“And who is my neighbor?” Now there’s a question with worldwide implications 2100 years after the lawyer wanting to justify himself asked it. Indeed the question has a very personal meaning for me at the moment. My question actually isn’t who is, but who will be my neighbor? You see the house next door, where my former student and her husband, and with time their two sons, lived for the past fifteen years, stands empty. The moving van pulled away exactly one month ago today. John, who has been in the management track at Costco his whole career, was finally given his own store in Silverdale, Washington. So these wonderful neighbors have moved on to a new home, new schools, a new life since all of them until this transfer had lived their entire lives in the Eugene area. I was thrilled back in 2010 when I realized that a former student and her husband were the people who were buying what had been my mom’s home for the previous six years. As time went by I was able to imagine how thrilled Mom would have been as first one little boy and then another came home to live in what had been her final home on this earth. Now I and the rest of us in the cul de sac can only wait and see who will live there next. Neighbors.
But we all know Jesus wasn’t simply talking about the people next door, or down the street, not even the ones who may seem less than friendly. No Jesus’ usage, indeed the biblical usage, of neighbor refers to everyone, with the emphasis seeming to be on neighbor as stranger. I presume that’s because it comes naturally to be kind to those with whom we already have loving relationships. As the inimitable Frank Burns of Mash fame remarked at one point: “It’s nice to be nice to the nice,” to which Margaret replies, “Really, Frank. It’s nice to be nice to the nice!” But it is, or at least it’s easy. Jesus asks us to go farther, and with the parable in today’s Gospel he goes so far as to use a Samaritan, someone with whom faithful Jews would not normally have even associated, to illustrate just how broadly love thy neighbor should apply. Interestingly this particular parable is so widely known in the secular world that all fifty states and the District of Columbia have Good Samaritan laws. Ironically though, these laws provide legal protection for individuals who try to provide aid to someone in need, preventing the aid giver from being sued for inadvertently causing injury while offering assistance. How sad we have to protect ourselves from legal difficulties for daring to try to help in a crisis. Of course most of us never find ourselves in such a situation. No, our failure to show compassion for those we don’t know, and sometimes those we do, is due more to the invisible yet remarkably powerful barriers we construct between ourselves and others, be they groups or individuals. Getting past those barriers is hard, hard because it’s uncomfortable and let’s face it, because we’re scared.
We’re taught from an early age to fear people we don’t know. I remember well that “Stranger Danger” was one of the topics covered at Safety School decades ago when Zack participated in the program before he went to kindergarten. How sad that we need to teach our children not to talk to someone they don’t know unless someone they do know tells them it’s okay. Depending on where we are, the time of day, whether we’re alone, adults have learned to be cautious about dealing with strangers as well. I believe this sense of caution around those we don’t know can really complicate any desire we may have to take to heart the message of today’s Gospel. Add to this cultural hesitancy to be open with strangers a healthy dose of shyness, and you’ve got a pretty clear picture of what it’s been like to live in my skin basically my whole life.
However, learned behaviors can be unlearned. While there are certainly situations where caution is appropriate, there are many more situations where a perceived threat is due more to those imaginary barriers we’ve created in order to isolate ourselves in our cozy little clusters of “other people like me,” than to any real danger. One way we can know how meaningless those barriers are is how quickly they disappear in times of crisis. When flood waters are rising, a wildfire is approaching, when an area has been left in ruins by a tornado or hurricane, people don’t pause to ask about political or religious affiliations, citizenship status or much of anything. They simply help each other. Our common humanity, grounded in the love from which we were created, wins out over societal norms or any sort of perceived differences based simply on fear. Fear is such an insidious emotion. The opposite of love, fear is what Jesus worked his entire ministry to teach people to overcome. Fear not, be not afraid, he pleaded over and over again. And yet we’re living in a world today where fear is systematically used by those in power to control us. The paradox though, is that those who rely on fear to control others are at heart fearful themselves. Terrified of how they see the world changing, they try through every intimidation tactic available to somehow force time to run backwards, to somehow recreate a world that simply no longer exists. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” is every bit as applicable today as it was in 1933.
Just as learned behaviors can be unlearned, habits can be changed as well. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been shy. Without going through my entire keep to myself history, let me just share that at the beginning of my sophomore year at Rochester, I decided I was going to meet every young woman on my hall before I looked up any of my friends from freshman year. This was completely new behavior for me, but having set a goal, I did it. As I’ve looked back on it, I believe in many ways that decision changed my life. To begin with, at the first hall meeting, since I was the only person everyone knew because I had introduced myself to all of them, they elected me hall president. I was stunned! I’d never been president of anything. Now I don’t know that being hall president meant a darn thing really, but in my mind it gave me license to speak to folks as we passed in the hall, check on how they were doing, offer help or at least encouragement when it was needed. By spring, having observed my behavior all year, my RA suggested I apply to be an RA myself. I did and was hired. I filled that role both junior and senior years, and doing so did more to prepare me to be a teacher than any class I ever took. What I think I learned, though only in writing this sermon did it occur to me in these words, is that loving your neighbor doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to involve offering medical care to the victim of a crime or an accident - that was a parable not an instruction manual - it simply means taking the time to be compassionate. We’re all so hurried, rushing past each other in hallways or on the street, so focused on the to do list in our heads or on our phones that we often fail to notice when others need us, or we push the awareness aside with the thought that we’ll help later, when we have more time. We’re not so much intentionally callous as obsessively oblivious.
However, we simply can’t afford to be oblivious in today’s world. There are too many people these days who truly need our help. Whatever has caused us, or allowed us, to live more or less by and for ourselves and those closest to us simply has to change, and it can if we’re simply open to the possibility. My favorite story of such a change, largely because it’s so extreme, is that of Oskar Schindler. Schindler was a German industrialist and member of the Nazi party who saw in the Jews of the ghettos of Poland a gold mine of slave labor for his factories. So he made use of his contacts and some well placed bribes to arrange for people to be released from the ghettos on a daily basis to work for him. It soon became clear to the Jews that working for Schindler offered perhaps the only assurance they could find of not being sent to the death camps. As time passed Schindler grew increasingly attached to the Jew he had made foreman of his operation and through him Schindler acquired an empathy he had never sought to develop with the workers themselves. Consequently, as the collapse of the Third Reich became imminent and the German army worked at an ever faster rate to send as many Jews as possible to the gas chambers, Schindler arranged to buy the freedom of roughly 1200 of his workers. This man who had set out to use people to make money, spent all the money he had to save people. Today the descendants of the people Schindler saved number in the thousands and his body is buried in Israel, where he is honored as a righteous man.
In perhaps less dramatic ways than in the case of Oskar Schindler, loving our neighbors doesn’t merely change their lives, it changes our lives too. Faithful scientist that I am, this seems to me a bit like a spiritual example of Newton’s Third Law which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. My students often had trouble discerning what the equal and opposite force was, or on what it was exerted. Similarly it may not be clear in the moment how our actions on behalf of others impact us but they do, and over time we may very well find that in the act of loving others we have been changed in ways we could never have asked for or imagined. Love, after all, is like that. Amen.
