Who are our neighbors?

Proper 10C (Post 1)

This week’s Sunday lectionary Gospel reading (Luke 10:25-37), the Good Samaritan story, ends with these words:

Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Jesus teaches that anyone whose life touches ours, anyone with whom we might share compassion in some way, is our neighbor. We are directly and consciously connected with people all over the globe in ways that would have been unimaginable to people in Jesus’ time.

What we do in our corner of the world affects people in other places. If we pollute a stream or river, it affects our neighbors downstream. If a corporation filters the emissions from a factory so that less mercury is released into the air, it helps the people in the neighborhood of the factory, the people who breathe that air. The fertilizers and pesticides we use on our lawns, the emissions from our cars and trucks, the plastics and remnants of household chemicals that find their way into our trash all have the potential to affect our neighbors in a negative way. When we reduce or eliminate these things out of consideration for others, we are better neighbors, true neighbors.

A new report from the World Bank released last month, Turn down the heat: climate extremes, regional impacts, and the case for resilience, looks at the effects of climate change on Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia and South Asia. Some of the poorest people in the world will be hit first and worst by increasing warming. In many cases, the people who stand to suffer the most from global warming are the people who have done the least to cause it. Those of us with big carbon footprints have more resources at our disposal to cope with climate change, at least in the short-term; we also bear more responsibility for it. Expectations for Africa are summarize in this short video from the World Bank:

Because of our relationship with our companion Diocese of Twic East, we know some of the people expected to bear the brunt of climate change in Africa. We act as neighbors when we help with development in areas such as agriculture and education and when we remember them in our prayers; they act as neighbors to us when they help us understand what is happening in their part of the world and keep us in their prayers. Since we have done much more to cause climate change than they have, acting as neighbors entails working hard to mitigate climate change.

Jesus chose the illustration of the Samaritan as the good neighbor to help us understand that our neighbors are not only the people who live nearby and whose way of life, language, and religious practices are the same as ours. Our neighbor is anyone with whom we can share compassion, anyone whose lives touch ours.

The Samaritan went out of his way to help. He stopped his own journey long enough to tend to the beaten man’s wounds, he found a safe place for him to heal, and he paid out of his own pocket for someone to continue caring for him. It wasn’t convenient, and like the priest and the Levite, he could have found an acceptable reason to do nothing. Because he went out of his way to help, he was a neighbor to the man in need.

Our greenhouse gas emissions have created a change in climate for the entire planet. By working to cut those emissions significantly and quickly, we can be neighbors to others affected by our actions. We know we could find all sorts of acceptable reasons not to act, because most of us have done that for years. By setting aside our own short-term convenience, we can be the ones who show mercy, the neighbors in the story of 2013.

(Post 2 on Sunday will look at the question of who is healed when we share compassion.)

Loving Our Neighbors in 2011

Part 1 of 3. Gospel for Proper 25A.

34When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40)

Faithfully loving God and our neighbors has been a challenge for Christ’s followers ever since he said these words. In the 21st century we have two comparatively recent circumstances to take into account in attempting to follow these commandments.

First, we live in a truly global community. Increased travel and communications, and especially the sorts of communications and relationship building possible through the internet, have brought us to a very different understanding of what it means to love our neighbors. When a newsworthy event happens anywhere in the world, we know about it immediately. When there is some sort of disaster, the world can respond immediately.

Second, our climate is changing rapidly and significantly. A warmer global atmosphere holds more moisture. This means there is less moderate precipitation; instead, there are at the same time both areas hit by heavy precipitation and areas of drought. Sea levels are rising, the ocean is becoming more acid, and coral reefs are dying. Changing temperatures bring changes in insect and disease patterns.

Just this week, exceptionally heavy rains from Hurricane Jova and a tropical depression hit Mexico, parts of Central America, and southern Haiti, affecting around 100,000 people.  The Episcopal News Service reports on the flooding in El Salvador, which Anglican Bishop of El Salvador Martin Barahona has described as “a catastrophe unparalleled by other disasters” in El Salvador’s recent history.Episcopal Relief and Development reports:

In El Salvador, the hardest hit country, the Lempa and Grande rivers overflowed onto already-saturated ground. The severe flooding that resulted has killed more than 30 people and destroyed more than 18,000 homes. An estimated 65 people have also died in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Costa Rica.

This is one example of the way increased precipitation can affect our neighbors. The church in El Salvador and Episcopal Relief and Development are responding in the name of Christ by helping people who have lost their homes. As we will see in tomorrow’s post, this flooding is one of many climate-related events affecting people right now. Every day we fail to address climate change, the chance of these sorts of disasters affecting more and more people increases.

In the introduction to Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, authors Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson describe a typical suburban autumn evening with people outdoors doing common things: a teenager driving a car, a little girl playing, someone using a leaf blower. After describing the scene, they say:

The scene feels odd, almost fictional, the way life goes on. It seems almost as if we were watching a herd of dinosaurs grazing on giant fern-trees, oblivious to the shadow of the asteroid that will strike Earth and forever change the conditions under which they will live – or die.

For some reason, even though we know what is happening in our world and know that we have very little time to change the way we do things so that the changes future generations face might be more bearable, life goes on pretty much unchanged. It’s as if we don’t realize what is happening or don't care.

Even those of us who care passionately and are intentional about keeping up with the issues of global warming and climate change find it easy to slip into acting and speaking as if nothing is changing. In a poem entitled Warsaw on the Eve of My Departure[i], poet Aaron Zeitlin wrote about the days before he left Warsaw in another situation where reality was difficult to grasp, knowing that the time for Jews living in Warsaw was short. He wrote: Everything that you own and that you see / a desolate darkness will soon envelope. / A voice tells you so, but you forget…You do and do not feel from day to day how final is / the city. In a similar way, as accelerated and increased climate change approaches, we both do and do not know what is coming; we both do and do not feel the finality of the changes taking place on our planet.

In the next couple of posts on this blog, we will look at the climate change situation and how it affects our neighbors near and far, some of the questions this raises for Christians and the institutional church in particular, and the question of how to talk about what is happening in a meaningful way.  The larger question asks what keeps us from doing the work we need to do to ensure our survival and that of our neighbors.

I’m suggesting that the time has come to make sure that the reality of climate change becomes part of our conversation any time we in the church plan for the future and talk about doing ministry. To avoid the topic intentionally for fear of upsetting people, or to let it slip out of our minds, or even to give it a quick nod before turning to our usual business is to ignore our neighbors and to deceive ourselves if we think our own lives as individuals and as a church will continue in familiar ways for many more years.

We need to talk now about mitigation of climate change, considering where and how we might decrease our carbon footprint as the church and how to help individuals learn good environmental stewardship. We can figure out how to gear up to provide disaster relief as the frequency and severity of floods, fires, droughts, and storms increase.  And the church especially needs to be thinking about how to meet people’s spiritual needs as the crisis becomes harder to ignore and people cope with a crisis different from any other in human history. What spiritual practices will be helpful? What language will we use to talk about it?  How do we stay faithful and find meaning in the years to come?

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[i] Zeitlin, Aaron. Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith, ed. and trans. By Morris M. Faierstein. iUniverse: 2007, p. 1.