws Greek words at you all the time in some effort to prove how smart I am.

But A) I spent a lot of good money on this degree, and

B) this word in particular is just way too much fun!

When the text says the Samaritan was “moved with pity,” that’s actually all one word in the Greek.

splanchnizomai

SAY IT WITH ME NOW!

Comes from the root word “Splanchnon.”

Quite literally, it’s your gut.

In the Bible, it often gets translated as heart, but that’s not even quiet what the writers of the text are getting at here.

It’s that center of your being, your soul almost, that place inside that kind of guides your every thought and emotion.

And so to splanchnizomai is to feel something for someone with your whole being.

It’s to have compassion for your fellow brothers and sisters.

It’s to recognize that however different our lives might be, we still experience the same humanity together.

It’s to look at another person, and see something familiar, and have an emotional response to it.

For those of you who are parents in the room, when your kids were first born, and they cried in the hospital, and you felt this immense wonder and joy but also kind of sadness and longing?

That’s the feeling we’re talking about here.

I wonder what it would feel like to love someone like that, to love from the gut?

What would have to happen inside of us to love anyone like that, much less everyone like that?

What would it take for us to love and expanding group of neighbors, even the ones we can’t even say their name, from the center of our being?

Well now that might lead us to another question…we’ll look at that next week.

Thanks be to God!