WHAT KIND OF NEIGHBOR AM I?

A NEW ATTITUDE FOR A NEW YEAR

Happy New Year. We are off and running on Day 2 of 2022 and doesn’t it seem like we were just starting 2021? It has been a really crazy two years from Pandemic to Political change to a loss of many dear friiends and its kinda been a blur.

I was grateful for our Christmas celebrations last month and the reminder of what, for me, is a steadying influence in the midst of all the change, confusion and chaos!

For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. Jn 3:16

It was one of the first verses I learned at home and church. Those Sunday School teachers (and my family, too) early on made sure I not only knew but felt that truth.

I remembered this oldie, but goody Sunday School song, too, by C. H. Woolston, a Baptist minister, who with his wife Agnes lived in East Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1880 and wrote these lyrics:

Jesus loves the little children, All the children of the world; Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.

That sounds sweet and good and nice on the surface: “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

Simple and sweet as it sounds, it’s a hard lesson we’re still trying to learn.

1 Jn 4:19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.

Jesus does love the whole lot of us – “red and yellow, black and white” and everyone in between.

The Question Is Do You and I Love Them, Too?

The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of those oldies, but goodies, too – from the host of Jesus’ parables – it’s the one we’ve all heard so much it may have lost its punch, over the years. I mean we’ve learned to serve it up sweet and good and nice for the kids in the Sunday school classroom, but we forget to add the hard stuff back in for the grown-ups in the sanctuary too.

Which brings me to point you to the hard, holy questions raised by Jesus’ parable. All of this begins and ends with questions, after all. That lawyer gets the ball rolling with a question: v. 2525 Then an expert in the law stood up to test him, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

And Jesus asks him a couple questions in return: v. 26 “What is written in the law?” he asked him. “How do you read it?”

v. 27 The lawyer answers correctly – 27 He answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,” and “your neighbor as yourself.”,

v. 28 Jesus gives him and A! 28 “You’ve answered correctly,” he told him. “Do this and you will live.”

v. 29 but then he asks another question 29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

30 Jesus took up the question and said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him up, and fled, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down that road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 In the same way, a Levite, when he arrived at the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan on his journey came up to him, and when he saw the man, he had compassion. 34 He went over to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on olive oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him. When I come back I’ll reimburse you for whatever extra you spend.’

And after Jesus tells the story about the sad sack who gets robbed, beaten, left for dead and all the rest; the story about the priest and the Levite who pass him by and the Samaritan who finally stops to help;

Jesus wraps it all up with yet anotherquestion. 36 “Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

Not a moral. Not a sermon. Not a lecture. But a question: “Which one was a neighbor?”

The answer, of course – finally something even the lawyer couldn’t deny – is, “The one who showed mercy.”

37 “The one who showed mercy to him,” he said.

Then Jesus told him, “Go and do the same.”

When Martin Luther King, Jr. taught about the Good Samaritan, he suggested that the priest and the Levite – the righteous, God-fearing, Chosen Ones who should have known better and who should have done differently – asked the wrong question as they saw and walked by the dying man on the side of the road. King suggests the big question in their heart of hearts was all about themselves: “What will happen to meif I stop and help?”

The Samaritan, though, King says, asks the better, faithful, merciful question: “What will happen to him – what will happen to the other– if I don’t?”

That’s the kind of compassionate question we can ask to move us to mercy. “What will happen to him, or her, or them, if I do nothing?”

Which brings us to this question:

WHAT KIND OF NEIGHBOR AM I?

I think we’re being called to get to know our neighbor, so that we will care about what might happen to them if we continue to do less than enough, or nothing at all.

I wonder how many of us have had people in our neighborhood, or in our classrooms, or in workplaces near us often enough to really get to know them, but just failed to take the time.

Because the sad truth is we don’t know enough of our neighbors, if we count our neighbors the way God does – as anyone and everyone beyond these walls, beyond the city limits, and beyond the comfortable, familiar social circles of life as we live it. And until we do… until we see “them” as “us”, like the Samaritan did, we won’t be moved to the kind of merciful action God invites us to. Let’s pray:

Father God, help me to renounce the barriers that prevent me from accepting my neighbors. May I never discriminate, whether they are young or old, male or female, black or white, atheist or religious, beggars or rich… help me to embrace everyone as you have embraced us.

Give me, Lord Jesus, a pure heart and a wise mind, that I may live according to your will. Save me from all false desires, from pride, greed, envy and anger, and let me accept joyfully every task you set before me.

Let me seek to serve the poor, the sad and those unable to work. Help me to discern honestly my own gifts that I may do the things of which I am capable, and happily and humbly leave the rest to others.

Above all, remind me constantly that I have nothing except what you give me, and can do nothing except what you enable me to do through God the Holy Spirit’s presence in me.

My desire is to do Your will and to do it willingly and without question, even though my nature and tendency has often been to kick against the circumstances of my life and to try to steer my own course independently of You.

Nevertheless, I pray that by the leading and guidance of the Holy Spirit, I may be willing to present my entire life to You as an acceptable offering. Lord, I want to be changed into the person that You want me to be, and to leave behind the things of the flesh, to walk in newness of life, and in spirit and truth with Your Holy Spirit in the driving seat of my life.

In Jesus' name I pray, Amen.

Source for the prayer: https://prayer.knowing-jesus.com/Prayers-on-Surrender