A Fourth Church Sermon by Rocky Supinger

Sunday, July 14, 2019 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 25:1–10
Luke 10:25–37

Faith necessarily involves not only love of God but love of neighbor and cannot really exist without it.

Paul D. Molnar

My family and I have been blessed with really good neighbors the last two places we’ve lived. In California we lived next door to Rick and Barbara, a couple with grown children of their own who were there the day we brought Laura home from the delivery ward. For eight years we saw them practically every day. When Barbara’s mother died we were at the funeral, and when Laura graduated from preschool, Rick and Barbara were in the front row. They were those neighbors who almost felt like family.

And now in Chicago we have the very best neighbors in our building and on our block you could ever hope for. This time of year we spend hours on the sidewalk out front talking and laughing with our neighbors while our kids run up and down the street. It’s pretty great.

“Who is my neighbor?” has been a pretty simple question for us. Our neighbors are the people who live near us. That’s the literal sense of the word neighbor: one who lives near.

But this expert in the Jewish Law who is interrogating Jesus in the story we just heard knows that who your neighbor is has to do with more than where you live. Your “neighbor” is actually in the Ten Commandments. Twice. Once in the command to not bear false witness against your neighbor and then again in the prohibition against coveting your neighbor’s stuff.

You’ve probably heard this quote: “Bread for myself is a material question, but bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.” So who is that?

This legal expert is really shooting straight, but he is onto something: who is and is not my neighbor is an important distinction. Especially in the situation the legal expert and Jesus are living in. You see, after centuries of conquest and exile, return, rebuilding, and then more conquest, the Jews of Jesus’ day were an occupied people. They lived under the thumb of the Roman Empire.

So are their Roman occupiers their neighbors? Or is their neighbor only their fellow Judean?

The early church grapples with this question too. “Love your neighbor as yourself” runs all the way through the New Testament. You might say that “Who is my neighbor?” is the most important question the early church faced. It mostly is concerned with how the first Christians, who were all Jewish, related to the Gentiles whom they perceived to be grasped by the Spirit with the same faith as they.

The letter to the Galatians said simply “The whole law is summed up in a single commandment: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The church is still wrestling with that question. From the first days of the church all the way to the present moment we have been guided by that command, and so we have also been dogged by the lawyer’s question: who is my neighbor?

The guy asking the question has already tipped his hand. He’s quoting the Bible!

“You shall love . . . your neighbor as yourself” comes from the Old Testament book of Leviticus, chapter 19, a catalog of laws for the Israelites as they prepare to enter the Promised Land. Here is the full citation from which the lawyer is quoting:

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

My neighbor is my kin, my people. That’s good. Everybody needs people. We need people. The need for kin and community is part of our makeup; the creation story says that God saw that it wasn’t good for the human to be alone. And from that point on the biblical story becomes a story of God’s people.

It’s one of the things that brings us together at church—our need to be part of a people, or as we more commonly say, a community.

Lots of people aren’t finding community today. Contemporary life is for many badly isolated, socially, and that goes for young people just as much as it does for their grandparents, and the technologies we’re all using to stay in constant contact with one another don’t seem to be helping; they may actually be making it worse.

Maybe you’ve felt some of that isolation. I certainly have.

So here’s one possible answer to the scribes little self-justifying question “Who is my neighbor?” My people. And that’s important. We all need a people.

Well, the good news is that we have them. The good news, the gospel, is that we are a people, because God has made us a people through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We have been made part of the community of God’s people through our baptism. Can I get an amen?

We’re going to baptize some babies in the 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. services this morning, and I want you to listen again to the promises we recite at that font.

In baptism God claims us and seals us to show that we belong to God. God frees us from sin and death, uniting us with Christ in his death and resurrection. By water and the Holy Spirit, we are made members of the church, the body of Christ, and joined to Christ’s ministry of love, peace, and justice.

After the baptism we introduce those baptized to the congregation as “the newest members of the household of God.”

Do you hear all of the community talk in those words? Claims, seals, belong, uniting, members, joined: God has made us into a community—women, men, and children—from those mere months of age to those approaching 100.

If you’re here today and you feel like you don’t have any neighbors or you don’t have a people, then I’m telling you that you do. Look around. These are your neighbors. This is your community. It’s far from perfect, and we have a lot to learn about how to love one another as ourselves across differences of race and ethnicity, age and class, gender and sexual orientation.

But the good news of our baptism is that God has made us—and is continuing to make us—into a people that loves one another and bears one another’s burdens. That good news will permit us to grow and learn together. It does not depend on us. Grace makes us into this people.

But what if my neighbor actually lives outside my community?

There’s another answer available to Jesus that the legal expert could be anticipating. A little bit further on in that passage of Leviticus that says, “Love your neighbor as yourself” we find this:

When immigrants live in your land with you, you must not cheat them. Any immigrant who lives with you must be treated as if they were one of your citizens. You must love them as yourself, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.

Love your neighbor as yourself and love any immigrant as yourself?

It’s a poignant time to hear that command, isn’t it? America in 2019 is not ancient Israel; we are a liberal democracy, a modern nation state, not a theocracy. But much of our national story (as well as contemporary political discourse) is shot through with religious—specifically biblical—language.

It has been very hard to not hear that language these past several months as I have been reading about immigrants to this country, mostly asylum seekers and many of them families with small children, being detained in frightening conditions: overcrowded, dirty, with children and infants separated from their parents. We have seen them forced to await court dates in Mexico, often afraid to go outside for weeks, even months (Kirk Semple, “Migrants in Mexico Face Kidnappings and Violence While Awaiting Immigration Hearings in U.S.,” New York Times, 12 July 2019).

And this weekend we are reading about planned raids in Chicago and around the country to detain and deport undocumented immigrants by the thousands (Elvia Malagon and Stacy St. Clair, “What Could Happen If ICE Raids Come to Your Neighborhood?” Chicago Tribune, 12 July 2019).

“You must love them as yourself.” OK, so this morning we here are taking a special offering to support the work of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and the organizations it is partnering with to help migrant families at the border. I urge you to give to that offering.

There is more, though. Thousands of people crammed into Daly Plaza yesterday morning and chanted “Immigrants are welcome here!” And a coalition called “Protected by Faith” spent Friday afternoon “encouraging people to spend time and money in immigrant neighborhoods including Pilsen, Little Village, Back of the Yards for eight days starting [yesterday]. . . . Other neighborhoods leaders urge people to visit are Albany Park, Gage Park, Chicago Lawn, Belmont Cragin, and Hermosa” (Mauricio Pena, “Fight ICE Deportation Sweeps Starting Sunday by Shopping in Immigrant Neighborhoods, Activists Say: ‘We Need All Hands on Deck,’” Block Club Chicago, 12 July 2019).

“And who is my neighbor?”

“You must love immigrants as yourself” sits right next to “You must love your neighbor as yourself” in scripture. The lawyer questioning Jesus knows that. He knows Jesus knows it.

So he must be more than a little surprised when Jesus doesn’t answer his gotcha question with another legal quote. Jesus doesn’t render a scholarly opinion. Instead he answers with the only thing powerful enough for a question as important as “Who is my neighbor?”: a story.

A story about a Samaritan. A Samaritan! Plot twist! Cue the record scratch sound effect.

Because if you’re listening to Jesus spin out this parable and you hear, “a priest . . . a Levite . . . and a . . .” the next thing you expect to hear is “Israelite.” It’s the setup everyone is used to; the Israelite enters as the hero. The Israelite is you. The action of the Israelite will render the moral of the tale.

Only you don’t get you. Jesus doesn’t give us an Israelite hero but a Samaritan one. And a Samaritan is the enemy of every decent Israelite. Nobody in Jesus’ audience thinks they have any kind of neighborly attachment to Samaritans. The enmity between the two groups goes back centuries.

It also goes back just a couple of pages. Right after Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem, he passes through a Samaritan village and is not received, because the villagers know he’s headed for Jerusalem; he isn’t one of them. Jesus’ disciples are outraged and even propose calling down fire from heaven on the village!

Nobody in Jesus’ audience—and I mean nobody—would say that a Samaritan was their neighbor.

The legal expert asks, “Who is my neighbor?” He wants to know who are the people to whom I owe my neighborly commitment, and who are those to whom I don’t? Who are the people I must consider the objects of my neighborliness?

But in the kingdom of God the object has become the subject and the subject has become the object.

Jesus’ question to the stunned legal expert at the end of the story is not “Which of these three did the man who fell into the hands of robbers realize was his neighbor?” No, it’s “Which of these three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands or robbers?”

In other words, you don’t have a neighbor. You become a neighbor. And if you don’t know how to do that, then you can take an example from the Samaritan, the last person you or anyone like you would ever consider a neighbor. And then go and do likewise.

Because the Samaritan becomes a neighbor.

Where others merely look at a tragedy, the Samaritan sees humanity. Go and do likewise.

Where others pass by, the Samaritan comes near. Go and do likewise.

Where others hurry along to other commitments, the Samaritan is moved to pity. Go and do likewise.

The Samaritan comes toward the victimized and bandages their wounds. Go and do likewise.

The Samaritan moves the vulnerable to safety. Go and do likewise.

The Samaritan delays other priorities to take care of one who is in need. Go and do likewise.

The Samaritan gives his own money to protecting the weak. Go and do likewise.

The Samaritan pledges to come back again, to stay in it, to keep caring. Go and do likewise.

Go and do likewise.

Amen.