Thought for Today
Leviticus 19:18 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.
Proverbs 3:27 Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. 28 Do not say to your neighbor, "Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give it"-- when you have it with you.
Luke 10:27 "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." . . . 29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
It snowed again last night. There was about 2” of light snowfall on my driveway when I awoke this morning. As I began shoveling the snow off the driveway, our next-door neighbor came out of her house to put her youngest son on the school bus. The next thing I knew, she was back out in her heavy coat with her snow shovel helping me clear the driveway.
Greta and I have been very fortunate to have wonderful neighbors here in New England. This morning, as I shoveled the driveway and our neighbor attacked the snowplow ridge at the end of the driveway, I remembered our first New England winter. Beginning in late January 2014 we received a total of 100” of snow before winter ended. There are 8 homes in our neighborhood. Four of the families had moved from other neighborhoods in the area and had snowblowers and shovels. The rest of us were without appropriate tools for managing snow. Each morning the 4 snowblowers attacked the night’s snowfall on their driveways and then proceeded to clear the driveways of the rest of us. Our next-door neighbor’s young son would be out with his father and would clear our stoop and porch. Wonderful neighbors!
Our earliest ancestors-in-the-faith were notoriously ethnocentric. Yet, the Bible mentions neighbors about 100 times, almost always in the context of treating our neighbors equitably. As a Christian, I know that Jesus’ words about loving our neighbors as ourselves appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
I have long been fascinated with Jesus’ answer to that question, "And who is my neighbor?" In Luke 10:30-37 Jesus tells the story we know today as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Hopefully all of you know that the Samaritans were the bitter enemies of the Jews. The roots of their enmity were deep, going back as far as the earliest settlement of the Promised Land, the period of the divided kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and reinforced by the Babylonian Captivity and the return. That enmity was essentially a family feud that extended to issues of ethnic purity and even to similar but different holy scriptures and worship practices.
Jesus did not tell that parable to resolve the conflict between Jews and Samaritans. Some rivalries are deep-seated and resist resolution. Try to imagine fans of the Yankees rooting for the Red Sox, or fans of the Rangers rooting for the Astros.
Jesus told that parable to tell us that we are all children of God, we are all equally-loved children of God, and we all need to act like it. In Mark, Jesus reinforces the idea somewhat differently. “3:32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.’ 33 And he replied, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’"
All people on earth (and in the International Space Station) are members of God’s family. We are related not by DNA, but by our common ancestry. We are all equally descendants of Adam and Eve; or, if you prefer, by our evolutionary descent from a common mammalian ancestor. Jesus’ point was not one of biology or any other ‘ology except theology (literally words about God).
Paul reminds us, “Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—” The ‘you’ in that passage is a 2nd person plural pronoun, i.e., ‘you all.’ Humanity is a family. God freely offers reconciliation to us all. Regrettably, some family members have forgotten. We all need to remember that our neighbors, all our neighbors, are our family.
Stay safe, treat your family like family, trust God,
Pastor Ray