The End of Neighboring; March 22, 2026

speaker-0: This morning's Hebrew Bible reading comes from the book of Jeremiah, chapter 29, verses 4 through 7. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles who I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce, take wives and have sons and daughters, take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters, multiply there and do not decrease, but seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and praise the Lord on its behalf for in its welfare you will find your welfare. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Jeremiah 29:4–7

speaker-1: ⁓ We've come the end our neighboring series. ⁓ The word end, ⁓ works in a couple of different ways. There is the end as in we're done, the finish line, the final chapter, the, the, the, the, the, that's all folks. ⁓ And then there's also the end as in the point of the whole dad gum thing. The goal, the purpose. If you want the really fancy seminary word, it's telos. What are we doing with this? What's it supposed to do? What is the goal of this whole project? And we're finishing it up. ⁓ I didn't even realize this just happened because this is the way calendars work. ⁓ We are finishing our neighboring project up on the Sunday after Mr. Rogers Day, which was on Friday. Won't you be my neighbor? It's his birthday was on Friday. Most famous Presbyterian pastor in the world, think. ⁓ Quite likely. At any rate, what is the end of neighboring? going to reference Jeremiah and we're going to look at this Romans passage and we're going to talk about what the goal is. We're going to talk about what happens the closer that we get to this project of loving God and our neighbor. So listen with me, would you, for the word of the Lord in Paul's letter to the church in Rome here in chapter 12 and verses 14 through 21. We start out really easy. Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. And beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord. Now, if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. For by doing this, you'll heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. ⁓ God, you bear all things with immense patience and love, choosing faithfulness over abandonment. So as we seek what is your will, as we strive for what is good, make us steadfast in love and commitment to our neighbors. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Christ, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. I think it's fair for me to start with an honest answer to what happens if you've been doing this project. Like if you made up a block map and you've worked on learning names and sharing meals, if you've striven to invite people into the plans that you've already made so that you could begin to build community in your neighborhood, what probably has happened is that things have gotten messy. Matter of fact, just yesterday, somebody sent me a message that said, ⁓ you know what I've discovered as I've built community in my neighborhood is that my neighbors are really nosy. That's fine. This is not something that you did wrong. This isn't, in fact, a punishment. In fact, it's a sign and a signal very likely that you did something right. Just this week, a friend of mine shared that he was knee deep in a neighbor's healthcare because he was the first to discover that he had had a stroke. He didn't ask for that. In fact, he was at once delighted to have been of help and berating himself for not noticing a little bit sooner. It was messy, but it was a good and a holy thing. Getting close to people is a two-edged sword. Love is always vulnerable like that. The best thing about great neighbors is that they're always there. And the worst thing about great neighbors is that they're always there. People overstay their welcome. Expectations don't get shared, boundaries get crossed, and when that happens, the temptation is always to reach back for the list of reasons that we shouldn't have started doing this in the first place. As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, there are legitimate hurdles to neighboring, and when things get tough, those hurdles can turn into fences with no trespassing signs, and we have to resist that. So... When you get close enough for conflict, that means you're doing something right. And let me give you a couple of things to hold on to in the midst of that messiness. Number one, remember that Romans 12, what we just read, And Jesus's entire life really in the gospels assumes that conflict is coming. You don't get wisdom like don't repay evil for evil or never avenge yourselves or as far as it depends on you live peaceably with all unless there is the presumption that someone is gonna blow leaves into your yard or do something that's actually bad, right? The truth is that we are all people in process with different histories and opinions and habits, and we are going to veer into one another's lives. The question isn't whether that's going to happen. It's what we're going to do when it does and how we're going to receive that. So here's my encouragement. When it does happen, and it inevitably will, Do not shrug it off and do that thing where we pretend like we didn't have a conflict or pretend like everything is fine when it is not. Do not run from the conflict that neighboring will invite into your life. Engage it. Be brave. Those moments of friction are where our piety becomes practice and where we flex the muscles of mercy and demonstrate the grit of the grace that we've been trying to build in our lives of discipleship. And when we come up short in those conflicts and we do not live up to our own expectations or what we believe Jesus's expectations are for us, which again, we will... Please do not frame that as a failure in your life. Loving God and loving neighbor. We've called this series the art of neighboring because it is an art form. It's a practice. It's not a performance. And it doesn't really matter if you screw it up. It's about humility and it's about growth. It is not about perfection. Plus, Jesus isn't gonna be disappointed in your attempts, however halting, to love him by loving your neighbor. This God sees our hearts and knows our desires. God is exceedingly proud that you are on this journey together. This is the whole bag of worms. Is that a thing? Two, speaking of Jesus, you aren't him. You can't do everything for everyone on your block. Neither, in fact, did Jesus when Jesus was walking the earth. I'd remind you that he also only had 24 hours in his day. And in those 24 hours, he spent time with 12 people most of the time. And among them, he spent time with three of them in the vast majority of time. Limitations aren't sinful. So when people start asking more of you than you can reasonably give, know your limits. Colleen, my wife and therapist in residence in my house, she literally lives with me, might say that the goal is to be interdependent, but not codependent. You are called to love people. You are called by God to serve them. Christ compels you to pray for them. but you are not responsible for the outcome of their lives. Just look at how Jesus called people. He didn't actually chase anyone down. He said, hey everybody, the kingdom of God is here. This is the way that I am going and I would really love it if you would join along. Come and follow me." And then he left people to their responsibility to respond to him and to follow in his ways. Know where you end and another begins. Three. Be gentle. When we remember that everyone we meet is far more like us than alien to us, commandments like bless those who persecute you begin to feel less impossible. Matter of fact. This week, someone sent me an email reflecting on what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. And they said, in fact, that loving your neighbor as yourself wasn't punchy enough for them because they are a real go-getter. But here's what they offered instead. And I'm just going to read it because I'm not sure I can say it any better than they said. When we begin to see our neighbor as ourselves, as our exact equal, one whose worth is equal to ours, I think it can make a big difference in the way we treat and eventually, hopefully, love others. I believe my neighbor is just as crazy as I am, has bad habits, just like me. Gets just as scared as I do when the doctor says that we need a CAT scan right away. Thinks I look as strange wearing a baseball cap as I think she does in a hijab. Loves their grandchildren, just like I do. Would take a life-saving kidney from anyone, regardless of color, religion, or gender identity, just as surely as I would. Calls himself a moron when he runs out of gas, just like I do. loves and prays as much and as little as I do. In short, he or she is us. I should have just let them preach this week. That's what it boils down to. Your neighbor is you. That is the ground beneath all of this, that we are all God's varied handiwork, beautiful and messy handiwork. And as that becomes ever clearer, loving our neighbors, even our difficult ones, even our enemies, even those who persecute us, stops. being a commandment and starts becoming an urge that wells up from some deep part of me that I can't control but still want to follow and that urge I call the voice of God. Now, all of that is almost too practical for me to preach. And so I want to make a theological claim that I think undergirds all of this. The end of neighboring, the goal, the purpose of neighboring, is neighboring itself. There is nothing hidden behind it. As Pastor Kim taught last week, Jesus does not teach the greatest commandment as a conversion strategy. He doesn't say, love your neighbor so that they will believe in me. He says, love God and love your neighbor. That's it. Love God and love your neighbor. We don't love to convert. We love because we are converted. The goal. is the loving, that is the thing itself. And I think we have to sit with that for a minute because we live in a culture that has trained us to see everything as instrumental, right? Everything as a means to something else, a stepping stone, so that even our relationships start to feel like strategies in service of something else. But Jesus resists this entirely. The love... is the point. The neighboring is the point and the goal. In the Old Testament, ⁓ number of profits. have a vision of what it's gonna be like when God comes to reign in full. And in Zechariah, I wanna call this reign of God the neighborhood of God because in Zechariah, he pictures this as old men and women sitting on their porches. He sees children filling the streets playing. He sees every person sitting under their own vine and fig tree with no one to make them afraid. It's just a vision of human flourishing and of peace. A place where everyone is known and everyone belongs and everyone is received. It is not, this isn't a preliminary step to get us to something greater. This is the thing itself. What more could we want from life than that? than a reality wherein every single person gets to flourish. I imagine that if we want something more than that, that those desires are actually unholy because they come from a place of my desire and something that somebody else can't have. So when we go out to love our neighbors, we are not running a program with conversion as the finish line. We are participating in the in-breaking of the kingdom of God, building for it one block party, one hello at the mailbox, one favor, and one hard conversation at a time. in very much the same way, I have long believed that the purpose of the church is simply for us to be the church publicly. and simply to make the world known as the world by our being the church. That is, that we are a place that is for what it is for more than what we're against what we're against. Does that make sense? Because there's a lot of like, I'm against that energy these days. And I really hope my prayer is that we're a place that's about what we're for. And I think that there may have been seasons in history when this work was difficult and the church needed to come up with some fancy new program or logo or hip fashion cool thing. I don't know. However, it seems to me. It seems to me that we are currently in a time when there is a lot of energy trying to separate us from our neighbors, literally and figuratively. And here I am thinking about bounty hunter incentives in Texas. I mean, you could turn people in for cash, if they're trying to seek women's health care or if they are using the wrong bathroom. You can get money from the government for turning your neighbor in. And a lot of people have been using the boogeyman of Sharia law to rouse up fear and anxiety against our neighbors. It's nuts. There's a lot of this energy in our culture right now. And because that is what things are like in our neighborhood, the church's very simple mission, but clear mission of loving God and loving our neighbor should stick out gloriously in the midst of this. contrast between the church and the rest of the world will be so distinct that the world will not be able to help but see our love. They will see our welcome and who we welcome and with such vigor that we welcome them with and they will wonder from whence this comes. And at that point, friends, we might just get to say with our words, as much as with our actions, that all this comes from God who loved us and welcomed us first. My deepest desire is that this love becomes so desired that its goodness would be so obvious that our light will shine incredibly bright. that it would become contagious and people will, as Jesus says, see our good deeds and praise our Father in heaven. And I trust that this is true, that people will see our good deeds and praise our Father in heaven because such a contagious neighborliness and love has happened in my own life. They're not here this morning, but Eric Work, some of you know him and his family. You know that block of shame or the chart of shame that's on the front of your bulletin that we've done, that we've been working through, the block chart here? I called that the chart of shame. For Eric, it was just a victory lap. Like, he got the show off. He wouldn't tell you that. He's too good for that. But this guy knows everybody. his block and not he puts that that knowledge to use and He connects people the guy got a monthly food truck for his block. I mean, what have I done? Nothing. I want a taco truck in my neighborhood I'm inspired by my friend Stephanie McKee. live a block up from us over here. And she does the same thing. She creates little events in their front yard around holidays just to invite the neighborhood into a thing that she's already doing. to grow a sense of community. So if you want to hang out with me on Thanksgiving or on Halloween, I will be in Stephanie's front yard eating their hot dogs and making s'mores while everybody goes trick-or-treating. I'm inspired, by the way, that the librarians have continually checked up on their neighbor who recently passed. or whose husband recently passed. Zane thought, you remember the Good Samaritan experiment that I talked about a couple of weeks ago where the Princeton students were sent across campus and they stumbled upon somebody who was in need? Zane thought that I had set this up for him when he found Vicki, their neighbor, lying on the ground outside while he was in a hurry to go get Clara from volleyball practice. And he told me he waved goodbye and hoped that she was okay. I'm kidding, he stopped. He is one of the 10 percenters, right? I told you this, that when we are in a hurry, only about 10 percent of those students stopped to help the person who was obviously in need. And then there's Margaret Hollingsworth. I buried Margaret Hollingsworth on Friday. Some of you may have known her. She sat right there. Her children in the lead up to her funeral, told me that at their holiday tables there were always strangers. Somebody down on their luck, some neighbor who needed a hand, some single mother with her children who didn't have anywhere else to go and no family. They were welcomed at Margaret's table. Margaret just wanted people to know that they were loved, that there was space for them, that somebody gave a rip. That's the good news of Jesus, my friends. Like, that is the good news of Jesus made very tangible and real. Without an agenda, without a program, there's nothing behind it except for the love that God has poured into our lives. It looks like an extra place setting at Thanksgiving. Neighboring is contagious because love is contagious. I suspect the same thing is true for the people who are watching your lives as those of you who I'm watching and am inspired by. When you go out of your way, when you make space, when you show up, others are bearing witness to your life that you might not even know that they're paying attention. But when they see you, will begin to consider how they might get in on that good work too. And that's how the neighborhood of God spreads. Because we have been transformed by the love and the way of Jesus, that love comes out and it spreads. Or we're just doing mouth lip service here. And my hope goes even further, in fact. I hope. that enough of us, if enough of us neighbor like this, like Eric and Stephanie and Zane and Mary Collette and Margaret and you, it'll change not just our blocks, but our common life together as people. That we'll become a people who receive the immigrant, who care for the poor, who make sure that everyone has what they need to flourish. Because what's really insane is that saying things like that out loud feels divisive right now. But those aren't divisive things. These are basic Christian hopes and dreams. They are the neighborhood of God made visible on Earth. And I believe that when we love our neighbors well enough, persistently enough, Contagiously and courageously enough, it reshapes what we think we owe one another, which is only a burden of love. So as the world burns with anger and hostility and people in bully pulpits trying to make us enemies of one another, let us learn to love one another instead. May love be our resistance song. So go forth, my friends, and practice the art of neighboring, the art of love, the art of following. For God is with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.