Well, it was a wonderful, joyful week here for Vacation Bible School! From Monday to Thursday we welcomed about 94 kids and over 40 teen and adult volunteers for mornings filled with singing, laughter, games, crafts, and quality time together. There were songs stuck in our heads (and if they’ve left, they’ll be back after we hear the kids sing tomorrow!), four birthdays celebrated, and $770 collected for ELCA Good Gifts to provide bandages, medicines, and other supplies for health clinics. Each brick you can see represents $10 gathered, and the kids were so generous and so excited to watch our clinic grow each day. If you’d like to add to our total, there’s a small basket on the table at the rear of the sanctuary.
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| Part of our "neighborhood" hallway! |
Our theme picked up the lawyer’s question in today’s Gospel reading: Who is my neighbor? We hear in Luke’s gospel that the lawyer asked this question so that he might vindicate, or justify, himself. What limits can I place on this love? Who can I ignore? What’s the precise formula I need to follow so that I can get this eternal life thing locked down and get on with living?
But what the lawyer finds, and what we found this week, is that the work of being neighbor is not individually focused or a one-time action to check off. Rather, it’s a way of living. As Moses shared with the people in today’s first reading, love of God and neighbor is an ongoing, continuous practice that entails our whole selves - heart, soul, strength, and mind; home, away, or wherever we go, whatever we’re doing, whatever time of day it is. Neighbor isn’t about similarity or difference, closeness or distance, but action. “Which of these three,” Jesus asks at the conclusion of the parable, “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer responds, correctly, “The one who showed him mercy.”
Each morning during opening, we saw a skit recounting a portion of the Gospel story. The parable doesn’t tell us why the first two men, the priest and the Levite, didn’t stop to help the man who fell into the hands of robbers. Our skits imagined it was because they were too busy, or running late, or didn’t know the man who was injured, or didn’t know how to help, or feared for their own safety. We’ve all been there! Our takeaway, though, was clear in our theme song - love your neighbor as yourself, for God has first loved you. When we’re afraid or don’t know how to help, God loves us and is with us. When we’re too busy, or choose to ignore a need right in front of us, God loves us and is with us. And it is this love - God’s love - we rely on to strengthen and encourage us for the work of loving our neighbor.
Early on in the week I was delighted to be approached by a few kids with some good, tricky, thoughtful questions. It was clear that they were listening, really listening to the story, and integrating what they heard into their own lives and their own experience of the world. “What about bad people?” they asked. “Did God make them? Are we supposed to love people who are bad?” “What about people in jail,” asked another kid - “are people in jail our neighbors?”
Without knowing it, they had found the sticky, uncomfortable part of this parable. (Because there’s always a sticky, uncomfortable part!). The one who stops and offers help? The Samaritan? Jesus’ original hearers would have put them in this category of “bad people”. While Samaritans and Jews may have been considered neighbors by proximity, it would be more accurate, more descriptive, to call them enemies. But that stereotype is subverted, flipped on its head in this parable. Here is a Samaritan - a good one, can you believe it? - who not only stops, but picks up the injured man, puts him on his own animal, brings him to an inn, and pays for his care, promising to return and check back to see if more is needed. That's not an enemy, that's a neighbor.
I imagine we have good, tricky, relevant questions about this, too. What about people in jail? What about terrorists? What about people who are violent, or manipulative, or cause harm? Are these our neighbors?
Or what about people who it's easy to demonize or declare as “other”, people who we might consider to be enemies? What about people whose politics or beliefs are in opposition to ours - are they our neighbors? What about unhoused people? What about ICE agents? What about undocumented immigrants? Are they our neighbors? Are we supposed to love them? Show mercy to them?
The answer, of course, is yes. Yes, they are our neighbors, made in the image of God, filled with the breath of life. Yes, we are called to love them. Yes, to be a neighbor to them is to show mercy and care, to seek their healing and work for wholeness. Yes, we are called to love them with the love that God first gave us.
This isn’t easy work, by any means. The hurt we may feel is real; the stereotypes we jump to are deeply rooted. But one of the things I talked about with the kids last week in response to these tricky questions is that most of the time, when people act badly, it’s not really badness but rather fear, or sadness, or loss, or grief coming out sideways. Perhaps loving our neighbor, then, is to commit to the premise that people are more than a single dimension; more than the one thing we know about them. Perhaps, at the very least, we can know two things about these ones who are our neighbors - the thing that drives us away, but also the truth that they, too, are a beloved child of God.
The work is not easy, and so we rejoice and give thanks that God’s love is with us always, strengthening and empowering us. We give thanks that, like the Good Samaritan, Jesus comes close to us, even when others disdain us or pass us by. We give thanks that he binds our wounds, nourishes us at the table, and gives us to one another for tending and care. We give thanks for this community - for sharing of yourselves to make this week of VBS happen, as seeds of love are planted in kids, teens, and adults alike. And, of course, we give thanks for our neighbors.
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