We come together as God’s People each month to be fed as the Body of Christ with the Body of Christ. We come to feed each other, to support and encourage each other during what, for many of us, are very painful times. And this is good. In many ways we need each other more than ever now. We listen to words from our Scriptures, words we’ve heard many times before, and they invite us to think about our lives and our world in another way, a way that leads toward heartfulness, hope, faith in an overarching plan we cannot see but can dimly sense when we put fear aside. And those ancient words come alive if we let them. They dance through our minds and unsettle our hearts. Deep questions surface, and we may begin to ask with interest, “what is God calling me to, calling US to, here and now?” Sometimes we sit with that question and remain clueless, forced to wait for Spirit to reveal a hint, or guide us toward a next step in discovering an answer. But sometimes in simply asking that question an image or thought pops into our mind, and we instantly KNOW the answer. At those times the answer can be terrifying because it requires a change we aren’t ready to make. Instead of being like Mary when Gabriel came with a message and a question, we aren’t ready to say “yes!” We may even dismiss the thought or bury it for a few days, weeks or decades! I’ve done that. Maybe you have too. Change is scary, especially if it threatens to upend just about everything you’ve come to know and depend on.
Scripture challenges us to think in new ways and to grow, to become more and more who we are—God’s Family, God’s People, God-infused people. And Scripture reminds us of who we are, individual cells in God’s Body which is made visible in Christ. Does that seem extreme? If so, listen again to Paul’s words. The Body of Christ taken as a whole, he says, is the “image [the face] of the unseen God.” In other words, we can SEE God only if we recognize the face of God in what God has created—nature, creatures, people, the earth, the world. All of this created reality, taken together, Richard Rohr calls “the Christ Mystery.” In this he builds on Paul’s theology; he isn’t making up something new.
We call ourselves “the Body of Christ” and that’s what we are. Each of us is a cell in that Body. If we step into this identity—really take it on—how can we not care about each other? We are all part of the same Body. Fighting each other, hating each other, injuring and killing each other we are cancerous cells, dividing and proliferating in random fashion, destroying the body we are part of from the inside out. The Body of Christ is not just an abstract theological concept. It is the earth. It is us. It is everything we see and taste, smell and touch. It is, in St. Francis’ words, “brother sun” and “sister moon,” “brothers wind and air,” “sister water,” “brother fire,” “sister earth” and all creatures great and small.
When the lawyer asks Jesus, “who is my neighbor?” neither of them have the earth-based, global experience we have today. Jesus’ parable is situated in the cultural and religious challenges of his time. But the question reverberates through centuries because it is a question situated locally in every place in every age. Who is our neighbor today? What do you feel and see when you hear the word “neighbor”? What images pop up? What happens in your heart? What would it say if it could speak what it feels and describe what it sees when it hears the word ‘neighbor’?
Every time I close my eyes and sit with this question I see my sisters and brothers at our Southern Border and it breaks my heart. My mind reaches out to families being hunted down by ICE this weekend and I relive scenes of the Gestapo rounding up Jews in Germany. I am horrified and enraged and sickened with grief. I become caught up in the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest, displaced and murdered indigenous peoples, elephants annihilated for their tusks in Africa, habitat and creatures erased from the earth as though they, too, are not vital cells in God’s Body. I see the dining hall and ministry to the homeless at St. Francis, a ministry of compassion and care dismantled for what purpose? I see a community torn apart. A vibrant ministry destroyed. A devastated people filled with anger and sadness, and I am heartsick. Who is our neighbor? It’s all of this, I think—all of us.
In our anger and confusion, in our grief and in our fear Scripture brings us back, again and again, to the Law of compassion. The priest and the Levite, the Samaritan and the brutalized victim at the side of the road—all are equally our sisters and brothers. We must always begin there. This is the Law written in our hearts. We cannot abandon it in our rage and in our grief. It lives in our mouths as we speak and as we breathe. It is given us to chew on and digest together around this Table. It is that Law that calls us home. It calls us back to who we are as a people, asks us to remember that all of THIS and all of us are cells of Christ’s Body. It challenges us to honor and care for all our neighbors, find ways to comfort the sorrowing, bind wounds of the injured, feed those who are hungry, become instruments of peace. The Law of compassion extends to everyone, every creature and every element on this good earth. It has from the beginning, does now and always will.
So who is our neighbor? Sit with the word, the feelings, the images that present themselves to you. Let God speak to your heart. This is the Gospel unfolding within you, your personal parable, and it is yours to carry and to share as you will for the healing of this Body of which we are all part. Receive with gratitude. Give thanks with a prayer. Go where your heart takes you and trust we are all in this together with the Spirit of God in us, lighting the way.
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