Being A Neighbor is an action

Recently I was helping someone move their office furniture – from a larger space to a smaller one. Of course not everything could fit. So when it came to the filing cabinets, they had to choose which one to take and which one to leave behind.

I feel similarly with today’s readings. There’s only so much “space” and we have two incredible bible stories. In the first reading, we have the story of Jonah. In the gospel we hear from Luke 10 about the “Good Samaritan.” How does one choose?

For today, I’ll pick the reading from Luke 10, but if you want to read some of my other musings about the Jonah story, you can look here, here or here!

Today’s gospel starts with a challenge to Jesus. A “scholar of the law” asks Jesus an academic question about eternal life to see what he’ll say. Instead of answering, Jesus asks the scholar what the “law” says. The man quotes Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19 about loving God with our whole heart, mind and soul and then loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus congratulates him on a good response. Then the man drops a question that changed history. He asks, “And who is my neighbor?”

In the time of Jesus, one’s “neighbor” was generally considered a member of the Israelite community. While the definition included foreigners who lived in the land and some other categories of people, it generally implied a person with whom you had some form of relationship or kinship. [Note: The corollary to this idea is that there are people who are not “kin” and therefore one is not obligated to love them]

I can imagine the scholar asking the question because he wanted Jesus to say, “And have you treated your kin (neighbor) well, my friend?” And the man was probably dying to say, “Why, yes, I have! Aren’t I a good person!”

Instead of answering the question, Jesus tells a story – a story that has been challenging us for 2000 years. In it a man falls prey to robbers and is left for dead by the side of the road. It is obvious to anyone who looks at him that he is hurting. A priest and a Levite – both respected religious authorities in the Jewish tradition – see this man and walk right on by. In fact, they even cross the road! A Samaritan comes along, however, notices the man’s injuries and takes action to help him.

It may be hard for our modern ears to understand the context of what the Samaritan means in this story. But maybe think about the deep historical animosity and violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. There was deep political, religious and cultural hate that had emerged over hundreds of years between the Samaritans and Jews.

And so the mention of the Samaritan as being the one who did the right thing would have been quite shocking (and maybe even revolting) to Jesus’ listeners.

I often think to myself, “Who would be in that category for me?” I don’t really want to put in writing who this would be for me, but ask me privately sometime! Maybe you have your own response.

Naturally, there’s so much we can take from today’s reading.

One aspect I want to focus on today is seeing one another as “kin.” Somehow, the priest and the Levite failed to recognize their deep connection to the person on the side of the road. Some internal mechanisms were operating that enabled them to disconnect themselves from the person in need.

You have likely heard me quote john powell before. He has done some amazing work related to “othering and belonging.” powell says that humans have figured out a lot of ways to “pretend we’re not connected. Our sexual orientation, our race, our gender, our age, our language, our disability. We use all these things to try to pretend that we’re not connected. And when we pretend we’re not connected, we’re in the process of othering. We’re in the process of denying not only someone’s humanity, but our own humanity, and denying our connectedness.”

We see that in today’s reading – this denial of connection. And it takes work to deny connection. Something essential in us needs to be turned off to be an agent of disconnection.

While it is not unique to the West, the denial of connection and othering seem to be something that is deep within us and have been practiced from the moment we set foot on these lands. From the very first contact that Westerners had here, we seemed to be able to separate ourselves from the people who were living here, the land that they lived upon and the other than human world. And we have been on a roll since!

Like the priest and the Levite, we either did not see the connection or we pretended that we weren’t connected. 

So I see two fundamental questions emerging in today’s reading. First, “Who is my neighbor?” And secondly, “How do we become kin again?”

In her wonderful book, Becoming Kin, Patty Krawec quotes writer and activist Aurora Levins Morales when she says, “Ultimately what we inherit are relationships and our beliefs about them. We can’t alter the actions of our ancestors, but we can decide what to do with the social relations they left us.”

Krawec’s book is trying to help people – especially Westerners with settler histories – reconnect with ideas of kinship. Kinship with each other. Kinship with the earth. Kinship with the other than human world. Krawec offers her readers such important counsel when she says “being a settler or a colonizer is not something you are; it is something you do.”

Jesus says the same thing. At the end of the story, once he has had the crowd respond to the question, “And who was the one who acted as neighbor,” he tells the people, “Go and do likewise.”

Jesus knows, as Levins Morales tells us, that we have all inherited so many systems of disconnection and othering. And he also knows that we can decide what to do with the social relations that they left us.

In the past year, deciding who is our neighbor and kin has been crucial. That’s why so many people are standing up to ICE raids. That’s why people are rallying for healthcare for the poor. That’s why people are on a flotilla to try to bring aid into Gaza. That’s why people are blockading banks that are funding environmental destruction. These are all moves towards kinship care!

People of faith have not always been at the forefront of solidariy movements and being neighbor to “the other”. In fact, Christians have often been agents of othering (and this is as true as ever in our modern context). But our faith tradition calls us to be ambassadors for kinship and connection – especially for the most vulnerable around us. It calls us to be neighbors to each other and to our world.

This week, may we recognize with greater and greater clarity just who our neighbor and kin really are, and in the process come to realize more fully who we are.

Being a neighbor is not an identity, it is an action.