Loving Your ____________ as Yourselves: A Sermon for September 11, in the year 2016

         It is impossible to preach on this day, and not carry the awareness of its significance. This date marks the remembrance of a tragedy larger than the individual losses, though they were many, or the depth of those losses, which was profound and final. This date marks a tragedy that now divides our sense of our history: things that happened before 9/11, and things that happened after.

         It is also impossible, and becoming more so with each passing day, to preach in this season and not carry the awareness of its significance. It is September; we inch closer and closer to November, and the closer we get the louder the voices shouting at us through our televisions and radios and Facebook and twitter accounts become. 

         But no, I’m not going to get political. I’m gonna stop right there. I’m going to stop right there, and invite us to do the most subversive thing possible: hear the word of the Lord, hear it, and discern within it what it is we are called to do as people of God.

         Our scriptures today are a motley bunch, not, I promise, chosen at random, but nonetheless a grab bag. Of them all, Leviticus gets the worst rap, and to be quite honest, it’s pretty well deserved. This chapter in particular is nothing short of a mess, really, with the strangest of minutia mixed in with the profound. But in the middle of this mess we get a reiteration of the basics: love your neighbor as yourself; and a few verses later, love the stranger as yourself.

         Much later, Jesus will preach the sermon we call the “sermon on the mount,” and he will tell the multitudes, “you have heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy; but I say to you, love your enemy, and do good to those who hate you.” At another time and place he is asked, “ah, but who is my neighbor,” a question that he will answer with a story, a story that unravels all of our assumptions about these categories. Neighbors. Enemies. Strangers.

         What I want to suggest to you today is that out of all of these familiar biblical injunctions—love your neighbor, love your enemies, love the stranger—the one we have the most trouble with, the most difficult one to do, is not the one we think. We think that Jesus is giving us a moral Mission Impossible with the “love your enemies” bit. But I want to suggest that we have a harder time loving the stranger.

         First, let’s be honest. We’re not that great with the “easy” one, either, to begin with. Loving people just isn’t all that easy most of the time. Loving your neighbor as yourself isn’t easy because your neighbor is close by, or because a neighbor is someone you know. Maybe that’s the very thing that makes it difficult. And if we get real honest, we’re not even that great at the loving ourselves part—and loving your fill-in-the-blank as yourself assumes that we’re getting that part right.

         Still and all: it’s easier in many ways to love a neighbor. Neighbors are familiar people: people whose lives we can understand, people whose needs we can see, people whose needs we often share ourselves. It is easy to love those people, the people who are like us. Love your neighbor like yourself: the very command implies a likeness, a similarity, a symmetry between this other person and the self. The needs of this other person are like my own; this other person is like me.

         This is why, I believe, the hardest command is to love the stranger. It interrupts that symmetry, that likeness, between my self and this other. This other person is not like me; this other person is strange. This is not someone whose life I understand. I don’t know this person. I don’t know anyone like this person.

         We fear what we do not know. We may dislike the neighbor; we may hate the enemy. But we fear the stranger.

         And this is the genius of Jesus’ parable, the one we call the parable of the Good Samaritan. Usually, we focus on the identity of the rescuer, and the reversal of expectation Jesus creates around the identity of the despised Samaritan, the enemy, as the righteous one, in contrast to the holy and pious Jews who pass by. And this is important; Jesus certainly told the story this way to make this point unavoidably obvious. But what I want to focus on is this: he answers the question “who is my neighbor” by telling a story about loving a stranger.

         The man on the road is travelling, walking down the road alone. He is a stranger, in a land not his own, a position that even today in a world of instant connections and communications can leave one vulnerable in unexpected ways. He is vulnerable. He is set upon, beaten and robbed and left for dead, on the side of the road in a place where no one knows him. And in what amounted to enemy territory.

         There’s no one watching. The priest and the Levite, his “neighbors,” pass by on the other side with impunity; no one sees them, maybe not even the dying man himself, there on the side of the road.

         There was no reason to stop and help, and all the reasons not to. 

          I was a college kid, backpacking around Europe, and I was walking down the road alone, in the dark. I'd taken off by myself for the day, following the advice of the never-wrong Rick Steves, looking for a tiny little place called Civita di Bagnoreggio, which meant a train and a bus and a walk to get there. It had been a lovely, quiet day, away from the 40 other students I lived with in that villa in Florence. So lovely and quiet that I forgot the time, and arrived back at the bus station, breathless, just in time to watch the bus taillights recede. And that was it; the last bus for the night. I walked into town and into the first little coffee bar I saw. I ordered a coffee and asked the barista if there was another bus. No. A taxi? No. Any way I can get to the Orvieto train station? No. Um...is there a place to stay for the night? No. (Told you it was a tiny little place.) And that's how I found myself walking down a road all alone in the dark, a stranger in a land not my own. Vulnerable. Headlights came up from behind, and a car passed me by on the other side. And then a second. And then, a car passed, slowed, stopped, and a man got out and gestured to me to get in. He was one of the customers from the bar; he'd heard my conversation with barista and seen me leave, and realized I was going to try to walk the 14 km to Orvieto, alone, in the dark. And he said, "I have a daughter studying in universita' in America. If she were alone and needed help, I would want someone there to help her." 

There was no reason to help this silly backpacking American stranger, and all sorts of reasons not to: time to go home, time for dinner, not his problem, maybe I don't want help, maybe I'd be scared to trust him. But he looked at me all alone and saw, not a stranger, but a daughter.

There was no reason to help, and all the reasons not to; but this is what the man we call the “good Samaritan” did. And when Jesus answers the question “who is my neighbor” by telling a story about an enemy loving a stranger, all of a sudden the categories implode. There is no difference. The command to love your neighbor as yourself is the command to love your enemy and the command to love the stranger.

No, I’m not going to preach a political sermon, not if I can help myself. But I will say this: what we hear in our scriptures here today cuts across the rhetoric we hear shouted from platforms from behind microphones, pushes back against the messages that we must, at all costs, protect ourselves from “those people,” whose only desire is to hurt us, kill us, terrify us because of their hatred for us and our “freedom” and our “way of life”—or those other “those people” who want to sneak in, hurt us, take advantage of us, cheat us, steal what is ours, ruin our “way of life” by their attempts to participate in it.  

      

         Love your neighbor as yourself is love your enemy and love the stranger. It is all one, as we are all one. May we be Samaritans who disregard these distinctions, as we go on our way, about our business. May we be tended by such when we are the strangers. May the indifference we have to our neighbors, the hostility we feel for our enemies, the fear we feel for the unknown stranger, dissipate in the presence of the Spirit which enables us to love without fear.