Who is My Neighbor?
Luke 10:25-37

Rev. Joyce Tompkins
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
July 11, 2010

There is no short path in the Bible. That’s one of the proverbs by which I try to live. It is a Christian paraphrase of a favorite saying of my good friend Helen, who is a Rabbi and my Hebrew teacher: “There is no short path in the Torah,” Helen says to me, when I am struggling with a passage. To listen to some of our fellow Christians, you might think the Christian Bible is an easy answer book. Just flip it open, read a sentence or two, and receive instant guidance to life’s most difficult question. Sorry. No way. It’s a lifelong journey of study and prayer and meditation. Even the most central questions, the ones Jesus seems to answer directly, turn out to be more like peeling the proverbial onion.

“Who is my neighbor?” This is the question posed to Jesus in today’s gospel reading from Luke. He answers, as he loves to do, with a story. The Good Samaritan is one of the best-loved and best-known stories in the gospels, and it seems at first to give an easy answer to the lawyer’s question: “Who is my neighbor?” If that’s the case, why does the question keep coming up, age after age, even for the most prayerful and pious Christians? And why is it that, while I have preached on this passage a dozen times, I continually find new layers of meaning and challenge in its simple narrative? There is no short road, indeed.

“Who is my neighbor?”At various times in my own life I have thought I had an answer to this central Christian question. As a matter of fact, I had a draft of a sermon on this very question all written out on Thursday, when my husband Doug and I left for Richmond, Virginia, in a U-haul truck packed with my son Jonnie’s belongings. It was a perfectly fine sermon.  And yet, there I was yesterday afternoon, after our return, re-writing the whole thing. Maybe it was the sweltering heat while we were lugging furniture and boxes of books. Or it might have been due to my vulnerable emotional state, since my second son was now moving away from home to start a new job and a new life in this strange new city. Then again, it might have been the Holy Spirit. I found myself re-visiting the question, “Who is my neighbor?” during those twenty-four hours in Richmond. I found a new meaning in Jesus’ timeless story of the Good Samaritan.

You see, for the first time in a while, I was the needy one. So often when we think about the Good Samaritan story we focus on the role of the helpers. As affluent suburban Christians, I think we carry a burden of guilt that we are not doing enough, sharing enough, reaching out enough beyond our comfort zones to the needy around us. I don’t mean to say that isn’t true. We DO need to do more, and I applaud you, my friends at Swarthmore Pres, because I know you push yourselves constantly here in Swarthmore, in Chester, in the campus ministry, in Nicaragua, and further afield to give more of yourselves. But I feel compelled to move beyond the traditional interpretation of this story, which sets up a divide between the helper and the victim. Of course we are called to be helpers, and to give of our time and treasure. But I believe that too often we forget that we, too, are the needy ones. We, too crave the love of God manifest in human touch. We, too, in our own perhaps more secret ways, are in need of a good neighbor.

What happened to me in Richmond? Nothing that was really that extraordinary. Only a constant barrage of neighborliness which surprised and moved me. There was the employee of the real estate company who stayed for 45 minutes past closing time so that we could sign the lease when a traffic jam made us hours late for our appointment. There was the truck driver who waved me into line in front of him at the toll booth, when I rolled down my window and asked for his help. There was the woman at the apartment building who moved her car blocks away so that we could park in the space right in front of the building to unload. There was the trash man who stopped loading his truck to help me haul the empty cardboard out to the dumpster, then offered me a cold bottle of water from his cooler. There were the countless people on the sidewalk, in the market, on the road, in the lobby who held doors, smiled, carried things for me, waved me in ahead of them in busy traffic. And finally, as I hugged Jonnie good bye on the sidewalk, trying not to cry, there was a woman with a dachshund outside the building who said to me, “Don’t worry, honey, We’ll all keep an eye on him for you. Y’all have a safe drive home.”

On one level, this is a banal story. My so-called problems are the blessings of a suburban mother with a successful son who has a college degree and a good job with benefits. But on another level, this ordinary story makes an extraordinary point about that question, “Who is my neighbor?” In the Kingdom of God, there are no haves and have-nots. We are all in need of the love of God. We all have wounds. We may be blessed with material fortune, good health and a life of fulfillment and pleasure, but we are just as much in need of God’s forgiveness as are the poor, the homeless, the uneducated whom we seek to help. If anything, we are at times in danger of forgetting our need for God, because our riches cushion us from that reality. While we strive to model ourselves on the Good Samaritan, we should not forget that we are, every one of us, also, at times, the wounded man lying by the road. As others reach out to help us, we are humbled by our common humanity. And it is in that humility, that we learn to turn our pity and charity into true Christian compassion, a compassion that acknowledges our common reliance upon God.

Jesus’ commandment that we love our neighbor is the friendlier flip-side  of another of his commandments:  “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Is he saying that our enemy and our neighbor might be the same person? This goes against our most basic instincts, for we are tribal by nature. Without even thinking, we look for reasons to turn away from others – anything that makes them seem different or strange. Against this natural inclination, Jesus calls us, instead, to look for reasons to turn toward others, especially those who appear different in clothing, language, or culture. Because it is most often those who appear different who are also the outcast and the needy. And it is with these different ones that Jesus spent most of his time, calling us to do the same, calling them not enemies, not strangers, but neighbors and friends.

As a Christian, I must suspect anyone deemed my enemy of actually being my secret neighbor. How’s that for turning the tables! Be on the lookout for a secret neighbor! The woman with the burqa, the man on the airplane reading the Qur’an,   the migrant laborer on the street corner, the stranger with a thick accent knocking at my front door – these are all my neighbors as much as Keith Reeves, who lives in the other half of my house. Secret neighbors. Jesus says so. It must be true. It certainly seemed to be the prevailing attitude in Richmond last Friday. No one asked for my credentials or balked at my strange New Jersey accent. They assumed I was their neighbor. And so, it became true.

Of course, this sounds very nice, but we know that in truth it is not an easy lesson. Our human world is built upon competition. Our culture thrives upon the belief that there is not enough for everyone and we must strive to get our share at the others’ expense. We invest enormous resources in this competition: in schools, in sports, in business, in the markers of our lifestyles, in our an military. For those who come out on top, life can seem sweet. But it comes at enormous cost, and not only for those left behind. Even more for those of us who are deemed successful. In this model of winners and losers, enemies and friends, our souls are often lost in the games along the way, and sport for pleasure becomes sport for blood. We may forget that we are called to help others. Worse, we may deem ourselves too strong, too self-sufficient, too proud to ever be in need of help ourselves.

There is a wonderful story told by Fred Rogers, the famous Mr. Rogers from the TV show “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.”  He also happened to be a Presbyterian minister, and a member of our summer congregation when we lived on Nantucket Island. The Fred Rogers of real life was exactly the same as the Mr. Rogers on TV – a humble, skinny man with a somewhat goofy-looking grin who wore cardigan sweaters and canvas sneakers. He came to see me in the hospital on Nantucket when Peter was born, and he brought all three of my boys t-shirts that said “Welcome to the Neighborhood.” In a sermon Mr. Rogers told this story:

“A few years ago in the Seattle Special Olympics there were nine contestants for the 100-yard dash, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. They all assembled at the starting line. As they took off at the sound of the gun, one little boy stumbled and fell, hurt his knee and began to cry. The other eight children heard the boy crying. They slowed down, turned around, saw the boy and ran back to him – every one of them ran back to him. One little girl with Down’s syndrome kissed the boy and said, ‘This will make it better.’ The boy got up, and he and the rest of the runners linked arms and joyfully walked to the finish line. They all finished the race at the same time. When they did, everyone in the stadium stood up and clapped, whistled, and cheered for a long, long time.”

Who is my neighbor? Why, everyone, of course. It is easy to look for enemies, and to imagine them lurking in our midst. It is human nature to vie with one another for the prize and for a bigger piece of the luscious American pie. But Jesus calls us beyond our basic nature, to see in ourselves and in one another, the image of the Creator God. He calls us to the more difficult task: to look not for enemies, but friends. And so, may we learn to look anew at each stranger, each immigrant, and all of those little ones who have fallen behind in our great race to the top. May we see in each of them a neighbor. May we be humble enough to realize our own deep need for God, and to receive the ministries of those who reach out to us in our own woundedness.  May we be a people who link arms and cross the finish line together, while the whole world of neighbors claps and whistles and cheers for a long, long time.

Amen.