LOVE NEIGHBOR | Luke 10:25–37 | Pastor John Anderson | 6.21.26

Love your neighbor. 

Transcript

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Hello, this is Pastor Rangerlock and Pastor John Anderson. Welcome to the Resurrection Church Play list. Each week we bring you Sunday's message from Resurrection Church right here in Racing, Wisconsin. So whether you're listening or folding some hungry or avoiding folding laundry, we hope this encourages your faith, challenges your perspective, and reminds you that resurrection isn't just something that happened. It's something God is still doing. Enjoy this week's message. And happy Father's Day to those who have played the role of father in the lives of many or a few. You're a gift. And so thank you. I think it's uh I think I'm I'm legally obligated to um share some dad jokes today as a result of that. Pastor Ryan, don't he already rolled his eyes. I got some good ones. Thank you, Nora. Did you know that I only know 25 letters of the alphabet? Yeah, I don't know why. Okay, thank you. Listen, if you are groaning or if you laugh, that's good. That means you're participating, and participation is what we're after today. I I I have uh I have three boys. I'm a father of three sons. Many of you have seen them. They'll be here at the second service. They're almost as tall as me. Um, and and my one youngest son, he asked me the other day, Dad, can you make a butterfly? And so I threw a stick of butter out the window, and that wasn't what he meant. Okay, I really appreciate the Nora. Thank you for that. Parenting is hard, and so is loving your neighbor. Um, I'm gonna get notes from Pastor Ryan on those later, but so is loving your neighbor. And we're gonna talk about what it means to love your neighbor today. Jesus talks a lot about it. The reading that Steve just read is is just the beginning of a conversation that Christ would continue to have with his disciples even after the resurrection about how to love people. Um and as we enter into today's scripture, I invite you to pray with me. God, I pray you would move in mighty ways today. I pray that at this service, at the next service, with those who are joining us online, God, that you would remind us of the command to go out and love like you. Help us to love in situations that are uncomfortable. Help us to grow in those moments, God, recognizing that all are worthy of your love, that we don't get to decide who is. As always, I pray the meditations of my heart and the words that pass through my lips are yours, oh God. It's in Christ's name I pray. Amen. My previous church, um, there was a woman named Marilyn Douglas. Now I I had just started there in uh the fall of 2020. Does anybody remember 2020? Yep, it was fun. Um in 2020, there was there was chaos and there was heartbreak and there was there was fear and there was all sorts of things. And I had just started a new call with a young family, and uh I was trying to figure out what it meant to pastor in this community, very focused on the people in front of me, building this church in the midst of some other hardships. And I was told that there was a family that wanted me to visit their mother, Marilyn. Now, Marilyn wasn't close by, she was actually in a memory care and hospice facility that was 40 minutes from the church. Marilyn hadn't worshipped at our church in years due to her health conditions, and her husband had stopped worshiping because he got into a fight with a previous pastor. They said that Marilyn wasn't always the easiest to talk to, but Pastor, you should go and spend some time with her. She's in hospice, it could be any day now. And friends, I'd love to tell you that I was so excited to go visit Marilyn. But we had other members who were healthy or unhealthy in our community. We also had a growing community. I was the only full-time staff member at this church, and I was trying to figure out where to give my time, where to best serve our community. So one day I said, I'm gonna go and visit Marilyn, thinking that this might be the last time I would see Marilyn, and really not having a great painted picture of Marilyn. I got up to Marilyn's room and she was alert and wide awake and ready to have conversation, which initially surprised me. I quickly learned that Marilyn had been an active member of the community I was serving in for years, for decades. She had led the choir. She had a beautiful voice. I asked her if she would like to sing, and so we sang together in her room. I asked her how she was feeling, and she said, Great. Everybody says I'm dying, she says, but I don't feel like I am. On my way out, Marilyn said, Could you come back and sing with me again? Marilyn hung on for three months. I went up and saw her every week. Became part of my weekly schedule. Something I didn't want to do, something I didn't go into full of joy. I'd bring my guitar, and Marilyn and I would just sing together. The last time I went up there, guitar in hand, the room was empty. She had passed a few hours earlier. Her husband, who hadn't attended church in years, reached out to me. Asked if I would sing at her funeral, along with leading it. And I did. And I bring that up because I think there's moments in our lives, and that's a softer example, where we get interrupted or when we're asked to do something, especially with somebody that we just don't want to do. Have you ever had a moment in your life, an interruption in your life that turns out to be one of the most meaningful? I think oftentimes we don't schedule these things, they just they just happen. We don't plan them, yet God shows up in them. The Gospel of Luke today, it tells us that a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. And right away, if you're reading scripture and if you have your Bible, turn to Luke 10. You you should ask the question, why? I would hope that if you came into my office or Pastor Ryan's office or anybody else on staff here, that you you wouldn't do so just to test us and try to trip us up. But that's what this lawyer is doing, not to learn, but to test. So the lawyer asks, a great question. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Have you ever thought about eternal life? I imagine all of you have at one point. Maybe you are right now in this moment. And then Jesus, because Jesus is the best, responds with a question. Pastor Ryan used to do this, still does as a teacher, and it used to frustrate me wildly. As a young Christian in college, I would ask Pastor Ryan all these questions about scripture, and he would then ask me a question. And if I'm honest, initially I thought he doesn't know anything about Christianity or the Bible. Why is he asking me? Then I quickly realized he's asking me because it's a much better way for me to learn. And so the lawyer is asked a question. Jesus says, What does the law say? And what does the lawyer say? Love God, love your neighbor. And really, the sermon could end here, and maybe some of you are wishing it will, it's not gonna. Because Jesus says these powerful words that we don't follow. He says, Okay, good job. Do this and live. And by the way, in the Greek, it means do this and you will actually experience life, wholeness if you do this. But then Luke gives us this key phrase, the lawyer wanting to justify himself. Don't we all want to justify ourselves? We want to justify who we think is in and out. We want to justify that our actions are righteous, and we can decide whose actions aren't righteous. What I've recognized in this sermon, and I've preached this text actually a number of times, but something new happened this time, and I don't know if it's my season in life. I don't know if it's the brokenness of our world that seems to be thrown into our face every day. The lawyer was so concerned about virtue. That's really what he came to Jesus to talk about. And virtues are good. He says, What must I do to inherit eternal life? But what he's really asking is, look, tell me the right things to do, old rabbi. Give me the checklist. Tell me the script, show me the standard so that I can at least meet it. And when Jesus points him to the law, love God and love your neighbor, the lawyer does what I think a lot of us do. He begins to look for boundaries. Like, all right, man, we can't love everybody, right? What a lazy way to love. No, what a radical way to love, Jesus says. Who is my neighbor? Is the question the lawyer asks. Have you ever thought about why he asked that question? And if this is the first time reading this text, the gospel of Luke is Pastor Ryan's favorite gospel. Um, it is uh an incredible gospel. It continues in the book of Acts. And the first nine chapters, and even the first part of chapter 10 in Luke, tell us all about Jesus. The whole story of Christ, the great birth stories that we read on Christmas. It tells about his baptism, it talks about the beginning of his ministry and calling disciples. It talks about who he is as the fulfillment of prophecy, the Messiah, the one who has come to save. But in chapter 10, there's a shift. The rest of the gospel until the cross, Jesus leans into his disciples and spends the rest of his time with them, telling them what they're going to be called to do. Have you ever thought about why he asked that question? Who is my neighbor? It's because if he can't define the category, I think he can't measure his success. If he can't narrow the field down, then he can't decide whether he has passed or failed. Did I love the right person today, God? Tim Keller, who, uh, the late Tim Keller, who's a pastor, he says the lawyer is focused on virtue when he should be focused on mercy. And a lot of us do this, and they're actually quite close together. And so we can kind of feel good and righteous in our virtues. But if we withhold mercy, the nothing we're offering the world is of Christ. The lawyer is trying to determine who deserves his love. And Jesus is showing him in the scriptures today that love doesn't work that way. The lawyer wants a definition, and then Jesus tells a story. And as a parent, by the way, I found this to be such an incredible tool for teaching. The lawyer wants a rule, and Jesus points to relationship. And I can imagine this lawyer who probably came in so confident, ready to trip up this wild rabbi from the country, getting more and more defeated, but also probably more and more convicted. The lawyer wants to know how little he can do and still be righteous, and Jesus shows him what a life transformed by grace can do, what it looks like. And we do the same thing. And I know we do, because I see it. I don't just see it in our church. And church, I love you. Resurrection is making an impact on this community and Racine, but I still see it. We love categories. We love boxes, we love knowing exactly where the line is in. We might not say it out loud, but we know who's in and who's out. That's not the gospel message. We can't spend our days wondering if we had enough generosity today or enough forgiveness today or enough neighbor love today. That's exhausting. Jesus moves us away from calculation. Jesus wants us to turn instead towards compassion and to figure out what a life rested in that looks like. The kingdom of God has never been about checking religious boxes. In fact, in our worst moments as a church, it's when we've made it that the Reformation was a result of the church trying to decide who was in and who was out, trying to qualify how good you were in God's eyes versus how bad you were based off what you gave or how you showed up. No, for Jesus, it's about becoming the kind of people whose hearts have been so shaped by God's mercy that it overflows into the world naturally. So the lawyer asks, Who is my neighbor? And Jesus essentially says, Look, dude, he probably didn't say dude. It'd be cool if he said dude. He said, Hey, you're asking the wrong question. The better question is, what kind of neighbor are you becoming? Like I said, I preached this a bunch, but I found myself asking a new question this week. And I think I might send it out in our communications with a small devotion this week because it's tripped me up. I've been wondering where I have quietly drawn boundaries around who deserves my compassion. And you might think as a pastor, I would never do something like that. And anybody that thinks pastors are perfect, oh man, we have fooled you. We deal with the same struggles that you deal with. And as we try to shepherd you, as we try to shepherd this community, we want to be honest and authentic that it's not always easy. Where have I quietly drawn boundaries around who deserves my compassion? Where have you done that? I think my favorite part of the story is how Jesus destroys boundaries and he does it in a radical way. And many of you, I think, know the story. If you were here for our Kings series, we talked a lot about why the Jewish people of Jesus' day hated the Samaritans. If you remember the story that Jesus told in Luke today, it begins with a priest and a Levite and a faithful Jewish person, right? No. Instead, the story that Jesus tells isn't what the original audience would have expected. He says there's a priest, there's a Levite, but then there's a Samaritan. And if you're listening to the story, if you're the lawyer and those Pharisees who are trying to trip up Jesus, you know, okay, the Samaritan is not going to be the hero of this story. There's no way. He's probably the villain. There's a good chance he was the one that beat this man. Now he's coming back to beat me, too. The crowd would have been uncomfortable. In the 8th century, for those that like this kind of stuff, in the 8th century BC, there were two kingdoms. After King David and his son King Solomon, Israel split. There was a northern kingdom, Israel. Some of you remember this, I see some heads. And there was a southern kingdom, Judah. Now, Israel, the northern kingdom, uh, they turned away from God. All the kings there, with the exception of one, turned away from God. And the and the kingdom fell eventually to the Assyrians. Now, the Assyrians, um, they had a machine with which they would work through. Anytime they would conquer a new place, um, they would keep those people in that place, but then they would intermarry, they would bring other cultures and customs in, and so the people of that land would be assimilated into their culture. Now, those in Judah, they looked down upon the Jewish people in now what would be controlled by Assyria and the northern kingdom. They thought that they had turned away from God, that their religion had been corrupt, that they no longer worshiped Yahweh, and so they judged them. And for 700 plus years, that enmity grew and grew so much, in fact, that those in Jerusalem would no longer allow those from the north to come and worship. So those in the north created their own temple. It got so bad that the worst thing you could say to someone is you're a Samaritan. I don't know what the modern equivalent is today. I actually thought about a few. None of them felt comfortable out loud. That's who this is, and that's who Jesus, that's who Jesus points to. The one people that would make everybody there angry and uncomfortable because that person in the story became the hero. Because the kingdom of God is always breaking through our categories. The lawyer asks, Who is my neighbor? And Jesus says, which one in this story became a neighbor? There's a shift there. Jesus, Jesus moves away from the tried and true. Just do what you're supposed to do, you know, fulfill the law, and you just might be good enough. Now, Jesus moves the conversation away from identifying the right people, and we do that. And maybe you're hearing me today and you're saying, Pastor, I don't do that, but we do. It's within us. I think from the fall, we are we are we're suspect of people, especially today when someone's asking for something or you see somebody in need and you just it's inconvenient to stop. You justify your actions, and Christ says, No, we got to move towards these people. I wondered if Jesus told this story right now from this pulpit in race scene today, who would he use as a people or a community instead of the Samaritans? I wonder what would pop into your mind right now when you think of that. Who would make us so angry that Christ says they're worth our love too? You can't ignore the people who walked past, right? There's a priest, there's a Levite, and we don't know why they walked past, but we do know that Jesus included them in the story. Maybe they were busy, maybe they were afraid. Maybe scary to see somebody beaten and bloody. Maybe the robbers are close by. Maybe they thought someone else would help. How many of us have thought that when we see someone in need? The truth is scripture never tells us because the reason doesn't matter. The wounded man was still wounded. As fractured as our country may seem right now, I really don't think that most of us are struggling with hatred. I don't. I know that that's the narrative that we can get lost in, maybe if we listen to the news too much, but I don't think that's true. I think what we're actually struggling with is distraction. I think we're just so distracted that we miss people. We're avoiding people, not because we want to, but because we're we're busy. We're we're looking at these things constantly, or we're hearing things constantly, or we don't know what to do with solitude and silence because it frightens us, and so we fill it with noise. We have activities, we have work. Maybe it's even church. I remember a member of ours many years ago during Advent saying, Oh, coming to church is exhausting. Sometimes the greatest threat to compassion isn't cruelty, it's just hurry, it's busyness. It's forgetting that we're all connected. I wonder if the greatest opportunities that God places before us, the the greatest opportunities that God has placed in front of you already and probably will today seem like, feel like interruptions. But what a great opportunity for God to move through you. You know what you can't miss here is that the Samaritan saw him. In ministry, I've been doing almost 20 years of ministry in some way, shape, or form, connected to Pastor Ryan. And as I look back on it, I realize I miss people sometimes. You know, the priest saw him, the Levites saw him, but they didn't really see him. The Samaritan sees, he stops, he moves towards him, he touches him, he lifts him, he carries him, he pays, he promises to come back, and guess what? He does. He returns. For the Samaritan, love is not a sentiment. Love is not just showing up saying I did something good for a second and taking off. No, love moves and it costs something. Love has to cost something. It's it's sometimes inconvenient. Love is not an emotion, it's an action, it's a verb, it's a choice you make. Love sacrifices. Two weeks ago, Pastor Ryan, or two weeks ago, I called you to follow Jesus. And last week, Pastor Ryan said that as we follow Jesus, the first thing we must do is love God with our whole being. But he talked about how hard that is. How the reality is, if it was a pie chart, we would give 87% of it to God, but God, this other part, let me hang on to it. No, all of it, all of it to God. Not just attending worship, not just believing the right things, but following Jesus means walking into the world the way that Jesus walked into the world. It means seeing people and moving towards people and loving people and doing things that make you uncomfortable in the name of Christ so that the love of Christ can be present in someone's life, perhaps for the first time. Loving neighbor is hard. And Jesus essentially says you cannot separate the two. It's impossible. In fact, you cannot claim to love God. And I'll tell you this, church, as your pastor, you cannot claim to love God and not love neighbor. They're not exclusive. Jesus says they must go together. And so I wonder today who have you stopped noticing? Who feels like a distraction or an annoyance? Who in your life needs a phone call that you've been putting off because you just don't want to deal with them? Who needs an invitation or encouragement? You know, most sermons would end right there. Don't worry, I'm getting near the end. But most would end right there exhorting you go and be a good Samaritan. Stop, bend down. But Jesus does something deeper. He wants us to identify with the priest because sometimes we are the priest, sometimes we are the Levite, sometimes we walk by, sometimes we fail, sometimes we don't love well. Amen. Let's try that one more time. Sometimes we fail at following Jesus. Amen. Thank God for grace, amen. Amen. But Jesus lives it. You see, the beauty of the story is that Christ is the good Samaritan. We're the wounded traveler. Christ sees us, sees a broken world, and what does Christ do? Christ comes down to us. Christ lifts us up. Christ helps us to get healed. Christ pays what's necessary for our debt. Christ promises to come back. Christ does. Unable to save ourselves. No more religion, no more self-help, no more trying harder, just relying on Christ because our Savior comes near. That's what this story teaches me. Jesus becomes our neighbor the first ever. And everything changes here because he models how we should receive each other. I'll end with a quick story. I I would every summer after uh during college, I would come home and teach, uh, I would lead a camp. At uh the Pleasant Prairie Renaissance School in Kenosha. And um it was a camp for you know ages five to twelve, and there was a number of us uh along with some teachers. And one of the kids in this camp uh was an 11-year-old named Zach Morris, and that was his real name for those that remember Saved by the Bell. Zach Morris. Zach was a great kid. Zach was blind, um, and Zach was autistic, but he was verbal. But Zach made some of the other kids uncomfortable. They didn't know how to deal with Zach. Zach would rock quite a bit, Zach would speak out sometimes. A lot of the leaders had a hard time with Zach because he would interrupt them, not to be disruptive, but because he couldn't control some of these things. And I would watch Zach, and I was an education major, but I definitely wasn't equipped to understand all the things that Zach was dealing with. I would do music throughout the week, and every time I would play the piano, I would notice that Zach would stop rocking and he would listen. And so I thought, well, maybe I'll spend some time with Zach. Zach couldn't go outside for the recess. So I sat down next to Zach and we had this little mini keyboard, and I brought it over and I played a couple notes, and Zach just grabbed the keyboard and then played the exact same notes that I just played. This continued all summer. We would have our music time together, and guess what? Before long, kids would stay in from recess to hear Zach play the piano. And I'm not blaming these kids for ignoring Zach or teachers for not trying to engage with Zach in a different way. And I definitely didn't know what I was doing. I just didn't want to go out to recess. And I would come back each summer, and Zach would be there until he was unable to be there because of his age. And then his mom reached out to me and she talked to me about how Zach would talk about his favorite time at camp with music, something that seemed so insignificant to me. How he began to take piano lessons. And I think about what a great opportunity and what a safe place for me to do that, by the way. There's moments in our lives where it's radical. We we took these kids to a mission trip once, and there was this young man, Ben, and he didn't want to be there, did not want to be on this mission trip. And I tasked him with working with these kids outside almost as a punishment because I knew that would be hard to work with. And Ben was outside working with these kids at this camp. And at the end of the week, I asked them to tell me where they saw God. And this camp was full of kids who had some special needs. And I'll leave you with what Ben wrote. Because Ben said he he came back from this camp, from this mission experience, understanding God's love in a different and radical way. And no longer seeing these kids, these kids who had some difficulties as inconveniences, but simply as God. Here's what Ben wrote. He said, Today I felt God in the tug of my shirt from a grinning child. In the hugs from his small arms and the love that came with unconditionally. Today, I saw God running up jungle gyms and scampering across gymnasium floors with smiles wider than an ocean. Today I was reminded that we were all children once. As I heard God and the laughter and giggles and whispers and secrets and shouts and playground war cries of his children, of his innocent, beautiful children. Today I knew God, and God can be as simple as the compassion and love from one child to another. Today I found God in a broken child, and God is good. Maybe, church, maybe this week Jesus is not asking who is your neighbor. Maybe Jesus is asking, who have you stopped seeing? Who have you refused to acknowledge is worthy of Christ's love? He's not asking you to change the whole world. He's inviting you to notice the person right in front of you: the coworker, the cashier, the lonely neighbor, the struggling student, the exhausted parent, the person sitting alone in worship. Following Jesus, loving God, and loving your neighbor, those are not three different things. They're simply one way of life. And as Christ told the lawyer, do this and you will live. Church, I promise. I promise. If you practice this, it will be uncomfortable at times, and there will be times where no one cares about the way that you loved neighbor, but you will experience life in Christ in a brand new way. Let us pray. God, you're so good. And I just know that I come to you, God, broken and too often missing opportunities in front of me to love like you, God. So I just pray, God, Holy Spirit, that you would arrest my heart. That you would help my focus to see those right next to me. Those who are so desperately in need of a friendly word, of being seen. God, following you is never supposed to be easy. It was never supposed to be a social club with the people that we like who dress like us and think like us and look like us. The kingdom of God is a variety of personalities and colors and peoples. Help us to see every person as a child of God and worthy of your love. And help us, God, to encounter neighbor in a radical way so that we don't walk by. So that we like you can lean in, reach down, lift up, and walk with. And we pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.