For years now, I have had a complicated relationship with the faith that raised me. As time continues, I keep wondering if we were even reading the same book. It has also been years since I have opened my Bible. But years spent studying and memorizing mean that it is inside me and it comes to mind unbidden often. Today, the question on my lips is this:
Is this how we love our neighbor? Most of my Christian friends and family supported an administration that is not quiet about who it hates and who it considers less than human. And somewhere along the last 6 years many of them have stepped quietly back to being some kind of vaguely apolitical. Some kind of spiritual bypassing that only cares about the next life and is really just coasting through this one.
Is this how we love our neighbor? Tax dollars fund a cold civil war that is erupting into violence in Minnesota and I'm sure will come to my city any day now. Why? Because somehow, someway all of the people allegedly gifted with God's discernment have become convinced that what makes us unsafe are immigrants.
And I think of the Good Samaritan. The political outcast Samaritan. The way Jesus led his audience to say with their mouths that the unpopular political group is the neighbor, the protagonist demonstrating how we follow the second greatest commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. Today, Jesus might have made the protagonist an undocumented immigrant or a trans person. Because that is the point. The man Jesus is telling the story of the Good Samaritan to wants to quantify who his neighbor is. Who does he have to love as himself? And Jesus tells the story of a Samaritan who finds a man bleeding in a ditch after all the righteous and powerful have already chose not to help. Jesus says, "be like the Samaritan". If you find a man bleeding in the ditch, even if he is your political opposite and might wish you harm if he were well and able, help him. Work for his health and happiness. Invest your time and your money. Loving your neighbor is going to cost you. It will not happen on a day when you have no other obligations or stress. That person might not even thank you or repay you.
And I look at the church folks I know today with that story burning in my heart, and I think, "Is this how we love our neighbor?" Have they not become the priest who pretends not to see, who chooses not to inconvenience themselves? Do they not shrink back from anything that seems too unclean?
So many Christians act like Jesus told you to make sure folks get to heaven. Did you know that love the sinner, hate the sin is not in fact in the Bible? If you go back and read things carefully, you will find verse upon verse that tells you to make Earth like heaven followed by verses about caring for people's physical needs. From the Lord's prayer to the book of James calling out that faith without deeds (deeds that feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and take care of the orphan and widow) is dead. Paul says that he could have every spiritual gift but they would all be nothing if he doesn't have love.
I have had people close to me tell me that my heart is so soft and I am too compassionate. But I think I just took the life of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount to the cleansing of the temple at face value. These words raised me and now they haunt me.
Is this how we love our neighbor? Is this how we love our neighbor? Is this?
