Where is my Neighbor?

Matthew 22:34-40

Last week we looked at the second part of the Great Commandment, Love your neighbor as yourself.

As yourself was our focus, trying to better understand what it means to love ourselves well.

This week I want to pay attention to the first part of this phrase.

Love your neighbor.

When I mentioned to a friend that this was going to be the text of my sermon, he replied wryly

“So your sermon is going to be, ‘Do it’?”

The Great Commandment is at once a very simple command, a very simple teaching.

And yet, as I mentioned last week we can very easily take it for granted that we know the command “Love God, love neighbor” and forget that as yourself is part of the mix.

In the same way I think there’s more to consider in love your neighbor than merely a general encouragement to do good.

When Jesus was asked by a lawyer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” he was answering one of the important questions we put to this command.  In Jesus’s characteristic style he answered by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan.

I want to put another question to this command, not “Who” but “Where is my neighbor?”

“Where is my neighbor?”

I think this is a really important question for us.

We can take a few seconds and in that short of time imagine many more people with whom we are connected than we can reasonably be expected to love or care for.

This for me has been one of the problems of Facebook.

On the one hand I am able to reconnect with people from all different times in my life—who live in all different places of the world.

And if I want to, I can write messages back and forth with them, share my pictures with them, look at their pictures, comment on their pictures, “like” their pictures or their “status updates.”

And Facebook enables me to imagine and interact in a community that transcends place.

And without this I would not be able to see pictures of nieces or nephews, keep up with where in the world my cousins are – immediately see new pictures of a friend’s baby or another friend’s wedding.

And so I appreciate Facebook for all of this new connection possibility.  But I wonder what this does to the Great Commandment?

“Where is my neighbor?”

John Donne writes,

“Any man's death diminishes me / Because I am involved in mankind”

And this is true, but I can’t reasonably and practically love every person in the world.

So, “Where is my neighbor?”

Of the hundreds of friends on Facebook who share their joys and concerns on their news feed,

Which ones do I “like” and which ones do I pass over? Or for those who do not use Facebook – of the hundreds of people who confront you through the radio or TV news which ones do you care about, send money for, and which ones do you ignore?

What are the limits in time and space for me loving my neighbor?

St. Augustine wrote about this.  Not about Facebook or modern news media.  But about the question of “Where is my neighbor?”

He wrote:

“All men are to be loved equally.
But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you….  Since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.” (On Christian Doctrine, I.29) 

Around the time when my friends and I were getting excited about local and organic produce, my friend started to joke that we should only have local and organic friends.

Facebook, like many modern technologies have expanded the possibilities of connection over time and place.  But like many modern technologies has enabled us to neglect those connections that we already have in our place.

Wendell Berry has thought a lot about this.  In a recent essay he wrote

“…Imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection.  For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it.  To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it.  By imagination we see it illumined by its own unique character and by our love for it.  By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place.  By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world.  As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection.  And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”

In order to answer the question “Where is my neighbor?” we need to remember and imagine again that we do live in a single place even though we also through these media outlets participate and are aware of other places.

It’s true that if we turn off the TV, Facebook, or radio and don’t ever pay attention to the outside world, while we may be a bit less stressed out, we also deceive ourselves that we can exist as an island. And in our globalized world, we must all be responsible to know the issues that are going on so that we can vote or write letters and exercise our rights to speak to our concerns.  What happens outside of Acworth affects Acworth considerably.  But I will not care about Acworth as Acworth if I only live inside the placeless world of news or social media.

In fact, I think that we will not be able to really understand or act well towards our global neighbors until we’ve remembered and reimagined our local place, and understood and acted well towards our local neighbors.

Just as we love ourselves and are able as a result to imagine what it might mean to love another,

We love those near to us and are able as a result to better understand what it might mean to love those who are far from us.

It is through practicing imagining our place, the mental map of our lives that we will better realize those

“who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with [us].”

Technologies like Facebook and TV condition us to imagine ourselves as an individual and our neighbors as everywhere and anywhere and makes us feel powerless and dependent on the government or the economy to take care of them.

But I think we need to resist the inertia that modern technologies create.  And we need to actively reimagine and practice local friendships.

We have been given a place.

And we have been given people in our lives.  Local to us. 

Real people in real time and place who we have been connected to through work, church, or school, or other activities we’re involved in.

“Where is my neighbor?” Those neighbors – real embodied neighbors who share those places where you live.

Because you can’t love an abstract neighbor.

You cannot see their face as it brightens with joy or darkens with concern.

You cannot hug or walk with or share a cup of tea with an abstract neighbor.

The geography of love begins locally.  You don’t get to choose your neighbors, but you can choose to love them, to cultivate those friendships and relationships you have been given quite by accident of where you work or live. 

When we take into consideration Jesus’s answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?”

We realize that we are called to love even those who are brought into our lives that we certainly would never in a million years have chosen – this is one of the reasons why we avoid local neighbors, isn’t it?  Facebook gives you the opportunity to “hide” those people who annoy you or “unfriend” them.

But geography is not so “user-friendly.”

Who do you see on a daily basis, a weekly basis? Who has come to you with their joys or excitements?

Listen to them, take time to be a neighbor to them. 

Even and especially the stranger who wanders into your path.

Let us imagine and realize the membership we already have with the human and nonhuman neighbors God has given us and cultivate those particular relationships in real time and space.

Because I think the health of local communities and local environments depends on the health of local neighborly connections

And that ultimately depends on the answer we give to the question “Where is my neighbor?”