Who is my Neighbor?

Who is My Neighbor? The Dover Church
July 14, 2013– 7th Sunday after Pentecost     Scripture: Luke 10:25-37

2003 and 2004 were challenging years in my life, one of the crucibles of my spiritual formation. A crucible is “a vessel, usually of earthenware, made to endure great heat and used for the fusing of metals.” So what was the great heat and metals being fused in 2003 and 4?
For starters, I was going to seminary full-time, which means taking 3 or 4 classes a semester, each of which required a few hundred pages of reading and usually several pages of reflective writing every week. Tough stuff. Really thought provoking, not easily processed, and challenging on all sorts of levels, personal, spiritual, vocational, relational. Just going to seminary was like being in a blender.
I was living in Quincy at the time, serving as an interim minister for a church that was in a lot of transitional pain following a 56 year pastorate. My predecessors were a husband and wife team who arrived as young newlyweds in 1947 and had just stayed. He died in 2000 and she retired at the age of 82 in 2003. The congregation couldn't imagine their church without their ministers. Also, the ministers had never taken a salary in all those years and the operating budget was $20,000 a year when I arrived. So you can see the tip of the iceberg facing this little church.
I was living next door in their parsonage with my mother, my dog and three cats. The parsonage also had not been touched since 1947 and was full of my predecessors' stuff, floor to ceiling from the cellar to the attic. You would have to have seen it to believe it. So I began a dumpster ministry, filling six tractor trailer sized dumpsters by the time I left so that the in-coming settled pastor could have a place to live with his wife and baby girl. For 18 months, I was hemmed in by stuff that was on its way to a dumpster.
Quincy is a tough, blue-collar town, transitioning from a thriving shipbuilding and granite quarrying past into an unpleasant present and an unlikely future. There was a lot of unemployment and underemployment, urban decay, crime, domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, and all the trashing of the neighborhood that goes with that. Some of the young boys in the neighborhood had taken to using the church as their beer drinking and pot smoking hangout. After the boys got a little drunk, stoned, or high on heroin, they enjoyed writing obscenities on the church or tossing a random brick through a window for kicks. I'm not the kind of minister to let that go on, so out I went and confronted them. Very tense and dangerous. My evening walks with Ella were tense and dangerous too, because the boys would dog my steps in the dark, calling out obscenities and occasionally lobbing an empty bottle at us from the bushes. It got to the point where a cinder block came crashing through the front window at the parsonage.
When I think back on my time there, I spent a lot of time anxious and angry in my mind, my spirit unsettled. I was anxious about how I was going to lead this lovely bunch of Christians into their future. Could I do it? How were we going to pay the bills? How were we going to get to a place where they could call a settled minister? I was anxious about my juvenile delinquent friends, anxious about getting my schoolwork done, anxious about completing my ministerial profile so I could become a settled minister somewhere, anxious about having my mother with me in this situation, angry when I would get caught in Boston traffic on the way to or from seminary, angry about all the cleaning I had to do in the parsonage (cleaning is not my strong suit), angry at the various husbands and boyfriends beating up their wives, girlfriends and children in the neighborhood, angry about all the human degradation I saw all around me, angry at the Quincy Police for not being able to clean up the situation. My mind and spirit were on an endless treadmill of concerns and frustrations, lists of things to do and questions about the future and doubts about my abilities to get myself and the church to the next step.
On top of all of this, I was a chaplain at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. It was part of my seminary education. Two days a week and one overnight a month I would be in the hospital, serving the patients and processing what I had experienced with the chaplaincy supervisor. For the overnights, I'd take the train into town and be in by 5 PM. I would start by visiting the patients who were scheduled for surgery the next morning and those patients who had asked to see a chaplain. If my beeper rang while I was making those visits, I would answer it. When all of that was done, usually by about 9 PM, I would pick up some linen and set up my little bedroom for the night, leaving my beeper on on a table by the pull-out couch where I tried to sleep.
One night during Advent of 2003, the beeper rang around midnight. I looked at it and called the number. It was a nurse in the Women's Center, specifically the delivery room. She told me that there had been a 25 week fetal demise, that the child was going to be delivered shortly, and that the couple, who were Catholics, would like a priest to be present.
I started off by explaining that I was all there was. Then I asked what fetal demise meant. “It means the child has died in-utero and is going to be delivered,” she said. “And since you're the only chaplain here, why don't you just come up and see what you can do? The baby will be delivered any time now.”
So I got out of bed, got dressed and off I went, down long, silent corridors lit by fluorescent lights to the other end of the hospital where the Women's Center was. It was so quiet. Only the sound of my shoes squeaking on the floor. Not another person to be seen. I took the elevator up, introduced myself to the nurse, who pointed me in the right direction, went up to the closed door, took a deep breath, breathed out, and knocked.
I heard an answer and went into a dark room. They were a young couple. The woman looked tired and worn out. She was in labor. The husband stood up to shake my hand as he tried to maintain his composure. They knew the situation. I sat down with them and we talked. They had two kids at home. They wanted a priest because they were Catholics. I explained that I could bless the child, but not baptize as baptism is for the living according to Catholic doctrine. I told them that I could perform the appropriate Catholic ritual, but would have to go get the book from the chaplain's office. They looked resigned, not at all uplifted by presence.
I left, telling them I would be right back. While I was gone, the child was delivered. He had been dead a couple of weeks. As I started to walk towards the room a nurse came out with the baby on the way to clean him up. She saw me, stopped and asked if I would like to see the baby. “No,” I said. “I'll wait until you bring him back.”
I went in to the couple and sat with them. We were mostly quiet. They shared with me their sense of loss and futility, of going through pregnancy and labor only to come home with nothing. All the hopes and dreams of six months come to naught.
Then the nurse came in with the baby in a little hat and swaddling clothes. He was the most beautiful little boy. He looked like his father, except that he was so tiny and purple. We gathered in a circle around the bed with the mother holding the child in her lap. I had my hand on her head and my other arm around the father's shoulders. We crossed ourselves, reminding ourselves of our own baptisms, and blessed this lovely little boy, Cameron James, a child of God. We prayed that God had already received him into heaven. We prayed the Lord's Prayer, ending with “deliver us from evil” as the Catholics do. I blessed them. We crossed ourselves. I hugged the father and kissed the mother on the top of her head. And then I left.
This was one of the most intense experiences of the presence of God in my life. I tell it narratively, that first this happened and then that happened, but it was all of a piece while I was living it. All the details were so very clear and meaningful. The ancient words of prayer and blessing came out of my mouth, but it was as if I was standing outside myself along with the couple. The grief was so very real and intense, but so was the sense of peace in the room and the sense of certainty that we were doing a good and holy thing. There was no sense of passing time. The silences communicated as much or more than the spoken words. The timeless wonder of what I had been part of stayed with me for the rest of the night, as I sat up and savored it until morning surgery. I felt rested and assured when I visited with the folks about to operated on. I felt energy coursing through me on the train home. All my senses were heightened. It was the most beautiful morning.
Do you remember all my anxieties and frustrations, all my lists of tasks and responsibilities, the litany of anger at the beginning of this sermon which I brought with me to the hospital that day? Do you remember? I didn't. When I walked into that room I stepped onto holy ground. The infinity of life and death, love and loss, had cleansed my spirit. And as I walked up the front stairs of the parsonage and saw the broken front window, it didn't mean the same thing to me as it had when I left. Not in light of what I had been part of. Standing in the presence of God has a way of changing your perspective.
The only thing standing between us and God is us. More precisely, the only thing standing between God and us is our ego. Wayne Dyer, of PBS and self-help book fame, defines “ego as my false self, the false self that tells me that I am separate from God and from everyone else. Ego insists that I am important, am therefore easily offended and entitled to judge. Ego tells me that I am defined by my possessions, my achievements, my reputation, and my body.” Ego tells me that I need to be right, to win, to be superior, and to have more. When you think about the priest and the Levite in the story of the good Samaritan, that's what got between them and God, their egos. Their egos told them that they were important, men of achievement with reputations, with ritually clean bodies that would be defiled by touching a half-dead man. They might have been offended by the obscenity of the broken and bruised body. Stopping would have cost them time, and time is money, and more money means more possessions. What their egos failed to tell them, is that they were missing God.
But the Samaritan. What does he do? He stops. Maybe the bandits are still nearby. He could be endangering himself. The man is lying in the road, so he gets down on his knees, humbles himself to get in the dust with a person who is his enemy. He humbles himself by touching and soothing the man, something that was probably embarrassing, the man was naked, and perhaps disgusting, the man had been badly beaten, left half-dead. He humbles himself by putting the man on his pack animal. Maybe he had to throw away some stuff to make room. He had to walk himself, leading the animal like a servant. He takes him to an inn, pays for both of them and stays the night. He's losing time and has gone out of his way. He gives the inn keeper two days wages to care for the man and promises to return to make up the difference later. He cleanses himself of everything that his ego might be telling him, like how he had to work harder at church and seminary; like how he had to get those kids under control; like how he had to get that house cleaned up; like how there shouldn't be so many idiots on the roads around Boston. Oh yeah. We were talking about the Samaritan.
Wayne Dyer, in his book The Power of Intention: Learning to co-create your world your way, writes “What should I do with my life? I suggest that there's only thing you can do with it. Since you came into this life with nothing and you'll leave with nothing; You can give it way. You'll feel most on purpose when you're giving your life away by serving others.”
Which brings us to the Good News of Jesus Christ? How do we inherit eternal life? How do we live life most fully, live into the lives that God has prepared for us? How can we be truly happy and fulfilled? Live lives full of meaning and purpose? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Give your life away in the service of others. You who are married or have children know it's true. You who have cared for elderly or disabled relatives know. But the stranger left to die by the side of the road? The only thing standing between God and us is our egos. Who is my neighbor? My surest pathway to God.