From the Pulpit: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Preaching on the well-known Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Rev. Spencer Brown says any of us could be the man who ends up in a ditch, helpless and vulnerable.

Which is why, he says, that Jesus’ teaching on loving your neighbor is so important in the world right now:

It’s true that any of us can be the person who is half-dead in the ditch, beaten and robbed; just as much as we could be the passerby not doing anything but going on the other side of the road; just as much as we could be the neighbor to the man who was hurt.

And it’s also true that there are those for whom traveling at all down the road of life is dangerous, whose parents have to have the talk before traveling, while undocumented traveling, while a person of color, traveling as a trans person, traveling as one who is not in the center of power, traveling down the road where anything could happen.

If we truly believe in Jesus Christ — in the liberating God that came to earth to sacrifice everything for the sake of all — if we truly believe the words of the gospel, the words printed in red in a third grade Bible speak truth to a hurting world. If we truly believe in the love of God, then we must believe that everyone is our neighbor, and we must believe that we are a neighbor to everyone.

Being a neighbor is not just about going to do and to act as though someone is a neighbor. It is to be a neighbor to others, to become proximate to those who are most unlike who we are. To create a world where love means to care for all of God’s people with dignity and mercy and grace, where love means to truly love and not shroud, words of judgment and hate in false teaching and condemnation where love isn’t hatred, shrouded in words, copied from some ancient tome.

Jesus ends his teaching by saying, “Go and do likewise.” And so we go to be neighbors, to show mercy, to save the world. One act of kindness at a time, one conversation at a at a time. In any way we can, in any place we can, by any means we can because to follow Christ is to follow love.

And it’s up to us to keep ourselves and every beloved child of God and the knowledge that there is nothing, not a single thing that can separate any part of creation from the love that we know in Christ Jesus.