Priority is a word that is used a lot today in popular culture. People like to joke about what one’s priorities should or should not be.
Today, however, I want to look at priorities as the evidence we leave behind of what is truly important to us.
We all make priorities. Indeed, they dictate our life. We set our alarm clocks and our wallets around the priorities that we consider important. When you go to college or buy a car, you are making financial or time priorities with your head. I want blank, therefore, I am going to do blank.
I think that maybe when you love someone, you make priorities with your heart. Those priorities might include; making family meals a valued habit, helping wade through hours of your child’s monotonous homework way over your head, traveling to visit gravely ill relatives even though your schedule is extremely tight, eating one more slice of the hideously over-dry meatloaf your mother makes you because she knows “how much it’s your favorite.” We also pay for our grandson’s back-to-school clothes, pay for and attend weekly piano and ballet lessons for your daughter, sew costumes for yet another Pilgrim Thanksgiving Pageant or Christmas program, and find the time to take your child to AAU basketball games every Saturday. I believe that these are all examples of the priorities we set because of the love we have for those close to us. We don’t seem to have problems making our families our priorities, the difficulty comes when we look further away from that close knit group into the broader population of “neighbors”.
In today’s scripture in Mathew, Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is in all of the law. The Lord replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Jesus continues, “This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Jesus then tells us, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
I think when we love God, we make Him a priority with our heart. We find time for prayer, we do things that would make Him happy. Maybe we serve the church in the choir, mow its lawn in the summer, make time for devotion or pray, maybe we make a financial pledge.
When we truly love our neighbors, we make them a priority. But who are our neighbors? In Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, He both answers the question of who is our neighbor and provides us an awesome example of loving our neighbor.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, on the day before his death, described the road to Jericho. He said:
I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about twelve hundred miles, or rather, twelve hundred feet above sea level and by the time you get down to Jericho fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about twenty-two feet below sea level . That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?"
However, King continues: “But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’"
Remember that Samaritans were hated by the Jews, to such a degree that (according to WikiPedia) the Lawyer's phrase "The one who had mercy on him" may indicate a reluctance to even use the name ‘ Samaritan’ in public.
The Good Samaritan, however, made caring for the injured man his personal priority. Note all the care and follow up he did for the stranger. It would have been easy to do as the priest and the Levite did. Perhaps no one would have thought any different of him. But the Samaritan was different. He knew his own priorities.
We have heard the Gospels of Luke and Matthew which were in our scripture. Now in Mark 12:30-31 Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” And He continues, “The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
In the non synoptic Gospel of John (13:34-35,) Jesus says,
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
All four Gospels clearly agree on the importance of loving your neighbor.
In Leviticus, the third book of the Old Testament, part of the Torah, we read in chapter 19, verse 18: “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.”
Again, Who is our neighbor? Is it the 50.3% of poor households in America that had days when they could not pay for their next meal? What about the starving today of famine in east Africa? According to the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, “Poverty kills 300,000 children every day.” The report states that poverty:
shortens, injures, and thwarts the lives of more than one billion people struggling to survive on less than one US Dollar a day. At present, 11 children under the age of five die of hunger-related causes every minute, and about 800 million people suffer from chronic or acute hunger. In our prosperous world, more than one billion people are denied the right to clean water and 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. Over 100 million children worldwide do not have access to education.
Mother Teresa is quoted as having said, “I want you to be concerned about your next-door neighbor.” Yet Again, Who is our neighbor? When speaking of the poor of Calcutta, Mother Teresa said that ‘each one of them is Jesus in disguise.’ Perhaps our God is providing us the opportunity to both Love our God AND our neighbor when we find time to make the poor our priority.
Thinking about the scripture this week, I have asked myself, ‘do I know my neighbor?’ Do I have the time right now for my neighbor? Is my neighbor a priority for me? Volunteers from Prosser United Methodist Church make it a priority to bag food at the food bank, they work at Jubilee Ministries, they leave early for church so that they can pick up and drive a friend to church who might otherwise be unable to make it to worship. These volunteers and the evidence they leave in the priorities they make are an example to me of truly loving your neighbor.
What priorities are your heart calling on you to make?
