Our opening worship service at the 2010 Congress on Evangelism featured the Reverend Rudy Rasmus. While at St. John’s UMC in Houston the congregation grew from 9 to over 9,000 members.
Rudy preached on the parable of the Good Samaritan found in Luke 10:25-37. A teacher of the law asked Jesus what he must do to live forever. Jesus, as was his custom, answered the question with a question: “What is written in the law?”
The man answered “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.”
Jesus told the man that he was correct, and if he did this he would have eternal life.
But the man wasn’t satisfied; he asked Jesus “Who is my neighbor?” You see, the man was trying to justify his feelings toward others by drawing a box around a group of people he wanted to consider as his neighbors – the people he wanted to love.
So Jesus told the familiar story of a man who was robbed, stripped of his clothes, and beaten. He was left half-dead on the side of the road.
Along passed a priest, who crossed to the other side of the road to avoid making contact with the victim. Likewise a Levite passed by without offering any assistance. A third man, a Samaritan, helped the man.
Jesus instructed the lawyer through this parable that the Samaritan was the one being the neighbor to the beaten man. Jesus told the man to go and do likewise.
I won’t go into all that Rev Rasmus preached, but I’m sharing this with you because it got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about a passage in the previous chapter of Luke. In Luke 9:51-56 Jesus had been rejected by the Samaritans. He had sent messengers ahead saying he was coming, asking for room to be prepared for him. They refused, because they found out he was going towards Jerusalem.
James and John, two of Jesus’ disciples asked Jesus “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Jesus rebuked them for this, because he knew that despite their unlikeable attitude, he loved them as his neighbor.
I started thinking about how if James and John got their way, perhaps the “good” Samaritan would have been stricken by that fire and wouldn’t have had a chance to help the victimized man. Yeah, I know, it’s a parable, so it doesn’t mean there was literally a Samaritan, Jesus used that as a story to illustrate his point. But even if Jesus was using the parable of the Good Samaritan as a hypothetical, it still shows that even a town that refused Christ can have a good man in it.
So as I walk up and down the streets of New Orleans this week, I will do so with a new attitude. This city with several liquor stores on every block is full of people I love, because they are all my neighbors.
Jesus doesn’t give us permission to pick and choose those we love.