14 July 2013

“Being neighborly”
Luke 10:25-37
OT 15C
14 July 2013


For today’s Gospel, we have a text … a parable of Jesus’ we commonly call “The Good Samaritan” … which is well-known to many of us. Just the words “Good Samaritan” describe a very nice person, someone who helps others, no matter if they believe in Jesus or not.
As for this story … we’ve heard it before, either in the way it was read today, or in other ways, in other stories, told about different people but the same basic thread. Someone is robbed and beat up … the supposed holy and righteous men of the time pass by and don’t offer to help … but a foreigner, an outcast in the land, is the one who actually stops to help the unfortunate traveler; through his actions, he saves the man’s life.
It’s the golden rule in action, we say; treat others as you would like to be treated.
But if we sum up this story in one sentence, and move on, we lose so much of the meaning Jesus has in it … for the pushy lawyer who asks him the question, “Who is my neighbor?” … and for us, as well.
For we also need a good lesson, a sure word, in what Being Neighborly is all about.
It all begins with a question, a question asked of Jesus by a lawyer. The lawyer actually asks Jesus two questions … the one, “Who is my neighbor?” is the one we likely remember better here, because it’s the one Jesus uses to set up his story … but the lawyer’s real motivation …what he is really after … is all wrapped up in his first question, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Now, there’s a whole sermon here on how Jesus doesn’t answer the lawyer. Because the lawyer, in how he asks his question, unknowingly answers it as well. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Well – duh - nothing – because for us to inherit something, anything, someone has to die who has made us a promise. Aha. Eternal life is all gift to us because of Jesus’ promises.
But that’s not where Jesus is going here and so that’s not where we’ll go either. Jesus sticks with the Law – the rules for life in this world – so we should be clued in by that, that what follows will be about life in this world – not making ourselves better before God, not inheriting eternal life.
But it’s still important stuff … for the lawyer as well as for us.
Jesus knows that this lawyer is no dummy … so Jesus turns the question back on him. “What is written in the law?” Of course, the lawyer knows this, from the Old Testament, and answers perfectly … he quotes the Shema, the defining words of what it means to be one of God’s chosen people … Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord alone, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and strength … and then, he makes the even better move of linking love of God with love of neighbor, which all the good rabbis have done through the centuries … And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The golden rule. The central legal statements of Judaism. And Jesus congratulates him for his “book knowledge’: “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.
But then … but then … the lawyer makes what he thinks is the smart legal move. “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” This isn’t a dumb question on the part of the lawyer. For the debate of that age was about who and what actually constituted one’s neighbor, and what being a neighbor was all about, the exact legal definition … so you could do well and right and just enough … to justify yourself, to make sure that you’d done the minimum of what the law required of you.
So let’s look at the parable Jesus tells the lawyer, to answer this question. “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.” And already a trap is set for the lawyer. For this man in the parable is, by the definition of the religious law of the time, sin waiting to happen. He’d been beaten, and very badly hurt; he was maybe even near death. And there were strict laws about having contact with human blood and dead bodies. They made one unclean; anyone touching blood or a dead body would have to be ritually purified before they came back into the fellowship of other believers.
Now along came the priest and the Levite … the two highest religious orders in the religion of the Israelites … and isn’t Jesus just a little hard on them? After all, they’re only obeying the Law. For if they were to have contact with this unfortunate person, not even picking him up, but merely going over and checking on him, they’d become unclean. They couldn’t do their jobs, leading worship in the Temple for the assembly of Israel. They would have to go through a long purification process before they would be allowed to do their jobs again. And so they obeyed the letter of the Law … they kept themselves clean … and they probably went back to Jerusalem to do their tasks.
And the lawyer, being the skilled interpreter of the Law he most certainly was, would surely have understood this.
But the story continues …. “A Samaritan while traveling came near him ….” Whoa, wait just a minute! Now Jesus introduces a totally different element here. And we’re sent back in Luke’s gospel, to a text we had just a couple of weeks ago, when Jesus passed through the village of the Samaritans, and they wouldn’t receive him, because he was going to Jerusalem. And why wouldn’t they receive him? Because the Samaritans felt that only they had the proper Temple in which to worship God, and that the Jerusalem-bound Jesus and his followers were sorely mistaken if they thought they were going to the place- Jerusalem - where God was worshipped properly. So because of this, Samaritans didn’t have much to do with Jews, and Jews looked upon Samaritans with contempt, and considered contact with them to be, if not illegal, at least unclean.
So the real point of the story is that the Samaritan … the one who wasn’t supposed to help out, did. He aided the man, cleaned and bandaged his wounds, put him up at an inn, and took care of him. More than took care of him. He cared for the unfortunate traveler into making him well once more, making sure that the injured man would be able to recover fully and get back about his business once again.
And so Jesus puts the question to the lawyer. “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” Jesus asked. And the lawyer knows he’s been outwitted by Jesus. “The one who showed mercy, of course,” he said. And then, Jesus’ final words to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Now we, we know this story so well after the centuries of telling it, we surely shake our heads at hearing it again and go, “Duh! Well, of course. Who else is really the neighbor to that poor beaten soul but the Samaritan. It’s a great irony, and points out how following the letter of the Law isn’t always the same as following the Spirit of the Law … or, how the Great Commandment, the Golden Rule, should always take precedence over the other laws that might contradict it.” And so we might pass this story off as a nice little sermon on living, how we’re to treat others the way we’d like to be treated, and so on.
But to do that misses the whole point of what Jesus was trying to get the lawyer to hear.
For today, we still have a debate going on over who exactly is our neighbor. Oh sure, we hear the term enough … today, we’re trying to get back to that old concept of neighborhoods and knowing our neighbors … people returning to small towns for their friendliness … people in the bigger cities building new houses in “intentional neighborhoods” with picket fences and front porches, so they can see their neighbors and get to know them better and, hopefully, form better communities where people know one another and talk to them.
Oh yes, we hear a lot about that word neighbor today. But as far as how it relates to the word as Jesus uses it in this story of the Good Samaritan, we … our “intentional neighborhoods” and ideas of “neighborliness”… are all off base.
We are off base because the meaning of neighbor as Jesus intends it isn’t someone who lives next door or across the street from us that we wave “hi” to every day, or water their plants or feed their cat while they’re on vacation … and it doesn’t mean “friend” … even though these are fine things, things we ought to be about in our lives that help make the world a better place to live. No, being a neighbor as Jesus uses it here doesn’t mean a spatial relationship that’s centered around me … my house … my neighbors … or, even a friend, an emotional relationship, that still has a lot to do with me … my friends. It doesn’t imply how these people relate to me … but instead, how I relate to them.
It’s really the same debate of the age that Jesus and the lawyer were in. Listen again to his question. “Who is my neighbor?” What does it mean for me, me, which people do I need to relate to in this way and which ones can I just walk away from, that’s what the lawyer was asking. But to Jesus that wasn’t the question at all. For it’s not “who is my neighbor” as the lawyer asks the question, but “who is a neighbor to the man” as Jesus answers it.
To Jesus, to be a neighbor means having a relationship of love, care and concern with them. Being a neighbor is more than just living next door to a person, it’s more than the selective process of choosing a friend. Really, to Jesus, it’s not “being a neighbor” to someone at all. It’s “being neighborly” to people in general, all the time, everyone we meet in the world.
It’s seeing all people, everywhere, as children of God, created in the image of God just like us, deserving of the same respect and care with which we ourselves would like to be treated.
It means, as Luther uses the term in his Small Catechism, that the “neighbor” to which he constantly refers, as the one we’re obligated to treat with respect, dignity, and great worth, the one whose property we are always to protect, the one of whom we’re always to speak kindly, the one whom we are not to wrong in any way, is every single person in the world.
So what does that mean for us, here today? Well, if everyone is my neighbor, each one deserving of being treated just like the Samaritan treated the badly beaten man, then … “being neighborly” means every person here being in a relationship of faith lived out to someone else … a classmate in school who is sad because they don’t have any friends … a young person, who needs an adult presence, to listen to how complicated life is for them sometimes … a widow who recently lost her spouse of many years, wondering how she will manage … a young family, struggling with children and workload and debt, needing prayers and support and a hand with things every now and then.
“Being Neighborly” is no easy task. It isn’t the same as someone new moves in next door and we take them a pan of brownies. It isn’t the same as a selective, emotional, limited in number friend-type relationship.
“Being neighborly” is answering Jesus’ missional call to each of us to live the Christian life, to and for and with everyone.
And it’s a daunting task if we believe we have to do it all alone. For we are all like the lawyer in our reading for today … he is an archetype, a character who stands for all of us … for we too want the easy way out, the limited relationship, the quick and clean answer to “who is my neighbor?” … the self-justification that comes from knowing we’ve obeyed the law perfectly and can get on with our lives without getting messed up, entangled in someone else’s problems, someone else’s life. We want to stand right before God, alone, clean and neat and unencumbered.
But that’s not what it means to be neighborly. It’s being in Christian relationship within our community, our school, our church, our workplace, our world.
And none of us, not one of us, can be neighborly as Jesus calls us to be, all by ourselves. For Jesus’ call to be neighborly … to “do this, and live,” now, it’s overwhelming. Once we get started being neighborly, where does it end, where can we stop, where can we rest? It isn’t clean and neat and unencumbered at all, but instead incredibly messy. And we just can’t do it all alone.
And so there is One with us to help us, to guide us, to bring us through it all, to give us the strength for Being Neighborly when we don’t feel we can anymore, to give us strength and courage to take the daily risk of being neighborly in our own little corners of God’s world … in our church, our school or workplace, our community … to forgive us when we lose our temper, when we see the injustice in the world, when we get frustrated and want to just walk away … to strengthen us when we feel overwhelmed, to let us know we are not alone, as we dine at his table with other Neighbors and are formed into his Body in the world. With our Lord, the one who both sets the example of Being Neighborly as well as makes us into people who can Be Neighborly, we will do that which he calls us to do … to Love the Lord our God with all our heart, and soul, and strength, and mind … and Our Neighbor as ourselves.
Not because we have to “justify ourselves” like that lawyer thought he had to do … because, remember, we have an inheritance coming, already promised to us by Jesus in his death and resurrection. We do this because … Being Neighborly is just who we are as Jesus’ brothers and sisters.
So let us go … let us go and do that which our Lord calls us to do … to Be Neighborly, to give of ourselves in Christian relationship to and for our neighbor … young, old, white, black, wealthy, poor, Hispanic, cancer ridden, mourning … yes, those around us right now … but more, those around us, outside these walls.
Let us “go and do likewise.” Amen.