Who, Then, Is Our Neighbor?

sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor

delivered May 21^st, 2000

Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church

Much too often, I allow my gas tank to get so near empty that a yellow light comes on. This past Thursday I stopped at the Arco station on the corner of Woodinville—Duvall and 156^th. My car, when virtually on empty, takes just shy of $20 of gas. As I returned to my car after getting the change, a man called out, “Can you help me?” He had a slight accent, looked like he is from Turkey or Iran, and was waving a piece of paper in his hand. “How do you get the Hollywood Hill junior high school?” Because he had an address, I pulled my Thomas Guide from the car. Now, I am good with maps, but navigating in Woodinville from one location to another can be extremely complex, and I quickly saw that this was going to be no easy feat. So I got a piece of paper; he gave me a pen, and I started writing directions. Then I realized that the way I was taking him had a dotted line for one of the roads. I wondered if I would get him even more lost. As he and I were standing next to my car, with the Thomas Guide on the roof on which I scribbled the directions, a woman in a pick-up truck asked, “Where are you trying to get to?” After he responded, the woman replied, “I used to be a bus driver, I know these roads.” So she started dictating the directions, and I wrote them down. But what I heard her say did not correspond to the map I had in front of me, so I said, “But the map makes it look like you’ve got to make several more turns.” She then said, “I’m going in that direction, so why don’t you follow me, and I’ll get you there.”

It was a refreshing moment, two complete strangers helping out another stranger. It may not sound like much, but this was the first time anyone outside of the church has asked me for help. We live in a state where people seek to take care of themselves. And in suburbs, people lead naturally more isolated lives. We are a culture of terminal self-sufficiency, a people who have taken self-reliance to the extreme. There seems to be an unspoken understanding among suburban life that if we don’t need anyone’s help, then we don’t need to give any help. The message is that everyone can and should fend for themselves.

Each week we begin our Sunday worship service with a chalice lighting with the unison reading that explicitly reminds us to treat our neighbor as ourselves. This begs the question, “Who, then, is our neighbor?”

Radical honesty about such questions can be unnerving, such as Wendell Berry’s poem about encountering a homeless man. I can identify with the loneliness and despair of not stopping to help someone. Driving into Seattle, there are often people standing on the roadside with a sign. I wonder how I can ignore their silent plea for help if I acknowledge my religious conviction that there is really no difference between human beings. How can we ignore the silent plea for help when someone stands on a street corner, in the rain?

Here in Woodinville, human need is not so visible. Anyone who looks needy will likely be ignored or asked to leave. And yet there are people amongst us who really struggle. Who are the guests that have entered your lives, though not invited?

Many of you share with me concerns about people you know. Given what has been shared with me this past week, I can offer some answers as to Who then is our neighbor?

--The gay man whose family won’t visit him even as he is diagnosed with AIDS.

--The family and friends of a ninth grader at Canyon Park Junior High who on Wednesday killed himself.

--The man who not only has three half-time jobs and no health care insurance but also a wife so ill he must choose between her medical bills and their rent.

--The woman in Monroe who walked into a mini-mart with a shiner visible underneath her sunglasses; and the man behind the counter who said, “So what’d ya do, mouth off?”

Samuel Miller, the former dean of Harvard Divinity Scholl said, “It is not enough to do everything we have always done. The church cannot amuse itself with the posture of its action in dealing with the radical changes in our world, not by its nostalgic reverence or its sterile respectability. Only one kind of religion counts today, and that is the kind which is radical enough to engage in the world’s basic troubles. If it cannot do that, then it can do nothing which merits our concern or the world’s respect.”

As a young minister, in a young church, these words scare me. Writing this sermon scares me. The wisdom, the truth, the reality that emerges when dealing with the pain in the world is hard to come by, for who wants to look suffering in the face? If we take the invitation of serving our world, of engaging our world, we must enter our fear—and run the risk of being changed. It’s feels like walking into fire. We could get burned. And yet, that is the path to transformation. As Marilyn Sewell says, “Transformation will occur when we dare to stop talking about social concerns and actually move to alleviate real human pain. Start at the beginning, where you don’t know anything, where everything you thought you knew about love starts dropping away. Let your heart be broken. Then you will begin to remember what love is about, and love will claim you, guide you, and lead you home.”

As we ask the question of who is our neighbor, we need not be overwhelmed. There is a simple path that will lead us to truth and love. It is simply:

Start small

Walk into the fear

Let your heart be broken

Allow love to guide you and lead you home.

So to begin, start small. That means, start with where you are. For me, that means starting with people I met this last week. I met the Buddhist monks who live in the Thai Buddhist Monastery here in Woodinville. How many of you are aware that there are Buddhist monks living just a few blocks from here? They bought land that has a nice house where the monks live and a barn which they want to convert to a temple. Ritti, the head monk, told me that his neighbors complained about the building. It turns out Ritti didn’t know he had to have a conditional use permit, and so the renovation of the barn was stopped by court order. Now he is seeking these permits, but one neighbor says that the value of his property will go down if a Buddhist Temple is adjacent to it, and so he told Ritti that he can’t build. I and other Cottage Lake clergy have told him that we welcome him as a neighbor. We assured him that we will attend a public hearing, which is bound to occur should neighbors oppose the Buddhist temple renovation. It would enrich our community to have a Buddhist congregation in town.

Another way of starting small is getting involved with a Habitat For Humanity project. Our congregation has the opportunity to join other churches in building one of four duplex units in Bothell. Starting small is about starting where you are. This project is a great way to get involved.

The next two steps are much harder: to walk into the fear and to let your heart be broken. For me, a transformative experience came during the summer after my first year of college. I worked as an intern at Clear Water Ranch, a psychiatric facility for abused children with severe behavior problems. It was located in the middle of nowhere, in rural northern California. Sometimes walking into the fear is best accomplished when we have no other choice. The children had stories that broke my heart. Two children came from parents who ran a child prostitution ring. One 6 year old didn’t know how to wipe herself when she arrived. She often stomped around with a look of rage. One day she stomped towards me, and I thought she might hit me. Instead she yelled, “I like your face.” It was when I realized somehow I was capable of being with these children. Most of them were much easier to adore, such as the 12 year old girl who had been molested by her father and then again by a foster brother. In one conversation she cheerfully told me, “I guess you could say I am an all around abused kid.” My heart broke time and again that summer.

All of us will suffer, and all of us will encounter others who are suffering. Who’s the guest of your knowing, though not asked?

How can we understand that we are not separate from the suffering?

How can we start to become love?

What if we looked at service to others as a spiritual path, a way towards healing ourselves?

Who then is our neighbor? It is when we allow love to guide us and take us home that we wholeheartedly can answer this question. Members of this congregation have reached out to a population generally ignored, if not loathed. People living in prison we might not readily think of as our neighbors, but Bob and Stephana Ditzler have been reaching out to men who are living at the Monroe state penitentiary.

When I asked Bob how he got involved with his prison ministry, he told me that years and years ago a Catholic priest talked with him about it. The priest said that unless you can commit to steady volunteer time and be there every week, it won’t work. And Bob told me, “So I didn’t.” That was until 1991. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Bob and Stephana attended a luncheon where they learned about the prison ministry and they decided this was the time to give start. Initially they assisted with a program set up for dialog and sharing, but that they found it little more than a BS session. So they put together a Tutorial program, where they and the volunteers they recruited would teach prisoners how to read, write and do arithmetic. They worked with the Black Prisoners Caucus. As I understand it, the Black Prisoners Caucus had to make a decision on who to identify as their sponsors, the people who can come into the prison anytime and walk out on to the yard without special clearance. Besides the Ditzlers, there were some black women who shared with them the Bible. Now if you were a black man, and you had the choice between some women of your own race or an older white couple, who would choose? Bob says that it makes a big difference if you’re not yelling at them all the time, and they asked the Ditzlers to be their sponsors.

Bob and Stephana recently started a new program talking with guys about what they’re going to do when they get out, to prepare them emotionally, socially, and personally for a world that is much different than both prison and the world several years past. As I talked with Bob on the telephone, I asked him if there has been an especially meaningful experience. Bob paused, and then said, “There are two guys who I met in the prison who are sitting in my house right now. At the moment we’re breaking for lunch, but these guys are now working for me. They were a team that knocked over Safeway stores for 30 grand a pop. They now work for me. They’re good carpenters.”

Bob tells me that several black guys who he has taught keep in touch with him. They ask for advice, perhaps looking for encouragement, or just a voice, a person who has seen them as a human being. Bob says, “This work has given a whole new dimension to my life. It has given me an incredible amount of information. One last thing. There’s a black guy who is 270 pounds. He’s been there a long time. And now he always calls Stephana ‘Ma.’ We’ve been there for so many years, we’re now like family.”

Bob and Stephana are happy to have others join them in their ministry. I am inspired by their journey of deepening their lives as they seek to treat their neighbors as themselves. There are plenty of opportunities to engage the world, to respond to suffering, to come to know others as no different from ourselves. The path is clear. Start where you are. Walk into the fear. let your heart be broken, and then to let love guide you and take you home.

Blessed be Amen.