Prairie Musings

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29) The parable of the Good Samaritan…possibly the best known story Jesus told. A man asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” and Jesus asks him what the Bible says. He responds, correctly, with what Jesus has given as the summary of all the law: love God, love your neighbor. But this is too open-ended for the questioner; he wants a boundary, a border…a fence…so that he can justify himself, secure in the knowledge that he only has to love as a neighbor those on the inside. Anyone outside the boundary, he’s off the hook—no need to love them, they’re not his neighbor. Jesus, as he always does when someone wants to know the limits of God’s love, or the limits of our responsibility, replies with a story. When we want something cut and dried, a contract we can use to prove we’ve done enough, Jesus always responds with a story. Stories have great power to indict and inspire u...

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [all people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...” The Declaration of Independence…you’ve all seen a reproduction of it, right? Remember the giant signature at the bottom, John Hancock’s? Legend has it that he wrote it bigger than anyone else’s so that King George could see it without his reading glasses. Paul does the same thing in today’s reading; he says: “See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!” Paul wants his readers to know that what he’s saying was so important that he isn’t doing the typical practice of having someone transcribe his words on paper for him—he’s writing it down himself, and in really big letters! This reading is from the end of Paul’s ...