EAST CRAFTSBURY – I wouldn’t be a Presbyterian pastor if I didn’t occasionally mention Presbyterian pastor, Mr. Rogers. For decades, Mr. (not going by Rev.) Rogers had a PBS show filmed from a Pittsburgh studio, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” You can pinpoint exactly where it was filmed in Studio A at WQED, but of course, it was not presented as a precise location. “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was a place that could have been anywhere. To viewers it felt like both nowhere and everywhere.
His neighborhood was not just the people who happened to be around us, though that is as good a starting point as any to find our neighbors, even if they are puppets. Part of the genius of Fred Rogers was that, without telling a single person on the air he was a Presbyterian minister, or even a Christian, he presented the kingdom of God as not a particular place with a particular land, but a state of mind; not a neighbor-dom, but a neighborhood.
In the Gospel of Luke, this was news to a religious lawyer who sought self-justification (Luke 10:29). After Jesus summarized the commandments by teaching to love God and love your neighbor as yourself, the religious lawyer asked him, “And who is my neighbor?” Christ responded by telling the story of the Good Samaritan, who helped a beaten man by the side of the road while the priests walked on. The story turned the question around; whether someone is your neighbor doesn’t depend on them, it depends on you.
How many of us are little spiritual lawyers in our own minds, seeking self-justification that we’re the Good Guys and they’re the Bad Guys? Challenging that idea is the truth that we’ve all played all characters in the Good Samaritan story before. We’ve all been the priests who looked away, we’ve all been the innkeeper who needs some convincing to help out and we’ve also all been the man beaten in the ditch in some way. And if we’re lucky, we have (through no real goodness of our own) been the Good Samaritan at least once before. I believe almost every child has been a Good Samaritan in some precious way before they reach kindergarten, if only to a bug. Maybe that’s why “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was made for them.
Crucial to the story, Jews and Samaritans in Christ’s day did not get along. When we think of who the Good Samaritans might be in our personal world, think of someone who is physically closest to you who you just know is deeply, deathly wrong about the big questions. Based on the deification of our politics, the modern name of this parable would likely be “The Good Liberal” or “The Good Trump Supporter,” someone just fundamentally wrong about the universe. But in this time and this place, the wrongness of Samaritan beliefs isn’t the point.
Instead, it’s our hidden beliefs that are on trial. Jesus tells us that he can tell who our god is based on who we do and don’t help. Is your god your politics? Is your god your religion? Is your god a business that you have to get back to? Is your god your family? Is your god your pride? Your comfort? Your time? When those are our gods, and those are just some of them, suddenly we’ll find the amount of true neighbors we have shrinks to the people we feel comfortable with, who are in our religion or can share our politics, who don’t cost anything to help. Soon, our world becomes a pretty small and exclusive neighborhood.
Jesus didn’t come to abolish the law, and he didn’t come to abolish the idea of neighbors, as if there are no differences between us. He came to fulfill what it means to be a neighbor. He didn’t come to abolish morality, but to establish the neighborhood of God among all of us.
Perhaps the even fuller question beyond “Who is my neighbor?” becomes, “What do you need to do to nurse your neighbor back to life, physically and spiritually? Who is within your power to help that needs it?”
While that may be simple, simple doesn’t mean easy. The bar here of “loving your neighbor as yourself” is one that is impossibly high. Are any of us always just as concerned with meeting the needs of others to the same degree as we are with meeting our own needs? Of course not. Yet the fountain of life is always there to drink from. The moments we take the risk to really love a neighbor at risk to ourselves, are those moments we really are neighbors, truly living in God’s neighborhood, nourishing the soul in an undeniable way more than we knew was possible.
I know we’ve all lived in that neighborhood for at least a moment. Then we develop amnesia. Eventually, we might think it was just a TV show, as real as a make-believe land with puppets and a nice guy in a sweater.
But if we’re feeling guilty about not helping our neighbors more, we haven’t quite gotten it yet. Guilt is not the point of the gospel. The starting point is that we are sinners in need of salvation. Sure, this is bad news to many of us. But that’s not the endpoint nor the full news. The point of the good news, which proclaims Christ has taken on sin in our stead, is an invitation to live in the life that can only be experienced when given away. True living is in the life given for others, to be the thing that gives itself away so that others might be nurtured. That is the Neighborhood of God.
So let us ask ourselves not only, “Am I a neighbor?”, but, “What do I need to do to give my neighbor life?” Wash, rinse, repeat; wash their wounds, rinse your hands, repeat over and over again. And when we fail to love our neighbors as ourselves, we can turn to Christ as our constant true neighbor, showing us mercy when we are wounded and bloodied and left for dead, asking that we take care of the wounded until he comes again, where he will repay us far more than we could ever spend.
Rev. Joe Welker serves the East Craftsbury Presbyterian Church. More of his writing can be found on indwelling.net.
