Checklists. Do you make them? Do you like to cross off the tasks that you've completed? A checklist points me in the direction of a day well-lived.
But do you ever keep checklists for people? Me neither. But sometimes I suspect I have a hidden checklist in my heart that helps me to keep track of people I will help and people I won't help. It gets worse. I suspect that the list keeps me from helping anybody.
Jeff read from Luke 10:25-37 - the story of the Good Samaritan. The story is of a man who wants to know if Jesus really takes the Jewish law seriously. What Jesus understands is that this man - this "expert in the law" thinks himself competent not only to know the law but to accomplish it. "Loving God and loving neighbor is just a matter of will power! Set your mind to it, stay focused, and we can all do it." So Jesus tells him what he'd like to hear. "You are correct." But then he adds "Do this and you will live." This makes the man think a little. "Who is my neighbor?" He asks Jesus. The text says he is trying to justify himself.
He's makes checklists too. Some people make the list and are counted as "neighbors". Others aren't. And aren't we like this too? This checklist matched up very well with mine.
1) I'm not bound to help the needy; only the destitute. I meet poor people with nice TV's. Surely they are doing well enough and don't need my help.
2) I barely have enough for my own needs and for my family's needs. I really don't have anything to spare.
3) So many people are just ill-tempered and ungrateful, no matter what you give them!
4) I'm not going to help people who are in poverty by their own foolishness; worse, many are violent and I could be opening myself to harm in providing meaningful help.
This isn't my checklist. This is a list that 18th century pastor Jonathan Edwards compiled from discussions with his parishioners' struggles with the Good Samaritan scripture. I read about it in Tim Keller's book, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just. He describes everything I'm writing here in more detail. Seriously. The whole next paragraph is 100% from his 4th chapter. So it isn't mine, but I realize I have one just like it.
Could God have made a list like this one? Sure. He might have picked those among us more in need of grace - but as sinners we all need it. He might not have wasted his wealth on us and kept it for himself - but he was rich in love toward us instead. Ill-tempered, ungrateful, foolish, selfish, and violent. Guilty, guilty, guilty, etc. Jesus used the example of a Samaritan because Jews hated Samaritans back then. But when the expert hears the story he can't help but acknowledge that even if he didn't like Samaritans, he would be grateful for the mercy the Samaritan provided in the story. So it is with God. We are sinners. We loathe God. We don't like it when he meddles. We don't like his authority. We don't like to give him credit that we can take ourselves. We don't love him, and we don't love our neighbors. But he found us on the roadside half-dead, and he didn't keep walking. Though the Good Samaritan gave his time, energy, resources, Jesus is the Great Samaritan who gives his whole life. Rather than make a list of ways to ignore, exclude, and leave us to our own devices, he gives us his own goodness at no cost to us but at total cost to himself - his own life.
Don't misunderstand me. We need guidelines to know how to give meaningful aid to people. But as for me, I have a hard heart. I deliberately walked away from someone near me in the Walmart parking lot yesterday because I thought he might ask me for money. Even as I walked away, I could hear what I expect was the Holy Spirit speaking to my hard, but not totally deaf heart - "Who do you think you are, Chris? Have I not given you way more than the little you are afraid this man will ask of you? Have I not made you rich in love - just like myself?"
Join me in identifying your checklist and then getting rid of it. If we think it is the way to real neighbor love, we are kidding ourselves. C.S. Lewis once compared us to "an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea." The answer isn't in our list, because we don't have what it takes for real neighbor love. Jesus does and gives it to us - real joy, real grace...and real neighborly love.
...it almost makes me want to hop in my car and drive to Walmart!
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