For almost 20 years, my husband John and I lived in a CoHousing community in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are several CoHousing communities in the Portland metro area, so perhaps you have heard of them or even lived in one yourself. But in case the CoHousing concept is new to you, let me suggest that you think of it as intentional neighborhood. My own CoHousing community consisted of twelve households, each with adjacent bit separate homes, sharing maintenance of the property and eating meals together three times a week. It took real commitment to live this way, but a lot of good things can happen over a shared meal. As we Episcopalians well know.
However, choosing to live together so intentionally—in our case in a collection of renovated lofts purpose-built for it—cuts against the prevailing American culture of individualism. The architects who brought the CoHousing concept to the US from Denmark were actually our neighbors, and he used to entertain us over shared dinners with the questions people asked in new CoHousing groups. “They always worry about the possibility of bad neighbors,” Chuck Durrett said. For example, they’ll ask “what if I invest all my money in this community, and my neighbor turns out to be a problem?’
I’ll confess he actually used a saltier word than problem.
And my neighbor, the CoHousing architect, would respond with theatrical sympathy. “Oh, that would be bad,” he’d confess. “So very bad. In fact I can think of only one thing worse than moving into a community and discovering that your neighbor is a problem. And that’s moving into the community and discovering that you’re the problem.”
“You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’” counsels the letter of James. And if my neighbor’s story (and for that matter my own experience) has any wisdom for us today, it’s that it’s actually pretty hard to love either—neighbor or self—well. That why the counsel is repeated over and over in the Bible—
From Leviticus 19:18, ‘You shall not bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. From Mark 12:31, with parallels in Matthew, “The second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself ‘ There is no other commandment greater…” From Galatians 5:14. For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, and from Romans 13:8: owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for the one who loves their neighbor has fulfilled the law.
Leviticus, the oldest of these sources, expands on the commandment in this way: ‘The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God. That is to say, we love our neighbors—even the ones who may seem problematic because of, for example, their immigration status—because we are like them. None of us are, by virtue of our birth or generosity or good manners or political party, are any more or any less valuable in God’s eyes than our most problematic neighbor.
That’s actually a hard truth to accept. On my better days, I’m willing to be kind to my problematic neighbor, but I’ll confess that mostly I don’t want to be like them or learn from them. And—although I may be going out on a theological limb here—it seems like that kind of vulnerable neighborliness was hard for Jesus as well. We proclaim him God incarnate, and yet in today’s Gospel lesson we encounter Jesus being fully human in his capacity to underestimate the radically inclusive love of God. It took a truly problematic neighbor—a Gentile woman of Syrophoenician origin—to remind him of who he was and what he was called to do.
Recall that the two healing stories we heard today occurred as Jesus was traveling to Galilee by a very circuitous route. He went from Tyre in the west, to Sidon in the north, then east to the Decapolis. Mark is very specific in his travel directions, for no apparent reason except perhaps to let us know that Jesus was broadly circumnavigating his home neighborhood. He took the long way through the borderlands, where Jews and Gentiles lived in uneasy proximity. These were villages and towns full of people who thought the others were the problem. Neighborhoods where a gentile woman had no business approaching a Jewish rabbi, much less insisting that her daughter had as much right to God’s healing power as the children of Israel.
But tell him she did, and Jesus praised her for her the courage and wisdom of her words. It was her boldness of speech that expanded his imagination and showed him that yet more healing was possible. He listened and truly heard her plea, and because of that, he came to understand his own mission in a new and more generous way. I wonder if that’s why Mark pairs the two healing stories we heard this morning. Was it the mother, whose brave words opened Jesus’ heart, who then enabled Jesus to pass along the gift of openness to a deaf man?
Problematic people—and that’s all of us, at least some of the time—have to entrust our vulnerabilities to each other. We have no other choice, because for the things that really count, we can rarely get there alone. The child was healed because her mother entrusted her to a Jewish healer and refused to be dissuaded, the deaf man’s ears were opened because his friends brought him to Jesus. The fact that we need family and friends to heal us is not news to we Trinitarians: we bring people to Jesus whenever we welcome each other, invite each other to a class or a gathering, give each other a ride, or visit each other in the hospital.
Our new Neighborhood Ministry initiative, which launches this very Sunday with this “Neighbors @ the Commons” welcome-back event, is one of the ways in which we entrust ourselves to each other and to Jesus. The simple act of knowing which Trinitarians live nearby to us—enhanced by new online tools designed to keep us connected on an ongoing basis—means that we can show up for each other in powerfully healing ways. We can listen to the worried mothers, pray for the struggling children, and bear witness to the disabled and the doubtful that the Lord indeed lifts up those who are bowed down. “The Lord cares for the stranger; he sustains the orphan and widow,” says our Psalm. That’s what God does… through us.
In preparation for today’s launch, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my hardworking ministry teams to equip leaders for our forty-plus neighborhood groups. Which has had me scouring my sources for appropriate prayers. And I rediscovered that our Book of Common Prayer—that red book in front of you that we never open in church—is chock full of prayers for local government, for agriculture, for cities, for towns and rural areas.One of the greatest gifts of Anglican theological tradition is our fidelity to local place, perhaps because the historical English understanding of parish was coterminous with neighborhood. Tyre and Tigard, Sidon and Sullivan’s Gulch, Galilee and Goose Hollow: we Episcopalians believe that the places we inhabit are the places where God shows up. The places where we live out our faith.
Trinitarians, we are called to be Christ in our neighborhoods. We are called to be Christ to our problematic neighbor, and also to let our neighbors to minister to us when we have a problem or when we are the problem. Whatever our sort or condition, whether we are cheeky or silent or sick, God will give us the grace to love each other just as we are and just where we are. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s what our Bible tells us to do. Listen again: “you shall love your neighbor… there is no other commandment greater… owe nothing to anyone except to love one another… the one who loves their neighbor has fulfilled the law.”
And who knows? In the process, we might just encounter the neighbor who opens our heart, like a problematic woman once opened Jesus’ heart, and discover that our capacity to love each other and ourselves is bigger than we ever imagined.
