there's no-one you're allowed not to love
Thumbnail Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay, used under https://pixabay.com/service/license-summary/
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
July 13, 2025—Proper 10C
Deuteronomy 30:9-14; Luke 10:25-37
“You were given a gift, and trusted. Love it all, love it all, love it always.”
In the back of the bulletin you can find the rest of this poem by Jay Hulme, which he calls, “Christianity for Heathens.” Which is to say, as I understand, the boiled down bones of what Christianity asks of us. Not the stories of incarnation, of death and resurrection, of a more complex sense of what salvation looks like in this world and the next. Just the basic idea of what it tells us to do (as, honestly, so many of the world’s religions tell us to do): to love one another.
Over and over: love everyone, love yourself, love the world, love justice and kindness and truth. And in this, to love God. You were given this gift. And trusted.
This morning, and every morning, it seems worth asking: Have we lived up to that trust? Are any of us trustworthy with this gift we have been given?
Some of us are, some of the time. But many of us are not, or not always. Many of us find our place with the lawyer in today’s gospel, who definitely WANTS to do the right thing, but doesn’t want that to go too far. So he asks, hoping for some reprieve: Okay, I have to love my neighbor. But who do you mean by that? Who is my neighbor?
Who, that is, do I actually need to love? There must be some limit to that, right? You can’t possibly mean everyone!
Sadly, for him (and in many ways, for us), the story Jesus tells in response makes it very clear that, in fact, there is NO-ONE God exempts you from loving. Which means, in gospel terms, that there is no one you are not called to serve. To pay attention to. Assess needs of. Take action on behalf of. Exert effort, spend money, and secure the future of.
Love them. Even the Samaritans, those foreigners, the people you fear and have no reason to feel assured that they mean you well. The ones whose ways are different, whose customs, religion (and politics!) seem foreign and despicable. They are your neighbor, and when you are in the ditch, they might well have something to offer you. Love them. Honor the ways in which they serve you.
Love them. Even when they are the ones in the ditch, the ones whose needs overwhelm you, and you’re maybe a bit suspicious how they got into this predicament, and honestly, you’re not really sure how you’re going to be able to help. But … they are your neighbor, and you surely have something to offer them. Serve them. Love them.
Phil Hooper, an Episcopal priest in Ohio, wrote this week that “Every single person you meet—of any faith, background, identity, or orientation—is a question mark placed before you. Do you see God now, in them? Do you see? Will you let yourself see?”[i] And in this, I heard him offering us another understanding of Trinity. God, neighbor, and self: united by the love which shows us the face of all of them, any time we look upon any one of them. The love we have for God, the love we have for neighbor, the love we have for self: each of them is tied up with the other. If one is there, it calls us to, strengthens us for, love for the other two. But if one is lacking, it drags at our ability to love the others. You cannot love neighbor well if you do not love yourself. You cannot love God, if you do not love your neighbor.
Hooper wrote those words in the context of speaking out on behalf of Imam Ayman Soliman, a faith leader and Children’s Hospital chaplain in Cincinnati, who was detained by ICE this past week. Imam Soliman was granted asylum in the U.S. after fleeing Egypt ten years ago, fearing persecution for his reporting during the revolts of the Arab Spring.
Like so many people who have been picked up by ICE, the reasons for his asylum being revoked are unclear. It seems possible that it’s connected to the lawsuit he brought against the government when they put him on a terrorist watchlist. It might be that he ended up on one of the various hazily-justified lists of “suspicious people” that are part of what is guiding current deportation efforts. We cannot be sure. We might someday find out that the justification for picking this man up was sound. But when we look at the whole situation, anyone who has ever suspected that they were pulled over by the police to fulfill some kind of ticket quota on a holiday weekend might well have concerns about the effects of the deportation quotas currently placed upon ICE. Especially when we combine that with the explosion of for-profit incarceration facilities across this nation.
There is a moral danger, when you make imprisoning people profitable.
Today, we hear Jesus calling to us, commanding us to look all these people in the eyes, and see them somehow as our neighbor. Commanding us to love them.
Love, of course, is not a simple nor a singular thing. There are many ways to love a person, and it definitely does not exclude the possibility of calling them to account for their action. But it does require us to stop, and to see them. To allow the reflection of God in us to recognize the reflection of God in them.
And we might well hate that. Might resent being asked to give up our wholesale rejection of them. Might not want to take up the challenge of seeing things from a different perspective, from THEIR perspective. Might not want to admit that we were not entirely correct in that conflict we had with that particular person. Might not be able to let go of the possibility that we were right to fear this group of people, that even one of them might hurt us, or someone we love.
Which is true. they might. But, we have to admit that we cannot actually eliminate danger, much as we might like to. The neighbor who is a stranger might hurt us, but we are in more danger from the neighbors who are closest to us. From family members. From home-grown terrorists. From violent people within our own cultural group.
We are afraid, because the world can be a dangerous place. But the story Jesus tells us today implores us not to demonize those of another culture, race or religion, in an effort to make ourselves FEEL safer.
“Every single person you meet—of any faith, background, identity, or orientation—is a question mark placed before you. Do you see God now, in them? … Will you let yourself see?”
Our reading from Deuteronomy today assures us that, "…this commandment … is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away… [in fact], the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe" (Deut 30:11, 14).
It’s right there. You don’t have to go looking for it, to try to live it out. Every day, you are given opportunities, presented with neighbors to love. And some of them will be easier to love than others. And some of the ways in which you are called to love them will be easier, and some will be harder (especially when that love has to leave the page and be made concrete). But still, every day, you are presented with the chance to recognize God in your neighbors … and in your response, to discover God within yourself.
May it be so. Amen.
[i] Phil Hooper, Facebook post 7/10/2025 https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10102244156883671&set=a.552025439691