Who is My Neighbor?

On Independence Day, I put on my clergy collar and stood on a hot sidewalk with my homemade LOVE ALL OUR NEIGHBORS sign. About 400 energetic people brought colorful signs with a common theme: we do not consent to authoritarian policies. Our elected leaders had just voted to strip medical care and nutrition assistance that protect neighbors’ health and renewable energy investments that protect everyone’s air and water. In place of love, the policy intensifies violence with massive expenditures for military and deportation and incarceration and shriveled funding of mental health services while instilling fear all around.

A legal scholar once correctly stated the most important law: “Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus complimented him on his answer and urged him to put it into practice. But the legal scholar wanted an exception—there is always a but—”who is my neighbor?”

Jesus answered that question with a story about an injured person who was rescued by a person of the “wrong” ethnicity and faith, while ignored by religious people similar to himself. Anyone who is hurting is my neighbor. Anyone who is helping others is my neighbor.

In our world today, our neighbors living close to us are likely to be our own kind. Probably similar economic status, since often housing is “from the mid-300s” or “build affordable housing somewhere else”. They are probably similar in race and immigration status—only citizens who look like us. They are likely similar in political interests, resulting in red states and blue states, gerrymandered districts carving out precincts by voting patterns rather than all mixed together where we may come to respect each other.

Anyone who is hurting is my neighbor. That means that we have millions of neighbors to love as ourselves, because so many in our world are suffering. Some may be on our same street—like the white veteran recovering alcoholic next door to the Central American contractor worried about ICE raids. Some may be drowning miles away in Texas or across the ocean in Kinshasa, Congo, flooded out by torrential rains in “dry season,” as a natural consequence of climate change.

Anyone who is hurting is my neighbor. Anyone who is helping others is my neighbor. When we love all our neighbors, we may save the lives of people who do not look like us or pray like us. And people who don’t vote like us may, someday, save our lives.

Who knows? People who call themselves Christian may turn away when we are suffering, considering empathy to be wrong. People who have been marginalized may reach out in compassion to lift us up. That’s what Jesus was saying to the legal scholar—I didn’t make that up.

Actually, even now we are being helped by the people our government is frantically trying to deport. When we are hungry, we eat food harvested by people milking cows or sweating under hot sun for tiny wages, without the benefit of citizenship. When our roof leaks, we get it repaired by people sweating under hot sun who cannot afford housing. When we are sick, we are cared for by people who may lose their own health coverage to offset the tax cuts for the people with the highest incomes. Anyone who is helping others is my neighbor. Anyone who is hurting is my neighbor.

So, on Independence Day when we celebrate our declaration of independence from kings and renew our commitment to democracy, my sign said LOVE ALL OUR NEIGHBORS. All millions and millions of them.