Acceptance & Kindness

Day 2, we looked at acceptance and kindness through Jesus's story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). When a lawyer asked how to be assured of a place in heaven, Jesus asks what the law says. "To love God and to love your neighbor." Then the lawyer asks, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus responds with the story of the man who is robbed and beat up on a roadside, passed by 2 religious people, and helped by a Samaritan. When Jesus then poses the question back to the lawyer, "Who was the neighbor?" The response was the one who helped. "Go and do likewise."

We talked about why the Jewish people who heard the story didn't like it. That the hero of the story is the enemy of the Jews. Jews and Samaritans did not interact, talk or touch. They were the people on the sidelines, the outskirts, the non-entities. In order to love our neighbor, those are the people we are to see as people, to help, to include--those who annoy us, those who are different from us. At camp I talked about acceptance of the people in your cabin who you were spending all week with, acceptance of change and difference. Kindness to those who pester or who we don't like.  We are all children of God and thus all worthy of both acceptance and kindness.

I find this lesson very important today when we have so much fear of "the other," when we don't see or recognize the humanity in so many in our society. Trying to remember that our neighbors, whom we are to love, may live next door, may look different from us, may believe different things, are still God's children. The Law says love your neighbor--Syrian, gay, black, homeless, refugee, transgendered,  poor...  Jesus says, "Go and do likewise."