speaker-0: This morning the epistle reading is in the book of Hebrews, chapter 13, verses 1 through 2, 16, 20, through 21. Please listen. Let mutual affection continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that, some have entertained angels without knowing it. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have. for such sacrifices are pleasing to God. ⁓ Now may the God of peace, who brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, make you complete in everything good, so that you may do his will, as he works among us, that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever. Amen. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

speaker-1: Last week, we reintroduced the Art of Neighboring series where I invited you to make neighboring a Lenten practice so that we would take it seriously together the greatest commandment, that is to love God with all that we've got and to love our actual neighbors as ourselves and to spend time doing that in concrete and very specific ways like learning their names. And this week we'll address the very first thing that arises when we talk about neighboring. And that is, of course, the reasons why we can't or shouldn't. So we're going to pick up in the Gospel of Luke with Mary and Martha in Luke chapter 10 and verses 38 to 42. Listen now with me for the word of the Lord for us this morning. Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village. where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks. So she came to Jesus and asked, Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Would you tell her to help me? Is there a more relatable scripture in all of the scriptures? What the Lord answered her, Martha. Martha, you are worried and you're distracted by many things. And there is need of only one thing. And Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her. The word of the Lord. Thank you. Let us pray.

speaker-0: you

speaker-1: God of grace, you entered our world coming to serve and not to be served. You chose the better part indeed. Inspire us today and send us out by your love to love one another. And so please you, and so to find blessing. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. O Christ, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. Depending on which study you read, and there are lots of them out there, they reveal that about 50 % of people in the United States feel lonely. I have no data for this, but I suspect that in a transient place like North Texas, where people come and go for work or trainings, that number is higher yet. And that is to say nothing of the adjacent, ⁓ but. different issue of social isolation, which just means that we aren't connecting to one another in place like we used to. The things that used to hold us together and keep us at least proximate to one another no longer do. As a culture, even here in the Bible Belt, we don't go to church in the numbers. I recognize that I'm speaking to the literal choir on this one. We don't go to church like we used to. And whatever church is good for, spiritual realities aside, it used to be something that kept a lot more Americans together than it now does. Folks don't community like they used to. As Robert Putnam might tell you, people are still bowling. They're just bowling alone. It is into this loneliness and isolation that Christ has called his church. We have a tremendous opportunity in the midst of this isolation and loneliness to make space in our church, in our homes, in our lives, in our hearts, where folks can be known and where love can be shared. But the truth remains that there are countless hurdles to neighboring. In 1973, John Darley and Daniel Batson were researchers and they created the Good Samaritan Experiment. How many of you have heard of this? A few, great. The rest of you are in for it. They took a group of divinity school students from Princeton Theological Seminary, people who were training for ministry, the most likely folks you would think on all the planet to want to help others, and they asked them to prepare a talk on the Good Samaritan. You'll know this parable because we talked about it last week. And then these students were sent across campus to deliver their message about the Good Samaritan. And on the way, they passed a man placed there by the researchers, slumped over alongside an alleyway, groaning and moaning in visible distress. And you would think that these future pastors, with the words of one of Jesus's most famous parables, fresh on their lips, would be the first to stop. and you will be wrong. And I'm not saying that it's because they went to Princeton instead of Pittsburgh for seminary. All I'm saying is that no one has disproven that point to date. What the researchers found was that the biggest factor impacting whether or not a student stopped was not their theology, whether they thought that people needed their help or whether God was calling them to offer help. It was not how kind they were. It was not their socioeconomic upbringing as if the poorer students would be more inclined and the richer students too good for it. That had nothing to do with it. They all wanted to help. I suspect that all of us want to do what pleases the Lord and love our neighbor. I think deep down that is true about all of us. The biggest barrier that they discovered to whether or not these students would stop is whether or not they were in a hurry. Of those who were told that they were early for their presentation, 63 % of them stopped to help. Of those who were told they were just on time, only 45 % stopped. And of those who were told that they were running late, 10%. In several instances, these folks were positioned in such a way that they had to literally step over this person to go deliver their message about being a good Samaritan. And the thing that kept them from stopping to do anything to help was that they were in such a hurry. They were too busy to be interrupted. I admit to you that I made no progress in filling out my chart of shame this week because I was too busy. I don't think I passed by anyone who was moaning on the sidewalk, but I was pretty busy one of those days, and I might have. My point is that you will not be alone if you feel like there are countless hurdles to loving your neighbor. I chose the word hurdle intentionally though because hurdles are literally made to be jumped over, right? On Ash Wednesday if you were here. I had you write hurdles on small planks that we then put on a railing to make a fence. What are the things that are keeping you from loving your neighbor? And none of the things that were written on those planks that made up our fence that are keeping us from our neighbors were impossible to get past. But all of them will require effort on our part. effort that our passage from Hebrews calls us to, to make room for the stranger and to share what we have with one another. And what do we have that is of more value than our time and our emotional energy, our love? When we offer these things as a sacrifice to God through loving our neighbor, this not only pleases the Lord, but it opens a means of connection and blessing where love can flow back and forth. So let's address some of the hurdles in the room. The first hurdle that we have to jump over. I think, and the more people that I talk to, the more I'm realizing this is pretty unique to our area, maybe a lot of Texas, but I haven't lived in a lot of Texas, but I have lived here. It's the structure of our very neighborhoods. Someone shared in Bible study on Wednesday night that they recently used the front door of their home for the first time in 30 years. They were surprised that the key still worked. The hinges didn't break off when the door swung open. Many of our neighborhoods, I don't know if you live in one of these, but I live in one of these, many of our neighborhoods are intentionally rear entry so that you come home through the alley and you drive directly into a garage. That's actually not true. You park in front of your garage door because it's too full of crap for you to drive into, but that's a conversation for another day. And you might, when you're parking there in front of your garage, see your other neighbors coming to and fro as you're maybe lounging in your backyard. However, our backyards are protected by 12-foot privacy fences gilded with razor wire because we are serious about privacy and protecting our lawns from intruders. A member of this church, ⁓ a transplant from New Jersey down here, where like most of the Northeast, ⁓ backyard fences are either not a thing or they are low or they're chain link. ⁓ She told me the story of when she moved down here and her backyard needed a fence repair and instead of choosing the Rikers Island option, she went with the forefoot option, which was a scandal. But it gave her an opportunity to have a chance encounter in her backyard with other neighbors who were coming or going or dragging their trash cans out for collection. You wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to bump into people, but with a four-foot fence, you might. I am not suggesting you scandalize your neighborhood with a four-foot tall fence. I am suggesting that you consider meaningful ways to combat the isolation that a lot of our neighborhoods by their very structure introduce into our lives. So maybe, this is crazy, use your front door for more than just the mail. Go sit out there, get a chair, read a book in your front yard. There was a movement, Colleen, I could not think of it. Was it the purple pick the table? Teal, teal picnic table. There was a whole movement about this where people were buying picnic tables, painting them teal, and putting them in their front yard as a symbol of like, I'm gonna be intentional about creating space and opportunity to meet my neighbors. I'm gonna sit at this teal picnic table. Do that, we'll buy you paint. Right? We have money for paint, don't we? I don't know. We're gonna buy you paint. Missy says we have it. But I wonder what kind of holy encounters we might have if we just create space to have them. I wonder what might happen if we just put ourselves in the way of, it's like the opposite of the fact that I don't keep cookies in the house because I have no self-control. I know that that's a bad situation for me, so I don't create it. We know this is a good situation for us to have chance encounters with our neighbors, so let's create space for that to happen. I wonder though if we are that protective of our backyards because of the next hurdle, which is that we are just so squeezed for time that we desperately want to protect what little privacy is left to us in our lives. That we're actually so stretched by our calendars and by the demands on us that we don't want to be encountered by our neighbors. We're all a little like Martha, running to and fro, trying to get 50 % more done than is reasonable for any one human being or family. The text says that Martha was distracted by her many tasks. And the Greek word there is perispeo, which sounds to me like perspiration, like she's working so hard she's flop sweating. But another way to interpret that word, perispeo, is overwhelmed. Sweaty with expectations of what we're supposed to do, what we're supposed to produce. It's overwhelming. I'm not sure that there's a better word for how so many of us feel, even while at the same time, we are persistently lonely and isolated from one another. It's a heck of a catch-22. And the problem, don't know that, I'm not sure that the problem is the stuff on the calendar. Like sports on their own aren't the problem, your job isn't the problem, your many community engagements aren't the problem. think the problem is that we feel a compulsion and a pressure to do everything everywhere all at once. And this squeezes the breathing room required to love our neighbor right out of our lives. Again, it wasn't that those Princeton Seminary kids didn't care about the stranger in distress. They were just too overwhelmed by their own concerns to do anything about it. They were immobilized by hurry. And very often so are we. Quoting the author, ⁓ John Ortberg, Jay and Dave, the authors of The Art of Neighboring, they write this sobering truth. Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time. And time is the one thing hurried people don't have. Nobody has ever tried to fall in love quick. I got 30 seconds for this, let's go. Right? So my suggestion is that we examine closely our calendars and determine what's actually important to us. Clutter happens in our lives as well as it happens in our garages and in our closets. But if as Christian folk we are committed to leaning into the greatest commandment, that is to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves, let's allow our calendars to reflect that truth about us. This will be a conscious choice, and it will likely stick out as loudly as putting a four-foot fence in instead of the deluxe southern border option. But when Jesus invites you, promises you indeed a life to the fullest, he did not mean a full calendar. He meant a life filled with meaning and love and depth of relationship. So own your space, own your time, make it count. Is there a better lesson of life that we can model for one another and for our children than to make space for love? Anybody can have a full calendar. Not everybody gets to make space for a life of depth and love. The last hurdle that we have time to talk about this morning is fear. And this showed up on that fence. I wish I had it in my office that I meant to bring it out here to show you. But that showed up on that fence in more forms than one. Of this I'm sure, it was the fear of awkwardness. The awkwardness required to have an intentional conversation with people that we feel like we should probably already know because we've had any number of conversations with them but we still don't know anything about them other than what the weather was that day or dang it if those guys didn't blow their grass clippings into my part of the lawn, you know what I'm saying? We know that we should already know these people, their names, something about them. So. The easiest thing for us to do is just to acquire a taste for Crow. I'm gonna eat some here in the next couple of weeks. There's a woman who lives and her son who lived catty corner to me that I have spoken to a million times. I used to say hello to them and wave hello and have brief conversations every single morning just about when I was walking my kids back to school. She just so happened to be coming out at that same time. I have no idea what her name is. No clue. Don't know a single fact about her other than she lives with her son. So I'm fixing to eat some crow. But here's the deal. I'm convinced that that awkwardness is actually the lowest possible hurdle. And that's not just because I'm me and I don't mind talking to strangers. It's because I think that all of us feel that way. And you're actually doing a service to the neighbor who feels the same awkwardness when you're the one that goes out of your way to say hello and ask the name because they don't remember either. So honestly, enduring a little bit of awkwardness is probably the worst of it. And you have endured far worse for much less, my friends. So with the spirit of God that is within you, you have got this. The bigger fears that were present on that picket fence were around a lack of compatibility once we got to know our neighbors. Like, we went out of our way to do the thing and we found out they were just as big a jerk as we thought they were. Right? And that's legit. However, however, it is also the very call of God on our lives to be people of reconciliation. and to be people who are peacemakers in our world. So that hurdle of discovering that they are just as big a jerk as you thought becomes an opportunity to be a people of grace and a people of forgiveness and an ambassador of the God who is healing all creation. There are countless hurdles to this, but there is also boundless goodness on the other side of it. So I'm going to invite Robin to come up. and to tell you why it is worth it to jump over these hurdles because of the goodness that is waiting on the

speaker-0: Thank you. I'm going to try and do this without getting emotional. ⁓ So when Jake went over being a neighbor in 2020, ⁓ he did this sermon and it just really tugged at my heartstrings because he gave us an index card and we had to write down all of our neighbors, if we could, their names, their family, what they do, just all of that. And I knew random names and I knew the people on each side and that was about it. And my mom on the other hand is over there like, ⁓ I own this. I know. And I was like, So ⁓ I went home and it didn't happen overnight. But it was just something that I slowly started to do. ⁓ Around Christmas I went to Lone Star and I bought popcorn tins. So ⁓ that's how you can meet people, just give them food. ⁓ so I went, I got like eight of them, give or take, and I went and I gave it to him, introduced myself, wrote our names on the card, so forth. Well, I got to know these people, and honestly, it's not as easy as it sounds because when you get home from work, the last thing you want to do is like go visit. You're like, I have stuff to do, I got to cook dinner. Like Jake said, you have to be busy. And thank goodness you didn't mention the teal table Because if I would have done that, I probably would have gotten written up from the HOA. So I'm glad we didn't go there. But anyway, I got to know these people. I got to know who they were. I was praying for them. I knew what their kids were up to. Basically, these people just became my real neighbors, not just people that I would pay and go inside real fast. And so fast forward to last year, I went through a divorce. And that's, even if you go through it last year, like I'm still, and it's been really hard, and I've had, you know, just my kids with me, and these people have shown up for me in ways that I never would have gotten had Jake not made that sermon about knowing your neighbor. And so there are times that I've had people bring me food. They have ⁓ right to my lawn of all the leaves, one time on my cameras, because I have cameras everywhere. ⁓ I saw my neighbor, who was a grandfather and lives by himself, come over in the rain with an umbrella and he emptied my trash cans and he brought them to the garage for me so I didn't have to worry about it. And they pray for me, they'll text me and be like, I see your ex at the house, is he supposed to be there? It's good. But it's these little things that have just really, really, really touched my heart. And I wouldn't be where I wouldn't, I mean I would, but I wouldn't honestly been able to get through everything I've been through if it weren't for them and their love. And Pastor Jake saying that sermon to me. So if anything, buy popcorn, do tacos, do something, meet your neighbor.

speaker-1: Thank you, Robin. God has placed all of you in your neighborhoods wherever they are for a reason. To be a person who bears the love of Christ there. There in your neighborhood is the closest opportunity you have to discover God at work in you and around you by offering up the gifts that you have and the greatest gift that you have to offer is yourself and a tin of popcorn. Your presence on your street, in your world, God has placed you there because he needs you there. And you just might find that you need your street as much as it needs you. Because this is what love looks like. The back and forth of care and concern. So in the header, on your order of worship, there is that chart of shame that Robin referenced. They're up at the top. And I would invite you at some point this week to take a moment to write a hurdle to relationship with your neighbor there in that block chart. It might be time, it might be fear, it might be the physical structure of your neighborhood, but whatever it is, may God give you the gift of lift to jump over those barriers and find the full life of blessing and love that Jesus has promised you. Thanks be to God. Amen.