Neighbor God

 

Matthew 22: 34-46
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
October 25, 2026

Lawn sign that reads "No importa de dónde eres, estamos contentos que seas nuestro vecino" (Spanish), "No matter where you are from, we're glad you're our neighbor" (English), and "لا يهم اين ولدت، و لكننا سعداء أنكم جيراننا" (Arabic).

A personal experience of the sacred or divine is a mystical thing. It’s not something that’s up for argument or debate but neither should it be dismissed out of hand. We are alive in a mystery which should provoke profound questions about who we are and our place in the universe. Jesus questions a group of Pharisees about who the Messiah is, and when Jesus comes back at them with his own interpretation, from that day on no one dared ask him any more questions.



Living in an empire has a way of dampening curiosity and turning questions into an opportunity for discovering a loophole or a weakness. Questions also make us vulnerable to uncertainty, not knowing, and the worst one of all—being wrong. And yet questions are a vital part of the spacious and gracious Jewish value of engaging in dialogue and even questioning God and God’s thinking, actions, and faithfulness to God’s people. Questions are how we seek to understand our experiences of the divine. So, this is unusual for a group of rabbis to not ask Jesus any more questions, except that they live under the occupation of the Roman Empire.



But with a 21st century, White male Christian God viewpoint, this episode between a few Pharisees and Jesus can look like Jesus scored a point for his side. He shut down the opposition. Which sounds more like American empire than American democracy. There’s something about American Christianity that values certainty, knowing the right answer, as if we’re still living under Puritanical superstition and the threat of witch hunts.



Earlier this week, someone contacted the church office with the concern that our church would allow a coven to meet in our building and host a Samhain event. This individual expressed their apprehension that those who were gathered here last night would engage in a séance, that they practice witchcraft, and then urged us to honor the Lord Jesus by ending our relationship with the coven. Plus, they threw in a couple of quotes from Leviticus and 2 Corinthians for good measure.



While it was tempting to give an expository lesson about how prayer is akin to incantation, Communion is a blood ritual, and the crucifixion a blood sacrifice, I simply replied that as part of our mission, we rent our building to any non-profit or faith community that requires space and that we do not discriminate against theology or practice.



Under White supremacy, Christian nationalist culture with its White male god, there is no room for mystery or curiosity, for multiple perspectives or the strange or unfamiliar. Which is why there are those who are trying to silence women and repeal the 19th amendment. Why immigrants, Muslims, and trans people are being persecuted and accused of taking over. There’s no room to breathe, make mistakes, be awkward, be imperfect, change your mind, be authentic. In essence there’s no room to be human.



Which is part of why I think we have this fascination with new technologies and artificial intelligence. We’re afraid to express ourselves imperfectly, inexpertly. We no longer want to take the time to be curious about the world around us or to even be curious about ourselves. If we really want to write well, we must take the time to write dozens of what author Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts”. Not only that, we must investigate ourselves, ask ourselves what is important and sacred to us, what we are afraid of, where do we hurt, what needs healing, how do we connect to other people and to the earth and its creatures.



And so as poet Alok Vaid-Menon reminds us, we have to love the vision of the world we want more than we decry and critique the world that we do not want. We live in a world that rewards us for finding everything that’s wrong and yet hardly teaches us how say what is beautiful about this mystery we get to be alive in. We know what we don’t want but can we say clearly with passion what it is that we do want, the world we want to live in? We want things like poverty and racism and misogyny and patriarchy and gender norms and ableism to end but what is it we want to create, to give birth to? What does that freedom look and feel and taste like?



I think Jesus answers those questions when he says what the greatest commandment is. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” The “Lord your God” is the power greater than we are. It is up to each of us to discern who and what that means. Whether we follow the great Mother Goddess, the earth’s rhythms and signs, astrology, the spirits of animals, Allah, Lord Buddha, Kwan Yin, Brahma, the Guru Granth Sahib, Baha’u’llah, YHWH, Jesus the Christ, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or no god at all. That’s the beauty of the law of this land that we find in the Constitution. No one can dictate how to worship or that we should worship any deity at all. It is up to each of us to discover what it means to have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.



But Jesus doesn’t leave it with individual devotion, individual freedom. Another commandment is like the first, meaning it is just as important: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If we really want to know who and what God is, if we really want to create a new world, if we want to know what freedom looks and feels and tastes like, we need to love our neighbor as ourselves. Catholic social activist Dorothy Day said, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” I am free only as much as my neighbor who is not free. What I want for myself is also what I want for my neighbor. And Jesus told us who our neighbor is.



But in order to love our neighbor, we need to love ourselves. I think we need to fall in love with ourselves, that we get to be alive in a mystery. A mystery that hurts like hell sometimes, that is lonely sometimes, but it’s also exquisite, like the warmth of the sun in October in the northern hemisphere, the smell of pine needles in that warmth, the taste of clean water, the sound of our breathing, what our voice sounds like joined with others, to know a story told well and to be healed by it.



If we really want to know who and what God is, we need to love our neighbor as ourselves. Because in this mystery we get to be alive in, this neighbor God needs us as much as we need Neighbor God.



As Rainer Maria Rilke imagined it:



“You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so
only because I seldom hear you breathe;
and I know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.
I am quite near.”



May we imagine and dream and create and love a world where we are as near to our neighbors as Neighbor God is to us. May it be so. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com


Dear ones, we don’t have to keep telling the same old stories
The ones that leave us weeping and unsatisfied
The ones written by those who have all they need and more
There are other stories to tell
Other mysteries to seek
Other patterns to weave between us
God, the Source of Radical Imagination, does not fear change as we do.
They accompany us from this space toward every opening
that leads to lands of flourishing in body, spirit, and mind