Scripture: Luke 10:25-37; Luke 10:21; Luke 10:38-42 Series: 2020
Concluding sermon in the ‘Mapping the Future’ series, preached during the COVID-19 pandemic on the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Pruitt argues Jesus turns ‘neighbor’ from a noun (who is near me) into a verb (whom will I prove neighbor to). He gives the Samaritan, priest, and Levite their real biblical context, treating the priest and Levite sympathetically as rational people protecting their livelihoods, and confesses he is often more like them. Drawing on Dunbar’s Number and childlike playground openness, he challenges the impulse to keep our circle small. Bridging to Mary and Martha, he frames neighbor-love as both contemplation and action, and urges the church to prepare their lives in advance so they can afford to be interrupted to show mercy.
Illustrations: mister-rogers-neighborhood, cup-of-sugar-borrowing, neighborhood-pickup-games, family-move-during-pandemic, brethren-baptism-still-vs-moving-water, samaritans-purse-nonprofit, seinfeld-finale-good-samaritan-law, dunbars-number, children-playing-on-playground, mary-and-martha, sports-preparation-blown-call, helping-hands-ministry, upper-room-resources
Love Neighbor
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “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. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” Luke 10:25-37
Who is my neighbor? That is a question that is asked to Jesus point blank, it is a question it is important for us to ask a lot, and it is a challenging question in this season. My family and I have moved and it is hard to meet the neighbors. It is hard to knock on doors and say, “Hi, how are you?” since you don’t know the dynamics about how people are going to respond in that situation. I have been able to meet a number of you in the Bee Creek community, but I wasn’t able to meet all of you. We weren’t able to have a big blowout reception after our first Sunday. It was a quick in and out. And it has been nice seeing people at Evensong on Sunday Nights, and it has been really nice in the shade with the breeze from the lake coming in, and greeting people and saying, “Hi” from a distance, and making those connections which are hard online, but it is not sufficient. Who is my neighbor? We use ‘neighbor’ in a lot of different ways. We have this great, cultural impression of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and …”Could you be mine? Would you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?” That connection, for, at least, my generation growing up, was a major connection of what it meant to be a neighbor. We have the people next door to us. When I was still a kid, we would knock on the door and ask for a cup of sugar or two eggs if we were just close to our recipe. It seems like a crazy thing today, but it was a common enough occurrence of connecting as neighbors. In my neighborhood growing up, there were a number of boys my age all along the block and we would spontaneously all meet up. We never called each other, we would meet and play football and baseball and other games, and that was part of being in the neighborhood. Who is my neighbor? My brothers and sisters, we are finishing our series on Mapping the Future at Bee Creek. We started by looking at the map of our area in a new way, thinking about how we could make our own new map in this time. As well, what we can do in this season, how God is asking us to live a full life now, and not just put off everything until there is a vaccine or some unknown future, but to act faithfully in the present, to respond to needs in the present. And today we are talking about loving our neighbors in this new map. There is a spatial reality to a neighbor. A neighbor is someone close and that means you must be aware that we have bodies and that we live in space. A neighbor is not just an intellectual idea, it is a concrete reality. A neighbor is a person with us in this world. Our Scripture for today comes from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 10 starting in verse 25:
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
The parable of the good samaritan: it is a good story, but it has a few words that are sometimes tricky without the biblical context. What is a Samaritan? Sometimes we hear that Samaritans are oppressed or an othered people. The Samaritans were cousins to the Jews. They weren’t of a different race. They weren’t of a different ethnicity. They were basically like Protestants and Catholics in a way. The Jews, Jesus’s people, believed in the centrality of the Temple and the sacrifices of the temple, and the Samaritans believed that there were high places where God could also be worshipped. Needless to say, that most Jews lived near the Temple, and most Samaritans lived a good ways from the Temple. It is like a sect of brethren in Pennsylvania which split because one group said that you had to be baptized in moving water, and the other sect said that you could be baptized in still water. One group lived by a river, and the other group lived 10 miles from a river, so there are these contexts which matter and impact the lived lives of people. So Samaritans weren’t like randomly other people or radically different. They were seen as unclean because they did not participate in the sacrifices of the Temple. The second terms that come up are the priests and the Levites. And the priests and the Levites were two different groups that participated in the cult of the Temple directly. The priests had the official job in the Temple of making sacrifices and the Levites were of the family who were connected to the Temple. They both had specific jobs related to the Temple. As well, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is a steep road, a kind of winding road down hill but it is not too far away, so it could be made in a day’s journey and there could be people who walked that road regularly. I think, as well, something super important about the parable of the good samaritan is that the Levite and the priest probably had somewhere to go. And they had a reason to not touch the person who was wounded and beaten on the side of the road. They had plans. They had expectations. They had people who counted on them. If they stopped, if a priest stopped and went down and touched a person wounded and touched their blood, that priest would become unclean, so then he could not do his job. He could not go to the Temple and make his sacrifices. He would have to go through a purification period in order to make himself clean again. He would basically have to go through his own quarantine. So he knew that if he touched that person, it would deeply impact his life. And it is a similar thing for the Levite. If he stopped and helped that person on the side of the road who was wounded and bloody and in need, it would impact his life to a great degree because of his employment. And I think that that is so important, because of it is told by saying, “Look at that uppity priest! Look at that uppity Levite. They could stop, but they are too full of themselves.” When there is a way to read it and understand that the priest and the Levite are quite rational in saying that. They are quite rational in saying that. You can easily imagine a situation where the Levite and the priest see a man wounded on the side of the road, “Gosh, I wish I could stop and help, but I can’t. My family is counting on me. My wife and children are counting on me to do this. If I don’t do this, I might lose me job.” I think it is so important, because often enough, we present good samaritans, like, “Wouldn’t be nice if we could all be good samaritans? There is a big non-profit called Samaritan’s Purse. Some people have good samaritan laws. The last episode of the TV show, Seinfeld, hinged on a good samaritan law in a small town, that you can’t just sit around and watch while someone is being hurt. Lifting up this good samaritan, this person who was walking by and saw the wounded man on the side of the road and stopped and radically changed what he was doing in order to care for this person. But most of the time, I will confess first, most of the time I am more like one of the priests and the Levites, and not because I work in a church and not because I’m a preacher. But because whenever I think about helping the person on the side of the road or the person in need, some of the first thoughts I have are “how is this going to impact my life? How is this going to impact my family? In a pros and cons kind of way, how am I going to do this? And Jesus says this parable rather swiftly. He is not being really wordy in this. Jesus gets right to the point. And it comes from this question of the neighbor. Who is my neighbor? And so we have this category of neighbor. This category that is filled for most of us by who is next to us. Who are the people next to us? Who are the houses next to us? Who are the people we see in church? Who are the people we see on the golf course? Who are the people we interact with? Oftentimes neighbor, for many people today, falls in what the anthropologist Robin Dunbar called, Dunbar’s Number, is about 150. It was published in the mid-90s, and it became popular in Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point,peopleas this is the number of people that any one person can really know. And I think that Dunbar, in his first article on this, he talks about the Dunbar number by imagining all of the people whom you would be willing to have dinner without of the blue. Some of us probably have smaller Dunbar Numbers, some of us have a little larger ones, I mean 150 is a good chunk of people. And Dunbar’s argument has to do with our prefrontal cortex and the size of our brain, and other scholars have responded back and forth about whether it should be higher or lower or if we should even think about this. But when we think about neighbor, it can often who are the people I am willing to talk to? Who are the people whom I can have over to my house for dinner? Who are the people who I am going to catch up with? Who are the people whose names I don’t forget after a year? Jesus, radically this category, this noun “neighbor” to a verb “to neighbor someone.” This is often not touched: Jesus responds to the question, “who is my neighbor? He responds to it with a question himself: Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The one who showed mercy. For Jesus, being a neighbor is not about how other people live but how we live our lives. It is not about what other people are doing. It is not about whether someone brought us Chicken Spaghetti last year or if they water our lawn we are out of town or if they house sit our pets, it is not a translational thing in that kind of way. Being a neighbor is about what we are willing to do for other people in our life. And like Dunbar’s number, so often we want to keep that circle small. Earlier in the passage from Luke 10, he says, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was your gracious will.” That you hid them from the wise and revealed them to children. And this is really important. It is not just a metaphor. If you are around kids, most kids that I have ever experienced, when you go to a playground, kids want to play together. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. But kids like playing together. When a bunch of kids meet at a playground in a non-pandemic time, it doesn’t take long for kids to click and play, play, play. And it doesn’t matter the color of their skin or where they live or what language they speak or what their parents job is, kids see each other and play together, offer time together, share together. The older we get, the more “wise” we get, the harder it is to see another person and see in them someone whose joy we can share. Someone whom we can play with. Whether that is watching a game, having a drink, having a round of golf. Usually, you have to go through a certain set of steps of protocol before we are willing to accept the other person as someone whom we are willing to “play” with. But to the child, no. A child sees another child and sees an opportunity to share joy. Now there are a lot of reasons for the wisdom of the world and suspicion about people we don’t know, but I think it is important to question: why is my circle so small like this? Why am I satisfied with my circle being small like this? For the church, we can expand not only the circle of the people participating in the ministries of the church, but also the people in our community. As an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church, I am appointed not specifically to the church, but to the mission field around the church. I am appointed to the community. And how we as the church, we as the people of Bee Creek United Methodist Church, we in our area can minister and serve and act neighborly and prove neighbor to the people around us. Including the people who may get in the way of what we wanted to do. We should be on guard to make sure that we are not acting like the priest or the Levite, not acting as if whatever is going on in our world is the most important thing in the world, and be ready to receive the Holy Spirit who may veer us off the course of our expectations. In this season, my brothers and sisters, we are all a little off kilter. Nobody’s routine is the exact same as it was a year ago. And in this time, maybe we can pray that the Holy Spirit will act afresh in us and that next time, we will be more open to receiving God’s presence in this time, to see our neighbors in a new way, but also to see our neighbors not just as instruments for our betterment but as ways that we can love God. Luke 10 finishes with the story of Mary and Martha. After Jesus talks to this lawyer and they have this nice, lawyerly conversation, he goes to the home of Mary and Martha. And this brief passage is very famous in the history of the church, but also famous in the way, are you a Mary or a Martha? Martha, Martha, Martha. Are you the one behind the scenes, in the kitchen, or are you the one out at Jesus’s feet. And usually, growing up for me, Martha was seen as slightly negative, whereas Mary was seen as positive, but the context of Jesus’s words do not hold one sister as negative and one sister as positive. They are both good, but one is better. Being at the feet of Jesus is the greater share. In the early church, it was often seen as the difference between contemplation and action. And Mary as the figure or type of contemplation and Martha as the figure of action and you need contemplation and action together. You can’t contemplate our Lord if you don’t have food to eat, if someone is not cooking that food. So they both work together. And I think that it is so wonderful that this passage follows the good Samaritan. I think Mary and Martha is another to answer the question: how are we to be neighbors to people: by contemplation and by action. That is how we start right now. Contemplation as another type of prayer. We spend time with Jesus. We take the time with Jesus. Starting with five minutes, with just a little bit of extra prayer in our day. That is not the beginning of our day or the end of our day or a meal to decide, I am going to spend this time with God. The Upper Room has a number of resources online, especially for the pandemic, that are really great. As well, just taking the time to breathe. To take a bible verse to hold on to. And in that contemplation, we are also preparing for the actions, for the time behind the scenes and neighbor love. And part of that in proving ourselves neighbor to others is preparing our lives so that they won’t be so radically disrupted if we stop and care for someone. That we are ready for that. And this is one of those things that is missing for the Levite and the priest. The problem was what they didn’t do before the trip. They weren’t ready to stop and love the person on the side of the road. It would interrupt what they were doing. It is kind of like every sports ad that talks about the preparation for the big game and not the big game itself. Or whenever a referee blows a call at the end of the game, and some people respond, “You know, you shouldn’t put yourself in to a position to need that call where you need that call to win. And that is what we need to think about as individual christians, as people, but also as a church: how can we prepare to love our neighbors? How can we talk to our spouses and partners and children and neighbors about preparing our lives to be disrupted and plan for that? How can we participate in ministries that are already happening like Helping Hands, that is this wonderful ministry that members of the church that the church still supports is doing great things. How can we prepare ourselves for that? Prayer and action. Realizing that God is going to put people in our life who are going to be in need. God will offer the opportunity to love our neighbor: can we be ready for that? Can we be ready to show mercy? My brothers and sisters, I pray for you all in this season that God is mapping our future as we speak. We can participate in that future. We can either choose to live the old maps of our old habits, of the old things we did, or we can receive the opportunity that God is giving us this day and this season. The opportunity that God is giving us as a church, to see our area in a new way, we can receive it as parents, as kids, as grandparents: God is offering us a new opportunity in this time. A new opportunity to plant gardens, to live our best life now, a new opportunity to love our neighbors, a new opportunity to show mercy, a new opportunity to expand our circle: may we accept it together. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.