Won’t you be my neighbor?

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10, Year C (July 10, 2022).

View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day: Proper 10C (Track 2)

Preached at Christ Episcopal Church, Jordan, New York

[Feature photo of Mister Rogers: KUHT, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons]

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Edited Transcript

I fought the medicine cabinet and the medicine cabinet won.

So, first of all, I did not do this in order to effectively illustrate the story of the good Samaritan. I have a black eye. I was visiting my father and a medicine cabinet door fell into my face. I'm fine but it was a little bit of a surprise. Nobody was seriously injured. This was about a week ago, so I will be better soon and I won't look like this forever. So, I just wanted to get that out of the way.

Now, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, oh God, our rock and our redeemer. I invite you to be seated.

I have been thinking about the late great Mister Rogers. Do you remember the opening song? Won't you be my, won't you be my, won't you be my neighbor? And it's kind of the opposite question from the one the lawyer asks today. The lawyer says, "Who is my neighbor?" Whereas, Mister Rogers is kind of inviting us to expand the definition of neighbor. We very much get the impression, and Luke tells us pretty directly, A) that the lawyer wants to test Jesus and B) he wants to, what does he say? He says, he wants to justify himself. And so he knows what the law is, but he would kind of like to narrow down the definition of this whole neighbor situation. He would like it maybe to mean people he already knows, maybe has a lot in common with, maybe people who he likes, and I can totally get that.

So Jesus, like he often does, Jesus hates to answer a question with an answer. So instead he does what he always does, which is, tell a story and then ask another question. The story he tells in response to this question, "Who is my neighbor?" Is a story we've all heard. We're all familiar with. We could probably all tell it by heart.

The story begins on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, which for the people listening to Jesus, they would've known what that meant. That road is about 17 miles long. It's very steep and narrow and it's full of good hiding places for bad guys. It was notorious, it was notorious, if you were on that road, you tried to get from point A to point B very quickly, because it was notorious for being a place where you could be set upon.

So a man traveling on that road, not unexpectedly is set upon by robbers, beat up, left for dead on the side of the road. Now what happens next with his fellow travelers... The Jericho Road is the kind of place where someone could totally be beat up and left for dead on the side of the road. But someone could also be pretending to be beat up and left for dead on the side of the road and as soon as you got close to them, they'd come and get you. Right? All they need is for you to slow down and make yourself vulnerable and you're caught.

The first two people who come down the road do the smart thing. They see someone lying on the side of the road, looking half dead and they cross the street and they hurry by. They're not going to be taken in. They're not going to be fooled. The last person... So it's interesting too, because people are used to hearing things in threes. You hear: person one, person two, they both did the same thing. Now, the third person everyone's waiting to say, "Oh, the third person, they're going to do something different." Right? And who's it going to be? Well, it is a Samaritan, who for Jesus' audience, are not neighbors. I mean, actually they are neighbors but they're not the kind of neighbors that we like. The lawyer asking this question was kind of hoping Jesus would not say Samaritans are our neighbors. So, it's a Samaritan.

This is a group close to the people of Israel. In fact, 10 centuries ago, they had been part of that larger tribe of the northern kingdom of Israel. But since then, between exiles and wars and intermarriage, had sort of developed their own ethnicity, developed their own ways of worshiping, so they were that kind of neighbor that really rubs us the wrong way, because they're kind of like us, but they're just different enough that they're doing everything wrong.

The people of Judea, and the people of Samaria, did not get along and about 125 years before Jesus is telling this story, that we've come to know as the Good Samaritan, which is kind of saying like the good Russian these days. The people of Samaria had actually been attacked by the people of Judea and their sanctuary had been attacked by the people of Judea. So, they were neighbors in the sense that they were actively at war and this would've been in memory of the people hearing Jesus' story.

So all that is to say, that when a Samaritan walks by the road and sees a Judean lying on the side of the road, and it's already the kind of place where you don't want to slow down, who do you think would want to stop? Do you think that Samaritan would want to stop to help that Judean on this dangerous road?

But he does something surprising. The gospel says, he draws near to him. So first of all, he goes near enough to put himself in danger and it's not just that because he doesn't kind of check and say, "Oh. You don't look good. I'll go on down the road and send the police." He gets off his own horse. He tends to the man right there and then on the side of the road. He uses his own supplies, his own oil, his own wine. He puts the man back on his horse. So now, not only has he been dumb enough to kind of stop by the side of the road and spend all this time, but now he is going to be slowly finishing his journey instead of quickly trotting along. Then he takes the injured man to a hotel. They spend the night there. The Samaritan kind of flashes his money around. He says, "I'm going to leave him here. When I come back, I'll bring even more money and I will pay you whatever I owe you."

I'm kind of hoping there's no robbers hanging around in the lobby because what would they be doing? They'd be waiting for this guy to come back. So, this man not only does the small thing, but he goes all out, in a display of total foolishness.

And Jesus says, "Which one of these was the neighbor to this man, the ones who did the smart thing or the one who goes all out in a display of foolish love?" And the lawyer says, "All right, I guess it was the third man." And Jesus says, "Go and do likewise."

Now, not long before he died, Dr. Martin Luther King preached a sermon on the Good Samaritan and he talked about the Jericho Road as not being just that one place in ancient times, but that here in our own nation, there are places just as dangerous. It might be easy to think about a certain neighborhood in the city that's "dangerous. "But we also, I think are coming to realize that for some people, our own village might feel like a Jericho Road because they would not feel that who they are is welcome in our village. The whole nation can be a place that feels unwelcoming and dangerous depending on who you are and whether the people there consider you to be a neighbor or not.

I think increasingly so. I'm thinking about the kind of foolish little displays of love like we do here in church, where even our own church maybe can start to feel like a Jericho Road. Again, I'm thinking of that congregation in Alabama, where the small act of welcoming people in and greeting someone who we didn't know, resulted in violence. The possibility of the Jericho Road is in so many places now.

And so I almost feel like identifying with the lawyer and kind of saying, "Okay, Jesus, can you kind of let me off the hook with this whole "reaching out in love in dangerous situations" thing?"

But thinking back to Dr. King's sermon, the point that Dr. King made is not just that Jesus calls one person to show mercy to another. That's not the goal. Dr. King invited us to think about, how do you think the Jericho Road got to be the way it was in the first place? Because it's a vicious cycle, right? One bad thing happens on the road. It starts to feel bad to slow down and take care of one another. All of a sudden, people are coming and going as fast as they can, kind of racing through the gauntlet, that leaves more space for more people to be predators and on and on until that place develops a reputation and the possibility of care is of increasingly cleared away.

So what the Samaritan did is not just about being that good person to another person, but it was an act of defying the vicious circle and going in the wrong direction, going against the current, because Jesus was trying to tell us that it's only in going against the current, and doing love, doing acts of love, it's only in going against the current, that we can hope to transform the Jericho Road. If one person does it, and then another person does it, maybe the Jericho Road would develop a reputation for being a place where people stop to help one another and maybe that could happen in our own neighborhood too.

Jesus says, "How do you know who is your neighbor?" Who is a neighbor? To be a neighbor is to act like one. And to create a neighborhood is to act like everyone is our neighbor and to stop and care. To be a neighbor is simply to act like one, even when it doesn't seem like the smartest thing to do.

Now Jesus... because I'm thinking Jesus always goes before us. It's not easy to go against the grain of the vicious cycle. It's not easy to show love, when danger is around. And Jesus was the first one to do it.

And the Rite One funeral service in this church, we say, we use those words of Job: "I know that my Redeemer lives and at the latter day, he shall stand upon the earth and I will see his face, who is my friend and not a stranger."

Jesus is a neighbor to us, not a stranger. So when we are called to stop and to care, in a world that would have us rush by, we're following that example. And we are responding, neighbor to neighbor, to Jesus, who is our friend, our neighbor. Who is a neighbor to us and no stranger. The one who shows mercy in an unmerciful world is a neighbor. We go and do likewise. Amen? Amen.