Who is My Neighbor?
Sermon preached by Subdeacon JD Swartz on Sunday, November 10, 2024 at St. Mary Orthodox Church in Cambridge, MA
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Christ is in our midst!
When I volunteered to give the homily today, it was because my mother is in town and I can’t remember the last time she saw me offer a sermon, but it has been quite a while – more than fifteen years. It didn’t strike me until Tuesday that I had offered to give the homily on the Sunday following election day. I toyed with the idea of ignoring the fact, considering that on Tuesday we rendered unto Caesar that which is his, and we are not here today for those things – we are here to encounter the Lord and to be the Body of Christ. But we are human, we are spiritual and we are physical – and the physical comes with a host of things including emotional and psychological aspects that cannot be ignored; to ignore our physical being is to neglect our spiritual being, because we are not one or the other, but both.
Before you get too worried, this is not a homily about politics, nor about the state of the nation, civil discourse, or anything of that sort; because as the Armenian theologian Vigen Guroian reminds us, “politics does not belong to the Kingdom.” What I do wish to convey this morning is that Love does belong to the Kingdom of God.
In today’s Gospel, we heard what is likely the most well-known parable of the Lord, that of the Good Samaritan. The pericope begins with a lawyer looking to test Christ by asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, and with Christ responding in kind by putting the lawyer to the test by asking him to recite the law. The law states, "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." Correct! And good on the lawyer for knowing the law, right? “But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’”
The Lord responds with a story of a man beaten and robbed, left for dead by the thieves and subsequently by the religious and the priestly, only to be aided by the detestable Samaritan – aided without hesitation, without hope of reward – a person who saw another in need and became a neighbor. In Christ, the question is not “who is my neighbor?” but “to whom have I been a neighbor?”
But I think a lot of people are questioning who their neighbor is these days, and to whom they should be a neighbor. “Are you with us, or are you with them?” “How might I justify my hatred, or my anger, or my disgust of you, because I am certain that you hate me.”
We cannot allow our political situation to decrease our hope for it is not our source of hope, nor, on the other hand, should it increase our pride as we are called to humility, and it must not steal – whether by depression or by egotism – our resolve to bring heaven to earth. To borrow a move from Deacon James, I’ll quote Fr. John Behr, “The Cross stands as the world turns.” And just as the Cross – that great sign of love through suffering, even unto death – stands firm, we are called to love consistently; we are here to love and to be transformed into the image and likeness of the one God Who is perfect-love in Trinity. We are to enter into the ditch with the ones we find suffering and broken, even if they themselves do not see their pain and suffering, and we are to become co-sufferers in love, giving love without preference and without need of justification. Archimandrite Vaselios from Mount Athos reminds us that Christ “came, not to do something that is easy, but to do something that is true.” And at this moment, I think the hard truth is that our actions – both personal and civil – have real consequences both for ourselves and those we are called to be neighbor to – that in this land of rampant individualism and cannibalistic capitalism we God-fearing folk must contend with the fact that, to paraphrase Dorothy Day, “we really only love God as much as we love the person we love the least.” Christ came as a servant of all, even and especially to those who reject Him – who are we to be any different?
Have hope, but above all, have love and be love so that we, and the world, may be transformed by Christ. To Him be the glory, amen.