Sermon of the Month - November 2009
Loving Your Neighbour
Readings: Luke 6:27-36, and Luke 10:25-37
Introduction
Jesus’ teaching about love – it’s the most important thing to him and to us – and it comes centre stage in both our readings – in his sermon on the mount as the longer version in Matthew is called, and in the parable of the Good Samaritan, unique to Luke’s gospel.
When Jesus was asked about the clue to eternity, what’s life all about abotu, what’s most important, he said it’s love: above all, love God, and love your neighbour. It’s here in Luke 10:27, and that bit is in Mark and Matthew, too. But then Luke follows it with the famous supplementary by the lawyer, And who is my neighbour? Maybe he was a bit like Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys, famous for his cutting questions. But he got more than he bargained for with Jesus – as they all did (perhaps that’s why they hated him: they couldn’t control and humiliate him?). Jesus’ story is one of those which forces the questioner to say what he didn’t want to say: your neighbour maybe a sinner, a crook, even a Samaritan, worse still you may be a Jew helped by a Samaritan. But that’s it. The glory of the Christian message is love. It’s the gospel: God so loved the world... And it’s the glory of our response to the gospel: We love because he first loved us.
I want to say a bit about the theory and then a bit about the practice
1. What love is not
The love Jesus calls for is Christian love, agapé in the Greek, biblical love. And we can see it partly by saying what it is not.
This love is not falling in love. It is not the same as liking. It is not the same as friendship – though it can overlap. No, the Samaritan was not a friend of the Jew, and there’s no indication they became buddies afterwards. His love was something different to friendship. It’s not motherly love, family love. And by the way, it’s not the same as evangelism either. If you’re talking of that, then if you’re spreading true faith in the biblical God, the Samaritan is way off-line; the priest and the Levite are far truer to speaking the truth of the biblical God. But the Samaritan loves, he cares, he shows compassion, he helps: he loves in this biblical sense. And this love is also not even the same as social action, not exactly. Paul in his hymn to love in 1 Corinthains 13 says, If I give all I possess to the poor...but have not love, I gain nothing.
2. What love is
Love is compassion, it is caring, it is doing something for another person that helps them. And we don’t help them because they are the same as me, white, male, middle class and middle aged! The Samaritan was different to the Jew! But he was the one who showed love.
Of course if you really want to know what love is, then we have a full living picture of love in Jesus. God is love: Jesus shows it!
And this love was controversial. It changed the ancient world, and it’s changing ours. Rome was built through power, engineering, civic law and organisation, and it used its army to create suffering, such as mass crucifixions, to impose control where necessary; Athens – Greece – was built through science, adventure, art, culture, and an attitude of sublime indifference to suffering. Jerusalem was built through religious law in many ways. And to all of these, the message of the love of God in the cross of Jesus was a horrific shock. It seemed pathetically weak and utter madness. But the King of Love melted the hearts of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem in varying degrees.
3. How love works out
I said I would get practical, and so must each of us. Love your neighbour – yes but how? Well one answer simply says, when you meet someone in need. The Samaritan came across a needy man – and he helped. But while that illustrates one side of things, there’s actually more to it than that. We don’t just carry on everyday life, and if we happed to stumble upon need, only then do something about it. Take a flight of fancy: you are a rich capitalist and you have bought the road from Jerusalem to Jericho? Well it’s not enough simply to get on your donkey and go up and down every so often, and help the casualities you stumble upon. Maybe you should be taking steps to protect people – perhaps having the road policed or whatever.
In other words we are not simply reactive in love, we also need to be proactive in love. And that is how the first Christians were. Acts 2: 44f.: all the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Even those diehard atheists Karl Marx and Lenin were impressed by this, and incoporated it into their plan for a perfect society: “From each according to his ability [Matthew 25:15], to each according to his need {Acts 2:45]. The trouble was they tried to make society do that. But society can’t; only God can. Society is not God, the Party is not God, Lenin and Stalin are not God – but they posed as God, and scores of millions died as a result. But only God can inspire the love that makes this wonderful change happen.
But how are we going to turn this proactive love into practice? Well each of us has to listen to God and respond. Let us receive God’s love, and let us share it.
I’m going to turn biographical and auto-biographical now, because this needs to be personal. We ministers have the danger of being like First World War generals, presenting plans for the shock troops on the front line to implement, while we stay too far back. Well I don’t know about other ministers, but that’s no good for me. I need to be on the front line, and in the last year and a half, God’s given me a new front line, a place where I can be a Christian in the context of non-Christians in a way that makes this difference. You will probably find a different way. Most of you are certain to do it differently. But each of us needs to say, where is it that God asks me to step in and make a difference in helping people, to make a difference as a Christian. For me it’s been as a Street Pastor – and I’ve just come back from a conference so you’ll hear a bit about that.
First from some others. This is a great ministry given by our Black Christians brothers and sisters. What about difficult people, people the church often struggles with, like homosexuals? Les Isaacs, the founder of Street Pastors, told yesterday of one team in London who helped a gay man who was the victim of a vicious life-threatening homophobic attack. They came to the rescue and the attackers fled. One was a doctor and helped protect his head and neck while others phoned for an ambulance. The next week they were out the gay community came to them in force and said, Thanks. Thanks for saving his life. Thanks for helping them to see something different. They had only seen Christians as people who were against them. Now they saw them as people who cared, who loved who helped when it counted.
Or take the case of the 15 year-old who turned up at school wearing a bullet proof vest. Les was called in and spent time with him. Though he had to fly the next day to the West Indies he rang from there, and the lad was surprised.
Politicians from all three parties are sitting up and taking notice. Michael Howard former Conservative leader went out with Street Pastors in his constituency and asked some of the young adults there what they thought of these people. And they said, “When we see them, we see God walking our streets.”
Boris Johnson, mayor of London, spoke to us (at the Street Pastors Conference) on Thursday and told us how fantastic it was to see this. When it comes to volunteering to help young people, he said he was aware of two striking statistics: the ratio of women to men helping is 2 to 1 – in volunteering to help young people, in all the different organisations, for every man helping, two women are helping. And the second is even more striking: the ratio of people in faith communities it’s also 2:1 – for every person volunteering to help young people, there are two people in faith communities. And of course the great majority of these in most places are Christians.
Love makes a difference – and the politicians are seeing it.
The police are certainly seeing it. We had the Deputy Commissioner of the Met from Scotland Yard speaking to us. The police are very keen on Street Pastors because it leads to a reduction in crime. I have just seen a video of the Devon and Cornwall Police saying how the introduction of Street Pastors in Torbay and Ilfracombe has led to a 25% reduction in crime in those areas. We are seeing a similar indeed larger drop in Hinckley. Leicester has seen great help too – the police are very keen.
When it comes to the people, I can think of the 18-19 year olds who we were able to help with a recent bereavment, or the homeless people we’ve been able to help a bit, or those struggling with alcohol dependency or drug addiction, and we’ve been there for them as they have come off the drugs. I think of the lad who was so enthusiastic about the helpful difference made, that he said, “without the Street Pastors I wouldn’t have my job”. Then there have been those times when we’ve been able to give people first aid – the man who had been glassed in an Irish sectarian attack, the woman whose arm had been broken by accident by a drunken man falliong on her, and so on. It’s a privilege to help, and a great encouragement to be able to make a positive difference in people’s lives.
I said I was going to speak about myself a bit – which I don’t do much, because I think the gospel is not about me, it’s about Jesus. But we do need to apply what Jesus says and does into our own lives. That’s been one side of my way, and each of us needs to find our own applications. Jesus calls us to love our neighbour – not in theory, like the priest and Levite, but in practice, like the Samaritan. And we need to put the same love into practice in our own lives.