Fairhaven UMC

I’ve never really considered myself to be a fire and brimstone preacher. And my preference generally is to stick close to the theological understanding of John Wesley, no surprise there. And Wesley insisted that God’s ruling attribute is love. That above all things, when it gets down to it, the one thing that will describe what God does, what God is, is love.

And that differs from other groups of Christians. It’s not sovereignty or power, that’s what Calvinists would usually say. It’s not righteousness or justice like Lutherans might suggest. It’s love.

Over all things, God is about love. However, I feel like I’m kind of cracking my evangelical knuckles here. I would suggest that preachers, myself included, can be a little bit too soft sometimes. We can be a little tepid in our focus on love, in confronting the powers and the principalities of a world that really is addicted to sin and to death, right? from our governing institutions all the way down to the way that we conduct our lives as individuals.

And I recognize that we all come to church for different reasons, and those reasons vary even from week to week. But one of those key drivers is often comfort. We want to hear a word that will soothe our weary souls. We want to sing some songs that will take us back to simpler times.

That’s why I’m wedging this in with a hymn singe. We want to have some coffee and donuts. And then we want to go home and relax. Church is this hour where you don’t have to think about the news.

You don’t have to think about trouble with your parents or your kids or grandkids. You don’t have to think about the stack of bills on the kitchen counter. And that’s totally valid from time to time. Your church, your faith, your preacher are doing you a terrible disservice if your overwhelmingly However.

.. predominant experience of the Christian faith is one of comfort. The Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor said that people think that faith is this warm electric blanket, but in reality it is the cross.

And I really have to remind myself of this sometimes, and Amos really is dragging us into it today. Right? The same John Wesley who staked his entire ministry on God being love above all other things, and he was correct about that, also had one single piercing question for anyone that sought to join one of his class meetings or societies that comprised the early Methodist movement. And that question was simply..

. Anybody? Okay, what? No. That’s what he asked at the meetings. But before you’re even allowed in, do you desire to flee from the wrath to come? A little harsher than we usually imagine, Wesley.

A little bit sharper than your average Methodist sermon these days. But it’s a crucial question because the Lord our God is making all things new. The old is passing away. The new has come.

And we say this together almost every Sunday. Jesus Christ shall come again to judge the quick and the dead, the living and the dead. So our goal should never be to just, you know, slip into heaven under the wire. That’s not what this is for.

Our goal is total righteousness, freedom, reconciliation in Christ. It’s to be made perfect through God working in us. We can be sure that one day, maybe in this life, maybe in the ages to come, the wicked and the righteous will both receive from God what is rightly theirs. And there are some who will indeed receive the wrath of God, and I would like to be as far away from that as possible.

I’d like us all instead to be on the ark that is Jesus when the storms roll in. And so we turn to the prophet Amos today, who is not at all shy in talking about God’s wrath, God’s justice. Now, we get a little bit of this information in the passage itself, but here’s some background as we jump in. Because we’re jumping into Amos 7 here.

Amos is basically a farmer. He’s not a priest or a prophet by trade. He’s a shepherd, to be specific. He’s a grower of sycamore trees, of sycamore figs.

And he comes from the village of Tekoa in Judah. And Judah is the southern portion of what was formerly, under David and his descendants, one big united kingdom of Israel. They split up. But the Lord has given Amos a vision, and he has sent him out as a prophet, not to his own country, but to the northern kingdom, which is still called Israel at this time.

He’s from Judah, but he’s preaching in Israel. And the time period here, by the way, just to give you a sense, is a couple decades. It’s right around the same time as Isaiah, but a couple decades beforehand. And Amos’ focus is very similar to Isaiah’s.

He’s warning the people of Israel that because of their injustice, because of their turning away from God, and particularly the way they treat the poor and the vulnerable, Okay? They’re going to be conquered. They’re going to be scattered by Assyria, this rising superpower to their northeast. The Assyrian threat is building, they don’t see it. Amos is warning them that they’re going to be taken by the sword because of the way they’re behaving.

And basically what Amos is warning Israel about is a precursor, this kind of preview of what’s going to happen to Judah a few decades later when they’re conquered by Babylon. And then we see the Babylonian captivity, the exile, all that stuff as Israel is basically destroyed. Amos is promising in his prophecies nothing less than the final end of Israel as an independent monarchy. And that was it.

This was it. It never happened again. This is apocalyptic. And he’s trying to get them to understand that there is a real reckoning coming.

So what we hear from Amos is a lot that should grab our attention. But there’s one thing in particular that strikes me as eternally true. And that is this. When someone speaking on behalf of the Lord asks the people if they desire to flee from the wrath to come, and when he even offers them a chance to do so, an off-ramp, Bye.

their response is not, great, let’s go, or, oh no, that’s terrible. It’s, shut up and go away. And that really is the crux of this story’s exchange between Amos and Amaziah, who’s the high priest of Bethel. God has given Amos this really stark vision of a plumb line.

You all know what a plumb line is. If you’ve never used one, it’s literally just a weight on a string. And it’s a tool that’s used to measure the straightness, the uprightness of a wall. You hold it against the wall and see if it’s square.

And God says that one of those has been placed in the midst of Israel as if to measure their uprightness. And the implication is they’re not straight. They’re not standing upright. They’re not the way they’re supposed to be.

They have been found wanting. And now God tells Amos he will never again forgive and restore Israel. Judgment will come in the form of the Assyrian sword. So Amos has been going around preaching this in Bethel.

That’s the religious capital of the northern kingdom. It’s like their Jerusalem. And Amaziah reports this to King Jeroboam. He’s like, something is going on here.

And he reports that Amos is engaging in this sedition, undermining the king, this treason, speaking against the kingdom of Israel like this in public. He’s getting people really upset. And they’re trying to put a lid on this because presumably it’s riling people up a bit. And Amaziah goes and confronts Amos and says, you who see things, what a way to talk about a prophet, right? You who see things, go.

Run away to the land of Judah, eat your bread there and prophesy there, but never again prophesy at Bethel. For this is the king’s holy place and his royal house. That is, shut up and go away. Amen.

You’re really ruining the vibes here, Amos. And he really is. Because the thing is, King Jeroboam II, who is the king at this time, is presiding over the absolute peak of Israelite power and prosperity. This is a golden age.

Israel is doing extremely well, as good as it will ever, ever, ever do. Even today, archaeologists looking back at this time period, confirm that during Jeroboam’s reign, Israel is the most densely populated country in the region. It’s extremely wealthy. It’s become wealthy by trading luxury goods like wine, olive oil, fine horses, and ironically mostly with the Assyrian Empire that’s soon going to wipe them out.

But things are really, really good when Amos is prophesying. So there’s a little bit of a dissonance here. You can understand where Amaziah is coming from. What are you talking about? We’re doing fine, actually.

The stock market is in excellent shape. The unemployment rate is very, very low. The military is strong as it’s ever been. Leave us alone.

And I suspect there’s another layer under this too, an implication that he’s making. Leave us alone. If things are booming the way that they are, God must be blessing us. God is giving this to us and you are wrong.

So see, there’s often this contradiction present whenever we’re in good times. Prosperity and power are accompanied by fear, not too far below the surface, that all of this could come crashing down. Who knows how much damage the shepherd could do if he just keeps talking in Bethel. It isn’t all that hard to drum up a rebellion, a market crash.

They were having assassination attempts right and left on Israelite kings at this time. It’s not that hard to make that happen. So Amaziah’s confrontation of Amos has what I read as a very noticeable tinge of frantic desperation in it. I hear some desperation.

Desperation. But in his conversation with King Jeroboam, the priest Amaziah expresses this fear of Amos’ words in a different way. And he says it like this. The land isn’t able to cope with everything that he is saying.

Isn’t that such an interesting way to put it? He doesn’t say that Amos is lying, you’ll notice. What he is saying instead is that this very land, the people, the place, the fabric of the kingdom of Israel cannot handle what Amos is saying. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, and so it has to be shut down. It doesn’t matter if he’s right.

It doesn’t matter if he’s wrong. We can’t handle hearing it. It’s not worth dealing with. It’s too much trouble.

I’m reminded of a satirical movie that came out about five years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio. Don’t Look Up on Netflix. Anybody seen it? But the president’s, in that movie, there’s a world-ending comet that looms ever closer in the sky. You know, people can see it moving towards Earth, this big rock hanging over them in the sky.

And everybody can see it. And the president’s response to the people who are worried about it is, don’t look up. That is their advertising campaign. Don’t worry about it.

Don’t look up. Keep on running over the cliff’s edge, hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote, praying that gravity never kicks in. Don’t look at it.

And that’s a deeply sad place for a priest to be. He ought to know better. Amaziah is desperately trying to preserve the status quo. He is completely cynical.

He represents a religion that has become so flimsy that he can’t imagine that anyone genuinely speaks the word of God. And further, he refers to Bethel, a word that literally means house of God in Hebrew, Bethel, house of God. He refers to Bethel as the king’s holy place and royal house, not God’s, the king’s house. The temple in Amaziah’s eyes is not primarily God’s, but exists in the service of the king.

It’s a really blasphemous thing to say. It’s offensive to God for any ruler to think they have a say over what comes out of the pulpit, so to speak. Because this is God’s temple. It’s not the king’s.

It’s not the emperor. It’s not the president’s temple. And so when Amos defends himself against Amaziah’s allegations by saying he’s not a prophet or a prophet’s son, he’s talking about what had become a lucrative career at the time. There were people who were vocational prophets.

They were court prophets. They were hired by the king to offer messages from God to tell them what to do. And Amos isn’t a pro here. He’s not a professional prophet who does this for the money or the recognition.

This isn’t his job. It’s his calling. He didn’t want to go from Judah to Israel to prophesy. He was a shepherd.

He has this fig orchard. That’s a way easier way to make money than going to a foreign land and shouting down its king. Calling an entire people to repentance, to change, to flee from the wrath to come. He would not be doing this if he had a choice.

And so Amaziah and King Jeroboam find out that they can’t shut Amaziah up. They can’t stop him from raining on their parade, from poking holes in this golden age. Because this word that comes from God can’t be stopped. Prophets of God can be slandered, they can be criticized, they can be shouted at, but they cannot shut him up.

Pretty much the entire issue that Amos is speaking about is that Israel is mistreating the poor and the vulnerable. That’s the whole issue here. The people whom they are commanded to care for countless times in the law of Moses, the widow, the orphan, the poor, the alien, or the immigrant, they’re throwing them under the bus in the name of prosperity and power. And indeed, they actually resent that God expects them to behave with justice, with honor.

Wow. They complain in the next chapter. When will the new moon be over? So that we may sell grain. And the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale.

Make the ephah, a measure of grain, smaller. Enlarge the shekel. and deceive with false balances in order to buy the needy for silver, to buy the helpless for sandals, and sell garbage as grain. They hate that God wants to put the brakes on what they want to do.

And that includes committing fraud by lying about the weight of grain and the value of money. They want to milk a little bit more money out of the poor who are trying to buy food. They want to adulterate the grain. They want to add stuff to the grain so that it’ll weigh more and they can make more money off it.

They want to force people into debt slavery. They want to cause the poor to be so vulnerable that they can be bought for a pair of sandals. And any attempt to shut Amos up is not going to change the reality that God will ensure that justice is done. In fact, God is offering them grace here.

God is doing them a service by offering them a prophet, by calling their attention back to the covenant that God has made with them, offering them again this off-ramp grace. to change their ways, to avoid destruction. That’s what prophets are for, to give people a chance. But regardless of how they respond, as Amos says in chapter 5, this is what’s going to happen.

Justice is going to roll down like rivers. Righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And that’s not supposed to be this image of natural beauty or whatever. This is supposed to be the unstoppable power of a flood, of holy justice, of righteousness, Righteousness.

washing away wickedness and sin like Pharaoh’s soldiers as the Red Sea closes on them. That’s what this role of justice looks like. And so Amos’ warning here is meant for this particular people in this particular place, but it’s also timeless because I think we’re a country that thinks we’re doing pretty well, after all. Yet our cities are dotted with tents and overdoses.

Credit card interest rates are so high that they’d have been viewed as obviously criminal 100 years ago, and we don’t even think about that stuff as immoral anymore. An uncontrolled new epidemic is emerging as gambling addiction, which is accompanied by domestic violence with suicide, is through the roof. It’s entirely illegal to lose everything you have to a slot machine on your phone. That would have been viewed as immoral by the church in the past.

Support for the poor and vulnerable is being rolled back. Foreigners in our land are being mistreated worse than they’ve been in generations. And so I ask, do we desire to flee from the wrath to come or not? We can tell ourselves like Jeroboam and Amaziah that God’s not really concerned with any of our stuff. Just with our souls.

As long as we keep on praying in his name, singing his praises, putting crosses in our houses, going about our rituals. But that’s not how it works. Because God’s ruling attribute is love. Which means that God burns with anger at the mistreatment of his people and of creation.

And judgment will come. The Lord stands in our midst as a plumb line, showing right where we’re crooked if we’re willing to see it. And that plumb line, by the way, is Jesus himself. We put ourselves up to the example of Jesus and we see where we’re right and where we’re wrong.

Paul talks about this in his letter to the Colossians about how we can move forward in the midst of this destruction. He says, Once you were alienated from God, you were enemies with him in your minds, which was shown by your evil actions. But now he has reconciled you by his physical body through death to present you before God as a people who are holy, faultless, and without blame. But you need to remain well-established, rooted in faith, and not shift away from the hope that was given in the good news that you heard.

live in the grace, the power, the reckless love of Jesus. Hold on to him and his example. Defy a world of violence and injustice. That’s what the church is for.

That’s what our faith in Christ is for. Flee from the wrath to come. Lift high the cross and pull the world along with you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

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.