MCC Podcasts
Love - Loving Those Around Us
It's the question of all questions, really, when it comes to the way the church is engaging with the world, and it has to do with loving those around us. We've been taught a lot, and Jesus said quite a lot, about loving those who are in our circle of influence, in our circle of friends, but what about the society that forms the circumference of the church? How do we love those who are around us? Apparently, the church of the first century had figured this out because the text tells us that even though they could not have been in more profound and measurable disagreement with the popular culture, they were held in favor among everyone. They loved those who were around them, and that's the text today. That's the topic for today. How do we love those who are around us? How do we love those who are not really in our closest circle of friends, or even in the place where they agree with everything that we don't even agree with everything we tend to present, do we? But how about those who are in our culture, in our community? How do we love those who are around us? We want to take the text this morning that you may have heard before, probably have heard before, if you've been in church for any length of time, from Luke chapter 10. This is the illustration Jesus is offering in answer to the question. The question was asked, "Who is my neighbor?" Because the challenge was to love your neighbor among other parts of the challenge. And in Luke chapter 10, Jesus tells a story that illustrates who the neighbor is, who's to be loved, and how this is supposed to work. So would you stand for the reading of God's Word? Luke chapter 10, and I'll begin reading at verse 25, and we'll go right through 37. On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "What must I do to inherit eternal life? What is written in the law?" Jesus replied, "How do you read it?" He answered, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself." You have answered correctly, Jesus replied, "Do this, and you will live. You'll have real life." But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" In other words, how far do I have to go with this thing? Whom can I limit, maybe, because I have been limiting? In reply, Jesus said, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and when he was attacked by robbers, he was attacked by robbers, they stripped him of his clothes, they beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead, so there's this guy laying in the street." A priest happened, no, there's this guy without his clothes, bleeding and bruised, moaning, half dead, laying in the street. You get a picture of this. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side, so to a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side, and there are theological reasons for that in their mind. We won't go into those today, yet Jesus is challenging them. But a Samaritan, and catch the sense of how offensive it would be, for Jesus to present a Samaritan as the hero of the story, getting something the religious leaders didn't get. That's what's going on here. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was, and when he saw him, took pity on him. He went to him, bandaged his wounds, poured oil and wine on his wounds, then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day, he took out to Daenerai and gave them to the innkeeper, to Daenerai, two measures of money. "Look after him," he said, "and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have." Then Jesus looks at this expert in the law, and he says, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him." He didn't say the Samaritan. He just said, "The one who had mercy on him," that's as far as he could take it. And Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise." May God add his blessing to his holy word, his fully inspired message to us. Couldn't be seated. What is involved in loving those around us? That's a question the church has been asking for centuries, and is going to have to come and keep asking, and sometimes we're not going to be real comfortable with the answers. But the question remains, how do we love those who exist around us? How do we love our community? What must we do in order to care for them the way Jesus taught here, the way Jesus commanded? What Peter and I have been talking about and thinking through is this, that in this story, the major movements that answer to that question in response to that question are revealed. And here's the first answer to that question, the first part of the answer. The first thing that has to happen, if we're going to love those who are around us, is we have to be able to see them. Start learning to see, but not just see with our eyes. We have to learn to see with our eyes and with our hearts, preferably at the same time. If you look at verse 30, you have this repetition of the idea of seeing, and then there was a seeing that blew all the other seeing away, right? A man's going from Jerusalem, he's attacked, he stripped his rather graphic, the presentation of what happened, the description, and a priest comes going down the same road, and when he saw, he quit going down that side of the road, crossed the street to the other side of the road, and continued on his trip, he saw, but he didn't see. And then a Levite, same thing, came to a place, he saw him, the text said, passed to the other side of the road, and kept going. He saw, but he didn't see. A Samaritan came to where the man was, and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He had care in his heart for him. The first thing we have to learn to do as a church, relearn to do, and continue to do, if we're going to love those who are around us, is we have to be able to see, really see, see with our hearts. That means we stop seeing the people around us as a physical risk through the eyes of fear. We stop seeing the people around us as some sort of a strange threat to our purity. Stop seeing the people around us in relationships with them as a compromise, which in effect is seeing people through the eyes of faithlessness. God, you do not have the capacity to keep me on track if I go and get involved with these folks that live around me. We need to stop seeing people as a lost cause, as a waste of time. Stop seeing people through the eyes of prejudice and our differences. We need to stop seeing people as simply examples of bad decision-making. You have what you earn. You have what you chose. You have what you deserve. In other words, we need to stop seeing people through the eyes of arrogance, because seeing people like that is seeing people with a very short memory about our own lives and our own secrets, isn't it? We need to see. Stop seeing people those ways and start seeing people around us the way the Samaritan saw, as human and therefore precious to God, period. Start seeing people as victims of a broken world and a ruthless enemy the way the Samaritan saw. Start seeing people as being at the mercy of their own bad choices. I'm not implying that people are not, that we're not responsible for our own choices. There are consequences to our own choices. But when we see people with our eyes and our hearts, we see them as folks who, yes, made choices and are facing decisions that are often linked to those choices. But we also see people as victims of inequitable circumstances. We look and we say, "You know, it's just a broken, unfair, oppressive world." And sometimes art is experiencing that because of the choices art made. Sometimes art is experiencing that because of the choices others make. And if we're going to love the world around us, we need to see. We need to love them by seeing them with compassionate seeing, with weeping over Jerusalem kind of seeing. It's an interesting art that you and I both go to Costco on occasion, and you all go to Costco on occasion, and I don't know about you, but we see men and women there who have cardboard signs and some of us perhaps veer to the outside lane so we can avoid the sort of internal confrontation. You go down on 4th Street in San Rafael and we see people down there and we sort of go to the other side of the street. I want to show you some people who have seen a situation and have done something about it. So if we could put up the first slide. This lady's name is Sharla. Sharla Perro and her husband were the founders of Foundation for his ministry in Mexico. Sharla's story is that she had been reading and praying about Mexico. She'd been, had heard about an area that Hollywood had sort of tried to develop and then just deserted. So she and another couple decided they would take a day trip from North Hollywood down to a place called Vicente Giro where this facility was and see what it looked like and then come back home. Well, they started getting into Mexico and the roads started to erode and they started running out of gasoline and then it started getting dark and they were operating on fumes and ended up in finally finding a place where there appeared to be a man out front. Everything else was deserted but there was this little place and there was a guy out front and they told him their story as best they could and he jumped in the front seat of the car and took them to another home and then he disappeared. They hadn't seen him since. They get in the home and they find this woman who is taking care of nine homeless kids, children who are just abandoned in the community. Then they were looking for a place to stay so she put them up for the evening. Matter of fact, next morning she put gas in their car and they, Sharla went and walked around this facility and took a look at it and her heart saw what was going on there. That there were children that were lost and had no place to go. Matter of fact, she heard the silence of children singing but she'd opened the door and there was nothing there, interesting. Next slide please. The outcome of Sharla and seeing this resulted in foundations for his ministry. Last year we took a team down to that same place. This has been a wonderful place for us. We took a team down and three of the team saw the depravity, saw the homelessness of some people and what people called a home but there wasn't much of a home. It was a cinder block laid on its side, little plastic. Next slide. And as an outcome of that they saw this little girl Rosa and as a result of that, the Lord opened their hearts to do some things and so now Rosa is living in a brand new home. Next slide. This is Rosa's older brother, there are five in the family and he is now in Tijuana going to school and the whole family has their education. All the siblings have all the education taken care of, next. And it goes on, this is affectionately called Gilead House South. It really is Casa de Gracias but because that team last year had a heart to see what was going on down there, there was enough money available. This is a home now for at least two moms with children who are really in desperate situation sort of like what happens at Gilead House. Next slide. And then this is the focus of foundation for his ministry, just so you know, it started out in Vicente Guillerno in this abandoned facility. Their focus is on rescuing children, reaching a loss, restoring the needy and now they're in five different areas in Mexico extending that kind of help. So it's great to see things, it's great to see as you're going to Costco or down in 4th Street or wherever, it's great to see things. But without going beyond the seeing, we're like the rest of the world. An example of somebody who saw with her heart, well what comes next though in loving the world around us, loving the people around us. If you look at verse 34, just the first few words, this is the big difference in the story that Jesus presents here, see he saw with his heart, he saw and had compassion. And then forwards in verse 34, this is the big difference, he went to him. Those forwards are offered in juxtaposition to, he crossed to the other side of the street. So you have the negative example of religious leaders given a charge by God to be compassionate to all the world, who come and they see and they walk to the other side of the street and create more distance. And the positive example that Jesus offers, he's saying in effect, this is what I expect of my followers who are seeking eternal life. We minimize the difference, we walk toward the need, we walk toward the risk, we walk toward the mess, we walk toward the cost. We don't simplify our lives by crossing to the other side of the street, we complicate our lives by walking toward the needs of the people around us. This is a great challenge, actually it's a rebuke to a religious community that thinks they can do the mission of God without doing relationship with the people who most need the message of God. Those who love their neighbor as their self are not people who pass to the other side of the road. And I really feel this is a strong message for the church. Now you've heard this message from so many angles as part of this church community. And if you were to go to many of the churches in Marin County, you would hear the same message a different way. I'm not saying we have an exclusive grip on this. It does not protect the gospel to separate ourselves from the folks who need to hear it most. It actually violates and poisons the gospel. That's not how you love your people, the people around you. The one that Jesus endorses stops, stops progress on his original journey, whatever that journey happened to be, and came to the one in need. This is really interesting, this observation. If you read that parable again and again and again, you'll realize really quickly that Jesus is writing it from the perspective of the one in need. So instead of saying, "He stopped and he went to him," you read and it's almost like you're seeing the story develop through the eyes of the one who sees somebody coming toward it, because the text says, "He came to him," came is, "You came to me." You're hearing this, writing this from the perspective of the one who's in need. And when the one who's in need sees the one who publicly reports to have all the answers, and the one who's in need sees that community crossing to the other side of the street to avoid contact, to minimize contact, to not have to engage, doesn't feel real hopeful. But when we stop what we're doing to come to them, what seems like an interruption to us looks like love to them. When we stop rebuking folks long enough for making bad decisions, and why do you travel alone, and how could you put yourself in this position to travel with that kind of wealth, not even protecting yourself, and then these robbers, don't you know there were robbers on the road? When we stop long enough in our rebuke to get involved with them, they feel as though they can be whole again. And the perspective of the one in need, stopping and coming, because according to Jesus we stop because from the perspective of someone who desperately needs to experience it, there's really no such, there is no such thing as drive-by mercy. There's only such a thing as stop, park, get out of the car, kind of mercy. That's what's involved in loving those around us. We must be willing to see, and we must be willing to stop. You know I think this is the, for me it's the hardest thing to stop. There's no light over there, let's just come over here. They can see me. There's no light over there. There's no light over there. Your halo will not work. To me, stopping is the hardest thing. I have this to-do list that goes a mile long. And I sort of thought about the priest as he was going down, and he probably came and looked at the guy lying, they were half dead, yeah but I've got to get back to the church. I've got things I need to do, I've got to hold a meeting tonight. You know it's that, it's that stopping that's so darn hard. I mean we've got lists, we've got to get the kids to swimming, we've got to get the kids to soccer, and I've got to go see the giants. Something people should stop. But we've got to let our hearts sort of speak to that. That's one nice thing I like about Alpha. We've seen so many people come on Alpha and say, no we can't do the Alpha course, that's 11 weeks, I can't commit to that. So what we tell people is, no we're not asking you to commit to that, just come once. And if you like what you partook of, the food, the fellowship, then come on back. We've seen people reschedule those 11 weeks, they saw a better option. We need to start tossing sort of our to-do list up when we see opportunities like that. Let me talk about a couple of people that, I can't go down there either, can I? Could I have the next slide? Can you see me? Okay, soup kitchen is something we do once a month, it started out once a week. Chris Nelson, who happened to go to Mexico with us one time, and Sandy Ailey run that for us now. But they're two people who have looked at their to-do lists and sort of resorted. They stopped what they were doing, next. This is our first open table, this represents 12 people, 11 of which were from this church, one from another church in Nevada. And everybody, busy lives, believe me, everybody had busy lives. But they made that decision, they went before the Lord and asked, okay, what do I do now that I see? There's an opportunity for us to come alongside a young man or a young woman who is struggling to get out of poverty. And so they did this for a year, we're in the aftercare portion of this now. But here's a young lady who has now been accepted at Dominican, she's in a home where she now feels safe, and she is now on the road to coming out of poverty. And it's all because 12 people saw something, stopped. So we see, we stop, and look, we understand, we usually are stopping in root to doing other things that have to get done, sometimes they don't really have to get done. This isn't us pretending, oh, you can stop and your kid can sit outside and wait for another ride from school if you have to go pick them up. But there's a heart that is willing to see and a life that is willing to be set aside or at least struggle to find ways to be set aside and to stop. That's how we love those around us. Finally, the most obvious thing happens because we see in this story, and the Samaritan stops, goes to the person, came to the person. And then he helps. He actually did something, something measurable and relevant. And I want you to notice that there's quite a cost to this Samaritan. He went down to him, verse 34, bandage his wounds, pours oil and wine on his wounds. Then he put the man on his own donkey, which means that he either took himself off of his donkey or his load and did something else with it. Set aside his own life and his own wealth and made them available to help this person. And brought him to an inn and then invested time and took care of him. It implies that it's only for an overnight, but it doesn't really say that in the story. He just takes care of him and then the next day, after he's done taking care of him, pays for further care. He says, "I'm going to come back. Here's some money up front. Take care of him. Make sure he's healthy. I'll come back and I'll catch up with you later." Look at how much the Samaritan health, it cost him money, it cost him time, it cost him energy, it cost him his agenda. And he helped in some really helpful ways. These are ways that we need to learn to help. First thing he did was he stopped the bleeding. This is a story. This may or may not have been an historical event. Jesus may be telling a story in response to something that he actually knew about. Probably not, but he could have been. But in this story, Jesus says he saw the immediate needs and there was a triage that happened. It was the bleeding. And it's the kind of triage that people need around us. Jesus put the church on earth to sort of stop the bleeding. The bleeding of a broken heart, the bleeding of broken relationships, certainly the bleeding of the broken relationship between humanity and God. He sends Jesus to stop that bleeding. And the church to give people access to the kinds of things that will help them stop bleeding. And then he addresses the infection. He puts oil and wine. That's addressing to help stop the infection. There's a festering that will happen. And this will go from bad to worse. What does the church need to do in her community to stop the bleeding and to address the infection, to keep things from festering? And then he does this. He stays present. He stays connected. He stayed at least the night and then arranged for ongoing care and then said, there's a future connection. So we stop the bleeding. We address the infection of those around us with humility, recognizing we are infected people who are infectors potentially addressing the infection. And then we stay present. Jesus is calling for serious, deep friendships and relationships over time. How do we love those around us? We see with our hearts. We stop and come to them and we help. We stop the bleeding. We address the infection. We stay present all the while being aware of the fact that what we're really doing is offering Jesus. I think the most critical part of this helping thing is the perseverance is the Samaritan coming back and saying, here's too generic and I'll be back in anything that he needs. I'll take care of and it's that ongoing thing. The joy that we've had as a congregation is becoming involved with Hamilton School. Several years ago we ended up at Hamilton School for a meeting and not to spend too much time on this, but the two people on your left, the young short lady on the left, Ruth Ann Bexton was the principal then, the guy standing in back of her as Steve is now the principal and Ruth Ann is working in the district. So it was a case of us trying to get an idea of how we might help. Next slide. And so how can we help a school whose mission it is to provide a safe and caring environment while students reach their academic potential next? And what we ended up doing starting to do was they were looking to develop a peaceful campus so we would go over and pull weeds, simple tasks, just go over and pull weeds, but all the time making relationship and deepening the relationship with everybody at the school. Next. Other ways that we met needs, we do a yard sale, that's coming up by the way in another month and so we'll tell you more about that as it happens, but it's not only, this was to provide some money so that they could have some discretionary money just to do whatever they wanted to, but what we found after the first year or two was that we were having a tremendous effect upon the families and the community that surrounds Hamilton School in providing them opportunities to buy clothes at a rather insignificant price. I mean, you could stuff a Trader Joe's bag full for $1. I mean, where else can you go buy clothes like that next? This year we had the joy because we persevered, I believe, and because we've developed this kind of a trust that we were able to take four people from Hamilton School to Mexico with us and so you can see them. Steve, again on the upper left-hand corner, is now the principal and the stories that I hear that are going on, even in his household, about who is God and why did he put us here and what happens to us when we die, all seeds that were planted and I know that we're going to see because of the perseverance, because of us taking Jesus onto that campus that we're going to see remarkable fruit from all of this. Eight and a half years ago when I first came from Chicago to be pastor here, eight and a half years and about 35 pounds ago, 40 pounds ago, the first three years were rather challenging and I was taking these prayer walks in my neighborhood and I would stop always in front of this run-down beat-up school and I remember stopping one day thinking, "How in a world can students be encouraged to learn when the campus looks so dry and awful?" That's not a great environment and I didn't know one stitch of anything about Hamilton School and I sensed the Lord leading me to ask him for access to that school and I remember praying for the teachers, the administrators and students just because it happened to be on my prayer walk and I would always stop in front of there. I'd see that school and I'd saw it differently, I'd stop but I didn't get to help. Look at what the Lord has done, Peter comes onto our staff, develops a huge heart for that school and actually took it and went and has done marvelous things and then the congregation responded and the Lord gets to use us and we get to be His answers to prayers. But do you remember the initial question from which, and that's all great, do you remember the initial question from which this story of Jesus comes? It was from a lawyer who came and said, "How do I acquire eternal life?" Jesus is saying, "Love those around you and here's how you do it." But the context for the whole conversation is this thing of eternal life. Knowing those around us is about helping them to have that life and that's a life that only fully comes from knowing Jesus, from counting Jesus among your friends and that's something that isn't going to happen unless the followers of Jesus will see differently, will stop and allow what seems like an interruption to our agenda to become actually God redirecting our agenda and help. To come to the community and say, "What we have will give you." We both love students for instance. How can we come alongside you and always mindful of the fact that we can stop the bleeding, but some of the bleeding that's happening is spiritual and ultimately our hope is that you'll not only be cared for and bandaged and made whole again so you can continue on your journey, but so that you can continue on it in a different way with a new comrade, the Lord Jesus Christ, who heals the ultimate broken relationship. We see with our hearts, we stop and see the detour as the real journey and we stop the bleeding, respond to the needs ultimately by helping people to get connected with the one who gave us life. That is how we love the community around us. To be anything less than that is to be less than the Church of Christ.