The final frontier

This morning I'm reminded that everyone counts the same. Rich folk. Poor folk. Educated folk. Drop-outs. Everyone counts the same.

I was reading the newspaper, and I saw numberous stories about the state boys basketball tournament. The interesting thing to me as I pondered who is my neighbor from Scot McKnight's book 40 Days of the Jesus Creed,  is the way every game starts. Every game begins with the same score, 0-0, with both teams having the same opportunity to do well, with both teams counting the same.

Then as the game goes along, the teams separate themselves until one team counts more than the other.

This, I'm afraid, is the way we live. We all start with the same score, then as life continues, we separate ourselves by race, gender, culture, finances, religion and everything and anything else we can imagine. We are separaters, we humans.
But Jesus came to us to pronounce this as a wrong method to evaluate things. In the eyes of Jesus, everyone is equal. Jesus tells us to love our neighbor. Seems simple until Jesus tells us that our neighbor is whomever we come in contact with, even an enemy. In the eyes of Jesus, since everyone is our neighbor and he tells us to love our neighbor, it follows logically that we are to love...everyone. Even that jerk down the street.

But Jesus. There's that guy on the corner who smells and hasn't taken a bath in what appears to be a very, very long time. His hair is messed up and his clothes are ragged and he's carrying a sign that says he will work for food but clearly he isn't capable of doing much work.

Love him.

But Jesus. There's that person of Middle Eastern lineage. Comes for coffee, black, every day at Starbucks. Who comes for black coffee at Starbucks? Clearly he must be a Muslim. He might even be a threat, a terrorist or something. He's just so, so, well he's so different.

Love him.

But Jesus. My brother hasn't spoken to me in 15 years over the dumbest of things. My brother was so wrong about, well I can't even remember what it was. But it was something dumb. Always was. My brother was always doing and saying the dumbest things. To apologize to him would be, well, it would be for lack of a better word, dumb.

Love him.

But Jesus. I came into church and there was a, I can't describe him any other way, a stranger. And he was sitting in my pew in my seat in my pew and everyone was looking at him but he wasn't getting the message at all. I asked him to move, and I did it real gently, too. He looked at me like I was the stranger. He didn't move, just went back to staring at the bulletin like he didn't know what we were going to do. Well...he wasn't wearing a suit and tie and his hair was in real need of a cutting and he had the gall to look at me like I was the stranger. Me. My family helped build the church. My daddy's name is on the cornerstone. And we do the same thing in the service every week. It was like he had never been before. Why would we want people like that in our church?

Love him.
Love them.
Love them all.
That's what our Lord and Master said. That's what he says.

Picking and choosing whom we love is so very wrong. It's wrong on so many levels. If we are allowed to pick and choose, there's a great, great chance we would never choose someone of another color, or another culture or another denomination even. We would choose those who are like us. It's the way of humankind. We come together with like-minded, like-featured people.

Certainly this whole stranger business would be a complicator. We seek peace, not complications.

Thus loving all is a challenge.

I'm headed back to prison next week, back to a table filled with residents and one lay person and me. I'm back to listening and loving, as the Kairos motto goes.

Implicit in that instruction is to love those we don't know, those who didn't come up the way we did possibly, and those who did and wound up in prison all the same. The motto is wonderful, though, because it doesn't say "love those we have common ties with." Or "love those who are outgoing and believe like we do." Or "love those we connect with."

You go into prison with the one idea rolling around in your head. Love them all. Love those who are there to make fun of Christianity. Love those who came to eat cookies and nothing else. Love those who are searching for greater meaning in their lives and say they found it in Mormonism or when they became a Muslim. Love those who killed, stole, beat and even those who would do it all again tomorrow if they could.

Love them. All.

Simple message.

Hard to do.

It's the harder knot to tie in all of Christianity. Beyond morals. Beyond ethics. Out beyond our white picket fences of righteousness is the act of loving our neighbor with no hope of reward. It's like the final frontier of Star Trek.

Love.

It might take beaming up into a new mindset to do so.