7/13/25 Sermon

Intro to Luke 10:25–37

By the time we reach this passage in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem.
He’s on the road—moving deliberately toward confrontation, toward the cross—
and along the way, he’s teaching his followers what it really means to live in the Kingdom of God.

Luke places this story in a stretch of parables and encounters where Jesus keeps flipping expectations upside down—
where the outsider is honored, the proud are humbled, and love is shown not just in words but in costly action.

This particular moment begins with a familiar figure: a legal expert, someone who knows the scriptures inside and out.

But he isn’t there with an open heart and open mind -  instead he’s trying to test Jesus—
to pin him down on doctrine, maybe to catch him saying something dangerous.

The question is about eternal life, but the real question—the one underneath—is about limits.
What’s the boundary of love? How far does neighborliness go?
And more to the point: who doesn’t count?

Jesus answers, as he so often does, not with a list of rules, but with a story—
one that would’ve shocked his listeners.

Because the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notoriously dangerous.
Because the priest and Levite were expected to be righteous.
And because the Samaritan—a religious and ethnic outsider—was someone no faithful Jew would have imagined as the hero.

This is more than a moral tale about kindness.
It’s a radical redefinition of what love looks like when the boundaries are gone.
And it’s still working on us today.

So let us listen to God’s word to us as we hear it in Luke 10:25–37

A legal expert stood up to test Jesus.
“Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to gain eternal life?”

Jesus replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?”

He responded, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”

But the legal expert wanted to prove that he was right, so he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus replied,
“A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
He encountered thieves, who stripped him naked, beat him up, and left him near death.
Now it just so happened that a priest was also going down the same road.
When he saw the injured man, he crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way.
Likewise, a Levite came by that spot, saw the injured man, and crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way.

But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came to where the man was.
But when he saw him, he was moved with compassion.
The Samaritan went to him and bandaged his wounds, tending them with oil and wine.
Then he placed the wounded man on his own donkey, took him to an inn, and took care of him.

The next day, he took two full days’ worth of wages and gave them to the innkeeper.
He said, ‘Take care of him, and when I return, I will pay you back for any additional costs.’
What do you think?
Which one of these three was a neighbor to the man who encountered thieves?”

Then the legal expert said, “The one who demonstrated mercy toward him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

WORD OF LORD

It’s strange how some questions linger.

Not the kind of questions you write down in a notebook or even say out loud—but the kind that hangs in the air after a conversation ended… or it echoes in your mind when you’re driving home from somewhere you didn’t expect to go.

Jesus was asked one of those questions once. It sounded simple enough: “Who is my neighbor?”

But I’ve found that the most dangerous questions are the ones we think we already know the answers to.

I thought I knew the answer to that question. I’ve preached about it. I’ve taught about it. I’ve tried to live by it. But I remember the day—standing outside a middle school, with my arms crossed and my blood pressure through the roof —when I realized… maybe I didn’t know it as well as I thought.

… You know my son Isaac… He’s getting too old for me… But he really struggled when he was younger..  Being a 12 year old boy is hard.  You have these hormones coursing through your body that throws everything out of whack.  Among other things, testosterone can make your temper and mood flare for no reason and when you’re that age you don’t know how to control it yet.  You add to it that when he was 12, he was huge at like  5’10, awkward and gangly and the cruelty of other kids… and he had a rough time.  And it didn’t help that he’s got too much of his father’s penitent for trouble in him. And that a lot of people in the town he was growing up in knew me. So he was fighting with that reputation too.

I get a call from the school one day.  He got into an altercation - not a fist fight - but a shouting match - with another kid at school and I had to go pick him up, take him home, and let him cool off.  I was ticked.  The boy was in trouble.

So, I hop in the car, I get to the school, I go to pick him up, and I see him sitting there in the social worker’s office just looking totally defeated.  He knew he was in trouble.  He knew if they called me and I came to get him, he was really going to be in trouble.

And so, I’m standing there looking at him, his head down, he won’t make eye-contact, he’s giving those short grumbly answers to questions, and I just… my heart broke for the kid.  And I realized something as I was standing there…. This kid is going to grow up hating his dad because it seems like the only times he and I talked at the time, it involved me yelling at him because he did something wrong. We don’t generally like people who the only times we talk to them, they tell us how much of a screw up we are.

Now, in my defense this kid’s batting average for defiance and getting in trouble was objectively waaay higher than my other 3 kids - by anyone’s standards.  But he was a good kid going through a rough time, crashing through life trying to find his way. And I stood there looking at him as he knows he’s about to get it again, and I wondered what it’s doing to a psyche of a kid if it seems like the only real time he spends with his father is when he’s in trouble and his dad is pointing out how he messed up again.  And does that become some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

So I get him outside and I stop him before we get to the car. And  I hug him -  right there in front of the school. I don’t yell. I don’t lecture. I don’t tell him how disappointed I am.  He knew all that already. I just hugged him. Right there in front of the school.  I think he would’ve preferred to be grounded. But I hugged him anyway. And we talked.  We talked about what happened. We talked about having a bad day. We talked about owning our mistakes and taking responsibility for them.   And then I start telling him about my own mistakes and this fear I now have that he’s going to hate me and think all I did was yell at him while he was growing up. And that he’s going to think that I think he’s worthless - which is about the farthest thing from the truth.  In fact, it’s just the opposite.  And on the drive home in the quiet, I began to think about this story and the question “Who is my neighbor?”

You know… Sometimes we’re really good at taking this story seriously  and we get caught up in really looking for those we least expect to be our neighbors and we understand our obligation as people of faith to care for those who can’t care for themselves.  We volunteer for community organizations that help people. We get involved in the mission and ministry of the church.  We coach teams, serve on boards, give generously, drop things when a friend calls in need, make dinners for hurting people.  We do all these things and we keep so busy.

For me, I really try to put my entire heart and soul into being a minister and into this church because I believe in it so strongly.  I’m passionate about our ministry here.  It’s important and I believe we make a difference and change people’s lives for the better through the ministry of this church.

And i’m getting better at realizing when my cup is running empty and I have to do things to fill my own cup in order to be of use here.  And I’m finding this balance between giving this all I’ve got and then taking time to re-charge.  But that Thursday riding home with my kid in that car, I realized something that was so stupidly obvious that I couldn’t believe I missed it.

My neighbor isn’t just the stranger in the store or the person on the street who needs a meal.  My neighbor isn’t just the people in Ukraine or Palestine who are still being beaten and bombed and killed.  My neighbor isn’t just someone who’s struggling to make ends meet. My neighbor isn’t just the people we generally think of as outcast or the marginalized. My neighbor also lives in my house.

And sometimes I get so busy trying to do all the right, faithful, good Christian things that I feel we’re supposed to do, and I try to be the kind of person and pastor who will drop anything to help someone in need, and I cram my schedule full of things.  And I think that my family or close friends will always be there and they know that if they ask, I’ll be there - And I get so caught up in everything else that I set the people closest to me aside to do these other things.  But the message that I’m worried I’m sometimes sending -  especially to my kids - is that I’m too busy doing “important things” to just be there for them. And because I’m only spending time on “important” things and that doesn’t seem to include them, then they must not be important…

I worry that’s the unconscious message I could be sending to my family and close friends. And I wonder about the difference between doing things for people verses really being there with people.  Parents today are overloaded with activities for kids who are overloaded with activities to do.   And we spend so much time running from thing to thing, getting the homework done, shoving some kind of food in their mouth before quickly packing them in the car and grabbing what they need for the next thing and it’s go, go, go…  And it isn’t just those of us with younger kids. Even with older kids or no kids, I’m finding we all still run that risk. My wife and I sometimes feel like ships in the night. Do You know how many retired people - including my own father- that tell me they don’t know how they found time to go to work with how busy they are now that they retired?

I don’t know… You know sometimes I think maybe I’ve spent too much time broadening Jesus’ definition of neighbor and making sure I’m not missing anyone in that definition that I forget, if we really look at this story, the person who’s the neighbor is the one who took the time to stop what he was doing, who saw a person who needed someone, and who was there - who was present in the moment to see the need.  And sometimes I spend so much time looking for all these other people who need a neighbor that I sometimes forget that I’m also a neighbor to those people in my life that I’m the closest to.

How many times do we get to put our spouses on a back burner and think there will be time to catch up later? How many times to we get to tell our kids we’re too busy doing important adult things to watch that stupid cartoon with them or go to the park?  How many times do we get to tell our friends we can’t meet up to talk because too much is going on before they stop asking?

Because what I’ve found and what I’ve often ignored in my own life I’m realizing, is that people are very rarely direct in their reaching out.  The man on the side of the road didn’t ask for help but he clearly needed it.  And we don’t always do a good job of asking either.  Instead it usually comes in the form of asking for a date night, or a walk, or a cup of coffee, or to play some video games.  And it’s in those times that don’t necessarily feel important or pressing that the truth comes out about who needs our help and who needs us to be a neighbor.

That afternoon—just a few years ago, though it feels like a lifetime now—standing beside my car with my arms wrapped around my boy, I realized something that should’ve been obvious all along: being a neighbor isn’t just about reaching out across boundaries to strangers or even enemies. Sometimes, being a neighbor means wrapping your arms around someone you love who didn’t ask for help — but who clearly needs it. It means choosing to see them fully, even if it interrupts your day or your expectations.

The Samaritan in the story stopped, noticed, and stayed present. His act of mercy didn’t just heal wounds — it showed a broken man that he was worthy of someone’s time, compassion, and care. Isn’t that what all of us deeply need — to know that we matter enough to be noticed, to be stopped for, to be embraced in moments when we expect punishment or indifference?

Jesus tells us simply, “Go and do likewise.” And so here’s our challenge for this week: what if each of us deliberately became neighbors to the people closest to us? What if we slowed down, stepped away from the rush of our packed schedules, and made time to truly see our spouses, our children, our parents, or our closest friends — not just because they need us, but because we love them deeply?

Who is your neighbor? Maybe they’re already sitting beside you—waiting quietly, hoping that you’ll stop, that you’ll notice, and that you'll remind them just how important they are.

Amen.