April 10, 2016
Hoosier Neighbor? | Call to Neighboring
- Luke 10:1-11
- Rev. Dr. Jerry Deck
As you should know by now we are going to take the next several weeks to look at what it means to love our neighbor. A good question to ask, of course, is why are we doing this and spending so much time on it? I mean almost all of us know that we’re supposed to love our neighbor and few people would really disagree that it’s a good thing to do. What’s the point of spending so much time on this simple subject? Well, that’s a great question.
There’s a couple of reasons why I think this is an important thing for us to do. First, because I think it’s always good for us, from time to time, to get back to the basics. And, as we heard in the first passage I read, this is clearly a basic that comes straight from Jesus’ lips. When the question is asked, “What does it mean to be church” or “What should the church be about,” this passage should always come to our mind because it helps simplify the call. Love God and love neighbor. Yet, as easy as that is to remember, I would suggest that the church, for many different reasons, oftentimes can easily forget that this is its call. As we talk about with some regularity, it is very easy for us to associate church only with what happens in here on Sunday mornings. Of course, even as a kid this was the message that was usually given to us. My guess is that many of us learned the simple lesson of, “Here’s the church. Here’s the steeple. Open it up and there’s the people.” Or, while it may seem subtle, every time I say something to my kids like, “Okay, it’s time to go to church,” what I am telling them is that church is a place and that this is the one place where church happens and that this is the one thing that church does. And, while that is a very simple message that may seem harmless I would suggest that, in many ways, it is merely the beginning of a message that is very difficult for us to get out of our heads and hearts.
And so it’s important for us to continually be reminded of who Jesus says we are and what Jesus says we are to be about. Because there are always competing messages coming from outside of the church, from inside the church and from within our own selves that can contradict this message. It’s easy for us to begin thinking that church is about what it does for me, how it makes me feel, whether it adds to my life. But Jesus suggests that the church is here in order to shape us more and more into a people who are able to love God and love neighbor. Love God. Love neighbor. And so it’s important for us to be reminded of this.
But the other reason why I think it’s critical that we look at what it means to love neighbor is because of the fact that saying we should love our neighbor rolls off our tongues so easily that it can easily begin to lose its’ impact. In fact, I would suggest that we frequently end up generalizing it so much that it doesn’t really have much teeth, that it doesn’t really mean all that much. And really we kind of like it like that because in many ways it lets us off the hook, it keeps us safe. What I mean is that if I just say, “Alright, let’s go love our neighbor,” the vast majority of you will think, “You know, he’s really right, we should love our neighbor” and nothing inside of you protests too much and you leave saying, “Great message, Pastor,” and so the whole week you feel good and I feel good and we come back next Sunday and we still feel good and nothing has really changed.
But, if I say to you, “This week go and actually love your literal neighbor,” which means, somehow you need to get to know one of them by striking up a conversation with them or having them over for coffee or a meal or even just actually getting to know their names then all of sudden you get fidgety, the hair on the back of your necks starts tingling, you start coming up with great reasons why you can’t do it, you avoid me after the service, I feel awkward and uncomfortable and well, it’s just not a good, fuzzy week. Plus, if I ask you all to do that, then that means I feel like I need to do it to and well, like I said, it’s easier to just say, “love your neighbor” and avoid all that all together. But, perhaps if just one person does actually go out and love their real neighbor, if one does get to know his or her neighbor a bit better, well, it may not be comfortable, but it might actually change something which is what oftentimes happens when we begin to take Jesus seriously. And so, we’ve decided that we need to ask the important question of what it means as someone has said to love your actual neighbor.
And even though it is so simple, it really can be a challenge for us to do it. In many ways the passage I read in Luke speaks to some of the things that perhaps inhibit us in loving our neighbor and are things we’ll take a look at in the coming weeks. It begins with Jesus sending out, we’re told, 70 others. Now that could easily be glossed over, but it’s important to see that this is not the 12, not the all-stars, but the “others.” Ones you’ve never heard of before and will never hear of again. These are not spiritual giants and not necessarily those who are extroverts or eloquent or have the gift of evangelism, they are simply the ordinary 70 others. In other words, this is all of us. It’s easy for us to think that the people who are called to really go out and love their neighbors and help to bring about God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven are those who have all the answers or who know the Bible incredibly well or who just wake up wanting to do that sort of thing, but here Luke makes very clear that these are simply 70 others, people just like you.
And they’re called to do what? To be sent out. Now I hope you noticed what Jesus doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “Here’s what I want you to do. “Go find a place in the village, locate a nice piece of land on a busy intersection, have a capital campaign drive, build a building, go inside the building and wait for people to come inside to worship.” To be sure, he doesn’t say it’s bad to have a building or to worship inside of a building, but he is saying that this is not enough or even primary. That at our core we are a people who go out, who are sent, who (as he says in Mark) are called to go out and love our neighbors. In other words, go out to where they are. But, of course, that’s more difficult because it’s messier. We’d prefer to wait for people to come in here because then we can meet them on our terms. We’re a bit more in control.
And the thing I love about Jesus is that he know that it’s messier and scarier to go out and meet people where they are rather than waiting for them to just come here. He doesn’t pull any punches as is seen in the fairly harrowing image he gives us. That you will be like what? Yes, like lambs in the midst of wolves. So, cozy, right?! Jesus clearly hadn’t taken any advertising classes because this is really not the way to get people excited about doing something. We churches are much smarter than that. Look at most church websites and you’ll find people who are smiling and having a great time. People with beautiful teeth and perfect children. Images that make you feel cozy, comfortable, safe.
You get the feeling that if Jesus was the ZPC webmaster the front page of our website would look like this (show slide), with the tagline: “Come join our flock of lambs!” Let’s be honest, the difference between Jesus’ image of the church and the one that most of us have of what church should be is a bit jarring. And, while I’m not suggesting that we change our website, I do wonder again whether or not we shouldn’t challenge our view of church a bit more. To be sure, I believe church should be a place of community, a place to belong, a place to have joy, but I think we can’t be content if that’s all it is because that’s not all Jesus sees it being. It’s also a place to be prepared to go out and do things that may scare us, that may cost us, that may make us vulnerable. Which, of course, can be the hard part about loving our literal neighbor.
Of course, another thing that makes it difficult for us to love our neighbor is that we struggle with finding time. That’s why it’s interesting what Jesus says about not greeting people along the road. On the face of it that seems anything but loving or neighboring. But I think that what Jesus is talking about here is not being impolite or rude, but the importance of not being distracted, of being mindful of how you are spending your time. Of living life with purpose and intentionality because we know how easy it is to get caught up in one thing or another. And so in a couple weeks we get to have an honest conversation and reflection on how we spend our time and whether we are distracted by things that may make it more difficult for us to be sent out into God’s mission.
I also think that one of the things that keep us from really engaging our neighborhoods more is that we don’t see it as a part of the larger beautiful project of, as we talked about in the last series, bringing God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus says that when they go out they are telling people that God’s kingdom is near and that’s because Jesus is near, but it’s also because they are acting as Jesus has called them to. I think if we can begin to see that what we’re talking about is not just being nice to people for the sake of being nice, but that we are playing a part of the larger Kingdom of God that it helps us to understand more clearly what an amazing opportunity we have. Because one of the things that happens and that is explained a bit later in the chapter is that the 70 come back and are amazed at how God has worked through them. Like they’re surprised that by going out, into their communities into their neighborhoods, that they actually experienced the Kingdom of God in ways they never would have had they just waited around for people to come to them. That’s what happens when you begin to follow Jesus into your neighborhood.
But remember this can’t just be some ethereal, general, loving of neighbor but must include genuine reaching out to those in our neighborhoods. Which is why I want us to start off this series by doing an experiment. The book The Art of Neighboring has this exercise that I think is interesting to do. If you open your bulletin up you’ll see a block map and so I want you to do something with that. This will take a few minutes for some of you and for others of you it might take no time at all. The first thing I want you to do is to think about those who live around you (if you live in a neighborhood) and write down the first and last names of everyone you can think of. (Give time) Ok, now I want you to write down a couple of relevant things about these folks that you wouldn’t know just from standing in their driveway. So, it can’t be he has a red car or she walks her dog every afternoon. It has be something like what they do for a living or where they’re from. (Give time) Finally, what do you know about any of these folks that’s a bit more in-depth. For instance, what are their dreams or their thoughts about God or what they fear? (Give time)
Now, you may not have had time to finish all of this (or you may have been done as soon as I asked the question), but what I want you to know is that when this exercise has been done in churches it has been discovered that about 10% of people can fill out the names of 8 of their neighbors, 3% can answer the 2nd question and less than 1% can fill out the last question. The point of the exercise is not to make you feel ashamed if you can’t do it, but it is to help us to see how we’re doing, to give us a baseline and to ask whether or not there isn’t room for us to improve a bit. I can assure you that when I have done this exercise in the past I have tried to cover up my answers so that no one can see just how much (or how little) I have gotten to know my neighbors.
The nice thing about the Block Map is that you can tear that off the bulletin and we have some magnets we’ll be handing out on your way out and you can post them on the refrigerator and perhaps in the next few weeks you might have something to add. It may just be a name or finding out their vocation, but at least it will be a step. Because, as the authors of the book point out, in order to love someone, like a neighbor, it helps to at least know their name!
The one last thing I want to point out about Luke 10 is the fact that they went out in pairs, in other words, this is not something they were doing on their own and I think that’s significant. Because when we talk about the importance of being community it’s not just because it makes us feel good, but because community helps us to do things we might not otherwise have the courage to do on our own. Pairing up was a way to make sure that they could be there for one another in the good times and the bad, when one of them had courage and one of them didn’t. When one of them wanted to quit and the other one wanted to keep going. And so over the next several weeks, and hopefully well into the future, I want us to be able to commit to one another and to know that we aren’t out there on our own.
Of course, I don’t want to just give a general “go love your neighbor” and so here’s the challenge for us in these next 7 days. I’m asking you to walk your neighborhood 2-3 days this week and that as you are doing so, to begin praying for your neighbors. There may be no more loving thing that you can do for your neighbor than pray for them. Pray for them by name if you can and if you don’t know their name then pray that you will be given the opportunity (or take the opportunity) to get to know their name. Pray that God will open a door for you to love them, pray for peace for them. Now, providentially we didn’t start this series last Sunday because this past week was horrible, but here you can see the weather for the next 7 days. (show slide) There’s no excuses!
And, as a reminder of the fact that we’re doing this together, I encourage you to take a picture of your neighborhood. Perhaps it’s just a picture taken from your door and looking out at your neighborhood or maybe it’s a picture of your family walking or, if you have a neighbor who seems to want their picture taken then do that as well and then post it on our FB page with #hoosierneighbor? It’s just another way of remembering that we’re not alone and to remember to actually do it!
Sisters and brothers in Christ, we have a great opportunity in the next several weeks to remember the basics of loving God and loving neighbor. I know that many of you already do this and perhaps this will be a simple encouragement to keep doing it. I also know that there are many of us for whom this is a real struggle and so I hope and pray that we will be a people who can encourage one another and, despite our fears or lack of time or concern of what to say or do, that we might just experience God’s kingdom in new and fresh ways as we go wherever he sends us. Love God. Love neighbor. Hallelujah. Amen.