Lenten Series: The Art of Neighboring; February 22, 2026

speaker-1: Our first reading. which was in the children's sermon, ⁓ comes from actually ⁓ the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, verses 25 to 29. As an expert in the law, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. Teacher, he said, what must I do to inherit eternal life? He, Jesus said to him, What is written in the law? What do you read there? He answered, 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. And he, Jesus, said to him, you have given the right answer. Do this and you will live. But wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor? This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Luke 10:25–29

speaker-0: So in ⁓ of the year of Our Lord 2020, ⁓ I invited churches in the a bunch of them, ⁓ to do a series called The Art of Neighboring. ⁓ And ⁓ we finished that series together at the end of February 2020. And we had this wonderful gathering with all of us. It was the three churches that really determined to do this with us. They preached the same sermon series. They did the same midweek studies. It was us and Creekwood Christian down the road here and Faith Lutheran at the end of February. We all gathered in the Love to the Max Center up at Faith. And it was great. It was full of neighborly energy. We were getting to know one another and we were just like raring to get out there and keep the momentum going. You know, we were about to enter prime outside months. mean, March 2020 was right around the corner. you know, we had kits ready to give people on how to put a block party together or how to throw a little shindig in your front yard. It was going to be awesome. apart from the sniffles of mountain cedar that were about to come, what could possibly go wrong? Everything is the answer ⁓ to that question. So for two reasons, we are giving this series another opportunity to breathe. The first is that I want to give us another crack at putting that neighboring energy to work. And if it happens that at the end of this series, another global pandemic shuts the world down, my personal commitment to you is that I will never talk about being a good neighbor ever again. We are listening, Lord. ⁓ This is my promise. But two, doesn't it feel to you at the moment like we could use some grounding back in the realities of what it means to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbor right now?

speaker-1: you

speaker-0: In a country where the energy seems to all be laser focused in negative ways against our neighbors and where it's rather easy to feel the burden of not feeling like we can do anything meaningfully in response to change the hatefulness of this moment, I want to offer you, the church, an alternative. Because there is something, in fact, that you can do. And indeed, this has always been before you. The challenge, nay. The command to love your neighbor well is set before you by Jesus who believes that this is the most important thing that you can do in the world. So let's do that as we pick up with Jesus' response to the question, who is my neighbor? Luke 10, 30 through 37. Let's continue the conversation. Jesus replied to the question, and who is my neighbor? With this story. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now, by chance, a priest was going down that road. And when he saw him, passed by. on the other side. So likewise, a Levite, another person that would have been very important and spiritual, when he came to the place and saw the man, he passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, while traveling, came near him. And when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. And then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out Tutunari, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, take care of him, and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend. Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? He said, the one who showed him mercy. Jesus said to him, go and do likewise. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Gracious God, you have shown us your love in Jesus Christ. And may we be so filled with that love that it flows out from us and into our neighborhoods. 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. This week, ⁓ a person that I was really close to about 25, 20 years ago, but haven't seen in 15 years, they texted me and said, happy birthday, old friend, love you. And I did love them, and I still love them, and I texted them back as much. Hey, thanks, man, love you too. Miss your face. Exclamation point. That's an exclamation point. And then I spent the next 20 minutes thinking about what exactly I meant by I love you too. What does my love for that friend mean now? Like I've got really warm feelings toward him. We've got lots of memories that bind us. together and there's nothing wrong with those warm feelings of course but surely those warm feelings aren't the most full expression of love that's possible but maybe maybe that's mostly all I can ask for given the distance and the fact that we're just like different people now than we were back then and then that's okay no animosity just distance but it's that question right who is my neighbor Who is the neighbor that I'm called to love? And what is that love supposed to look like? And also, why am I so inclined to find reasons to wriggle out of that responsibility? These are the questions that had me pondering. The answer to the first part, who is my neighbor, is pretty easy. That word, neighbor, has only proximity. in mind. Whoever is nearest to you in any given moment is your neighbor. That's why this text when Jesus tells the story, when he talks about the priest and the Levite walking by, they just so happen to be in the same place at the same time and that was normal because we're supposed to assume that this guy was like their neighbor anyway, right? But when it talks about the Samaritan, it says and a Samaritan while he was traveling. This guy is outside of his normal neighborhood and yet he is the neighbor in this moment because he just so happens to be near him. So neighbor has everything to do with just who is nearby, just like that Samaritan was a neighbor because they both just so happen to be on the same road. And it didn't matter that this beaten man likely would have hated him. for who he was, a Samaritan, an outsider. So maybe I can just let that old relationship settle into what it is now because of the distance. But the closer that we get to one another, the people on my street, the people in my office building, the people in the room with me in church right now, or the people across from me on the sofa, The closer we get, the higher the expectation for how concrete this love must become to be meaningful at all. Right? Now, to ratchet things way up for demonstration purposes, the sort of love that is demanded of me by my relationship with Colleen and the kids is quite different than the relationship of that, that I have with that semi-annual texting friend, isn't it? I might feel very warmly toward my family, but if I do not demonstrate my love for Colleen by picking up the little piles of crap that I leave all around the house that she abhors, right? Or if I do not verb my love to my children by feeding them when they are hungry or putting clothes on their backs when they are cold, what good is my warm interior feelings of thinking of them at all. They are of no good. They are meaningless. One surefire way to have a dysfunctional relationship is to preach your love and practice your disregard. So it is a grace then, I think, that Jesus ties these two commandments together. Because these neighbors become opportunities for us to demonstrate our love for God. What better a positive prod toward neighbor love do we need than this? Jesus asks, do you want to show that you love God and demonstrate your gratitude to the creator for all the blessings you enjoy? Well, guess what then? You get to love your neighbor. But the struggle is always against making love simply an idea or a feeling. Maybe especially in a religious environment where belief in Jesus is mostly understood as a mental assent to certain ideas. Right? I believe the right things and therefore I've punched my ticket to heaven. In fact, this was the impetus for the question to begin with. Teacher, what do I need to do to inherit eternal life? And because we sometimes just want to make it about ideas, there is a temptation toward wriggling our way out of real honest to goodness concrete love of the actual neighbors that we actually have. Turns out that we've all got just a wee little bit of this religious scholar in us as well. Because the fella in Jesus' story wants to know who his neighbor is, but I'm not sure if you caught this part. It's not so that he can then rush over with a casserole because he's on the food team at Trinity Presbyterian Church. Right? The story goes that he asks this question so that he can justify himself. That is to figure a way out of being on the hook for the love of his neighbor. And we do this all of the time. Can you imagine? This is like the most natural human thing that we do. Can you imagine if the news got a hold of the story that Jesus told? What they would do with that? What's the first question that they would ask? Well, what was this person doing that he put himself in a position to be robbed? What was he wearing? What did he look like? We are very naturally inclined to try to find any escape path that we can possibly take to get out of loving the people that God has put in our lives. I am convinced that human beings emerge from the womb justifying themselves. Like if somebody could translate that first lung clearing cry, it would be like, I don't want to be crying right now, but you're making me do it. I didn't ask for this. It's cold out here and it's so bright. It's not my fault. But this scholar and we with him are quick to come up with any number of reasons why we simply can't or shouldn't love our neighbor. So here again is the tricky bit. in order to keep ourselves from feeling guilty about the thing that is blatantly obvious to all of us. By the way, when Jesus at or when he responds to this man's question, what do I have to do to inherit eternal life? Jesus just asked him, what do you already know is true? Right? And he tells them, he tells Jesus, well, I love you Lord God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus is like, right, yeah, go do that. He knows. But we want to wiggle out. So we try to make love a feeling. We make it abstract. We make it an idea instead of a concrete reality. Here's what I mean. We say that we love God. And yes, of course, we love our neighbors, but we often love our neighbor in the same way that we love like soup dumplings or the endangered Austin blind salamander. Like the first kind of love is just a feeling. Right? And it's more about how that soup dumpling makes me feel, which is very good, by the way, and less about what I can do for the soup dumpling. Right? Less about how I might serve the soup dumpling. It's about how that soup dumpling makes me feel. I love the soup dumpling. I love soup dumplings. The second kind of love about the endangered Austin blind salamander I mean, like, we might really love all of God's creatures or we might love nature, but like, how are we actually loving those things? What are you actually doing to keep the Austin blind salamander from going the way of the dodo? And if you are doing nothing, what exactly does your love for the Austin blind salamander mean? Nada. What does love mean if it's not concrete? Jay Pathak, he's one of the authors of the book, The Art of Neighboring, which I would encourage all of you to buy and to read along with me this series. He writes this. He writes, if you aim for everything, you'll hit nothing. If you aim for everything, you will hit nothing. J, because Jesus did it, is encouraging us to move from an abstract love of our neighbor to the concrete reality of loving your actual neighbor. Who is your neighbor? Who is God calling you to love? It's whoever is nearest you in any given moment, regardless of nationality or creed or deserving. That real person that you can really love in tangible ways, that is your neighbor. And I have some great news. That person is accessible to you because they live in a house whose door, front door is only feet from your own. Now they don't ever use that door except to get the mail. But they are indeed still accessible to you. So this lent, we are all gonna take this greatest commandment very seriously as though Jesus meant our real life neighbors. And we're gonna start with the people who actually live beside you because to do so is a step toward a life that is in supported and enriched by the very love of God poured out into your life and through your life. But here's the hard truth. Nobody can really expect you to love people that you don't know. So, to give ourselves a baseline, we're going to take a quiz on the back of your order of worship. is a chart. It's a grid with a house in the middle and houses around it. This represents your house. You are here. And these eight houses around it are the eight houses around your house. If you do not live in a neighborhood with eight houses around you, congratulations, you've made it. ⁓ But you are not off the hook. You're not off the hook. Just choose the eight houses that are nearest to you. And I want you to write. Three things, so grab a pencil. If you have a pencil or a pen, if you don't, just take notes in your phone. I don't really care. Nobody's gonna see this other than you, and you can do it later if you want. But in the first line, first thing I want you to write is to write down the names of the people that live in that house. Just their names. Second line, some fact about them. Basic fact. They, what they do for a living, something like that. And on the third line, the third thing I want you to write about them is something personal you'd only know by talking to them. They have a phobia of olives or they love classic cars, right? So three things, their name, a basic fact, and then a personal fact. You got 90 seconds. 90 seconds starting now. If the early services turned into a group project, which was fun, all of them. Is the room getting darker or is it just me? Alright, so that's your time. thought 90 seconds wasn't going be long enough, didn't you? If you feel terrible right now... You aren't alone. Jay and Dave call this the chart of shame. And here are the stats. Only 10 % of people can fill out the names of their neighbors. Only 3 % of people know anything, any observable fact about those neighbors. And less than 1 % of people know something personal about all those neighbors. And I think those less than one percenters just represent the number of people that are willing to lie in church. so, the, I did this with all of you six years ago and I will tell you that I was full of the neighborly energy. We've had a couple of houses change ownership and I need to get back on my grind. I've been lax. ⁓ The upside of the emptiness of your chart is actually really obvious. You can see it on paper that there is in fact progress to be made. And you can take action and then be able to hold in your hand evidence of the work that you've done toward loving your neighbor. as a reflection of your desire to love your God. It is not every day, and you will know this, it is not every day that you get to look at the work of pleasing Jesus that you've done that exists as a chart on your refrigerator, which is where I want you to hang this, because you can fill it in. And I'll give you a fresh one, it doesn't have to be attached to an entire bulletin, I'll give you a fresh one. This is the work of deep and abiding worth that we're gonna do together this land. And I know that this is a big ask. for some of you, I know that this is, like it is, there is an awkwardness to going across the street and being like, we've lived together, across the street together for five years, and I gotta be honest, I still don't know your name. Like, but that's where we all have to start, and they feel the same way, right? Like, this is not just a you thing, it's an all of us thing, like I said. less than 1 % of people can fill this out for everybody in their neighborhood. But at the same time as it is a big ask and it is awkward, the promise of learning to neighbor well is really exciting. You're gonna hear more about this next week, but honest to God, like who knows what you're gonna find out about your neighbor? Who knows how you are going to be blessed or be able, put yourself in a position to be a blessing to others? when you step outside of this comfort zone in order to learn and therefore be empowered to love your neighbors. Just imagine how different this world would look if everyone took simple steps toward knowing one another so that we would be inclined to love one another more. How less inclined toward hatred would we be? How less inclined toward racism or xenophobia or how absurd homophobia would become if so folks simply got to know one another well and could see by looking into the eyes of their neighbor the image of God stamped on each one. The great news is that the first step is right outside your front door. Like the Samaritan, who took concrete steps to demonstrate love and care to a real person who was in need, who was nearby and therefore became his neighbor. Jesus tells us, go and do likewise. This is how we love our neighbor and this is how we love our God. And there is a blessing in that. There's a blessing for you, for our world, and more concretely, and to the point this week, there's a blessing for you on your street in this. Thanks be to God. Amen.