This Sunday in worship, we continue our series Together by looking at how we are Created Together. You have something in common with everyone you meet: Like you, they are created by God and bear God’s image. We’ll hear how Jesus calls us to love our neighbors—no exceptions. Even when they don’t seem very lovable. Even when they are different than us. Even when they don’t seem very loving to us.
Today’s Scripture readings are Ephesians 2:8-22, Psalm 139:13-18, and Luke 10:25-37. A portion of this sermon draws from my 2018 annual meeting sermon on Luke 10.
Here’s the livestream from Living Hope and the podcast audio from Christ the King:
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Grace to you and peace, from God our Creator and our redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen
I don’t know if this is true, but I read about a guy who was charged with stealing dog food from a Walmart store. But, on the criminal charge, someone listed the wrong corporate name. They just said “Walmart” instead of “Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.” so he got off.
Or there’s a true story from 2005 where a man in Australia got out of paying his $160,000 mortgage by proving that Citibank Savings—who he owed the mortgage to—had been deregistered as a business in Australia, and a deregistered company couldn’t own a mortgage. Pretty good loophole, right?
In the Gospel reading we just heard, a lawyer comes to Jesus looking for a loophole. He knows he’s supposed to love God and love his neighbor, but he wants to check the fine print on exactly which people he needs to care about.
Most of us are not lawyers, but we sometimes do the same kind of thing. We hear Jesus’ teaching—we know we’re supposed to love our neighbor—but we want to find the loopholes.
We want to figure out who exactly our neighbors are, where the line is on who we’re supposed to serve. We want to serve God on our terms.
But in this parable, Jesus makes it clear: There are no loopholes. We don’t get to decide which people count as our neighbors. Jesus did not say, “Love your neighbor…as long as they vote like you.” He didn’t say, “Love your neighbor, unless they’re poor, or a different race, or gay, or Muslim.”
There are no qualifications, because all people are created in the image of God. Psalm 139 says God formed your inward parts; God knit you together in your mother’s womb. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. And so are they, whoever they are. We’re in the same boat; Jesus died for them too.
So when the lawyer asks who is my neighbor, Jesus shifts the question to what it means to act as a neighbor. And he picks the most unexpected person to be the hero of his story. The example Jesus gives us to emulate is a Samaritan. Some of you might know there was a lot of animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans at that time.
We don’t need to go into the details, but it’s hard to overstate how unlikely a Samaritan is to be the heroic figure in a Jewish rabbi’s story.
In a commentary a few years ago, Debie Thomas says:
“Think about it this way: Who is the last person on earth you’d ever want to deem ‘a good guy?’ The last person you’d ask to save your life? Whom do you secretly hope to convert, fix, impress, control, or save — but never, ever need?
At the risk of offending my readers, I’ll throw out some possibilities: An Israeli Jewish man is robbed, and a Good Hamas member saves his life. A liberal Democrat is robbed, and a Good conservative Republican saves her life. A white supremacist is robbed, and a Good black teenager saves his life. A transgender woman is robbed, and a Good anti-LGBTQ activist saves her life. An atheist is robbed, and a Good Christian fundamentalist saves his life.
I don’t mean for one moment to trivialize the real and agonizing differences that divide us. I dare not do that — not when those differences have stinging real-world consequences. But the enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans in Jesus’s day was not theoretical; it was embodied and real. The differences between them were not easily negotiated; each was fully convinced that the other was wrong.
So what Jesus did when he deemed the Samaritan “good” was radical and risky; it stunned his Jewish listeners. He was asking them to dream of a different kind of kingdom. He was inviting them to consider the possibility that a person might add up to more than the sum of her political, racial, cultural, and economic identities. He was calling them to put aside the history they knew, and the prejudices they nursed. He was asking them to leave room for divine and world-altering surprises.”
How sad it is that almost two thousand years after Jesus told this parable, we still struggle to see each other as created together.
As we think about our current political climate, what would change if we not only gave the people on the other side the benefit of the doubt and assumed the best of their intentions, like we talked about two weeks ago, not only looked for places we can cooperate and work together for the common good, as we said last week, but committed to seeing each other as children of the same heavenly Father? What changes if we believe we are created together?
We can disagree on policies; we can debate solutions to the immigration crisis, or even if there is an immigration crisis. But we cannot as followers of Jesus dehumanize people made in God’s image by calling them “animals” or “vermin” and we should call it out when politicians use that language.
Watch for that rhetoric in this election season, but I’m not just talking about US politicians here. Human beings have a long history of dehumanizing enemies, saying that because they are not like us, they must be inferior. We can take their land, we can force them into servitude, we can lock them up in camps, we can use them as bargaining chips, because they’re not like us.
And yet, as Christians, we believe we are created together. Whoever they are, they bear God’s image too. Jesus died for them as much as he did for us. I had a seminary professor who liked to say, “Whenever we draw a line in the sand, Jesus is on the other side of it.”
Jesus tells us, “Whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to him.” (See Matthew 25:31-46) How we treat other people reflects how we treat Jesus. The language we use for God’s children demonstrates our faith in God.
1 John 4:20-21 says, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”
I thought about this a few days ago on the Lighthouse Youth mission trip as we were serving at a food pantry. We were there for about an hour and half while there was a steady stream of people coming in to pick out food.
It was busy, it was crowded, there were language barriers, but the volunteers at the pantry did a great job of treating each person who came in as an individual. Each person was greeted respectfully. Our youth walked outside with them and helped load their groceries into their cars. As we debriefed later, we talked about how each of those people has their own story, their own situation, even if we don’t know it. They deserve the same dignity and respect as we do.
Again, we can disagree on policies. We can debate the best way to feed the most people in a way that’s economically sustainable and avoids perpetuating dependency. But we cannot pass by neighbors who are hungry and not work to give them food.
We can run experiments on whether the best way to help people with addictions is through non-judgmental needle exchanges or by using criminal penalties cracking down on opportunities to find addictive drugs. But we cannot treat people with addictions as somehow less worthy of life than us, as less precious to God than we are.
We can debate when more weapons are needed as a deterrent, when we need to support our allies, or whether bigger armies distract from social needs around us and become a tool for empire-building. But we are always called to pray for peace, and to work for the day when swords are turned into plowshares. As we’ll sing in a moment, even when the world around us says war, we stand as witnesses, singing to the one who brings peace.
We can join in patriotic celebrations, giving thanks for the freedoms we enjoy and those who defend them, while remembering that our primary allegiance is never to an earthly country, but to God’s kingdom. And God brings together people of every tribe and tongue and nation (Rev. 17:15) and changes us from strangers and aliens to be citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
Jesus’ proclamation of peace is for both those who are far off and those who are near, those who are like us, and those who seem so different. All are welcome in God’s kingdom.
When the world gives up on people, when the world says certain people are beyond redemption, useless, too poor, too old, too young, not smart enough, even too evil, we believe no one is beyond redemption. No one is beyond God’s reach.
I think about people who grow up in situations of hatred. I read a memoir a couple years ago from Megan Phelps-Roper (Amazon affiliate link), who grew up at the Westboro Baptist Church. I don’t know if you remember them, but they’re a group in Kansas who became famous for picketing and protesting at soldiers’ funerals. They’re an awful hate group.
Megan’s memoir talks about how she came to leave that church—really a cult—they’re definitely not a normal Baptist church—and it was because people interacted with her not as a monster, but as a real human being. People on the outside looked past the terrible things she and her family were saying, and treated her as a real human being. When people she hated offered her love, she lost her basis for hate.
Her encounters with people who saw her as a human being worthy of love—misguided, doing hateful things—but still a human made in God’s image worthy of love were what opened her eyes to realize other people were not who she’d been taught they were.
That’s what we are called to do as Christians. We are called to recognize that we are created together, sharing a common humanity.
Siblings in Christ, you are children of God. You are created in God’s image, together with neighbors near and far.
May you see them—whoever they are—as people who bear the mark of their creator, the image of God. No loopholes. God loves them too.
I’ll end with a prayer from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Please pray with me.
O God, you have bound us together in a common life. Help us, in the midst of our struggles for justice and truth, to confront one another without hatred or bitterness, and to work together with mutual forbearance and respect; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, Prayer #28)