Who is My Neighbor?

WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?
REV. DAVID ROBINS
NOVEMBER 9, 2008
 
            “Good fences make good neighbors,” reads the line in Robert Frost’s poem.
            I share a stone wall with one of my neighbors, as in Frost’s poem. Yesterday I spent some time re-stacking my stone wall. How the stones roll off, I haven’t a clue. The neighbor in Frost’s poem thinks that good walls make good neighbors. Loving your neighbor means loving their boundaries as your own.
                        On the back of your order of service is a source described of as “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.” There is no ethical call in our faith that points out with more clarity and judgment, how humanity falls short. Kristallnacht and Veteran’s Day for example, commemorate times when neighbors turned o n each other with savagery.
            We tend to think that Jesus made up the quote about loving one’s neighbor. Jesus didn’t make this up. He was quoting Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18 “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Buddhism, Hinduism, and most other religions contain similar words, to love one’s neighbor. Does that keep people from suing each other, and countries from going to war, and religions from excluding people? No. it does not keep the United States from building a wall to keep out our Mexican neighbors, nor Israel from building a wall to keep out its Palestinian neighbors. I can only hope that a new generation of peacemaking will lead to the gradual dismantling of these walls.
 Islam has an interesting answer in the Quran regarding just who is my neighbor. Mohammed said that the people up to 7 doors down from me are my neighbors, implying that I should not put limits on who is my neighbor.
            I’ve had a lot of neighbors over the years. Many of them were not lovable. How can I love the neighbor who told me one day, “I don’t like your wife, and I never have.” I had trouble loving the neighbor whose dog used our yard for a bathroom. I was angrily unable to love the neighbor who played techno music loud enough to rattle my house windows at 2am every week.
            From the reverse perspective, how could my neighbor love me the time my dog bit her? How could my neighbors love me back in my previous town when I pushed through the town council historic status for the neighborhood knowing that half the residents were against it?
            I don’t even know any of my neighbors seven doors down, let alone the people on either side of me. Hesiod, the Greek shepherd and poet who lived almost 3000 years ago, pointed out that “the person who finds a good neighbor finds a precious thing.” I really want to be a good neighbor. I want to fulfill Mr. Rogers call to all of us: “Would you be my neighbor?”
            Yes, I will be Mr. Rogers neighbor. But I don’t think I can live up to the words on the back of the order of service. I don’t think that I can love my neighbor as much as I love myself, at least not all of the time.    
            The people of our country are called by great expectations of loving neighbors.
            As long as we humans act more from our evolutionary aggression, loving one’s neighbor will seem unrealistic and dangerous. Good fences make good neighbors only when the fence is built out of mutual respect, understanding and control.
            Our UU principles ask of us a bit more than any other time in our history. The 7th principle asks us to consider our neighbor to be more than the people living next door. The 7th principle asks us to love the trees, and animals and plants, and sky and air and earth and water as our neighbors. To love them as we love ourselves. But there is more than just a quantitative reciprocity. There is a qualitative reciprocity that whispers of mystical relationship. Such a mystical reality lies in our transcendentalist strain of UUism, in which the boundary, the wall that separates us from an experience of transcendence evaporates. As much as we might like to live without the wall that makes us a good neighbor with the earth, and with God, it is a short lived experience that echoes in our souls, and draws us back again and again to its deep and dear wonder. The Unitarian, Emerson, said: “Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us; that the sources of nature are in our own minds. As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and god, the cause, begins.”
            My religious conditioning as a child taught me to think of God as three people, a father and a man, and another wispy kind of male figure. The first building your own theology class I taught, one of the men, who had had similar religious upbringing, said, “I have trouble loving a father figure. I think of God as a woman, a black woman. I can crawl into her lap and she holds me tight.”
            There’s a new pop Christian book called “The Shack”, that has sold 2 million copies and has been on the New York Times bestseller list. The Trinity appears in this book, transformed in gender and ethnicity, into a glorious African American woman, a middle-eastern laborer, and an Asian woman.  What a loosening up of the imagination! A triune God could just as easily be the Contoocook River, Mt. Monadnock, and the maple tree in the church front yard.
 And we love this natural trinity, and they are our neighbors. We need certain types of fences between us to define us and give us space to live. But across the fence, neighbor and universal soul are sometimes the same, in whatever form or shape they appear.  
When you walk the fence with your neighbor, tree or human or universal soul, let your eyes and hands and emotions spell out respect and love. May the fences that connect you be lovely and loving.
            Our church’s religious education program is offering a program this yeaqr on non-violent communication that holds the hope of teaching us how to be better neighbors. 200,000 people each year around the world are trained in this particular non-violent communication. If we can have a million people trained a year, especially in the conflict spots of the world, I think we will have reached a tipping point for good.        
            Coming to Sunday worship is one of the occasions for walking the stone fence with our neighbors and our universal soul.
As you walk your walls this week, attend to the fallen stones, attend to your neighbor, be it person, place or precious source.