Everything In Between || Stranger & Neighbor || The First Sunday in Lent
Sunday, March 9, 2025 || 11:00am
Rev. Dr. Donna Claycomb Sokol || Pastor
During this sacred season of Lent, you are invited to step beyond the black-and-white boundaries we are prone to create and instead look for God in the complexity of life’s polarities. Jesus’ ministry consistently challenged societal divisions as he called a stigmatized Samaritan a good neighbor, valued one lost sheep out of 100, and extended grace to a criminal on the cross. These “extreme” words and actions were meant to disrupt cultural, political, and religious divides, revealing the radical, all-inclusive love of God that still speaks to the divides we experience in our families, churches, and communities today. Join MVP as we explore supposed binaries like faith & works, rest & growth, grief & hope and find that they are not opposites, but invitations to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of God’s presence in our lives today; invitations to be encouraged to engage with the tension between the categories we often impose, and discover where God meets us in between, in the spaces where we might least expect.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan begins and ends with the question, “Who is my neighbor?” and the answer is, surprisingly, “the stranger.” The Samaritan, whose place of worship and customs are different from the scribe who questions Jesus, is both a stranger and a neighbor to the man who was beaten and left in a ditch. In our world, many of our physical neighbors are strangers to us, and many of our neighbors—those closest to us—feel like strangers in divisive political climates. If we align our intentions and actions, then maybe we need to reconsider who we label “stranger,” and ask ourselves if we have acted as good neighbors.