Who is your neighbor?

When Jesus said love God and your neighbor, he wasn't saying anything particularly new to his Jewish audience. He was simply repeating a rabbinical answer to the question "What is the summation of Hebrew law?" What made his comments unique was his answer to the question "Who is your neighbor?" The inclusion of the Good Samaritan story in the gospels was intended to remind us that Jesus not only had a different definition of neighbor, but a broad definition of who was able to be a good neighbor.
By using the Samaritan as the protaganist in the story he was broadening the scope of who was able to be seen as righteous. It's the Samaritan who answers the queston, "Who is your neighbor?" by crossing cultural lines with a merciful act. The people listening to the story were left shaking their heads in disbelief. Jesus was proving again with his story the radical nature of this new way of following God. Faith in God in Jesus way would supercede cultual prejudices, historic hatreds, cross old boundaries.
Is this still the Jesus way? What are we doing to answer the question "Who is your neighbor?"

attitude and abundance

Last Sunday was our congregational potluck. It was an extraordinary Sunday meal--a table loaded down with food, plenty for everyone to have a course and seconds. By the time we were done, each of us was stuffed and satisfied.
My mind wandered back to other potlucks in the life of our congregation, not so abundant. Times when we had to run to the store at the last minute to fill in the gaps in our sparse buffet. I realized in that moment that something had changed. Our congregation is beginning to act like a congregation of abundance instead of scarcity. An attitude shift has begun, God will supply our needs brimming up and overflowing beyond what we can even imagine. When we live with an attitude of abundance, satisfaction is guaranteed.

Parents--part 1: wag the dog parents

Most of us don't need to go far back into our memory banks to remember the film "Wag the Dog." In this film the president and his entourage are doing everything possible to please the electorate, leading on the basis of opinion polls. Needless to say, everything the president did was choreographed to please the people he was supposed to be leading.

Similarly, American parents have succumbed to the temptation of allowing children to take the primary seats at the family table. Parents make decisions based on family opinion polls. We have forgotten that it is a parent's job to lead his or her child(ren). Parents, it is high time for us to reclaim our roll as spiritual leaders of our children. If our children have learned that going to church is an optional activity, why should we be surprised when they decide that working on Sundays is more important to them than going to Sunday worship, choir, or youth group. When we model that our minimum daily adult requirement for church is one hour on Sunday, by leaving the church building as soon as the closing benediction sounds, why should we be surprised when they don't think even that even that one hour is well spent? Why should we be surprised when we awaken our children for church and have them say they don't want to go today, when we take Sunday after Sunday off to rest rather than showing our children that attending worship is a high priority for us as parents? The outcome of this wag-the-dog behavior will be disastrous. We shouldn't be surprised when our children who are looking for full-time jobs, take no consideration of how their spiritual life may be hampered by job schedules that prohibit worship. It shouldn't shock us when they choose working overtime ($) over worshiping regularly. We will have no basis to question our children as they raise a new generation of wag-the-dog children when soccer, tennis, jobs, band outings, etcetera take precedence over regular attendance at public worship and the joy of participating in a community of faith. I, for one, won't stand for it. I refuse to let the tail wag the dog. Our children are clamoring for us to show them what we think is important. They want to be led.

party time

Last night in our "Saving Jesus" class, the commentators of our video considered the question, "Did Jesus hold services or throw parties?" Their contention was that Jesus went from neighborhood to neighborhood throwing parties with expansive guest lists that included people from all social classes and even mixed religious backgrounds. This activity was considered revolutionary because it brought people together across socially, politically and religiously enforced lines. The Roman Empire effectively worked to keep these people of various classes and backgrounds separate and hating one another, thus ensuring centralized Roman power and a dis-empowered general populous.
I think it's time for the people of God to start throwing parties again--celebrations of God that bridge social, economic, political and ethnic barriers. We need to stretch our invitation list beyond our comfort zone. Anything less than a well-attended Jesus party will never accomplish the ministry and witness that Jesus did.
Jesus self-proclaimed mission is found in Luke 4:18-19, 18 when he reads a passage from Isaiah 61, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has appointed me to preach Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the downtrodden will be freed from their oppressors, and that the time of the Lord's favor has come." What better way to say that than to throw a party in Jesus's honor?
p lou