The Movement of Neighboring; March 8, 2026

Trinity Presbyterian Church: Hey everybody, so this is a special edition of the podcast wherein I recorded in my office to no audience because all of our streaming stuff went down on Sunday morning. So, ⁓ you're just gonna have to pretend like there are people actually interacting with me and that there is some sort of sense of crowd noise so that this isn't completely weird. At any rate, ⁓ here's what I offered on Sunday morning. This week, last week, Courtney of In Our Office fame texted to ask me if I had any sourdough starter that she could have. She wanted a loaf by Friday and it was Wednesday and as an old sourdough pro, I texted back the 100 emoji and the word no and then I laughed a little bit to myself. Not to be mean, but only because sourdough isn't fast. It doesn't rise in an hour, it has too much self-respect to be bossed around like that. It might not rise at all, as a matter of fact. Sourdough is a fickle mistress and it doesn't appreciate all your expectations. A sourdough starter is a slow and a living thing. You have to feed it regularly. You gotta feed it if you wanna eat from it days ahead, building it bit by bit and watching its progress. And then at the exact right moment, you take it and you fold it into a larger mass of dough. You shape it, you let it rest overnight in the fridge. And then finally, the following day, you commit it to a hot oven. And when it comes out, that dark. Crackly crust, that open crumb, that tang, it is something genuinely special. And it's different. More nutritious, more complex than a loaf that anybody could hope to make with a packet of instant yeast. And I couldn't help but think that that is exactly the work that we're doing here during this neighboring series. You can't have a loaf of neighboring by Friday if you start on Wednesday. Nobody gets ready-made community on a two-day timeline. But if you start now, if you feed it a little bit of attention, a little courage, a little time, invite the Lord Jesus into it, something real and something nourishing will indeed grow. That's week three of The Art of Neighboring. So we pick up this week with two stories. The first from the Gospel of Luke and the call of Levi, and then the Gospel of John, a story that you've heard a thousand times, the eating of the 5,000. So let's start with the Gospel of Luke, chapter five, verses 27 through 32. Listen for the word of the Lord for us. After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax collection station. And he said to him, follow me. And he got up. left everything and followed Jesus. Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house, and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with him. The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answered them, Those who are well, had no need of a physician but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." And now from the Gospel of John, chapter 6, verses 1 through 14. After this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. And when he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat? Jesus said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, Six months' wages wouldn't buy enough bread for each of them to get a little. And one of the disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, Hey, there's a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people? Jesus said, make the people sit down. Now there was a great deal of grass in the place, so they sat down, about 5,000 at all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. so also the fish as much as they wanted. And when they were satisfied, he told his disciples, gather up the fragments left over so that nothing may be lost. So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, This is indeed the prophet who has come into the world. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. God of grace, hear our prayers and see our earnest desire to love you and our world well. Open our ears and our lives to your presence and to your leading today. 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. So, If week one of this series was taking seriously Jesus's simple call to love your neighbor to mean your actual real-life neighbor that might actually really live beside you, and week two was reckoning with the very many legitimate barriers to that love, then this week is an encouragement that there is in fact a way to make the journey from point A of being a stranger to point C, that is knowing your neighbors well enough to love them in practical ways. Practical ways like bringing a meal, like helping with a project around the house, or watching one of their kids until a parent gets home. Now the good news is that while you might be scared that I'm casually throwing free childcare for strangers out there, we're not gonna start there. In fact, please do not suggest to the neighbors you just met that you can watch their kids. This is not a good look for anybody. And I don't want you to feel like you need to take drastic action to get to the place where you have that sort of mutual trust, like demanding that your neighbors accompany you on a weekend retreat where you bear your souls to one another and braid each other's hair so that you can watch their kids. That's not what I'm after. ⁓ However, at the same time, there are little heroisms, little flashes of courage, small movements toward neighboring for you to live into day after day. I think our scripture demonstrates exactly this point. John's Gospel tells the story of Jesus' very popular teaching ministry. He makes the note that it was the Passover, which is just to say that a lot of folks who didn't live nearby were visiting for the holiday. John says that there were 5,000 people there, and when Matthew tells the story, he notes that this figure doesn't even include women and children, so there may have been as many as 15,000 hungry mouths to feed. And the disciples are completely overwhelmed. They don't know what to do. And Philip says what everybody else is thinking. He says, even six months wages wouldn't be up by enough food to give everyone even a little bit, even if there was a grocery store around, right? And in Matthew's version, they tell Jesus to send everyone away to fend for themselves. But Jesus tells the disciples, they don't need to go home. You feed them. You feed them. And at this the disciples are like, there isn't a way to buy any food, there are no grocery stores around, but we do have all these people here. And that is the story of the eating of the 5,000, which is a terrible mistranslation, and an even worse joke that everybody pity left at both services. So you have to do me the favor of chuckling now. But enter the act of a courageous young boy. who offers the lunchable his mom packed for him, two fish, five lobes, which again is nothing in the face of such great need. And yet, in the hands of the Lord, indeed in the hands of his disciples, it feeds everyone with leftovers still. My point is that you don't need to do everything. You don't have to have enough food for everybody, right? You don't even need to have a plan for some extravagant display of love for your neighbor. You only ever have to do something and trust that Jesus is gonna honor that effort, right? Jesus urges us to love our neighbor as ourselves, not as some sort of cruel joke that's gonna backfire so we can trust him. that when we make an effort toward neighboring, that effort is gonna bear fruit, whether or not we get to see that fruit, because the blessing is in the faithfulness to the call and not the effectiveness of our actions. And some of you this week have shared with me the small steps you are taking and some of the plans that you are making to be good neighbors. Going out of your way to meet people, being opportunistic when you happen to see someone outside, it's been really encouraging. And others of you might not be making plans, but I know that you are thinking about neighboring. Somebody sent me a picture this week with a sign that sits at their front door. It's about, I don't know, chest high. And it says in about one foot letters down the line, it says, go away. And the sign is directed, of course, at people who try to sell you windows two or three times a week, who tell you that they were sent down your way by Bob, who lives up the street, you know? And the message that came with it was, you telling me that I need to get rid of this sign? And the answer is that I don't know. Probably not, because it's funny. But I am here to tell you that one of the great benefits of doing this neighboring project is that you will be able to say to those unwanted solicitors that you are aware with full confidence that there is not a bob on your street and that they can get lost. Kindly. My point is that I want you to just continue considering ways that you can give the fish and the loaves of your lives away because one small act of faithfulness will beget another opportunity for a small act of faithfulness. One faithful footstep in front of the other until everybody gets fed. That's the work of the Lord in our lives and in neighborhoods. It's important, I think, for me to say that this matters for us beyond simply being a better neighbor on your cul-de-sac. We are, as of this week, at war with Iran. And yes, sure, Congress hasn't called it a war, but they haven't called anything a war since World War II. That's a not-so-fun fact. I was in college when the United States began bombing Iraq and Baghdad specifically on March 19, 2003, just a few days from now, 23 years ago. My dorm mates and I set up couches in stadium seating on cinder blocks in our common area. We turned the lights down low so it felt like a movie theater. And we watched shock and awe while eating popcorn and microwave noodle cups. We thought we were watching American greatness. After all, President Bush had told us that we were going to rid the world of evil doers. We'd all started using a new phrase, the axis of evil, to describe other nations and other people. And we believed that we were the cheering on the good guys, watching the good guys win. as fire bloomed in the night over a city of 6 million people, nearly the population of the entire Metroplex, over and over and over again. It did not cross our minds that night, or that day, or that week, to think about the 6 or 7,000 innocent civilians who died that very night, March 19th, or the 40,000 who were wounded. not to mention the other casualties that would come later. We didn't think about them because we didn't call them people. We called them targets, evildoers, the enemy. And if we thought about them at all, we didn't think in terms of parents and children and school teachers. We might at best have considered them collateral damage. I want you to consider how much work those words are doing. Target. Enemy. Evildoer. Do see the distance that it places between us and them? In the same way, this week the Department of Defense posted a video of the first American torpedo strike to sink a ship since World War II. And the headline was about the military history of it, the novelty of it. How neat, a torpedo! We haven't used that in years. But 82 people died on that ship. Reports are that it wasn't even armed. It was coming back from naval exercises that we were invited to as well. And those 82 people were soldiers, sure, but they were also sons and daughters, spouses and parents. People whose names someone somewhere is unable to say out loud right now without weeping. War is ugly. And it is made uglier when we look away from it, when we excuse it, when we dress it up in euphemistic language about precision and necessity and warrior ethos. Our faith demonstrates that violence never ends violence. But it sure does multiply. The fact is that I am a pastor. And I am not a foreign policy wonk, but I do in fact have eyes and ears, and I am here to tell you that the way that our culture prepares us to accept war, the way that it flattens human beings into targets, into threats, into acceptable losses, is antithetical. Not only to our project of neighboring right now, but to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I mean, for heaven's sakes, friends, we are in week three of a series that is all about moving toward our neighbors. The whole project is about closing the distance between ourselves and the people next door so that they are no longer a vague them, but a Steve, a Raquel, a Shaheed. We want to get close enough so that we can bear witness to one another's lives. So that we can arrive at a shared sense of being in this world, God's good world together. And in that closeness, we learn to do something that we call love. That's the work. of the Christian in this world. That's the work of Christ within us. And that work is at direct cross purposes with the dehumanization and the distance that is required for us to kill another human being. Now you and I might not be in position to stop a war. We might not be in those rooms. But we are absolutely in a position to refuse to hate our neighbor. We can refuse to call the people of Iran evil. We can refuse to watch the snuff films posted by the Pentagon as though they were highlight reels. We can spit out of our mouths the blatant Islamophobia fed to us by our local reps. We can refuse the story that says that the world is divided into good people and evil people and that we always just so happen to be on the good side and that's why we drop the bombs first. That is always the story that war tells about itself. And it is never the whole truth. refusing that story and insisting on the humanity of every person in our neighbor's country of origin, holding on to the names of the people that we know as people created in God's own image. These are acts of resistance to the forces in our world that would divide us from one another and keep us from being the reconcilers and the peacemakers that God calls us to become a time and time over again. You know, all of these might be small acts and they might feel like screaming into the void. They might be the practice of the sourdough baker and not the comeback strategist, but they are faithful. And that is all that God calls us to. And the more that we do them, I believe that they will compound over time and that God will honor them. And once you've been in the practice of participating in these small courageous acts for a while, you might find that you have the gumption to take on a bigger project. And if you've been reading along in our Art of Neighboring book, one of those suggestions is to throw a party. It doesn't have to be large. It could be the family that lives in your house. and the neighbors on either side of you. Text a couple of people to say that you're outside roasting marshmallows before it gets too hard, before just walking outside with a marshmallow and DFW is enough to melt it. The point is that we don't necessarily need to make extra space in our lives to love our neighbors. We can simply invite the people around us into the lives we are already living. And if you want to get crazy, you can do more. ⁓ You can throw a block party for your whole street. For those of you who live in Flower Mound, the town already encourages you to do this on National Night Out. You can just do it more, just for fun, and not just to get a visit from McGruff the Crime Dog, which I don't think they're still doing, but they did in fact do a time ago, a while ago. And for those of you in Lewisville, the city actually will let you borrow A party trailer that is full of tables and chairs and games. And they will work with you on closing down your street for traffic so that everybody can have a good time. And if you're already skilled at this sort of thing, if you're a party person, like go for it. Go with God. But if you aren't skilled and you want to give this a go, find a partner. I bet there's somebody on your street that would help gather the people. You know, Jesus knew the power. of gathering people together and simply being with them. He did it all the time, especially with people that others might exclude. And he did it, indeed, so much that people called him a drunkard and a glutton. He loved a dinner party. And God made you for this same connection. He knows that holy moments happen on accident when we put our lives in the way of other people's lives, where grace and love and patience can be shared, and where our lives can be transformed by those same gifts. Again, one simple step after another. And maybe all these efforts still feel like standing in front of a hungry crowd with a lunch box, given the size of our world's need. And that's okay. The good news for wannabe good neighbors is that God is here for it. He is present at parties. He is at work in your chance encounters at the mailbox. He's with you when you roll down your window to say hello and how you doing. Those offerings, small as they may be, create movement. Movement from stranger to acquaintance and into something more unreal. And every offering that we present, no matter how small, is honored and seen by God. So let's commit to making small steps a big priority. And let's see how many leftovers God provides. Thanks be to God. Amen.

John 6:1–14