Proper 10 - 2025
Sermon for Proper 10, Year C
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
The Rev. Andrew McLarty
Being Right vs. Being Neighborly
In today’s Gospel, a lawyer stands up to test Jesus, asking, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus, ever the wise teacher, turns the question back on him: “What is written in the law?” The man answers correctly—love God and love your neighbor—but then, seeking to justify himself, he asks, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story so familiar that we risk missing its radical challenge. We often hear it as a simple moral lesson: Don’t be like the priest and the Levite who passed by; be like the Samaritan who helped. But what if there’s more to it?
What if the priest and the Levite weren’t just heartless or indifferent? What if they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do?
The priest and the Levite had important roles in their community. Touching a bloody, half-dead man would have made them ritually unclean, disqualifying them from temple service. Their duty to the many might have seemed to outweigh their duty to the one.
And yet, Jesus holds up the Samaritan—an outsider, a person despised by the religious elite—as the one who got it right. Why? Because he saw beyond duty, beyond rules, beyond what was expected. He saw a neighbor.
This isn’t just a story about helping strangers. It’s about recognizing that sometimes, love demands more than what the rules require. Sometimes, being a neighbor means interrupting our plans, risking our comfort, and even sacrificing something important.
The lawyer’s first question was, “What must I do?” His second was, “Who is my neighbor?” But Jesus flips the script. At the end of the parable, He doesn’t ask, “Who did the right thing?” Instead, He asks, “Which of these three was a neighbor?”
The answer isn’t just about action—it’s about identity. Being a neighbor isn’t a checkbox on a moral to-do list; it’s a way of living. It’s seeing every person—especially the wounded, the overlooked, the outsider—as someone worthy of love.
Gina Burkhart, a Mennonite pastor, once reflected on how Fred Rogers reimagined the question “Who is my neighbor?” as an invitation: “Won’t you be my neighbor?” Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”
Mr. Rogers’s lyrics turn the self-protecting question of “Who is my neighbor?” into a self-expanding invitation. It’s a shift in perspective, expecting that our lives and our community will be even more beautiful as they become filled with new neighbors. It was a countercultural idea then and continues to exist in contrast with a secular narrative that describes outsiders as a dangerous intrusion into our comfortable neighborhoods.
Jesus invites us to embrace this sort of boundaryless approach, full of anticipation rather than dread. When there are tangible ways to serve others and to share mercy and kindness, taking them up is not our obligation but our delight. When we recall how Jesus related to others, it confirms the wisdom that there are two kinds of people: those we love and those we haven’t yet met.”
The priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan each made a defensible choice. The priest and Levite upheld their religious duties; the Samaritan chose mercy. But Jesus makes it clear: If we want to follow Him, we must choose the way of radical love.
How often do we tell ourselves we have more important things to do than help? That our work, our schedules, even our ministries are too urgent to pause for one hurting soul? But Jesus says the Kingdom belongs to those who stop, who bandage wounds, who pay the price—even when it costs them something big.
Loving our neighbor isn’t just an obligation—it’s our delight. When we live with open hands and open hearts, we discover what Jesus already knows: There are no strangers, only neighbors we haven’t met yet.
Amen.
