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Proverbs 3:
28-32
September 13, 2009 GOD’S
NEIGHBORHOOD: I’ve been thinking about the new name for our Sunday School program – “God’s Neighborhood”, and as long as I don’t have to wear a sweater and do a Mr. Roger’s imitation, I rather like this new name for what we do with our children on a Sunday morning. It doesn’t sound so stodgy or a regimented as “Sunday School”, and furthermore, I think it’s a good description of what we do in our church. In coming here on a Sunday morning and taking part in the various activities, ministries and mission of our church, I hope we all come to feel as if we live in God’s neighborhood. As a church we come from many different neighborhoods; some live here in Old Lyme, and some live a little further away in Lyme, Essex, Old Saybrook, Chester, Deep River, East Lyme and Salem and I know at least one family that lives in Branford and another in Guilford and a few more in Clinton and yet another that comes all the way from Gales Ferry. Regardless of where we live, we all yearn for a stronger sense of community, and the word “neighborhood” has that sort of warm and friendly connotation. I hear the word “neighborhood” and I automatically think of the neighborhood in which I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. By the time I graduated from High School, I knew every square inch of that neighborhood. In preparation for my various sports teams, I would run around and around the blocks of that neighborhood, every block being a quarter of a mile, and I would tick off the miles one block at a time. At the back of the neighborhood, there was a small woods, an undeveloped area, where we would ride our bicycles, a place where we had all sorts of adventures and misadventures. I went to Public School #89, but my education was supplemented by the school for the imagination that was that beautiful dark woods at the back of our neighborhood. In our neighborhood, there was a large field where we played football and baseball, and being Indiana, there was hardly a driveway that didn’t have a basketball hoop. That’s what you do in Indiana; even before you put up your mailbox, you put up a basketball hoop, and because there was a large branch of a tree growing across the driveway, to this day, my jump shot is more like a line drive. Also, in that neighborhood, because the houses were fairly close together, the neighbors all knew when I was in trouble, which was more frequent than I like to admit! So, that was the neighborhood in which we lived, but even though it was a fairly safe and cozy neighborhood, I confess that as neighbors we really didn’t know each other all that well. In thinking about my neighborhood of origin, I’m reminded of a few lines from a poem by T.S. Eliot: Now you live
dispersed on ribbon roads, The quintessential neighborhood for me – the one that may not exist anywhere else but in our minds or maybe in our souls – is the one where everyone knows everyone else, a place where emails and text messages are non-essential, because everyone knows, almost by osmosis, if there’s ever anyone in need. Did you know that in the word “gossip”, etymologically, you’ll find the word “God”? While now it has negative connotations, originally gossip was seen to have divine purpose. So, as a church, as God’s neighborhood, we want you to “gossip about your neighbor”. Now, I know I’m going to get into trouble for saying that, but let me hasten to say, “gossip” not in the ugly mean way in which we have come to use that word, as a way of spreading false rumors or even true rumors about our neighbors, but rather in the sense that we are a community, or, at least we want to be a community, and if one of our members is sick or injured or suffering from loneliness or fear, we want 99 others doing all that they can, trying to be neighborly. The quintessential neighborhood -- God’s neighborhood -- is one where if anyone is sick or injured, you don’t just say it with flowers, you say it with casseroles, so many of them that you have to put your shoulder to the old Frigidaire just to get it to close. Thinking back on it, my neighborhood had a lot of houses, but I wouldn’t say it had a particularly strong sense of community. Neither was it a particularly diverse neighborhood. Most of us were white and middle class. There were other neighborhoods nearby, indeed, less than a mile away, but they might as well have been on the other side of the moon, and over on the other side of the city, there was a high school called Crispus Attucks, a school that was originally built as a segregated high school for Black students. It was the place where the great basketball player, Oscar Robertson – the Big O -- would get his start. But if we were to meet any of the students at Crispus Attucks, sadly, it only would have been out on the football field or basketball court. Now, in retrospect, I can think of other ways in which my neighborhood was too small. Maybe there were Jews or Muslims or Native Americans or Hindu or Buddhist that lived in that neighborhood, but if they were there, we never had the privilege of sitting down and breaking bread together. I would hope that God’s Neighborhood might be seen as being wider and deeper and higher than that rather cozy and homogeneous neighborhood. Our scripture lesson for this morning is the very familiar story of the Good Samaritan, but it probably should have been called, “The Story of the Good Neighbor.” If you look carefully at this story, you’ll see that yes, it’s a story about compassion and generosity, how a man is found by the side of the road by a man who was a foreigner and not a neighbor or least not the usual definition of what a neighbor is. The man who was robbed belonged to a different tribe, and people of his own tribe had passed him by, but it was this Good Samaritan, this man of a different tribe who stopped and provided him with care. So, yes, for certain, this was a story about compassion, a story about how one’s faith is empty and supercilious, even hypocritical unless it is accompanied by generosity. But on a deeper level, Jesus was using this story to expand the consciousness of his students, to get them to move beyond thinking of their “neighbor” as only their next of kin or the person who lived next door. Jesus was concerned about what people did, yes, how they behaved, yes, but he was equally concerned, maybe even more concerned about what they thought, and so in this sense he was a true philosopher, for he was forever telling stories and playing word games and asking questions, every question, every question mark like a pry bar trying to open up minds that were prematurely closed, trying always to get people to think and rethink what it means to live in God’s neighborhood, trying to help people to see how stultifying it is to live in a neighborhood where you are always and only ever surrounded by “your kind of people” or the so-called, “right sort of people.” But the story of the Good Samaritan could have been called the story of the Good Neighbor, but also, it could have been called the story of the Happy Neighbor, for yes, the Good Samaritan did a lot for the man who was beaten up and left for dead, but also, in doing so, the Good Samaritan did a lot for himself as well, for it is in living in that larger universe that we can find the greatest sense of meaning and purpose and joy. Or to put it more succinctly, and here is something you can put on your refrigerator door, “The larger the world in which you live, the happier you will be in your own backyard.” It has been my experience that those who have tried to draw artificial circles around their lives, those who have tried and tried so hard to live only in their own narrowly defined neighborhoods who are the most miserable, shriveled up people I have known. If you were to read Hegel’s, the German philosopher’s Phenomenology of Mind or sometimes translated, Phenomenology of Spirit, and frankly I don’t necessarily recommended that you do read it, for in doing so you would have to wade through an awful lot of verbiage, sort of the linguistic equivalent of alligator alley. But if you were to read it, you would see that he is trying to say that our consciousness is or at least should be forever expanding. In our most primitive state, all we ever think about is ourselves and our own immediate families, the gratification of our own hunger, and the division of the world between “us” and everything or everyone who is “not us.” We speak of “us” and “them”, but in the evolution, indeed the education and the enlightenment of the human spirit, the circumference of our consciousness keeps on getting larger and larger. We start to think of “God’s neighborhood” as being not only our next of kin, not only those who live next door, and if we follow this progression, ultimately we become “citizens of the world.” This is what we yearn and pray for our children and our grandchildren. We want them to be a part of this ever-expanding consciousness. We want them to learn to think not only “outside the box” but indeed “outside the neighborhood.” We want them to think as Jesus thought, to be no respecter of boundaries and borders, for in God’s Neighborhood, attitudes are more important than latitudes, and if you’re around here for any length of time, you’ll hear mention of such far-flung places as the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Zimbabwe and South Africa, Israel and Palestine, Darfur, and during our Adult forum today, we’ll have a chance (we had a chance) to learn more about the human rights crisis in the Congo, and this evening you can come help me break the fast of Ramadan with our Muslim friends in New London. This is all part of what it means to be God’s Neighborhood, and we want our children to think of themselves as residents of that wonderful place, God’s Neighborhood. A week or so ago at one of these so-called “town meetings” to discuss the crisis of medical care in this country, in the audience, there was a woman of German descent, a woman who spoke with a German accent but had actually lived in this country since about 1960, and, as I understand it, she became a citizen of our county many years ago. She talked about how there was a need for universal health care, to which someone shouted out, trying to silence her, “why don’t you go back to where you came from.” Now, regardless of where you may stand on this issue, I would hope that at least most of us would agree that there is something not only mean but also something quite sad in this man’s attitude. Obviously, this man is stuck in what Hegel would call a very primitive state of consciousness. In the long journey from the caterpillar to the butterfly, he’s still rearranging the furniture inside his cocoon, and if Jesus had been at that town meeting, he would have asked that man all sorts of questions, questions intended not so much to humiliate this man, but rather to free him from his ever so limited way of thinking, such that he too might come to think of himself as a resident of God’s Neighborhood. I also want to say that as God’s Neighborhood, I hope and I pray that this will be a place where all might feel as if they are at home. For some of us that may not even seem to be an issue. For those of us that grew up feeling safe and secure, surrounded by the love of our parents, we may take it for granted that we have a rightful place in what we have called, “God’s Neighborhood.” But I know there are others for whom those words may not seem so warm and fuzzy. There are those who have been led to believe that they are not worthy of God’s Love. There are those who have been terrified by aberrant theologies of wrath. There are those for whom the doors of the church have been closed for much too long. If banks have been notorious for drawing red lines on who can get a mortgage and who cannot, so there’s been sort of a redlining in our Christian churches. As it says in our welcome statement, we want this to be a place where all feel that they are welcome. This isn’t my neighborhood or your neighborhood; this is God’s neighborhood, and to be here, you do not have to pass a theological test, you do not have to get past the purity police, for I am proud to say that the doors here are open, and wherever you may be in your spiritual journey, they will always be open, for after all, it’s the neighborly thing to do. Amen.
David W. Good Old Lyme, Connecticut
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