Sermon at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Va., on July 14, 2019, the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, two Sundays before the last Sunday before I stepped away from my work there as director of music in order to begin studies at Virginia Theological Seminary, as a postulant for holy orders (priesthood) in the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia.
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“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“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.
“Do this and you will live.”
Jesus reaches back into the Hebrew law to answer this.
But then, the lawyer asks a second question, maybe because, well, he is a lawyer.
The lawyer isn’t satisfied with just hearing the law repeated for him:
“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.”
“Do this and you will live.”
He asks: “Who is my neighbor?”
That followup question is not a single, simple question with a single, simple answer.
The lawyer is not only asking, “who is my neighbor?”
I think he’s also asking:
“What do you mean by ‘neighbor’?”
and “What do you mean by ‘love’?”
and “What do you mean by ‘do’?”
And so Jesus’ answer is not single or simple – none of his parables are, and this is no exception: Jesus doesn’t answer the lawyer’s question in a way that anyone would expect it to. It also doesn’t answer the lawyer’s question, or our own echo of it, as completely as it could, at least not immediately. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a story that we need to live with a while.
As always, the words are important – three in particular:
Neighbor.
Love.
Do.
The lawyer asks: what do you mean by ‘neighbor’?”
In this time and place, the Samaritan was the enemy, theologically, ethnically. The Jews and the Samaritans did not associate with each other. The Samaritans were Jews who had not left Israel in the Babylonian Exile; they had intermarried with non-Jews. The Samaritans had even gone so far as to build their own temple, miles away from Jerusalem.
Jesus’ answer to the question “who is my neighbor?” is this: that the neighbor was that person who was kind to the other, without judgment, without provocation or reward, without rational reason. The neighbor was the one who acted in compassion for a person who was a stranger and an enemy, setting aside prejudice, disagreement, anger, disdain, and seeing only a human being who was hurting. The Samaritan – the last person the lawyer would expect to be kind to someone like him.
The neighbor is the one who recognized that this unknown man – beaten, robbed and left for dead by the side of the road, a person with whom a Samaritan never would have associated – was his neighbor.
The lawyer asks: What do you mean by love?
Jesus reminds us that we are commanded to love one another as we love ourselves.
In this parable, the Samaritan was the one who looked and saw, truly saw, the suffering of the stranger by the side of the road, saw the humanity of the stranger by the side of the road. Not knowing this man, the Samaritan loved him because he saw him as a fellow human being, and he guessed that his life was likely not in many ways that different from his own.
To love is to see.
In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Shylock speaks one of the most heartrending defenses of humanity in all of English literature, when he points out the discrimination he and other Jews faced from Christians and reminds them of our shared humanity, our shared vulnerabilities and joys and pain:
Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is?
To love is to see.
To love one another as we love ourselves, then we must acknowledge each other’s humanity and worth and lovability. We must be able to look in the stranger’s eyes and see the human there, the person who is looking back at us and trying to find the humanity in our eyes. We must discover and acknowledge what connects us, what we have in common, while at the same time acknowledging and even celebrating what makes us different.
To love another is to see the other.
The lawyer asks: What do you mean by “do”?
To love our neighbors as ourselves, we must recognize that everyone is our neighbor. We must see in each other the humanity we know in ourselves. That can’t just mean the people who are in our path, who are convenient, or conveniently inconvenient, the people who look like us or live in our hometown or speak our language, or the people with whom we agree, the people we think are noble or good or responsible.
In today’s parable, the neighbor isn’t just the compassionate Samaritan. We can’t stop there, with that answer.
And the neighbor isn’t just the stranger, beaten and dying by the side of the road, needing help, needing us.
Our neighbor is everyone in that story, no matter how hard any of them may be to love, because they are all human, with the same, as Shakespeare writes, affections, passions, food, diseases, summers and winters – all of them are our neighbors:
The man suffering by the side of the road
The pious priest who passed him by
The Levite who passed him by
The innkeeper who’s just trying to keep his small business going
The Samaritan
The robbers.
In this day and time, who is our neighbor? Our neighbors are the retired couple living next-door. Our neighbor is the cousin who voted for the other political candidate. Our neighbors are our annoying coworkers. Our neighbors are the drivers who tailgate us and the tired, whiny kids in the grocery store and they are the shabby people who hang around downtown and ask for money and start arguments in public. Our neighbors are the west African family new in the U.S. and trying to understand American culture. Our neighbors are the teenagers growing up without parents, turning to gangs to save themselves. Our neighbors are the parents and children who have come to our border and who have settled in our towns and cities, seeking asylum, trying to find better and safer lives.
What do we mean by “love”? What do we mean by “do”?
To be neighbors, to love one another, we are to take care of one another. We are to be a neighbor to the beaten, the downtrodden – we are to love the dying man by the side of the road, and then do what needs to be done – bind his wounds, put him on our donkey, give our own money to help heal this person who doesn’t have the same riches we do.
To be neighbors, to love one another, is to share this common life together, to celebrate, grieve, work and create together.
And we practice that in these four walls, so that we can practice it outside, in the rest of the world.
It was a little over 10 years ago when I first came to St. Elizabeth’s as music director, and in those early weeks I talked through the job description with our rector then, Richard Fife, working out vacation days and starting to learn the ins and outs of what was then an unfamiliar liturgy. I was making sure he understood that I am not a very strong singer and that my organ pedal skills are a little limited.
As we worked out the details, the thing I remember in particular that he emphasized was that the job description included coming to coffee hour after church. I wasn’t expected just to rehearse with the choir, play a prelude, some hymns and a postlude and head home. I was supposed to stay and eat. And drink coffee.
I was glad to agree to that unexpected expectation, even before I knew how well we do coffee hour. And you don’t have to twist my arm to convince me to drink coffee.
What I soon realized was that what Richard was inviting me to do, by making sure I came to coffee hour after church, was to become part of the community of St. Elizabeth’s, to gather around the table and break bread together, to become part of the fabric of this place, to discover the kind, dedicated, funny, talented, wonderful family of this church. To see and love this neighbor that I had lived three blocks away from for a few years and had never come to visit, except when I found out about the annual book sale.
What I realized over the years that followed was that St. Elizabeth’s is not just neighborly but family, that by turns we are to each other both Good Samaritan and the traveler hurt by the side of the road.
St. Elizabeth’s is a church of relationships that reflect what Jesus describes in the parable of the Good Samaritan. We come together, even when we don’t agree. We visit each other when we are sick. We encourage each other. We laugh together. We pray for each other, laying our hands on those who weep or fear. We cook meals for each other. We share pictures of grandchildren and pets, we give each other rides to church, we sing with each other. We listen to each other’s stories.
We see each other, we acknowledge the humanity we have in common and we celebrate our rich differences.
In in loving each other as ourselves, we can then turn and love the rest of the world. We reach out to our neighbors – in many literal ways, surrounded as we are by actual neighborhoods of families and retired folks, a high school and a middle school, tennis courts and a greenway and a sports bar and a library and another six or eight churches along Grandin Road. Some of our parishioners walk to church.
And people visit the top of our hill, not just to come to church, but to stargaze, to ride bikes, walk the labyrinth, do yoga, practice centering prayer, learn English from a patient tutor, to drop off canned food, pick up canned food, plant gardens, go sledding, walk dogs, bless pets, picnic and listen to music under the big oak tree.
A few months ago, during Lent, we invited one of our neighbors to come and talk with us about the common threads between our faiths, Islam and Christianity, celebrating our common humanity and our rich differences, breaking bread together.
On the last night of those weekly Sunday conversations, after the meal and the talk, something wonderful happened. I was walking to my office and realized our friend, Dr. Saleem Ahmed, was unrolling his rug in the ark room, preparing to pray in the direction of Mecca. I left quietly, not wanting to disturb him, and went to the sanctuary, where a small group of us prayed compline. That evening, there was a profound holiness held by the walls of this church, embracing our different and common human faiths, as Muslim and Christian prayed together in the same sacred space, for peace, for love, for healing.
We were neighbors to each other.
And that is what it is all about. We share these sacred spaces – this church and this world – and they are made sacred because we share them, because we see and love each other, within and outside this church, finding our common humanity, celebrating our rich differences, taking care of each other, stranger and family alike.
That is what we mean by do.
That is what we mean by neighbor.
That is what we mean by love.
Amen.
Images: from St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church, Roanoke, Va.; photos by the author.