Sermon Tone Analysis

Who here has good neighbors?

I know Alan and Connie do.

Their neighbor, who doesn’t even attend this church, came out yesterday and helped clean up around the church.

I told him how nice it was that he would do this for us, and he responded, “When Alan needs help, I’m there.”

Now, that’s a good neighbor.

Better than State Farm, even.

We haven’t gotten to know all our neighbors.

For some reason, one of them seems to go out of her way to avoid us.

Maybe she’s heard about me?

But we have had the chance to get to know a couple of others.

One of them calls out to me — “Hey, neighbor!”

— whenever she comes outside and sees me working in our screen room.

And another one came into our house and made herself at home last year when workers were there repairing damage from a broken water heater.

It turns out that she has dementia, and she was pretty confused that day.

So Miss Lynn and I sat with her a bit in our living room, and I figured out how to get in touch with her husband at work.

And then I walked her back to her house and waited outside for him to get home so he could take care of her.

Neighbors can be a bit of a mixed bag.

We’ve had anonymous ones and terrible ones and a few good ones.

Frankly, the last one I remember being really good friends with was Donnie Whittington, who lived across the street from us when I was a boy in Portsmouth.

He and I hung out together all the time.

Ever since we moved away from there when I was 11, I’ve never found a neighbor whom I would say became a friend.

I’ve been friend-LY with some of them.

But the truth is that, for the most part, I’ve lived as most folks do in America these days.

We might say hello to the neighbors when we see them outside, and maybe we’ll even stop and chat at the mailbox for a few minutes once in a while.

Mostly, though, we all seem to live pretty much separate lives, moving in our own separate circles.

But the truth is that God calls us to something greater.

Remember when the lawyer tried to trap Jesus by asking Him which was the great commandment in the Law?

Remember how Jesus responded?

Perhaps you’ll recall that I have said these two commandments are really two sides of a coin.

The great and foremost commandment, as Jesus said, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.

And if you DO love God that way, then you’ll love the people He loves — and among those people is your neighbor.

Yes, even the one who reported you to the homeowner’s association for needing to power wash your driveway.

Now, for the last couple of weeks, as we have been working our way through this series I’ve called “The Church — Revealed,” we’ve been talking about the purpose of the church.

Maybe you’ll recall that a couple of weeks ago, I said the purpose of the church is to worship God.

That means to proclaim the greatness of God — to ascribe to God the worth that is His.

In worshiping God, we are declaring our love for Him.

And one of the best ways we can declare our love for God is by becoming more like His Son, Jesus, who perfectly represented the perfect character of His Father while He was here on earth.

That’s discipleship, and we said last week that it happens best within the context of the gathered church.

As we gather together, whether on Sundays or on Saturday clean-up days, we have the opportunity to help one another grow in our Christian faith, to become more and more like Jesus.

Discipleship IS worship.

Discipleship is part of how we love God, how we worship Him.

And if loving your neighbor as yourself is the flip side of the coin, then I would suggest to you that loving your neighbor is ALSO worshiping God.

In loving our neighbors as ourselves, we bring glory to God.

In loving our neighbors, we show that what’s important to God is also important to us.

And so, what I will argue today is that loving our neighbors well is another facet of the church’s one purpose — to worship God.

But what I want to point out right from the start is that this commandment wasn’t new to the time of Jesus.

And it’s not new to the Church Age, which began at Pentecost, when Peter preached his sermon and 3,000 souls were added to the new church.

From the beginning, this is what God desired of individuals and of communities.

In fact, when Jesus made that reply to the lawyer, He was quoting from the Old Testament Book of Leviticus, where God had said:

But the thing about this commandment is that it’s kind of broad.

What, exactly does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself?

Maybe it means something different to you than it does to me or to the person sitting next to you.

Especially because we interpret this word, “love” in so many different ways, “love your neighbor as yourself” could be a matter of interpretation.

Of course, God knew this about people.

He knew that we would look for whatever loopholes we thought we could find.

He knew that, in our sinful, self-involved nature, we would look for ways to elevate ourselves, and that as often as not our own elevation would be at the expense of our neighbors’ physical, emotional, and even spiritual well-being.

And then, even as we saw the wreckage of hurt that we’d left behind, we’d look up to God and say, right along with Cain, “What?

Am I my brother’s keeper?”

So, God gave the people of Israel — his chosen people who were supposed to represent His character in the world — an explanation of what it would look like to love their neighbors as themselves.

First, He did it in the 10 Commandments, half of which deal with our relationships with one another.

Then, He did it in the other 603 or so other commandments He gave them throughout the Torah, the first five books of what we know as the Old Testament.

A large percentage of those commandments deals with relationships between people.

And finally, He did it in the writings of the prophets, much of which proclaimed God’s coming judgment because of His people’s failure to love one another.

But there is a passage in the Book of Deuteronomy where this commandment — love your neighbor as yourself — is distilled into an illustration that cuts right to the heart of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.

You’ll find it in Deuteronomy, chapter 22.

Now this passage is part of a long list of what the NASB labels “Sundry Laws.”

It’s hard to connect them or to find a common theme.

So we’re just going to concentrate on the first four verses of this chapter.

Let’s stop there for a moment.

Your neighbor’s problem — and remember that Jesus defined “neighbor” in very broad terms — your neighbor’s problem is your problem.

That’s what God is saying here through Moses.

If you see your countryman’s ox or sheep wandering off, don’t just go on your merry way and pretend you didn’t notice it.

Don’t think to yourself that someone else will take care of it.

Even worse, don’t say to yourself, “Well, thank God that’s not MY sheep; good luck to old Joe down the road.

I hope he finds that sheep someday.”

No.

If you see that sheep or ox wandering, then YOU have a responsibility to get it back home.

Furthermore, if your neighbor’s not home to put it back in the barn or whatever, then YOU have a responsibility to take it back home with you and CARE for it until your neighbor can pick it up for himself.

Of course, most of us don’t have sheep or oxen, and most of us don’t have neighbors who have sheep or oxen.

So, we’re off the hook then, right?

Of course not!

God gave this specific example to illustrate a general principle.

We are ALL our brother’s keepers.

We are all responsible for helping when we see a neighbor in need.

So, individually, we might help the widow down the road by cutting her grass or putting out her trash.

And as a church, we might — as our Missions and Evangelism team did recently — help a prospective high school graduate in Suffolk pay off his student debts so he could receive his diploma.

As a church, we might send money to help with food distribution in Ukraine or to help care for the elderly in Haiti.

And we get a clue about this larger meaning in the next two verses.

Do you see that?

Just as we must help reunite a countryman — a neighbor — with his lost donkey, we must do likewise with anything that is lost.

And I would suggest that includes your neighbor’s dignity.

So, if your neighbor is in need somehow and you know it, you have a responsibility to help to whatever degree you can do so.

“You are not allowed to neglect them.”

That word that’s translated as “neglect” here can mean “hide yourself.”

And when I read the line this way — “You are not allowed to hide yourself” — I’m reminded of the parable of the good Samaritan.

Remember?

A man was walking on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and was attacked by robbers, who beat him and left him for dead.

A priest came by and then a Levite, and both of them, instead of helping the man, crossed over to the other side of the road.

They hid themselves from him.

They pretended they didn’t see the need that was right in front of them.