Fairhaven Sermon 7-13-2025

You know, you're originally going to get a sermon with both of these passages in it. I was going to do the Luke and the Amos. I didn't want to talk for an hour. So we might go back next week and do Amos because I got about six pages in and I'm like, you know what? We'll wait.

All right. Yes. If you use the word neighbor in Pittsburgh, there's an image and a voice that inevitably Yes. comes to mind, right? A zip-up sweater, maybe? Mr.

Rogers defined what a neighborhood is for generations of Americans. His imprint in this region, his home in particular, is even bigger. He's become something of a saint around here. When Mr.

Rogers welcomed us all into his living room to spend some time with the goldfish and, God help us, Lady Elaine, by asking, won't you be my neighbor, it's worth looking a little bit more closely to ask exactly what he meant by that. Be my neighbor, right? Obviously, you and I and millions of PBS watchers were not Fred Rogers' literal neighbors, unless you happened to live in Squirrel Hill during that 33-year time span. Right? Maybe some of you did. Some of you might have been his neighbors.

At least that's the way we tend to understand the word neighbor, right? But we were invited to be his neighbors in a spiritual, in a Christian sort of sense. And you can certainly, you're probably almost certainly aware of this, rather, but Mr. Rogers' Right? training was as a Presbyterian pastor. He was a pastor first.

He was educated at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He was ordained into the Pittsburgh Presbytery. And he never left that behind, even as kind of the venue of his ministry shifted, right? And so whenever he talked about neighbors, he knew very well what he was trying to get at. He knew what language he was speaking, and that was Christian language.

He wasn't calling us to go buy a house in Squirrel Hill. He wasn't calling us to rent along the miniature trolley line that ran between his home on one end and the castle in the neighborhood of make-believe on the other end. That's not what he meant. Instead, he was helping American children and hopefully their parents and later their children He wasn't calling us to rent along the miniature trolley line that ran between his home on one end and the castle in the neighborhood of make-believe on the other end.

start to understand this really deeply Christian concept, one that Jesus talks about most memorably here in the 10th chapter of Luke. So if I were to ask you what a neighbor is, you'd probably give me a definition that stems from what a neighborhood is. And so a neighborhood, Pittsburgh has 99 of them. We have neighborhoods as huge as Carrick, as tiny as Duck Hollow.

I feel like they're inventing new ones every couple weeks. I learn about a new one. A neighborhood is a geographical area, right? It's often centered around a particular landmark or a focal point. Highland Park is centered around Highland Park.

In Carrick, it's centered around the Brownsville Road corridor. In Overbrook, it's centered around us. Wow. I mean, the ghost of what used to be Overbrook's Main Street back in the old days.

And especially true here in Pittsburgh, a neighborhood is also home to a particular, like, hyper-local culture. which could be ethnic, it could be racial, it could be economic, it could be something else. I mean, like, try telling someone from Overbrook that they live in Carrick and see how they respond. Think about this.

Shadyside is rich. Bels Hoover is the tight-knit center of gravity for the black community in South Pittsburgh. Beach View has this growing Latino population. Brookline is a more affordable, semi-suburban area.

Young families often buy their first house there. Right? Polish Hill used to be Polish. And now it's known for this punk rock kind of subculture that's there. So given all this, you might tell me that your neighbor is someone who lives in your neighborhood.

And at the very least, that would be a neighbor who would share geographic roots with you, cultural roots as well. And so that would seem to give a relatively cut and dry answer to the question a legal expert uses to try to trick Jesus in Luke 10. Who is my neighbor? Someone who lives in my neighborhood. Well, maybe not.

It might not be that straightforward. Okay. So for context as to what's going on here in Luke 10, this legal expert serving kind of as a challenger, an antagonist of Jesus, he's trying to catch him saying something heretical, something that's against the law of Moses that will prove that he's this false teacher who needs to be condemned and ignored. There are a lot of those floating around, so you see why they were doing this.

And so the legal expert is asking this sequence of questions, and each of them he's hoping is just a little bit harder trying to trip Jesus up. So he starts with a really big picture, kind of the fundamental question. What must I do to gain eternal life? And Jesus answers, well, what does scripture tell you? Good answer, Jesus. And this is an answer that can't be wrong since it puts the focus back on the legal expert.

It makes him answer and it makes clear that Jesus is not coming up with some newfangled theology. So the legal expert gives his answer and he says, You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And this is verbatim scripture. This is straight out of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the law of Moses, Deuteronomy 6.

5 and Leviticus 19.8 to be specific. That's word for word Old Testament. And this is the centerpiece, the kind of scaffolding around which the entire law of Moses is built.

This is the law that Jews have lived by for thousands of years. And so Jesus confirms, yes, exactly. Do that. Do that and you will live.

But the legal expert pushes further. Do that. He thinks that he can maybe trip Jesus up on the details. So, ah, okay, we know who God is, but who is my neighbor? I know God, I can love God, but who's my neighbor? Who specifically am I obligated to love? How big is this circle of care that I'm supposed to be responsible for? And I don't know about you, but this is a question that I wrestle with constantly.

Okay. Who is my responsibility? So this is where we and he, the legal expert, think that we're going to get some specific answer from Jesus. You got to love these people. These people aren't your problem.

And after all, rabbis in the Jewish tradition, and Jesus was a rabbi, keep that in mind, they painstakingly debate details like this in the Torah. They come up with all these specific regulations that help people apply the law to their daily lives. That's a lot of what rabbis do. Think about the specificity even today with which the Jewish community treats regulations around Sabbath, what you're allowed to do, what you're not.

How you keep kosher, what you can eat, what you can't, what you can touch, and when. All that stuff. All of that gets hammered out in debate over the years. But Jesus here isn't interested in debating anybody.

He's not interested in making any kind of explicit legal argument, making a ruling on the law. Instead, and this is extremely irritating because he does it to anybody who wants to debate him, he tells a story. He says, He tells a story. He placed him on his own donkey and he brings him to the inn in order to sleep and recuperate.

He finds a motel six along the road, puts him up there, tends to him. And even then, whenever he has to leave and continue on his journey, the Samaritan keeps caring for the beaten man. He leaves money with the innkeeper to make sure that he's still got a place to stay, make sure that he's well fed, make sure that he gets medical care. And then he promises the innkeeper that when he comes back through, he'll pay whatever the balance is, whatever it costs to take care of this guy, he'll make it right.

So finishing the story, Jesus asks the legal expert, which one of these three was a neighbor? And the legal expert, again, is forced to answer his own question. The Samaritan is the one who has been a neighbor. and we can be sure that this is not the answer that he wants. Okay.

He's forced to concede that it's the right answer, but it's not the answer that he wants to give. It's not the answer that we're going to want to give either. Because Jesus has fundamentally redefined what the meaning of neighbor is, transforming it from what we think it means to something unrecognizably different. Because the thing is, the Samaritan is literally not this beaten up guy's neighbor.

He's literally not. He's not the legal expert's neighbor. He's not Jesus' neighbor. It's right there in his name.

He's a Samaritan. He's not even from their country. He's from Samaria. He's from a different place, a different ethnicity, a different religion, right? And more than that, this is something that has gotten often kind of obscured in the telling of this story over the years.

The Samaritans are some of the most hated enemies of the Jews in those days. The Jews and the Samaritans despised each other. Their history diverged from the Jewish peoples in such a way that they were like almost feuding cousins because they started as one people. But then after the exile, the Samaritans sort of changed their religion and they worshiped God on a different mountain in Samaria.

They worshiped God on Mount Gerizim while the Jews worshiped God in Judea on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, right? And this sounds small, but it's a huge sticking point. I mean, there's Samaritans still around today, by the way, like 700 of them. But they are completely contradictory because as far as the Jewish people are concerned, the Samaritans are worshiping a different God. They are traitors.

They are blasphemers to the God they once shared. They didn't hold on. And so there's this really deep ancient ethnic heritage here. It had actually increased a little bit in the 200 years before Jesus came on the scene due to a couple historical events.

This was peak Samaritan hatred time. And so the Jewish people oppress and reject the Samaritans. They hate the Samaritans. So much so, and we see this elsewhere in the Gospels, that Jews do their absolute best to go around Samaria when they're traveling.

If they have to take a much longer route, they will because they don't want to go there and see those people. And it's not like it's tucked off to the side. Samaria is like right there. we can be pretty sure that even the innkeeper in this story is probably not happy when a Samaritan walks in the door and asks to rent a room.

He doesn't want him, with his funny accent, his different clothes. But who is the one who behaves as a neighbor? And don't forget this part. Go back to the original question the legal expert asked. Who then is the one, by implication, who's in the position to inherit eternal life? Because those questions were one and the same.

That was the original question. And the answer from Jesus is not the Israelite priest, not the Levite who's another ancestral member of the Jewish religious elite. It is this heretical, hated foreigner, the Samaritan. Jesus has thrown out completely this idea that we are foremost neighbors to the people who are like us, who live near us, who share our culture, our status, our religion, our language.

That stuff might matter in the secular world, but it's not of concern to Christians. It's not our problem. No, if you want to inherit eternal life, Jesus says, you are to love your neighbor as yourself. And your neighbor, as far as God is concerned, is everyone whose life interacts with yours.

Neighborness is not a function of geography, of culture, of shared citizenship. And you can easily choose not to be a neighbor to the person who lives next door to you. Plenty of people do that. You can easily not be a neighbor, in Jesus' definition, to the person who is literally your neighbor.

It's two different kinds of neighbors. And the same way you can be a neighbor to say a child in Gaza, a persecuted Christian in Nigeria or China, a Salvadoran refugee family. Right? You can do that. You can be a neighbor to those people regardless of if they live next to you.

Fewer do that. To be a neighbor is something that you choose. It's not dictated by where you buy a house or by where you rent an apartment. And here's the important thing in this story.

If you're a Christian, Jesus Christ himself requires you to make that choice. Jesus makes this a matter of eternal life and death, does he not? Because again, the original question the legal expert asked was, how do I inherit eternal life? And the final answer that they come to is be like that Samaritan. who has acted with selfless love towards a man who was raised to hate him in a country that wanted him to go back to where he came from, or at the very least, just get out of here. And so we see in this parable, and we know from real life, that religious people who should know better are often the worst at this.

Perhaps it's because we're deep enough into scripture, into faith, into calling ourselves Christians, that we can end up in so many situations like this legal expert. We find ourselves scrambling to come up with a good Christian sounding reason why this teaching doesn't apply to us. It doesn't apply to our specific situation. but we will, like the legal expert, end up confronting Jesus face-to-face, and he will make the truth unavoidable.

So I'll ask you a question here, and this is not a rhetorical one, but I'm also not asking you to answer out loud. As you have heard Jesus' parable about this hated foreigner who pours out his life for a stranger, whom Jesus says ends up being a better believer in God than the professionals, Who is your neighbor? And then, who is the individual in your life? The group in this world? The population that makes you ask, but surely not them, right? but surely not them, because that's what this legal expert is thinking, but surely not them. He's coming up with reasons. You're coming up with reasons.

I'm coming up with reasons. Right? I'm sure that the Holy Spirit makes this specific in your heart. Look, the Levite and the priest probably had excellent, compelling reasons why they had to leave that beaten man on the side of the road. They did have good reasons.

Many preachers have speculated about this over the years. Touching him would make them impure, and they need to be pure in order to do their priestly jobs. Maybe they were on their way to deal with a life or death situation. Maybe they had to go meet a congregant who was dying, right? Right? Maybe it was reasonable to suspect that this guy lying in the ditch was there as a trap, a lure, bait, putting them at risk of being victims themselves.

That's an age-old scam. Maybe he was a criminal himself. Maybe he was reaping the consequences of his own actions, right? Jesus doesn't care. I think that's very clear here.

Jesus doesn't care. Whatever bulletproof reasons we might come up with for why someone isn't our neighbor, for why they aren't worthy of love, of dignity, of care, the same way that we are and our families are, well, those bulletproof reasons are our reasons. They're not God's reasons. They're not.

So who is your neighbor? They're not. Jesus tells us not to let your answer stand between you and eternal life. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Amen.