For me and my family, it has been really easy for us to love our Oak Ridge neighbors. The summer after we moved in at 107 Willow Lane, we met the family that now lives at 106. I remember coming home a little early from a church meeting to see my husband and son at the top of our neighbors’ yard soaking wet and covered in mud and grass clippings. They had been invited to careen down the neighbors’ hill on a hosed-down five-foot-wide sheet of plastic. There have been slip-n-slide events every Summer since!

With children about the same age, similar interests, and surroundings – our friendship has grown easily. Three more children later – their last two on either side of our youngest, we have gone to Dollywood together, watched each other’s kids or pets, and played cards until the wee hours of the morning. We’ve had many conversations about Linden elementary school while waiting for the bus, and we supported each other in difficult times when our respective daughters were both born with complications.

Having neighbors like this makes Jesus’ most important commandment seem easy. Yes, I can love my neighbors like I love myself – these neighbors especially who have become part of our extended family. So just how hard can following this commandment be?

The problem is that Jesus broadens the category of “neighbor,” sometimes a little too much for our liking. There are days when it’s hard enough just to come home at the end of a long day and have love enough for my husband, and the kids, and the people that I like. If only that were enough! If only it were enough to love the people that it’s easy to love, we’d have it made. But Jesus reminds us in his famous Sermon on the Mount that your ordinary run-of-the-mill sinners do that. It doesn’t make us especially good or religious to be loving and kind to our close friends and family.

The love of neighbor that Jesus encourages us to follow is huge in scope. It doesn’t just mean loving my “across the street” neighbors, it means also loving the neighbors who are hard to love, like the ones that invite the police to cruise the cul-de-sac when our Willow Lane parties seem too loud or over the top. It means caring about the whole Oak Ridge community from Whippoorwill Drive to Scarboro, from Rivers Run to Hillside Drive, from Briarcliff, and Willow Place, and Emory Heights, to the East End (where I always get lost.) It means being a city to city neighbor from Oak Ridge to Clinton, and Oliver Springs, and Knoxville. It means connecting East Tennessee to other Appalachian States and poor communities around the world. Jesus’ “neighbor” is inclusive of all races, nationalities, and worldviews. And if that weren’t enough Jesus instructs us not only to love neighbors, but to also love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Then John’s gospel reminds us that Jesus says there is no greater love than this – to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Love like Jesus describes transgresses all our comfortable boundaries and gives us no excuses. Jesus didn’t even stop loving us when it cost him his own life.

So just when we thought we could take Jesus’ two most important commandments – loving God and loving our neighbor and get the Bible down to its condensed “Bible for Dummies” version, it turns out that these two commandments encompass so much, so much of our energy, creativity, and concern that not even a lifetime of our dedication would seem to meet the little end of this vision Jesus lays out for his disciples.

A lawyer once asked Jesus a very similar question to the one the scribe asks in Mark, “Which of the commandments are the greatest?” Jesus was remarkably consistent in his answer on this one – Love God, love your neighbor. But the lawyer, being a lawyer, pressed further – “So who is my neighbor?” That’s the catch we’re getting at, isn’t it?

It is from Luke’s gospel that we get the story of the “Good Samaritan” that follows that all important question. Over time, we have learned to think of anyone who does a good deed as a “Good Samaritan,” but in so doing we miss some of the subtle nuances of this story. For one thing, any Jew wouldn’t have thought much about Samaritans at that time. Samaritans were “other.” They weren’t Jewish. They weren’t Greek. And they were displaced and despised by both cultures. In addition, the man who gets helped by the hero of the story fell upon robbers on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem – at the time known for being not at all a safe place to travel. Therefore, most everyone hearing the story at the time would have thought that someone going along that road took a risk into their own hands and if they then got beat up by robbers – so be it. Jesus is willing to press back hard against the lawyer’s question. So you want to know who your neighbor is? Well, who was the neighbor to the man left by the road? Was it the priest who kept on walking? No. Was it the church elder who had better things to do? No. It was the Samaritan, the other, the unexpected person who showed compassion without limits.

If we accept the long ingrained religious truth that we are to love our neighbors, and if we then agree with Jesus that we are all neighbors – regardless of geography, nationality, race, worldview, politics, etc. Then the next question we might want to press Jesus for an answer on is: How are we to love them all? Like the implied thought behind the lawyer’s question, we want to know how to get off the hook. Surely, not everyone is a neighbor, and surely we can’t be expected to love them ALL – or can we?

Though by time and space restraints it may be impossible for me to know let alone love every person in the world face to face, and though it is true that my energy for love will be spent disproportionally more on my close family, friends, and church community before I get to the next levels, I think Jesus has a certain attitude or stance toward the world in mind when he calls up these two commandments as more important than all the rest. To describe the attitude he’s talking about, I would borrow from the social sciences for some language about love. Daniel Goleman, in his book Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships, describes in general terms that human beings can treat others like an “it” or we can treat them like a “you” – like a whole person. For generations on generations of humans living in tribal cultures it has been easy to focus on our “minor differences” (299) that which identifies you as part of this tribe and the other tribe as something less than human. This absolutely slants how we treat one another. If I think of you as an “it” – I am less likely to see you for who you are, a whole person with needs, wants, and concerns just like me. In scary ways, this leads to whole cultures adopting an Us/Them mentality that has led to war justified by prejudices and genocide in all its forms. It starts there. It starts with how we objectify one person or one group as somehow not worthy of our love and concern.

Adopting an attitude of love for our neighbors challenges the way we think. It means that we have to let go of being right and accept the relationships of being human. Ticking off what I think is best - like being Presbyterian, or middle class, or white, or female, or whatever it is that creates categories of “better than” isn’t helping us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. First, loving ourselves gives us permission to be human, with all its gifts and limitations, likes and dislikes. Then opening ourselves to whole relationships with whole people gives us opportunities greater than we ever had by keeping to our own kind. As the social sciences are beginning to discover, with love in our hearts from our teachers, we learn better; with love from our doctors, we heal faster; with love from our police force, we reduce violence; with love from parents, children thrive, and on and on it goes.

What are the greatest commandments in all of scripture? Love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself. We may trust that because it comes from Jesus, and yet Christians do not have a corner on this market. Human love is a universal. Love wins every time –even when it looks defeated – like on a cross, or in a Memphis hotel, or in a mother’s tears, a father’s anguish. Love perseveres and says, “You are important. You are my beloved. You matter to me. And it makes a difference that you are in the world today. “ So love your neighbor. Love God. Love will change the world. It already has, and it always will.

Amen.