Leviticus 19: 15-18
“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand idly by when the blood of your neighbor is at stake: I am the Lord.
“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Sermon Text
I’m going to say something I believe to be true and then I’m going to immediately contradict it, and I want you all to understand that that’s the point. The easiest people to love are people you don’t know. It is impossible to love people who you do not know personally. Those are the two truths I’m putting before you today and I’m telling you that both are true even though they contradict each other. Hopefully by the end of our time together you’ll understand a little bit more about what I possibly could mean by those two truths.
When I think of what the church does best, not just this church but all churches, it is taking a cause, thinking deeply about it, and then cutting a check to fix it. Wonderful things can happen when we cut checks and I’m a big proponent for us being generous with the things that God has given us. However, I do not believe that God has called us to love the world from a distance, only through cutting checks when we get the call that someone needs something. The love that we are told we must show our neighbors is a love that has to go deeper than just sending away the things that they need.
When I was serving in Clarksburg the ministry that most impressed was the decades long work of our food pantry head. She would wake up early, go out and find the deals she needed to find so that she could really do good work for the people who came into the pantry week after week. She did not stop at getting the best food at the best price, though. She knew the people who came through, their stories, their families, their needs, even above how much food we needed to put in the cart. She learned the names of her neighbors and cared about them beyond the bare minimum asked of her.
I talk a lot about the problem that we have in the modern age where we do not know our neighbors, and we don’t really care to know them either. When you go outside and get your paper or put out your trash, or get into your car, if you have somebody across the street who will wave to you, who will ask how you’re doing, and you know their name, and they know yours, then you are in the minority of the modern age. We don’t know each other because we do not trust each other, and because we neither know nor trust each other we are not there to help each other. In a world where we are all isolated, no wonder we begin to feel like we are alone.
When the Bible was written things were different. Your average person lived in a town of no more than 250 people. They would know the names, the stories, and the circumstances of everyone who lived in that town. Truthfully this is how human society has been for basically our entire existence. Once a population reaches 250 people you usually have some folks move to start a different community. Cities, therefore, are a deviation from that norm. In cities, there are so many people that you cannot begin to know the neighbors around you. As we continue through our Genesis study we’re going to talk a lot about the fact that cities are often presented as a problem to living out our lives as people of God.
When we read throughout the Torah and the New Testament and all of the prophets how God expects us to love our neighbor, we quickly learn that we are not meant to do so only abstractly or from a distance. We are called to know the people who are around us, to care about their needs, and to do something to help them when we can. Elsewhere Jesus is very clear that because of our good nature as Christians, we can be taken advantage of and therefore we need to be shrewd about the kind of help we give, but never does he give us an excuse not to care for people. The expectation is always that we will help people when we can, how we can, and still have enough sense in ourselves that we don’t let ourselves get taken advantage of.
This is something that I come back to again and again, so as a sermon it would be very easy for me to just repeat those kind of points and call it a day. Instead, I want us to really think of a way that we can meet our neighbors. We as a church have tried to do this over the past few months. We’ve going out into the neighborhood and distributing our cards for the question series as well as handouts for different events that we have. We saw what we usually expect, which is that of the two hundred and some that we handed out, we talked to or heard back from about twenty people. That is about the distribution of responses you expect to get from that kind of campaign. This is a fine way of beginning conversations with people in the community but the thing that allows us to become a church that knows the needs and lives of its neighbors is by us, as individuals, doing the same thing in between times the church does it.
Moses does not say you the people of Israel as a worshiping unit must do these things Moses’s teachings are for each individual who is called to follow after God’s work. I want all of us to think of ways that we can get to know at least one of the people who lives on our street. Someone that we do not currently know. I say this as somebody who is as shy as can be when I am not wearing a collar and doing something that I can say I am doing this as a pastor. In my personal life, in my personal disposition, I am a shy person, and yet I am not exempt from this call to know and love my neighbors.
I will tell a story in terms of how I have done this in the past and how I hope to do it over in Fort Ashby as time goes on. When I lived in Clarksburg, I lived across the street from somebody who I was loathe to meet. He had political signs all over his long and they weren’t just saying who he supported, many of them were mean spirited, and some even a little gross. I never got over the weird signs, but one day when I was out putting mail in the big blue mailbox on the corner, I stopped and talked to him while he was out working in his garden.
From there I learned that while he did have some prickly political opinions, he really wasn’t that bad of a guy. He had a cat rescue he ran out of his house; he fed the local strays and used their trust of him to make sure that he could get them all spayed and neutered and adopted out. He cared deeply about his community, and though we had not met person to person yet, when he saw me and my growing family, he made sure to pay special attention to our house. He would watch it while we were gone and make note of any strange happenings around our house. I learned that though there were many things that I was not going to see eye to eye with this man that are shared humanity and community could bridge the gap for us to care for each other.
Now as I live in Fort Ashby, I do not know my neighbors except for some of the people in the extended neighborhood that I live in. I know the fellow who mows my lawn and who has two gorgeous dogs. I know my neighbors across the street who have beautiful cars, and tools that I sometimes borrow when I need to work on my own vehicles. They also, I should say, have two beautiful dogs. Likewise, up the street there is a family with children who are about Jack’s age but whom we have never really interacted with except for occasional moments where we run into each other with our respective kids and wish one another good luck. In other words, I’m aware of these people but I do not know them like I came to know my neighbor in Clarksburg. We are aware of each other in vague terms that allow us to wish each other well, but we do not know each other enough to really be able to love each other fully.
My challenge to you in the coming week, in the coming months, across several years if it takes that long, is to try and find a way to bridge the gap between you and at least one person on your street that you do not know yet. Maybe they moved in after somebody you knew quite well moved out. Maybe they’re much younger than you are, maybe they’re much more old than you. Maybe they have shown themselves to be a good and quiet neighbor, or raucous and kind of annoying, and yet still they are your neighbor. If we wish to care for the people around us, we have to know them by name and love them with action.
The last time that I felt I was truly in a neighborhood that had any sort of community was when I lived in Berkeley Springs as a child. I may have told some form of this story in this church before, but it always stood out to me. For years when we lived up on the big hill, we did not know our neighbors’ names. Eventually I think my parents learned them, but we were not often in communication with each other. Then came the big snowstorm of 2008 and 2009, this was the year that we were out of school for about a month, where no one left their house, where everything was just shut down.
From that year on our neighbor with a tractor was always sure to plow the entire street and, where possible, clear out the places where our cars were parked. The neighbor who lived two houses up from us, and, I can’t believe I’m saying, this had two beautiful dogs, likewise, began to speak to us more regularly. The twins who owned the repair shop next door, if they saw we were working on something, would offer a tool, or a hand if we really seemed to need it. We did not know each other’s business. We didn’t even really learn too much about the ins and outs of our lives, but we did learn who each other was. We learned enough so that our knowledge became love and that love became care. My challenge to you today is to love your neighbor as yourself and to do that by meeting them, one way or the other. – Amen.
