10 Ways You Can Check-In on Your Neighbor
Every year we gather the staff of 40 employees at Logos Academy in a day of service to give back to other nonprofits. This year I was on a team that helped at Catholic Food Harvest.
One member of our team was given the role of delivering food to people who were not mobile. He ended up doing a delivery to someone in his own neighborhood, a neighbor he had never met. I happen to live a couple of blocks away.
The recipient was an elderly man who required a caretaker. The aide informed our employee that he was bending agency rules because the man had no one to check-in or care for him. This elderly man was isolated and vulnerable. The aide thought it more humane to include him in his own family life as a means of caring for him.
This aide described how the elderly man frequently had his first-floor AC unit kicked in and his home robbed. The man was deaf and immobilized against defending himself or his property.
A poor, elderly, disabled, deaf, and vulnerable man was living in our neighborhood. Neither of us had ever met him or had knowledge of his situation. Here was a defenseless man that we could easily check on so that he might not be at risk.
I could tell you about a man I recently found sleeping under a tree in the snow, or about the man that neighborhood kids found dead bundled up under a bridge.
My little hometown, York, PA, was recently rated by a Harvard-connected group named ICIC (Initiative for a Competitive Inner City) among 450 US cities as one of five most disadvantaged under-resourced communities. This rating is due to the concentration of poverty and disproportionate impact on Black people due to housing policies, structures of government, transportation, and numerous other factors.
It would seem that the vulnerable man in my neighborhood is trapped in a broader system of dysfunction.
Jesus wants us to get busy checking in on our neighbors
My friend Todd recently retired and tried out some time away in a popular retirement destination. He described the experience as a miserable purgatory. The self-focus and greed were too much for him to bear. He described how everyone competed to see who owned the fanciest golf cart. His heart was pricked because it felt like the whole exercise was just a way to avoid the hardships of the world by creating an alternate reality devoid of suffering.
Todd has traveled on an overseas mission trip and has witnessed human suffering and poverty firsthand. The experience changed him. He isn’t ready to quit just yet. Todd keeps a timer on his phone that shows that he has 19 years left to live (apparently based on the size of his available retirement funds). He wants to stay busy living the life Jesus has for him by caring for his neighbors.
2 Corinthians 5:14 and 20 says that “Christ’s love compels us… to be His ambassadors.” In chapter 2 of that same letter, Paul says that “God uses us to spread the knowledge of Him everywhere.”
We are literally the “aroma of Christ” to our hurting neighbors.
Eternal life is bound up with my neighbor
Jesus had a conflict with a religious teacher that is memorialized in Luke 10:25-37, traditionally known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. A teacher in the Law stood, a social courtesy to a Rabbi, to test Jesus. The question revealed more cynicism toward Jesus than respect because his goal was to trap Jesus.
“We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”
The teacher asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus did not reply to the teacher about heaven in the ways we conceive of the afterlife.
Jesus replied: “Tell me your reading of the Law.” The teacher answered, ”Love God and your neighbor.”
Jesus simply responded, “Do this and you will live.”
Eternal life for Jesus was not just something that happened after you die, but something that you enter into right now in this life. Apparently, how we treat our neighbors is a sign that we actually possess eternal life. This life of the age-to-come is the right-now-Kingdom-of-God marked by knowing God and loving our neighbor.
In John 17:3 Jesus said, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
The teacher wanted to justify himself before Jesus and therefore asked: “Who is my neighbor?”
He expected Jesus to reply with an answer based on Jewish Law that said, “Your relative and Jewish friends are your neighbors.” To this, the teacher would respond, “I have done this,” with the expectation that Jesus would say, “All is good. Well done.” The teacher would then be justified and move on with his interrogation of Jesus.
Jesus redefines who is our neighbor
But Jesus doesn’t justify the man. Instead, he told a disruptive story that radically expands what it really means to be a neighbor.
A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, a 17-mile trek known to be perilous. This man was attacked by robbers, beaten, stripped, robbed, and left half-dead on the road.
Arriving in order, a Jewish priest and then a Levite who served as an assistant to the priests at the Temple, both see the battered man on the road and pass by on the other side to avoid the unsightly inconvenience.
Middle-Eastern scholar Kenneth Bailey in his combo book Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes sheds interpretive light on the story. He describes how a Jewish audience member would have expected a progression of people based on Temple and societal norms. The priest would be followed by a Levite who would be followed by a Jewish layman. This would have laid out a set of expected actions in the mind of the audience that each person would take based on societal understanding of these three people.
The priest was part of the wealthy ruling class and would likely have been riding on an animal. The audience would expect that he could have carried the man to safety.
The Levite, who was not as wealthy as the priest, would have stopped to bind the man’s wounds and care for him in the road.
The next arrival should have been a Jewish layman. Instead, Jesus inserts a Samaritan layman. Samaritans were despised and hated by Jewish people as half-breed betrayers and idolaters. There was a prayer going around 1st-century synagogues that Samaritans would not be partakers of eternal life.
The insertion of a Samaritan, an ethnic enemy of the Jewish people, is surprising. The Good Samaritan goes to the man, cleans, sanitizes, and binds up the man’s wounds, carries him on his donkey to a nearby inn, provides overnight care, pays the innkeeper two denarii to provide care, and promises to return and reimburse the innkeeper for any additional expense.
Jesus asked the teacher, “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The teacher is forced to answer but refuses to name the Samaritan, instead replying, “The one who had mercy on him.”
To whom should I become a neighbor?
A Samaritan is the hero of Jesus’s story. The question that requires an answer is not the limiting question, “Who is my neighbor?”, but rather the inclusive question, “To whom should I become a neighbor?”
Jesus’s command to “Go and do likewise” is not just for the teacher but also for us. “Do this and you will live.”
Don’t tell people you are in possession of eternal life by simply sharing your theology. Show people you are already in possession of eternal life BY looking for neighbors who need to know the same love of God you have experienced.
God checked in on you when you were lying dead on the road to Jericho so you should go check in on your neighbors.
10 Ways You Can Check-In on Your Neighbors (8 practical, 1 crazy, 1 costly)
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is really practical. The following are ten ways that you can check in on your neighbors. Eight are practical, one is a little crazy, and the final is really costly.
1. You can go with your feet. Luke 10:33 says, “as he traveled, he came where the man was.”
The Priest and Levite passed by on the dangerous road. The Samaritan used his feet to close the distance gap.
Are there ways we distance ourselves from hurting neighbors? Do we skirt difficult people, the ones who make bad life choices, the tiring ones who drain us with their problems? Do we avoid the City because of its poverty and violence?
Too much of our Church experience is “come and see” what is happening in our building, our services and programs, and not enough of the “GO” that Jesus instructed us. We have come too much to believe that the good stuff is happening in the building when God is often on the move among our neighbors.
2. You can look with your eyes. Luke 10:33 continues that “he saw him.”
The Samaritan opened his eyes. There were no ethnic-linguistic markers to help him know who the man was. He was stripped of cultural clothing identifiers and was unconscious so he couldn’t discern his dialect. In that geography, the man could have been any number of ethnicities.
The Priest and Levite relied on excuses to pass by. Perhaps there was too much risk of becoming ceremonially unclean which could have been costly in terms of time and expense to become clean again. If the man was obviously not of Jewish ethnicity then perhaps the religious leaders felt no obligation to care for him.
What do you see with your eyes? A suffering human being or some kind of identity marker that relieves you of a sense of responsibility?
We should use our eyes to see fellow human beings. As we walk or drive through our communities we should have eyes wide open and look with observant eyes. We can see better by not relying on assumptions but by asking questions so we might see better.
3. You can open your heart. Luke 10:33 says that when he saw “he had compassion.”
The language literally means that his innards were stirred. The doorway to his heart was opened.
Compassion means to “suffer with another.” We can open our hearts by listening to people’s stories. Try it and see if your heart isn’t stirred.
Too often we build assumptions about people based on distance from them and by analysis of groups of people we see in the news.
Ask God to break your heart with the things that break His heart.
Watch how the Samaritan reverses the indifference and evil of the Levite, priest, and the robbers.
4. You can share resources. Luke 10:34 says, “bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.”
Jesus reverses the story in order of damage done to the man. This binding of wounds is what the Levite should have done.
On the road, you will meet wounded people who need your resources. The Samaritan used what he had on hand to provide care. You probably have things on hand that your neighbors could use.
We can donate clothes, shoes, hygienic supplies, bedding supplies, sleeping bags, offer a ride, or shop for groceries with or for a neighbor. These can be given to individuals or to organizations like LifePath and Bell Socialization.
There are places in York, PA where we can point people to resources for binding wounds, places like Katallasso, Family First Health, and numerous organizations that offer counseling services to people with emotional wounds.
5. You can offer safety Luke 10:34 says, “he put him on his donkey…and brought him to an inn.”
The man needed to get to safety so that he could heal. The Samaritan got him out of harm’s way. This is what the priest could and should have done for the man.
Vulnerable neighbors are often abused, scared, and stressed out. Do your vulnerable neighbors in your neighborhood have your phone number? We have elderly neighbors who have our number and use it to call on us as needed. We welcome them as though they were our own parents or grandparents.
Have you ever considered that welcoming your kid’s friends into your home might be a place of safety for them? Our doors are always revolving with a variety of kids we welcome and receive the way we would want our own kids received elsewhere.
My friend Robin Shearer of Friends & Neighbors of Pennsylvania does regular wellness checks on homeless people. Organizations that house the homeless often lose track of guests when they leave. They contact Robin to go find them to make sure they are safe. Her work can be literally life-saving.
The YWCA offers urgent safety for victims of abuse through programs such as ACCESS York and the Victims Assistance Center. The Children’s Aid Society offers immediate safety to kids through their crisis nursery for parents in need of immediate help.
6. You can be with someone. Luke 10:34 says, “he brought him to an in and took care of him.”
He spent real time being a comforting friend to ONE man. I have to confess that my own mind focuses on macro issues like global hunger or the US education system. Jesus told us a powerful story about one man caring for one neighbor. We should not minimize the impact of caring for the one person who matters to God.
There are far too many lonely people in our own neighborhoods. My heart breaks when I hear stories of EMTs or police officers doing wellness checks on elderly people only to find the proof they had died days ago.
The CDC says that 25% of elderly people are socially isolated. How easy would it be for us to invite them over for a meal?
Again, who has your phone number with permission to call or to ask if they can come by for dinner? I recently made sure to tell an elderly neighbor that we were available to help him whenever needed. Sometimes our neighbors take us up on the offer!
7. You can give your money. Luke 10:35 says, “he took out two denarii.”
The Samaritan undoes what the robbers did to the man by stealing his possessions. A denarius was a day laborer’s wage. Scholars believe this would have covered two weeks or more of care at the inn.
Are you generous with your money? I’m not talking about handouts to homeless people on the side of the road. Are you strategic and sacrificial in your investments in people and in organizations that care for the vulnerable? I can assure you as a nonprofit leader that regular monthly gifts to fund operations are so valuable in maintaining consistent services.
Last year, $128B was given to religious institutions in the US. One study suggested that if all Christians gave, an additional $165B would be added to that total.
8. You can be an advocate who gives hope. Luke 10:35 says he asked the innkeeper to “look after him.”
The Samaritan had one hand on the man and the other on the innkeeper. That is what an advocate does for the vulnerable. He was a voice for the voiceless man.
My sweet and gentle friend Grace once spent the day helping a young, poor, Black man in our church try to access local government services. I will never forget how exasperated and frustrated with how difficult it was to get him the help he needed. She was irate and took people to task for the callous neglect he was experiencing.
The world isn’t fair. If the Samaritan never returned to pay the bill the wounded man could have been imprisoned for the debt. The Samaritan gave him the hope of real advocacy and action.
If God has given you influence, social capital, or a reputation you should use it not for personal advancement but to help others.
Locally I have partnered with friends to advocate for better relationships between the police and our communities of color via our Chiefs & Clergy Partnership. Recently we started a new dialogue with local economic leaders and groups of people who are historically underrepresented and under-resourced.
Go be a voice for whatever it is that breaks your heart every day. You don’t need permission to get started.
Those were eight practical ideas for checking in on your neighbors. Now for a little bit of crazy.
9. You can multiply by being a missional entrepreneur. Luke 10:35 says that the man offered to “reimburse” the innkeeper.
The Samaritan deployed the profits from his vocation to offer mercy to a neighbor.
I’m going to be blunt: our collective strategy for solving social problems is horribly ineffective and unsustainable.
The chart to the right reveals a disturbing trend highlighted by Steven Goldberg in his book Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets. Of the $450B in annual philanthropy in the US in 2019, $378B of it went to 1% of the largest nonprofits. These large nonprofits have annual revenues in excess of $10M and many are much larger than that.
Small and midsize nonprofit organizations are vying for a very small slice of the pie. 1.42M small nonprofits are battling over an $18B slice of the pie. In addition, there are years when 100k new 501(c)(3) nonprofits are added to the list.
A similar picture emerges in York, PA.
The total value of local “philanthropy” is deceptive since approximately $4.4B of those dollars are likely revenues that nonprofit hospitals generate through medical services.
That would leave about $1B in dollars allocated to nonprofits in York. Keep in mind that there are nonprofits maintained by country clubs and other groups whose purpose is to serve their members not necessarily alleviate poverty.
There are about 1,200 organizations to compete for about $300M in annual funding. 1,127 of them are vying for $99M.
Those may seem like big numbers but they are not nearly sufficient to support that many nonprofits in York or across the US.
The resources appear to be scarce that are available to nonprofits. US GDP (economic value of US goods & services) annually totals over $20T dollars with about $3T going to the government and $1T allocated to nonprofits.
Most of these nonprofits, small and mid-size, operate in an unsustainable death spiral as they fight for a tiny slice of the resources available to nonprofits (pictured in red to the right).
Remember, only $18B goes to about 1.42M nonprofits!
Most nonprofit organizations are therefore in the same position as the impoverished people they serve. They don’t have the employee count, resources, available services, or facilities they really need to do their work. They end up chasing funds like a dog chasing its tail.
Large funding that could help is usually not available until they can show they are managing fine without the gift. Donors understandably look for competency and stability.
Sizable donations are often restricted to capital campaigns to build new facilities or to start new programs that nonprofits can’t currently afford. These funds disappear within a couple of years as donors expect the nonprofit to have replaced the initial gift.
Further, it is very common that large grants are not available to fund annual operating expenses. Unfortunately, annual operating expenses are what is needed to pay for employees, buildings, and supplies to actually do charitable work.
These realities are massively limiting for the leaders of these nonprofits. In years when budgets are missed, staff cuts have to be made. It is very difficult to maintain healthy employee culture when employees fear losing jobs or are asked to defer paychecks. Most leaders know a sizable loss in the budget could lead to the bank calling their loan.
Our local nonprofits are one of the very best ways we can check in on our neighbors. They provide vital, life-saving services but are deprived of the resources needed to really make a dent. The sub-title to Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets says it well: Why Philanthropy Doesn’t Advance Social Progress.
The reason is simple: the model is broken to the point that nonprofits end up being more concerned about their own survival when they exist to ensure the survival of our neighbors.
We can break that system.
Missional entrepreneurs
Is there a better strategy? Michael Porter of Harvard’s Business School suggests there is. You can watch him here. If we use our pie analogy, we can ask what slice of pie has more abundant resources.
What if nonprofit leaders could access that $20T slice of the corporate pie. I am not suggesting doing that through government taxation. That slice is already represented in the $3T government slice of the pie.
Before I discuss how missional entrepreneurs can access new revenues to help neighbors, consider the following:
2 billion people in the world are hungry. It would cost an estimated $7-265B per year to solve that problem. No one agrees on the cost due to the various methodologies available.
The cost to address US hunger is in the $25-83B ballpark.
York has 55,000 food-insecure people. How much would that cost to solve?
3 billion people on the planet do not have access to clean water or sanitation. That can be solved for about $150B per year.
Why are we waiting?
The revenues are right there to solve world hunger and clean water. Why on earth would we not check in on these neighbors by taking care of these basic human needs?
The costs are huge but the dollars are available. The US generates 24% of the entire globe’s GDP!
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time.”
We can drastically multiply our care for neighbors by becoming missional entrepreneurs.
Father Greg Boyle and the good people at Homeboy Industries tackled a gang problem and prison recidivism in LA by grabbing a piece of that large corporate pie to fund their services. They started businesses such as a bakery, embroidery/silkscreening, and others that now generate upwards of $20M per year. They offer “on-the-job training and support to 250-300 gang members and previously incarcerated men and women” and give them holistic services and education to transform their lives.
Homeboy Industries is literally changing the Jericho Road not just caring for wounded people.
Dr. King said, “On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
This kind of missional entrepreneurial activity is what inspired us at Logos Academy to recently launch LogosWorks to generate $3M of new revenues through social enterprise to reduce the impact of poverty on the lives of our students and their families.
There are structures available within the IRS tax codes that allow nonprofits to generate tax-exempt business revenues to provide charitable services. We just need nonprofit leaders to start to think outside the box and act like missional entrepreneurs.
Just imagine what kind of problems could be solved for vulnerable neighbors with an additional $1T of that total GDP pie. We should allow ourselves to dream a bit.
There is one final way the Good Samaritan shows you can check in on your neighbor.
One final costly idea.
10. You can offer your life. Luke 10:34 says “he brought him to an inn” and verse 35 says “when I return.”
We miss the fact that the Samaritan’s generosity could have cost him his life.
There is no archaeological proof of an inn near the road. A Samaritan would have to go to a Jewish town, likely Jericho, with a half-dead Jew on his animal. Kenneth Bailey tells us to picture a Native American strolling into Dodge City in the Wild West with a half-dead cowboy draped across a horse with arrows in his back. The prospect that the Native American would be murdered by an irrational mob would be really high.
The Samaritan was taking a massive risk to care for this man. He was literally putting his own life on the line by venturing into enemy territory.
Every human life matters from womb to tomb. We should run to our neighbors when we see their life at risk. This may even mean putting ourselves in harm’s way.
“Jimi” Olubunmi-Adewole (pictured with his parent to the right) is a 20-year-old young man who jumped into the Thames River after hearing the screams of a drowning young woman. He drowned in the process of saving a stranger he never met.
In 1982, Arland D. Williams was one of six survivors on Air Florida flight 90 when it crashed into the Potomac River. Witnesses watched as Arland passed the helicopter rescue rope off five times to other passengers. When the helicopter came back for Arland, the wreckage sunk and he drowned.
He was memorialized with the following: “So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do.”
The Samaritan, Jimi, and Arland D. Williams went to great lengths to check in on their neighbors. They handed over their lives to strangers. Jesus did the same when he gave his life on the cross for us as we lay dying on the Jericho Road.
No one usually goes looking for death, but they refuse to shy away from risk if their neighbor’s life is in danger.
Do this and live
People who possess eternal life are not afraid to risk what they can’t lose.
The question we should ask is not the teacher’s “who is my neighbor?” but the more expansive “to whom should I become a neighbor?” As Jesus said, “The fields are ripe for harvest.”
Jesus wants us to get busy living the eternal life available to us right now by checking in on our neighbors. He wants them to live too.
5/2/2021, Luke 10:25-37
