This Is My Story, Part IV

We live in a world of unlikely and needy neighbors

Regina Harlow, an ordained member of the Church of the Brethren, and I were recently asked by our local Brethren-Mennonite Heritage Center to share our stories around four themes, 1) peace, 2) covenant community, 3) alienation from our surrounding culture and 4) being a neighbor in a world of need. She grew up Old Order Mennonite and I was raised in an Amish community. 

This is the last of my four presentations at the Sunrise Church of the Brethren October 17.

I can’t think of my own future without thinking about the future of my children and grandchildren, along with all of God’s children on our fragile and imperiled planet. So I've come to believe that one of the most important questions we should be re-asking and re-answering is one once asked of Jesus, ”Who is my neighbor?” 

In Jesus’s response, as in the story of the Good Samaritan, the neighbor is whoever has the means to help someone in need and does whatever is possible to meet it. What is shocking in Jesus’s parable is that it means even enemies and aliens becoming "neighbors." A Samaritan shows compassion for a Jew, which means we, like him, are each to love and to "neighbor" Muslims, capitalists, communists, friends and enemies alike.

We’ve been reasonably good at offering aid to folks who are mostly like us, our people. In my church community we even avoided collecting social security benefits, simply because we believed we were responsible for each other’s care in old age. We were committed to seeing that none of us us starved unless we all starved, and to offering help to nearby neighbors we sought to love and support as we would have them love and support us.

But I'm convinced we need to draw that circle larger. What if we counted all of God’s children everywhere as our neighbors? Are we not all distant cousins, descendants of the same original human parents, equally entitled to God’s benefits and blessings?  So what if we took seriously the prayer “Give us (plural, as in all of Father-in-heaven’s children) our portion of the bread needed for today," so everyone would have enough? This was clearly a reference to the provision of manna to former slaves who were being freed from their bondage and were on a long journey to freedom. Each person was to have enough but not too much, in an economy of mutual dependence rather than an economy of exploitation such as they had been living under in Egypt. 

I’ve been a part of a committee of the Virginia Mennonite Relief Sale for the past number of years in which we have been raising monetary contributions for Mennonite Central Committee refugee relief, over and above what is brought in though auction, food and other sales. So we’ve had a tent set up at the Sale with a giving table for that purpose. This year this SOS (Sharing Our Surplus) effort raised a total of just over $50,000, not a paltry sum, even though we could easily raise a million each year if Virginia Conference Mennonites alone gave to a fund like this in an amount equal to what we spend on lawn care, on Netflix, on eating out, and on expensive vacations, to mention just a few things for which we could reduce our spending without getting anywhere close to living the life of voluntary poverty chosen by Jesus. 

Our problem is, and I include myself in this, is that we don’t really consider homeless migrants and refugees around the globe as our actual “neighbors.” With literally thousands of miles between us and them, we can’t quite picture foreigners, aliens and strangers as “our people,” in spite of the Torah having more to say about being hospitable and helpful to strangers than it has instructions about keeping the Sabbath, and Jesus having more to say about giving to the poor and offering hospitality to “the least of these” than he does about almost anything else.  Likewise the apostle Paul, in raising money for world relief needs, as recorded in II Corinthians 8-9, urges believers to contribute generously not just as an act of charity, but as as a way of creating equality among God’s children. 

In the 70’s our congregation at Zion Mennonite sponsored members of the Truong family who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, four adult siblings and a cousin. This became a wonderful opportunity for us to experience a greater sense of being part of the larger world neighborhood. Three of them, from as far away as the west coast, recently returned to pay their respects at the memorial service of one of the members of a Zion family who had spent countless hours with them as they settled in and became our friends and next door neighbors.

I have come to believe that all people, of whatever race, color or creed, are our kin, should be seen as a part of an extended family we are to love and look after as we do ourselves. Having said that, I know I am among the world’s worst hypocrites when it comes to having my own giving and my lifestyle choices truly reflect that kind of mindset. 

So confession, repentance and a need for radical conversion are all a part of my story. 

My longing in my old age is to be to become more like my father, who faithfully tithed half of his milk check every month on our struggling little 120 acre dairy farm when I was growing up, the other half going to our uncle Ed to pay off the mortgage. I recall this being not a just a tenth of the profit after expenses, but of the actual half of the milk check itself, even though my parents had adopted a ninth addition to their family when I was seven. We did have some other farm income, and some of my older sisters worked at other jobs to help with the family income, but generous giving out of a heart of gratitude was a priority for my dad. 

On his death bed my father sang, with the last bit of strength he had, the words of one of his favorite gospel songs, ‘This is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long.” He felt a profound sense of being truly “happy and blessed” content with little in the way of earthly possessions. He and my mother, and later he and my stepmother, spent an active retirement in a mobile home, and died with barely enough to cover their burial expenses. Yet he experienced a truly “Blessed Assurance,” and those two simple words are engraved on my dad’s tombstone. And on my mother’s are the words, “I need no mansion here below.”

I would like to die that way, used up and spent out, having invested heavily in the company of heaven, and being able to say, “This, too, is my story. This is my song.”