"Love neighbors":  some action required

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Somewhere in our spiritual journey we wonder what we should be doing to live an authentic Christian life.  We wonder if we actually and fully lived the life called “eternal life,” what we should be doing.  When I was very young, Christian faith meant to me a list of things that I shouldn’t be doing.  To me, in those days, the Christian life meant keeping my nose clean, avoiding wrong behavior.  Christian life was observing the “thou shalt nots.”  As I was coming of age, I listened to the preaching of my pastor.  He preached not so much “thou shalt not” as “you ought.”  Seen in this light, Christian faith was a life to be lived.  It was about doing the right things, not just avoiding wrong behavior.  The authentic Christian life, I began to understand, is about being engaged in the world in a positive way, doing the will of God.  And that brings us back to our original question:  What should we be doing if we want to be living eternal life?

            Well, let’s consult a religious expert.  Let’s ask a lawyer of Jesus’ time what he would consider the way to live eternal life.  All we have to do is listen in to his conversation with Jesus.  “Teacher,” we hear him say as he approaches the Lord, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  See?  That’s our very question.  We posed it a little differently, but it is the same question.  What should we be doing if we want to be living eternal life?  We cock our ears to hear Jesus’ answer.  What does he do?  He poses a question back to our religious expert.  “What does it say in your Bible?” Jesus asks.  You bring out your Bible and flip its pages until you reach Deuteronomy 6:4-5.  What do you find there?  “Hear, O Israel:  The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.  You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”  There is something missing, you figure.  Where is that passage?  Oh, right!  You turn to Leviticus 19:18b.  What does that say?  “. . . you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Nicely done!  Let’s see what our religious expert says.  “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.”  Hey!  That’s what you discovered yourself in the Bible.  So, what does Jesus say about this answer?  He says, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”  There it is!  To live eternal life, all we have to do is love God and neighbors and ourselves.  Not so hard, right?

            Not so fast!  The word for “love” used by our religious expert is powerful.  The word for love in today’s gospel reading is an active love.  Our gospel writer has the religious expert using the Greek word agapao.  This is an action word.  To obey the command to love neighbors, some action is required.  Agape, a related Greek word for love, means so much more than having a warm-fuzzy feeling for someone.  This kind of love requires rolling up your sleeves, girding up your loins, willing and working for the well-being of another.  This kind of love can be hard indeed.  This past week, some of us saw the powerful film, The Hiding Place.  It is the true story of Betsie and Corrie ten Boom of Holland.  Influenced by the powerful faith and active love of their father, the family began to hide Jews in their home to keep them safe from Nazi persecution.  The ten Booms had a good life in Holland.  If they would have just obeyed the Nazi’s laws, they could have ridden out the difficult time of the invasion until their eventual liberation.  But they didn’t.  They understood that loving neighbors involves caring for their well-being.  So they took in Jews.  Eventually, they were caught.  Corrie and Betsie were sent to a concentration camp at Ravensbruck.  Betsie died there.  Before the war was over, only Corrie would survive, released from Ravensbruck by a clerical error.  Only Corrie ten Boom would live to speak of the horrors of their life in the concentration camp.  They all could have ignored the needs of their neighbors and been safe.  But they all knew that love rolls up its sleeves and works for the well-being of the other.  When Jesus commands us to love neighbors, it requires some action.

            “Okay, I got that,” we hear our religious expert say to Jesus.  “But who exactly is my neighbor?”  Good!  Good question.  Our religious expert is a good lawyer.  So he asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”  Do you understand what our religious expert is doing for us?  He’s finding out who is in and who is out as a neighbor.  And that’s what we want to know.  It’s not so hard to understand that all of the members of our family of faith here are our neighbors.  It is not only our duty to love and serve one another, it is our pleasure.  We love one another as children love their parents, as siblings love one another, as parents love their children.  What’s more, the nice folks that make up this family of faith make it easy to love them.  We’re nice folks.  We love to eat together.  We’re getting ready to celebrate our church’s one hundred fifty-first anniversary with a little shindig after worship next Sunday.  We’ll tell stories.  We’ll laugh.  And we’ll love one another as neighbors.  But beyond our congregation, who is our neighbor?  Beyond Christian people, who is our neighbor?  Beyond fellow Texans, who is our neighbor?  Beyond fellow Americans, who is our neighbor?  The lawyer asks our question:  Where is the limit?  Who is in and who is beyond the definition of our neighbor?

            To answer that, Jesus tells a story.  You know it well.  A man was on a notoriously dangerous road.  The predictable happened.  The man was mugged and robbed and left half dead.  A Presbyterian pastor approached the scene.  He looked at his watch.  “If I stop and help this man, I’ll be late for church; I can’t be late to lead worship,” he thought.  “I’ve got to preach my sermon on compassion, so I can’t stop and help this man.”  And he went on.  Soon a Presbyterian Director of Christian Education came the same way.  He also saw the man who was robbed and beaten.  He checked his watch.  “Man, I’m running late,” he muttered to himself.  “If I stop to help this man, who’s going to open up the church and get things ready for Sunday school?  How are our adults and children going to be taught about loving neighbors if I stop and help the man and miss Sunday school altogether?  I can’t get sidetracked.”  And he went on.  Not long a layperson from another church came upon the man who was mugged.  He was a salesman who traveled that road a lot, and he was from that church where all the gay people go, not Presbyterian!  He came upon the beaten man, and you know what happened?  He didn’t even look at his PDA to check his schedule.  Instantly, this salesman had compassion.  He loved the victim.  He quickly got his first-aid kid out of his glove compartment, dressed the wounds as best he could, and then put the victim into the back seat of his car.  That made a bloody mess of the car seat.  The salesman took the victim to the nearest descent motel.  He presented his credit card to the woman at the front desk, and he checked the man in and spent the night taking care of him.  The next day, he told the desk clerk, “Whatever it takes to help this man recover, please be sure to do it.  Put it on my tab.  I come this way often on my rounds.  I’ll be back to look in on this man.  In the meantime, please see to it that he has whatever he needs.”

            So, who was the one who acted like a neighbor in that story?  Jesus puts that question to our religious expert.  He gives the same answer we give.  It is obvious.  It was the man who put love into action.  It was the salesman who stopped to help the beaten man.  He’s the one who showed compassion.  There’s the neighbor.  The one who put love into action.  To that, Jesus says, “Right you are!”

            Hey!  Wait a minute!  What did Jesus just do?  He pulled a switch on us!  Our question was:  Who is in and who is beyond the definition of our neighbor?  We wanted to know the limits of our obligation.  And what did Jesus do?  He asked which one in his story acted like a neighbor!  He asked which one in the story went into action as a neighbor would!  Jesus switched the whole question around, making the neighbor the subject rather than the object.  Richard C. Halverson had it right when he put the matter this way:  “The question is not ‘Who is my neighbor?’ but ‘Am I a neighbor?’”  To profess that we are neighbors, some action is required.  How do we act like a neighbor?  We take compassionate action.  We learn of hungry people in Lancaster, so we give food and money to the Lancaster Outreach Center.  By the way, their need is critical today.  We learn of people who have been forced out of New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina, so we provide them with furniture and clothing and visits to give them a higher quality of life while they recover.  We learn of children in some distant land who need the most basic things, so we fill boxes with toothbrushes and clothing and other items at Christmastime, putting our love into action.  We learn of hunger and disasters around the world, so we provide hope through the One Great Hour of Sharing offering.  We learn of neighbors in Lancaster who have been flooded out of their homes, and we help provide the resources they need, including our own time to serve them directly.  Those are the moments when we have acted like a neighbor to one in need.  Those are the moments when we put love into action.  Those are the moments when we acted as loving neighbors.