“Do This and You Will Live”
Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
July 13, 2025
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
But who is my neighbor?
It sounds simple, right? The people who live next to you. The ones your mom sends you to when you’re out of date syrup. The ones who bring over dinner when a loved one dies.
That’s the answer you’re looking for, right? Who’s my neighbor? It’s them.
But what happens when you’re not really from anywhere? When one of the most important features about you is where you’re from, what happens when you grew up on the road between two places? When you grew up in that thin space that doesn’t really belong to any one group of people? When the only folks you really ever encounter are travelers and bandits?
Can you even have neighbors when you’re from nowhere?
Oh, don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t all as bad as I’m making it out to be. Truth be told, I never really knew how we ended up out here in the borderlands between Jerusalem and Jericho. Dad would say one thing, uncle another, and Grandma never really talked about it. But growing up, our household was big enough for a kid like me to keep busy. We were fortunate enough to have steady streams of caravans stopping through to stay the night throughout the busy seasons.
I was responsible for making sure that the stalls were cleaned before a new caravan arrived for the night.
You’d be surprised at how much…waste a caravan of camels can make in one night.
We didn’t have much to offer our guests—well, apart from the security of a night free of harassment from bandits, which, to be honest, wasn’t nothing.
You have to understand that, in those days, all those bandit and rebel factions were all kind of disjointed. Independent cells, really, fighting more with each other than anyone else. But there were enough of them that would set up camp off the highway to target caravans and travelers.
If a merchant couldn’t afford their own private security detail to deal with them, our inn was the next best thing.
If they couldn’t afford a night at the inn, well, it was a roll of a dice as to which cell would pick them off that night—God willing, it was one of the friendlier ones.
Because the only thing that those cells all had in common was a healthy respect for Grandma. No matter who you had beef with, our inn was off-limits.
We wouldn’t bother them, and they wouldn’t bother us.
They stayed away from our inn, and when the centurions or Temple authorities would ask us about them, we all knew to, respectfully, keep our mouths shut.
Thankfully, the centurions and Temple authorities wouldn’t prod too much. They knew that our inn was one of the only places between Jerusalem and Jericho you could safely spend the night—where merchants from Jericho could securely stay with their grain on the way to the market in Jerusalem.
As long as we did their job for them—and paid our taxes of course, they would leave us alone.
Nothing really matters so long as commerce continues to flow.
Besides, they needed those roving bandits and rebel factions as much as they needed us. Nothing shores up your own power and authority quite like some rogue bogeymen keeping everyone else afraid.
When you grow up on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, you learn about how the world really works.
You learn that you can’t depend on anyone else but yourself and your household.
You learn that no matter what god you may or may not pray to, the one true God is the bottom line.
And you learn that, when it comes to neighbors, it’s best to have a good fence.
You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
But who is my neighbor?
If it sounds cold and callous, I guess that’s because it had to be.
Because look, it’s easy to recite the commandments when you’re safe and at home in your fortified city. You can spend all day studying and arguing the finer points of Moses’ teachings if you want to. You’re going to sleep safely anyways.
But out here? On the road between Jerusalem and Jericho? No one cares how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
You do what you have to in order to make it through the night, and your soul takes a backseat. Ideals only get in the way. Learned that from my father.
He and my uncle never really saw eye to eye. But while Grandma was still with us, they managed to keep the peace. Like I said, Grandma had that way about her. But I knew that the tension was always there. Dad fashioned himself as a revolutionary. Where my uncle knew better than to hang out with the different rebel factions, Dad just couldn’t help himself.
They’d bicker about it constantly whenever Grandma wasn’t around—got to the point where Grandma had to totally separate them from one another in their roles at the inn. One supervised the day shift and the other the night shift.
After Grandma passed, though, there was nothing to stop my dad. He joined up with some gang—said he was doing it for me, something about building a world where we would be free of our Roman oppressors.
Yeah, right. Like some ragtag gang was going to bring down Rome.
Lucky for me, my uncle took me under his wing. I had grown up working with his kids, and he had always been more there for me more than my dad anyways.
My uncle took up the work of managing the whole inn at that point, and he’d have me help him with the books. And luckily, the various factions of bandits continued to keep their distance from the inn under my uncle’s ownership. For a time, all was peaceful.
But I wasn’t prepared for just how fragile the peace really was.
One night—a night that I happened to have off—I was startled awake by a pounding on the front door. I peeked out my bedroom door just in time to see my uncle arguing with my disheveled father. He was frantic—demanding a room that he and his friends could lie low in. They had botched an ambush on a Roman garrison that was camping along the highway. They had faulty intel from another cell. The authorities weren’t far behind.
They should have known better. We don’t mess with the bandits, and the bandits don’t mess with us. That’s how it’s always been.
My uncle was having none of it.
Their argument grew to a crescendo. I couldn’t see who threw the first fist, but it was clear that my dad threw the last. I tried to run out and break it up, but I wasn’t fast enough. My uncle’s body lay there, lifeless. My dad stood there, a look of horror on his face. And there I was, the weight of what had just happened and all that was to come slowly dawning upon me.
Dad tried to reason with me, but I cut him off.
“Just…go”, I said, my voice trembling in an unholy combination of grief, shock, and rage.
Just…go.
And he ran away.
About a week later, after the mourning period had ended, my cousin told me that she saw dad outside of the city when she was picking something up from the market.
He was hanging on a cross.
All those revolutionary ideals, and a lot of good it did him.
You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
But who is my neighbor?
With Grandma and my uncle gone, I was the one who knew the books well enough to manage the inn. Not exactly the promotion I wanted, but my cousins were fine with it, and the job needed to be done.
Word of my uncle’s passing spread. Caravans and merchants would offer awkward condolences as they were checking in or checking out over the coming months. Temple authorities and centurions, too.
But out here on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, life doesn’t slow down for you to mourn. All you were and all you are take a backseat to just getting through the day so that you make it to the next one. There aren’t any neighbors out here to look out for you—to cook up dinners for you or bake you a dessert. There isn’t anyone you can send your little cousins to watch over them while you go to the market.
Keep your head down. Greet guests as they come in. Take their payment. Show them to their room and take their camels to the stalls. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
It’s cold. It’s calloused. But hey, so is the world.
Who is my neighbor?
Out here, there are no neighbors.
That’s everything I’ve ever known.
So, yeah, I saw that guy get attacked, and sure, I didn’t do anything about it. What of it? What was he doing traveling this road by himself, anyways? No one goes between Jerusalem and Jericho by themselves.
It’s not like anyone else tried to help. Not even that priest or that Levite. I don’t care what god you pray to when you tuck yourself in at night. Out here, the only God that matters is the God of staying alive and minding your own business.
And don’t tell me that they couldn’t touch him because of some ritual purity laws. Every priest knows that the law of life comes first—they just didn’t want to see it.
No. Out here, we’re all hypocrites, just doing what we need to do to get to the other side.
So tell me why. Just tell me why…he did?
My dad died trying to save strangers. I survived by learning to never stop for them. But there he was.
Stopped over that beaten man.
Exposed and vulnerable to further attack.
Dressing his wounds with wine and oil. Not just medicine—a blessing.
Putting him on his own donkey. Giving up his own ride so that he could rest.
And bringing him… to my inn.
One of the only safe places on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.
They stayed the night, and this morning, the Samaritan came out of the room and gave me enough money for the beaten man to stay for weeks. No one ever stays at our inn for more than one night… maybe two if the weather’s not great. But weeks and weeks? Forget it.
Then he said that he’d be coming back, and if the man spent anything more than what he gave me, he’d repay me.
This isn’t how the world is supposed to work.
Not out here. Not for people like you or like me.
No one lavishes oil or wine, coins and trust on strangers. Not out here. Not ever.
Out here, when you fall into robbers and are left for dead, no one comes to save you.
Not the ones in uniform.
And not the ones in robes.
No one.
There are no neighbors here.
So why did that Samaritan, that Samaritan of all people, stop?
Why did he bring him to my inn? My inn of all places?
Why did he trust me with his care? How could I be trusted with his care?
I didn’t even stop to save him, myself!
I...could have saved him.
I could have saved so many others.
I didn’t.
But he asked me to take care of him.
Why did I say yes?
You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
But who is my neighbor?
I don’t know why that Samaritan stopped, but I can’t go back to pretending that no one ever will. Not after he did.
Maybe that’s what Grandma saw out here on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. In this thin space where the world cracks just enough for mercy to shine through.
That the world doesn’t change when we finally know who our neighbor is.
It changes the moment we finally decide to be one.
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues.
Amen.
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