Life Long Process

 

The last few days we have done a deep dive into the invitation to love God with our full selves and our neighbor with loving kindness.  I have invited you to experiment in the laboratory of your life, even when the chemical reaction of relationships goes up like baking soda and vinegar you mixed for your sixth-grade science project in your paper mâché volcano.  Today, I want to turn toward our neighbors, the people who might live physically next to you or the ones you sit next to in the pew on Sunday mornings or the ones you interact with weekly or monthly or the ones you see when you volunteer or now the ones we connect with digitally.  As humans one of our needs is connection.  To be sure, some feel this need more acutely and deeply.  Some desire relationships like oxygen.  Others prefer the company of people in the form of words and ideas in books.  Others prefer being in proximity to others.  The current surgeon general of the United States says that loneliness is an epidemic.  After the COVID virus snaped a thread in the social fabric of trust, we know can feel our hearts race when someone sneezes or coughs.  Our amygdala is constantly on high alert, scanning the landscape for any sign telling us to be afraid.  And the gospels of the world (from politics to religion to media) are all too glad to show you all sorts of people to fear.  We love “othering” those people, because just look at them breathing ~ inhaling and exhaling like they deserve the same oxygen you do.  Who do they think they are!  No wonder this passage about love sounds like a fairy tale.  No wonder this passage about loving God and neighbor sounds like good advice we will never put into practice.  No wonder G.K. Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal (or way) has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult; and left untried.”  No wonder people walk away from the church when we struggle to live this way with each other inside the walls of the church, not to mention outside.  The story of the Good Samaritan is a gospel within the gospel because it will take us a lifetime to explore and experiment.  We will go out full of vim and vigor to show love at that meeting today, only to have that person say something or stand in the way of our good idea or just be a jerk to us, causing us to throw in the towel.  How might the church, like a good 12-step program, be a safe space to show our human size-ness?  How can we show up and tell each other that I struggle to love that family member right now who isn’t talking to me?  How can we create spaces and places where our confessions are not just printed in the bulletin but are expressions from our heart?  I don’t have answers to all these questions, but I am so grateful that this parable provokes and evokes more than just one moral lesson to apply to your life.  Three weeks we have held this passage close ~ and we could do so for the rest of your life, because like a flowing stream that is never the same when you step into it, so too with this story it keeps changing because you bring your evolving and expanding life to the words.  May all that is swirling and stirring within you, continue to percolate and ponder as the Good Samaritan and Loving Kindness sings to our souls in these Lenten days.  Amen.