Scripture Matthew 5:43-48
“You all have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ Yet I say to you all: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of the One in heaven who begot you; for the sun—which belongs to God—rises on the evil and on the good, and God rains on the righteous and on the unrighteous woman or man. For if you all love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your sisters and brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Sovereign is perfect.
Sermon
The UPC book group selection for July was American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett. The author is the Japanese-American daughter of many generations of midwestern farmers on her father’s side, and a mother who hails from Japan. Marie grew up on the coasts, and knows Manhattan and the Bay area, much more about city life than her family’s agricultural heritage. She becomes good friends with a conservative Pennsylvania farmer who travels across the US every summer with a crew of evangelical wheat farmers, for the purpose of harvesting the wheat as it ripens. (They harvest the wheat on the Mockett family’s farm.) After many years of being invited, Marie decides to join the group for one summer’s harvest season.
City-born and college educated, Marie opens her heart this group of men whose educations mostly stop somewhere between the 8th and 12th grades, all of whom know exponentially more than she does about the task at hand, the equipment used for the task, and the Bible. She asks questions—about harvesting, about weather, about their understanding of scripture, about why they’re ok with GMO’s and scoff at “organic” farming. She asks questions about their beliefs and shares her own. She goes to church with them: some of those experiences are transcendent and some fill her with fury. She comes to treasure the group’s knowledge and their sparing use of language; there are times when this journey quiets her heart. She also struggles to communicate with some of the men, at least one of whom shows her open hostility for a good part of the trip.
Throughout the trip, Marie is also acutely aware of how her appearance, as she bears both family’s traits, marks her as an outsider in every state she is traveling through. She is sometimes mistaken as Native American. Asian people seem to see her as white, and white people clock her as Asian, or at least not-white, something else.
Marie and the harvesting crew she is traveling with, as well as many of the people she meets along the way, make uncomfortable neighbors. Despite nearly everyone’s best efforts, there is a divide between them that may never be bridged. They are not enemies, but, with the exceptions of the three members of the crew who are college educated, neither are they friends. Their relationships hold a tension that is difficult to overcome.
I think there are at least three kinds of uncomfortable neighbors. Those who experience a divide between them are one. Those whose divide reaches the point of actual enmity are another.
The third kind of uncomfortable neighbors are those who are not comfortable because they must struggle through life without ready access to all the things we need to survive: food, shelter, and health care. The resources necessary to hold down jobs, which can be anything from access to education to access to shower and laundry facilities.
Let’s take these three categories one at a time. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. This can be challenging when there is a divide between us, and that divide can be any number of things. The divide in “American Harvest” is cultural, religious, experiential, and educational, but it can also be a divide of language, race, national origin, sexuality, gender expression, able-bodiedness, and more. We will always find ways in which we are not like one another. But love one another we must. How do we do this when so many things may be seen as divides we cannot cross?
It’s always good to remember that love isn’t necessarily a feeling. Love, in its simplest terms, is an action, a verb. We love with our actions. We can feel awkward with someone who seems to be on the other side of a divide, but we can still be welcoming, we can still be hospitable. We can open our hearts in the way Marie seeks to, and, in the words of the great Ted Lasso, “Be curious, not judgmental.” When we don’t understand someone, we can ask a question that will help us, in one tiny way, to know them better. Ask a question you would be comfortable answering… “Do you like music, or sports, or…” and you can fill in the blank. Start gently. And always, remind yourself: We don’t have to agree with people to love them. We don’t have to approve of their values to demonstrate simple kindness and compassion.
This becomes more complicated, obviously, when the issue of actual enmity arises. How do we love our enemies? Jesus is quite clear about this in our passage. First, he tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (or, let’s say, have harmed us). I think here our best beginning is to love our enemies BY praying for them.
How do we do this? You should feel free to start right where you are. You might be inclined to pray, Dear God, please fix this person. Bring them to their senses. Make them stop doing this awful thing. Go ahead and do that. God will know if you’re prettying it up. Be honest. This is God you’re talking with. Interesting thing, though. Over time you may find that your prayers are changing. One day, you may realize that you are no longer praying for God to change that person. Instead, you are simply praying for that person—that God might bless them. That they might have life abundant, or joy, or peace. Or all the above. We don’t have to approve of people to love them. We can give a part of ourselves over to our Sovereign God, and leave the details in her hands.
In fact, prayer can be a balm for both these kinds of uncomfortable neighbors. We can pray for those who are on the other side of whatever divide most distresses us. We can pray for people we love who have made what feel like unfathomable decisions. And we can trust God with our prayers.
Now to the third kind of uncomfortable neighbor, which can be the most nuanced of these relationships. Our instincts when someone is in need can be to charge in and provide it. All of it. And at times, that may be exactly the correct response. Fires. Floods. Emergencies of all kinds. At other times, when we encounter folks who are struggling, our best approach is one of humility and honoring the dignity of the person we wish to help. You may or may not have heard of a Savior Complex. In her article on Healthline, Crystal Raypole describes someone with a savior complex. She writes,
If you have a savior complex, you might:
only feel good about yourself when helping someone
believe helping others is your purpose
expend so much energy trying to fix others that you end up burning out.[1]
Self-awareness is key here. Presuming that others want our help when they haven’t asked for it, only feeling good when we’re helping, and burning out by trying to fix others, can be signs that what we’re not necessarily loving our uncomfortable neighbor in the way they need to be loved.
Our Food Pantry, now in its ninth year, is an excellent example of loving people from a place of humility and honoring their dignity.
We advertise that the Pantry is available, but we don’t go door to door telling people they need it. We welcome those who come, and we set boundaries as to what we can and cannot do for them. We offer people choices, and don’t impose our own ideas of what they need.
Key to all this is that the focus is on helping, not saving. The focus is on offering options to people, and not trying to change them. The focus is on treating people as children of God, and not broken things in need of fixing.
We can love our uncomfortable neighbors in all kinds of ways, but rule # 1 when offering help to those who are struggling is to ask a simple question, such as: How can we help? What do you need? And then, to listen—truly, deeply listen—to their response. If they say they don’t need anything, you might offer your number, or the church or pantry’s number, just in case it does occur to them that you or we might be helpful. If they don’t want that, you can simply say, You know where to find us. That is a door left open, and sometimes, the best way for someone to begin to consider what they need, if anything.
How do we love our uncomfortable neighbors? We love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Ah, there’s the rub. Do we love ourselves? Do we understand that we, too, are made in God’s image, and not only all the people we see in a day? Do we understand that God loves us with an everlasting and ever faithful love? Once we are able to do that, to take that in, we realize, that in all our loving, we are letting the love God has given us pour out, pour into the world, and each person we love. Our comfortable neighbor, our uncomfortable neighbor. Our love for them is the overflow of the love we receive from God.
We love our neighbor by remaining curious and not judgmental. We love them by praying for them. We love them by listening to their answers when we say, “How can we help?” or “What do you need?” And we check ourselves for any tendencies that would diminish those who might need our help, but who will run if we seem to be preparing to save them, or fix them. We love others the way we have been and want to be loved: with curiosity, and prayer, and humility, and listening well, and keeping our hearts wide open.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Crystal Raypole, ed. Timothy J. Legg, PhD, Psy D, “Always Trying to ‘Save’ People? You Might Have a Savior Complex,” Healthline, January 16, 2020. https://www.healthline.com/health/savior-complex?utm_source=ReadNextRAAS.