Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve lived around Princeton Junction now for more than 30 years, and I’ve been part of this parish for almost all that time, almost 20 of them as a deacon. And on the one hand I wonder of course what’s happened to my life so quickly, it wasn’t at all what I had planned, at one point I was hoping for a lot more excitement than you get in West Windsor. But on the other hand the fact is that being around a place and a group of people for so long is a tremendous pleasure in life. No matter where I go around town, from the train to Wegman’s, I run into friends and faces I know, and especially when I come here, and look around, see people coming up for communion, I’m amazed at how many of you I know, even when I forget names, which I always do, I know so many faces I feel a connection with, and also a sense of faith and trust. I hope you have a few circles in your life that operate like that, your family, your friends, where you have people and faces that give you a sense of a home base. We can’t live without that, like the old TV show used to say, we need places where everybody knows your name.
But now let’s think about these deep connections we feel with people in a different light, by turning to this week’s gospel reading. I think this gospel reading is about that feeling and the connection we have with the people we know and love, but also is asking us a hard question about how we feel about and react to people we don’t know. In this story of the three travelers on the road down from Jerusalem, I think we ought to assume that even the first two of them, the priest and the Levite, if the beaten man had been a friend or a relative, someone from the parish, surely they would have stopped, and fallen to their knees at his side, and tried to do something. But the point is that the beaten man was a stranger, not someone they knew, and so since it wasn’t, we can almost see the calculation start in their minds, weighing the risks and the situation. This was a high-crime area: Is this whole scene faked up to trap me? Is this beaten man a criminal? Is he crazy? Did he bring this on himself? If it was someone they recognized with a start of recognition — My God, how did this happen to someone I know? — their instincts would take over, but since it isn’t someone they knew, their minds are crowded with barriers and questions.
But of course that is the point of the story, it’s the question that was put to Jesus before the story: Who is our neighbor, are there any limits? And of course as he does with so many questions like this, Jesus doesn’t answer it, he doesn’t tell us who our neighbor is, he shows us what neighbors do. And what neighbors do is react with the same compassion to everyone, they allow their heart to overcome any kind of question of Who is this? Even a Samaritan Jewish heretic can get it right, it has nothing to do with our faith or our status, it has to do with a way of reacting to the world with a compassion that doesn’t divide it into neighbors and outsiders.
Maybe by coincidence, this weekend our bishop is asking all of us who preach on Sunday to draw people’s attention to immigrants in our own country, legal and illegal, and to ask ourselves how we react to these invisible neighbors, strangers to us and yet God reminds us today that they are not strangers.
Maybe also by coincidence, this week Pope Francis made his first trip outside of Rome, and his destination says a lot about what he hopes we will be thinking of this week. He went to a small island off the coast of Sicily where thousands of primarily Muslim immigrants end up when they are desperate to leave Africa and the Middle East for a new life. They find themselves there without anywhere to turn, and many of them die making the trip. It is the Mexican border crossing of Europe. You might want to go find the Pope’s homily from this trip, it is clearly preached from the heart, he says that is easy for all of us to live in a bubble that is beautiful but insubstantial, where we surround ourselves with things and people that we know, but where real compassion, real tears, for the things that happen outside our bubble are becoming more and more rare.
And that is where following this gospel starts, not with debating immigration laws or programs or works of charity, but with tears of compassion. It was great that the good Samaritan gave someone a ride, lost an hour or two on a business trip, and spent a few dollars wisely. But that all happened because the gospel says he allowed his heart to be moved, and thought, that could be me or someone I love. That is what we want our hearts to be like, recognizing with a jolt that the neighbors we love are not just here, but everywhere we look.