"Who is My Neighbor?", July 13, 2025

 

Who is My Neighbor?
Rev. Jamie Green Klopotoski
Luke 10:25-37
Trinity Congregational Church, Gloucester
July 13, 2025

 

One thousand, three hundred, and seventy-one. That’s the number of hate groups in America, according to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, male supremacists, neo-confederates, racist skinheads, Klansmen, black separatists, groups that are anti-muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, and antisemitic. One of these 1371 groups is the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.

The church was founded by a man named Fred Phelps in 1955 and it has become infamous for picketing at the funerals of U.S. soldiers. Church members, including young children, hold signs with crude slogans about God hating people. They target military funerals because the church believes that when an American soldier dies, it is God’s punishment for America's sins, specifically its “sin” of tolerating of homosexuality.

I’ve seen pictures and videos of these protests, and it makes me particularly angry to see young kids holding signs that say: “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates you” and other more profane things I don’t want to repeat. It is really easy to feel a lot of hatred towards a man like Fred Phelps for teaching and preaching these awful messages. Surely someone like Fred Phelps is not my neighbor. Right?

I recently saw a yard sign while driving through Topsfield that said in big letters LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR with an asterisk. In small letters at the bottom, the asterisk was explained: some exceptions apply. Surely there must be exceptions, right? Surely our neighbors are NOT the people who hurt us, people who are mean or full of hatred or are members of a hate group, people who are weird or different or smell bad or talk funny… Right?

Who is my neighbor? That’s the question asked of Jesus in our Gospel story. Jesus has summed up all the laws and commandments, every story in the bible, the entire call of God into one seemingly easily digestible and understandable lesson: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. But a snarky man in the crowd listening to Jesus spoke up. “Ok, Jesus, but who exactly do you mean? WHO is my neighbor?”

Jesus decides to tell a parable, a story, to answer this question: the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

A severely beaten Jewish man is lying half dead in the road.  A priest, who ministers in the temple and who is revered by his countrymen as holding a special status with God, sees the man but passes by and does nothing.  Likewise, a Levite, a member of the tribe set apart by God for special service, hastens his pace and ignores the bleeding man.  But then, a Samaritan – someone considered to be an ignorant half-breed with a messed-up theology – stops and looks down at the beaten man who would not hesitate to spit in his face if he were in good health.  The Samaritan’s heart breaks over the condition of this man, his sworn enemy, so he cleans and bandages the man’s wounds and takes him to a place where he can be nursed back to health.

I think to modern ears, the lesson of this story seems so easy, so obvious, so noncontroversial. But it’s totally not to supposed to be. Jesus intended this story to be shocking, and to make you feel uncomfortable and uneasy.

To really understand the difficulty and the controversy of this story, you have to understand the relationship between Jews and Samaritans.

For centuries, Jews and Samaritans had a deep-seated animosity towards each other.

It all started when King Solomon died in 930 B.C.E. The ancient kingdom of Israel was divided into two realms: one ruled by Samaria in the North, and the other ruled by Jerusalem in the South. Initially, people on both sides had a lot in common. They all claimed Abraham as father and Moses as liberator. They all worshipped the God of Jacob. They were all children of Israel.

But as time went on, the Samaritans developed different religious practices and beliefs that were seen as heretical by the Jews. For example, Samaritans only recognized the first five books of the Bible as scripture, while Jews included a wider range of texts, including historical and prophetic books. Samaritans considered Mount Gerizim their holy place of worship, while Jews considered Mount Zion the only legitimate place for worship. After Jewish temple was destroyed in 586 BCE, the Samaritans actively tried to hinder its rebuilding.

Around that time, the governor of Jerusalem, Zerubbabel, was the first to take a racist approach: He said the Samaritan’s blood was impure due to their practice of mixed marriages with non-Israeli tribes. Jews started describing Samaritans as "half-breeds", unclean heretics, second class citizens. For hundreds of years, violent skirmishes erupted between the northern Samaritans and the Southern Jews, and by the time of Jesus, the worst thing you could call a Jew was a Samaritan.

Ultimately, Samaritans were deemed unlovable. Most certainly, Jews would not have considered Samaritans their neighbors. This made Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan shocking. It made people feel uncomfortable. We’re supposed to love these people?

In Jesus’ day, Samaritans, lepers, tax collectors, and prostitutes were deemed unlovable and not worthy to be called our neighbors. In our day, they are refugees, immigrants, drug addicts, the homeless, people who are trans.  

I feel grateful that I am a member of this church that stands with the outcast, that welcomes all people, that adopted an open and affirming statement to include those that so many others exclude. So sometimes I think to us, the story of the Good Samaritan seems like a piece of cake. Done. We do welcome and include and love those who are different than us, those whom the world abandons.

But I also think that if the story of the Good Samaritan no longer makes you feel uncomfortable and uneasy, then we must be missing something. So how about instead of substituting the Samarian man with an undocumented immigrant, a homeless man, or a trans woman, what if the Samaritan was Fred Phelps, minister of the Westboro Baptist Church. That’s where the story starts to make me feel uncomfortable.

Imagine waking up from a trauma and finding your worst enemy caring for you at your bedside, having scraped you up off the road and paid your hospital bills.  Or flip the script, imagine someone with whom you vehemently disagree, someone like Fred Phelps, injured and lying on the side of the road. Would we simply walk by, thinking he had gotten what he deserved? Or would we stop and help? Imagining helping someone like him is not so easy. That’s the point.

Jesus crafted this story to shock us, to shatter our perspectives and expectations. It’s supposed to make us feel uneasy and uncomfortable. Jesus could have chosen anyone to be the character of the good neighbor in this parable.  But He didn’t.  He chose a Samaritan.  He reached to the very bottom of the barrel in the Jewish way of thinking.  He chose one of the most despised people to make the point that God’s love and acceptance and radical welcome are not affected by what race you are born into or who your parents are, what your position or status is, or how you think, talk, dress, or act. There should be NO debate over who our neighbor is. According to God, every single human being on this entire planet is our neighbor. There are no asterisks. There are no exceptions.

As much I do not want to admit it, people like Fred Phelps and I are neighbors. We are fellow human beings, fellow children of God. And no matter how much hatred I feel toward him for the terrible things he preaches, he deserves as much love as people I actually like. More love, even.  

Jesus preached — embodied, actually, in a way that got him killed –love. Risky, radical, costly, inconvenient love. Messy, complicated, difficult, demanding love. Love of neighbor, love of stranger, love of enemy. Loving others — seeking their good, willing their prosperity and happiness, genuinely desiring the best for their lives — this is the hazardous business of following Jesus.

So how do we do this? How can we love people we don’t like?

Well, first, we can pray. We can pray for those who preach hatred. We can pray for them to experience joy, truth, and love. We can pray that God’s spirit will be awakened within them. We can pray that grace will go to work in their lives and soften their hearts.

Second, we can do our best to be an example of a life of love, even and especially in situations that cause us pain and anger. We must respond to hate with love. If we show others our God-centered-ness, if we let our light shine, if we practice love in all we do, then our very lives can be a catalyst for change.

This will not always be easy. But this is the task we have been given, to love our neighbors, to love our enemies, to love all the members of the 1371 hate groups in America, to love all those we don’t agree with, to love all those who make us angry.

I’d like to end with words from a sermon preached by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr:

 

“I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. . . . and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. . . . But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” May it be so. Amen.