James 2: 1-13; Luke 10:25-37
June 24, 2018
First Presbyterian Church, Sterling IL
Christina Berry
Our first reading comes from the short epistle of James. This letter was believed to be written around the end of the 1st century. It’s quite brief, easy to read, and filled with teachings for Christians that convey as much power and authority today as they did back then.
The New Interpreter’s Commentary sums up this scripture reading well:
“There are at least three ways in which James speaks to every generation of Christianity with unparalleled clarity and conviction. First, it is uncompromising in its demand for a clear rejection of "the world," together with a consistent commitment to an understanding of reality as measured by God. Second, because its teaching is rooted less in Christology than in theology, it is among the most ecumenical writings in the New Testament, able to speak also to those who do not confess Jesus as Lord but who share the faith of Abraham. Third, it is the New Testament writing that most clearly yields a social ethics grounded in the perception of the world as created and gifted by God.”[1]
This reading invokes the Great Commandment to love neighbor, and demonstrates to Christians the importance of loving ALL our neighbors, not just the ones who look like us, or seem important, or who can do something good for us in return. Let’s listen for God’s word to us in James 2: 1-13:
My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?
Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?
But you have dishonored the poor.
Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?
Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For the one who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.
Our second reading is a familiar story to many of us, whose main character, “The Good Samaritan,” has become so well known that laws and clubs have been named after him. “Good Samaritan laws generally provide basic legal protection for those who assist a person who is injured or in danger. In essence, these laws protect the “Good Samaritan” from liability if unintended consequences result from their assistance.”[2] This story Jesus told about the Good Samaritan, though, was not told about liability or in order to give a sweet little moral lesson. Jesus told the story in order to answer a challenge. The lawyer asking questions wanted to catch Jesus in an error. Instead, he evoked a powerful lesson about the meaning of the word “neighbor.” Let’s listen for God’s word to us in Luke 10:25-37:
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.
“Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”
He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.
Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”
Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
It seems like such an innocent question, that lawyer’s challenge.
Who is my neighbor?
What area, exactly, is my neighborhood?
Most of you probably remember Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Mr. Rogers asked, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” and he wanted everyone to be his neighbor! Fred Rogers was 29 when the show began, a young Presbyterian minister. The foundations of his gentle, loving program were his faith, his respect for children, and his conviction that all of us, even Samaritans, are neighbors.
Who is my neighbor? Who is your neighbor?
What are the boundaries of my neighborhood?
In a world where there is increasing tension and polarization, the challenging question rings loudly for us as Christians. Our tough question this week was about tolerance, prejudice and racism. In the last couple of years, talking about race or discrimination has become like kryptonite for some people.
Many white people have started to feel like they can’t say anything right. Maybe they thought they had the whole racism thing figured out – “just be color-blind,” maybe, just “don’t see race.” But maybe they found out that wasn’t helpful to people of color, and then they didn’t know what to say.
Some of us thought we’d done our work, overcome our prejudices, and then found out we’d barely scratched the surface. We learned that our neighbors were suffering, were anxious, were being excluded and persecuted, because of their differences, and that our silence had made it worse.
Some of us struggled with that whole idea of “white privilege.” Those of us who grew up poor, who worked hard to achieve something, who did without and put up with incompetent bosses in dull jobs felt pretty angry about the idea that we were somehow privileged. We didn’t realize that we’d had a head start, just by virtue of the color of our skin. That skin color meant we had a better shot at everything – better schools, better houses, better jobs, better pay, than our neighbors who are people of color.
That’s a hard thing to take in – that we are privileged.
Then, when we try to explain that we are not racist, we get called out for “virtue signaling.” The guy who coined that term says virtue signaling is “the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous. Sometimes it is quite subtle. … One of the crucial aspects of virtue signalling is that it does not require actually doing anything virtuous. It does not involve delivering lunches to elderly neighbours or staying together with a spouse for the sake of the children. It takes no effort or sacrifice at all.”[3]
It’s the kind of thing that priest or that Levite in Jesus’ story would do.
You can just see them, down at the temple, telling about the guy they saw:
“I just hate it when someone gets beat up and robbed like that.”
“Oh, I saw that guy too, such a shame.”
You wonder if they then speculated on what that fellow had done wrong, in order to be set upon by thieves, beaten and robbed. You wonder if they talked about what he should have done, and how he shouldn’t have been in that neighborhood. You wonder if they said, “I wanted to stop and help him, but I was in a hurry, and night was coming, and that’s a dangerous neighborhood, and I was afraid I might get robbed, too.”
The Levite and the priest are the kind of “righteous” folks James describes. They take notice of a person with gold rings and in fine clothes coming into the assembly, and they say, “Have a seat here, please.”
But if someone had told them that they were judges with evil thoughts, they’d have been outraged.
“I’m not like that!” they’d say.
“I’m not racist! I’m not prejudiced! I see all people as equals!”
The Samaritans knew otherwise, of course. They were outcasts, the people everyone loved to hate. When Jesus was telling the story and said “But a Samaritan while traveling came near him…” there must have been a gasp from the crowd.
A Samaritan?!
Is Jesus saying that horrid, nasty Samaritan is my NEIGHBOR?
But Jesus had turned the question around.
The lawyer wanted to know, “Who is my neighbor?”
But Jesus asked “Which of the three was a neighbor?”
The lawyer answered, “The one who showed him mercy.”
The point was made – neighbor isn’t a person you name, it is something you do!
Neighbor is a verb.
The Biblical commandment to neighbor is inescapable. But how, exactly, are we supposed to love our neighbor? Let’s take a minute and talk about racism, prejudice, and discrimination.
Racism is the big one – the difficult issue.
Racism is “based on perceived 'racial' superiority and inferiority.” Systemic racism is “unequal distribution of privilege, resources and power.” That’s things like redlining, blockbusting, segregation, and hiring bias.
Prejudice is usually a little more personal. Prejudice is a “preconceived attitude, opinion or feeling, usually negative, formed without adequate knowledge, thought or reason.”[4] Each of us has some racial prejudices, some preconceived attitudes that we may not even be aware of. We have implicit biases, usually positive bias toward white people, and negative biases toward people of color. These biases can be so unconscious that we are not even aware of them, but those biases can have a powerful effect on our behavior. They make us roll up our car windows when we see a black man on the sidewalk. They make us nervous when we’re in a different neighborhood. They affect our judgment of a person’s character.
Prejudice makes white adults think black children are older than they are, which makes black boys seem more threatening. And unacknowledged prejudice may be what motivates a white police officer to fire on an unarmed black man who is reaching for his wallet, or on a thirteen year old boy playing with a toy gun in a park.
Discrimination is what happens when racism prevails. Discrimination is when we allow our prejudices to determine our actions, and that results in unfair treatment of individuals or groups; and unjust conditions in areas such as employment, housing and education.
Most of us would like to believe that we are not racist.
Most of us would like to believe that we are not too prejudiced.
Most of us want to believe that we would never discriminate.
We’d like to see ourselves as the Samaritan in Jesus’s story, not like the Levite and the priest, certainly not like the fellow who’d been beaten and robbed, and not like the person in James’ example who tells the poor person in dirty clothes, “sit at my feet!”
But we tend to overestimate ourselves, it seems.
We think we are more like Jesus, or at least more like Mr. Rogers -- than we actually are.
We think that if we witness a racist incident, we’d stick up for the victim.
We might even call ourselves allies of those who are discriminated against.
But research on prejudice and behavior tells us that most people “vastly overestimate how upset they would feel – and what they would do -- - in bad situations such as hearing a racial slur."[5]
It’s not always easy to figure out how to be a good neighbor, or how to walk with love and mercy in every neighborhood.
Sometimes, loving our neighbor asks us to simply speak up. When we witness discrimination, or a racist comment, or any situation in which a person made in God’s image is being mistreated, we are called to speak on their behalf.
Sometimes loving our neighbor means we need to set aside our prejudices and simply listen to someone who is very different from us.
Sometimes loving our neighbor means extending welcome, to someone who seems strange to us, or looks strange to us, even if we are a little bit uncomfortable.
Whether people are richly dressed, or poor and dirty,
wearing a three piece suit or a Black Lives Matter t-shirt,
flying a rainbow flag or speaking Spanish,
no matter what the color of their skin,
or their country of origin,
or their orientation,
even if they AREN’T PRESBYTERIAN!
they are our neighbors!
They are beloved people made in God’s image.
They are people for whom Christ died.
When we are good neighbors, when we neighbor,
our lives demonstrate that we are Christian–
by the words we speak,
by the actions we take,
by the mercy we show
as we listen to others and hear their stories.
Mr. Rogers would agree with that.
He said “The purpose of life is to listen – to yourself, to your neighbor, to your world and to God and, when the time comes, to respond in as helpful a way as you can find ... from within and without.”[6]
In the early months of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, in 1968, Fred Rogers met an African American opera singer, Francois Clemmons, and recruited him to play a police officer on the show, the only African American cast member in a children’s program. “In one segment that aired [in 1969], during pitched battles about integration, [Mr. Rogers] soaked his feet in a small wading pool outside his home, then invited the black policeman to cool his feet in the pool with him.”[7] “Clemmons quickly accepted, rolled up his pant legs, and placed his very brown feet in the same water as Rogers’ very white feet.
Mr. Rogers and Officer Clemmons
Nearly 25 years later Rogers and Clemmons reenacted this moment. A much older Rogers and Clemmons sat with their feet in a similar blue wading pool talking about the many different ways that children and adults say “I Love You”– from singing, to cleaning up a room, to drawing special pictures to making plays. As the scene ended, Mister Rogers took a towel and helped Clemmons dry his feet.
“Here, let me help you,” Mr. Rogers said.[8]
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Your black, brown, immigrant, disabled,
religiously different, LGBTQ, fully human neighbor.
“Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asked.
And Jesus told him a story.
At the end of the story, Jesus asked the man: who, then, was a neighbor?
And the lawyer answered, “The one who showed mercy.”
A neighbor is one who shows mercy,
no matter what neighborhood they are in.
Neighbors are not necessarily the people down your street,
but the ones we are called to love as we love ourselves.
Every person you and I meet—every single one—
has a neighbor in you and me.[9]
“Which of the three, do you think,
was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”
Jesus said to him – Jesus says to us –
“Go and do likewise.”
“Go and do likewise.”
[1] https://www.ministrymatters.com/library/#/tnib/a6f4400400b410d203ce56c53c93fd61/circumstances-of-composition.html
[2] https://www.aaos.org/AAOSNow/2014/Jan/managing/managing3/?ssopc=1
[3] https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/i-invented-virtue-signalling-now-its-taking-over-the-world/
[4] http://www.museumoftolerance.com/site/c.tmL6KfNVLtH/b.5063305/k.63A3/Vocabulary_and_Concepts.
[5] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090108144747.htm
[6] http://www.azquotes.com/quote/864095
[7] https://www.vox.com/summer-movies/2018/6/7/17433834/mister-fred-rogers-neighborhood-wont-you-be-my-neighbor-review
[8] https://christandpopculture.com/wont-you-be-my-neighbor-mister-rogers/
[9] http://www.perspectivedigest.org/article/104/archives/18-3/neighbor-is-a-verb
It’s the kind of thing that priest or that Levite in Jesus’ story would do.
You can just see them, down at the temple, telling about the guy they saw:
“I just hate it when someone gets beat up and robbed like that.”
“Oh, I saw that guy too, such a shame.”
You wonder if they then speculated on what that fellow had done wrong, in order to be set upon by thieves, beaten and robbed. You wonder if they talked about what he should have done, and how he shouldn’t have been in that neighborhood. You wonder if they said, “I wanted to stop and help him, but I was in a hurry, and night was coming, and that’s a dangerous neighborhood, and I was afraid I might get robbed, too.”
The Levite and the priest are the kind of “righteous” folks James describes. They take notice of a person with gold rings and in fine clothes coming into the assembly, and they say, “Have a seat here, please.”
But if someone had told them that they were judges with evil thoughts, they’d have been outraged.
“I’m not like that!” they’d say.
“I’m not racist! I’m not prejudiced! I see all people as equals!”
The Samaritans knew otherwise, of course. They were outcasts, the people everyone loved to hate. When Jesus was telling the story and said “But a Samaritan while traveling came near him…” there must have been a gasp from the crowd.
A Samaritan?!
Is Jesus saying that horrid, nasty Samaritan is my NEIGHBOR?
But Jesus had turned the question around.
The lawyer wanted to know, “Who is my neighbor?”
But Jesus asked “Which of the three was a neighbor?”
The lawyer answered, “The one who showed him mercy.”
The point was made – neighbor isn’t a person you name, it is something you do!
Neighbor is a verb.
The Biblical commandment to neighbor is inescapable. But how, exactly, are we supposed to love our neighbor? Let’s take a minute and talk about racism, prejudice, and discrimination.
Racism is the big one – the difficult issue.
Racism is “based on perceived 'racial' superiority and inferiority.” Systemic racism is “unequal distribution of privilege, resources and power.” That’s things like redlining, blockbusting, segregation, and hiring bias.
Prejudice is usually a little more personal. Prejudice is a “preconceived attitude, opinion or feeling, usually negative, formed without adequate knowledge, thought or reason.”[4] Each of us has some racial prejudices, some preconceived attitudes that we may not even be aware of. We have implicit biases, usually positive bias toward white people, and negative biases toward people of color. These biases can be so unconscious that we are not even aware of them, but those biases can have a powerful effect on our behavior. They make us roll up our car windows when we see a black man on the sidewalk. They make us nervous when we’re in a different neighborhood. They affect our judgment of a person’s character.
Prejudice makes white adults think black children are older than they are, which makes black boys seem more threatening. And unacknowledged prejudice may be what motivates a white police officer to fire on an unarmed black man who is reaching for his wallet, or on a thirteen year old boy playing with a toy gun in a park.
Discrimination is what happens when racism prevails. Discrimination is when we allow our prejudices to determine our actions, and that results in unfair treatment of individuals or groups; and unjust conditions in areas such as employment, housing and education.
Most of us would like to believe that we are not racist.
Most of us would like to believe that we are not too prejudiced.
Most of us want to believe that we would never discriminate.
We’d like to see ourselves as the Samaritan in Jesus’s story, not like the Levite and the priest, certainly not like the fellow who’d been beaten and robbed, and not like the person in James’ example who tells the poor person in dirty clothes, “sit at my feet!”
But we tend to overestimate ourselves, it seems.
We think we are more like Jesus, or at least more like Mr. Rogers -- than we actually are.
We think that if we witness a racist incident, we’d stick up for the victim.
We might even call ourselves allies of those who are discriminated against.
But research on prejudice and behavior tells us that most people “vastly overestimate how upset they would feel – and what they would do -- - in bad situations such as hearing a racial slur."[5]
It’s not always easy to figure out how to be a good neighbor, or how to walk with love and mercy in every neighborhood.
Sometimes, loving our neighbor asks us to simply speak up. When we witness discrimination, or a racist comment, or any situation in which a person made in God’s image is being mistreated, we are called to speak on their behalf.
Sometimes loving our neighbor means we need to set aside our prejudices and simply listen to someone who is very different from us.
Sometimes loving our neighbor means extending welcome, to someone who seems strange to us, or looks strange to us, even if we are a little bit uncomfortable.
Whether people are richly dressed, or poor and dirty,
wearing a three piece suit or a Black Lives Matter t-shirt,
flying a rainbow flag or speaking Spanish,
no matter what the color of their skin,
or their country of origin,
or their orientation,
even if they AREN’T PRESBYTERIAN!
they are our neighbors!
They are beloved people made in God’s image.
They are people for whom Christ died.
When we are good neighbors, when we neighbor,
our lives demonstrate that we are Christian–
by the words we speak,
by the actions we take,
by the mercy we show
as we listen to others and hear their stories.
Mr. Rogers would agree with that.
He said “The purpose of life is to listen – to yourself, to your neighbor, to your world and to God and, when the time comes, to respond in as helpful a way as you can find ... from within and without.”[6]
In the early months of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, in 1968, Fred Rogers met an African American opera singer, Francois Clemmons, and recruited him to play a police officer on the show, the only African American cast member in a children’s program. “In one segment that aired [in 1969], during pitched battles about integration, [Mr. Rogers] soaked his feet in a small wading pool outside his home, then invited the black policeman to cool his feet in the pool with him.”[7] “Clemmons quickly accepted, rolled up his pant legs, and placed his very brown feet in the same water as Rogers’ very white feet.
Mr. Rogers and Officer Clemmons
Nearly 25 years later Rogers and Clemmons reenacted this moment. A much older Rogers and Clemmons sat with their feet in a similar blue wading pool talking about the many different ways that children and adults say “I Love You”– from singing, to cleaning up a room, to drawing special pictures to making plays. As the scene ended, Mister Rogers took a towel and helped Clemmons dry his feet.
“Here, let me help you,” Mr. Rogers said.[8]
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Your black, brown, immigrant, disabled,
religiously different, LGBTQ, fully human neighbor.
“Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asked.
And Jesus told him a story.
At the end of the story, Jesus asked the man: who, then, was a neighbor?
And the lawyer answered, “The one who showed mercy.”
A neighbor is one who shows mercy,
no matter what neighborhood they are in.
Neighbors are not necessarily the people down your street,
but the ones we are called to love as we love ourselves.
Every person you and I meet—every single one—
has a neighbor in you and me.[9]
“Which of the three, do you think,
was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”
Jesus said to him – Jesus says to us –
“Go and do likewise.”
“Go and do likewise.”
[1] https://www.ministrymatters.com/library/#/tnib/a6f4400400b410d203ce56c53c93fd61/circumstances-of-composition.html
[2] https://www.aaos.org/AAOSNow/2014/Jan/managing/managing3/?ssopc=1
[3] https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/i-invented-virtue-signalling-now-its-taking-over-the-world/
[4] http://www.museumoftolerance.com/site/c.tmL6KfNVLtH/b.5063305/k.63A3/Vocabulary_and_Concepts.
[5] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090108144747.htm
[6] http://www.azquotes.com/quote/864095
[7] https://www.vox.com/summer-movies/2018/6/7/17433834/mister-fred-rogers-neighborhood-wont-you-be-my-neighbor-review
[8] https://christandpopculture.com/wont-you-be-my-neighbor-mister-rogers/
[9] http://www.perspectivedigest.org/article/104/archives/18-3/neighbor-is-a-verb
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