Matthew 19:19 “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 

As many of you know we painted, “Love your neighbor” on our building and in fact made it bigger than our church name.  In Matthew 19:19, Jesus was telling a successful young attorney how to enter the Kingdom of God and have eternal life.  Imagine that; when you asked God how to have a great and sustainable life he will give you a two part answer, “Love me and love your neighbor.”

Many religious people are determined to make the path to the Kingdom of God and eternal life lead deeper into their religion and less involved with their community.  Jesus made it clear that the path to a powerful forever life is to connect more deeply into the humans around us.  In the Luke 10 version of this response, he defined a neighbor as a man who made it his business to save the life of a victim of violent crime and injustice.  He defined the “anti-neighbors” as those who were insular and wouldn’t stop what they were doing to rescue a battered man in the ditch because they had to get to their religious services.  This is why we are starting to say at BCC, “our church has to be bigger on Monday than it is on Sunday.”

Now it certainly isn’t harmful to see that battered man as our neighbor.  We absolutely should all be in direct contact with those who are hurting and being destroyed by acts of injustice, but let’s not miss that other point I am trying to make.  Jesus identified the “neighbor” in the good Samaritan story as the man who gave the aid, not the man who received it.  I believe that the most powerful implication of “Love your neighbor” is when compassionate people in a community get related and elevate that community to greatness; a type of greatness that is rare.

We at Bethany Community Church are crazy enough to believe that we can lead a revolution in which humans live out this new kind of power Jesus talked about here and many other places.  In the words of Acts 10:38 these renewed people “go about doing good and healing all who are oppressed of the Devil.”  By the way, don’t let your sophisticated Western thinking stop you from believing we aren’t fighting dark non-human forces that are hurting creation as well as natural forces.

There are two primary partnerships that matter to God.  The one you have with him and one you have with people who love people.  I don’t know if the people who love people around here can “change the world,” but we can change our world.  “Won’t you be, won’t you be my neighbor?”