Neighbors, Not Heroes • Luke 103/12/2025
Tonight I want to talk a little more about what it means to be and have neighbors, and what “neighboring” can look like in real life, because, as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said when he preached on this text, that’s what Jesus did in this parable: He removed the Greatest Commandment from the thought exercises of theologians, and gave it bloody skin and broken bones instead. I’m going to dwell a lot on Dr. King’s lessons here, but first I want to tell you a story from my own life about a night that found me as both a neighbor to someone in crisis and as the someone in crisis who needed a neighbor.
It was sometime early last winter when my family and I were all jolted awake in the middle of the night by a major crash in front of our house. Someone had driven into the light pole and wrapped the front of their minivan around it, knocking it over.
We waited for a few minutes to see who would exit the car and what they might do -- we’ve seen crashes like this before, and sometimes people call a friend or just walk away. But when the driver and passenger climbed out and made their way to our front steps, we went outside to meet them and found a man pacing worriedly and a woman leaning on the steps in obvious profound pain. And as my husband talked with the man and convinced him to call 911, I sat down behind the woman, so she could lean against my legs and chest instead of on the concrete, and asked her to breathe with me. I learned a while ago that co-regulation is one of the most powerful ways to reduce the impact of trauma on the body and nervous system, and that breathing together is one of the most powerful forms of co-regulation. So we breathed. I leaned my head near hers, promised that I would stay with her until help came, and we breathed. Over the 20 minutes that stretched between when we called 911 and when first responders arrived, we realized the couple had been living out of their van and had to move in the middle of the night. We think the driver fell asleep behind the wheel when the crash happened. Knowing their van would be impounded along with all their possessions, he asked us if we would hold onto their things until he could come back and collect his things. So he and Paul worked to remove as much as they could and get it into our front porch. When the two were taken to the hospital, we spoke with police and kept collecting whatever else we could to store for them, until the van was finally towed away and we all went back to bed.
The next day I came to work bedraggled. When I shared the whole ordeal with Pastors John and Lydia, John simply asked if I realized that the couple who crashed weren’t the only ones who went through a traumatic experience. While different and lesser, for sure, I also experienced that crash in my own body; I took a bit of her trauma on myself by using my flesh and bone to help brace and regulate hers. I didn’t realize it. Then he asked me if I’d eaten -- or if I’d brought lunch. I said I didn’t. 10 minutes later as we gathered for staff meeting, John brought two servings of his lunch -- one for him, and one for me -- and told me to eat. Because I needed to eat. In his sermon on the Good Samaritan, titled ‘On Being a Good Neighbor,’ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. posits that what makes the Good Samaritan “good” and sets him apart from the others who passed by is not heroism nor paternalistic saviorism, but rather, "sympathetic altruism." He had “made concern for and devotion to others the first law of his life.” In wondering, along with all of us, why the Priest and the Levite didn’t stop, Dr. King suggests that, “perhaps they could not delay their arrival at an important ecclesiastical meeting,” or maybe “their religious regulations demanded they touch no human body for several hours prior to performing temple functions." Or perhaps, he offers, “they were on their way to an organizational meeting of a Jericho Road Improvement Association” to discuss the dangerous conditions of the Bloody Way that all but ensured not only this man’s death but more in the future. And something needed to be done about it! Point being, neither the Priest nor the Levite need to be “bad” or malicious actors; they very well may have been deeply moved by the man’s condition. But they still missed the point. The Samaritan, on the other hand, was not concerned with the man’s ethnicity or their prescribed enmity toward each other as a Samaritan and Jew, nor was he deterred by the risks inherent to rendering aid on such a dangerous road, nor was he held back by the cost of what lay ahead to ensure the man's recovery. Instead, he saw the dying man and instead of asking, “what will happen to me if I stop to help,” he asked, “what will happen to him if I don’t.” [emphasis mine] “With his own hands he bound the wounds of the man and then set him on his own beast….carried him to an inn, and left money for his care making clear that if further financial needs arose he would gladly meet them.” In every way, he went above and beyond to “bind not only the wounds of the robbed man’s body, but he also released an overflowing love to bind up the wounds of his broken spirit.” His altruism was "universal, dangerous, and excessive." Of course, Dr. King preached that sermon in a particular time and place -- during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement -- but like the text it is based on, it remains prescient because our times are not so different. Now, as then, “a mighty struggle is taking place” but instead of it being a struggle between Jews and Samaritans and the Roman Empire; or the 1960s “struggle to conquer the reign of an evil monster called segregation and its twin, discrimination,” ours is a struggle against the reign of nationalism, racism, bigotry, poverty, houselessness, and more. And now, as then, these problems cannot be solved by legislation, nor will hearts be changed through judicial decrees -- though both can still help to “restrain the heartless,” so we are wise to use our power well within the democratic republic as long and as best as we can. But the truth remains, now as then, as always: “Enforcement of [just laws] will not bring an end to fears, prejudice, pride and irrationality,” which are barriers to our liberation; Instead, King writes, “these dark and demonic responses will be removed only as [people] are possessed by the invisible, inner law which etches on [our] hearts the conviction that all [of us are siblings] and that love is [our] most potent weapon for personal and social transformation.” Now, as then and as always, our salvation and liberation will be [realized] “by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations” -- that is, by our choosing, like the Good Samaritan, to “make concern for others the highest law of our lives.” The thing is, nobody -- not the poor, not the oppressed, not the dying -- nobody needs a hero to save the day, or a champion to take down their enemies. We have enough enemies! We don't need more! We just need neighbors. We need to see one another as siblings and internalize the simple truth that we “must not ignore the wounded man on life’s Jericho road because he is a part of [us] and [we] are a part of him. His agony diminishes [us all]; his salvation enlarges [us all].” We are all bound up together. Amen.
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