We Have Not Loved Our Neighbors

by

Iowa Annual Conference | Nov. 27, 2024

My neighbors put up Christmas decorations outside last week. Their front door is outlined in lights. They hung a huge wreath on their fence. During the day it is bright with red berries and bows. At night it twinkles in the darkness with red and green and blue lights.

Yesterday we answered in kind and hung up a wreath above our garage door and placed three small Christmas trees on our stoop.

At night, while we are inside, our Christmas lights twinkle back at their Christmas lights.

I don’t know my neighbors. Beyond drive-by waves and a brief conversation I once had with the woman who lives in the house about the berm of landscaping her husband wanted in front of the house and her disappointment (more than disappointment, actually, more like frustration, maybe even disgust) that he didn’t pull the weeds on the berm, I have never really spoken to my neighbor or anyone who lives in the house.

But their Christmas lights send a festive hopeful glow into the darkness.

Our United Methodist Confession and Pardon includes these words: “We have not loved our neighbors.” In this post-election season of “us and them,” and in this pre-Advent season when we remember Mary and Joseph, driven from their homes by an empire-ordered census, I am wondering about the “us and them” of us.

In recent weeks the Holy Spirit has been nudging me, whispering “Do you know the ‘them’ and ‘they’ that are so often referred to in our conversations?” “Neighbor” conjures up images of borrowed cups of sugar and evening conversations in the driveway. Neighbors come when a tree falls across your driveway, or your dog dies and you are bereft, or you are stuck in traffic and your child is sitting on your front steps locked out of the house after the bus has dropped them off.  “Neighbor” implies an undeniable shared dependency in the day-to-day that so often morphs into a deeper sense of sharing. Lives lived side by side.

T.D. Jakes once preached (loudly and in a rich Southern accent), “How can I pray for you if I don’t know you?” And I would add how can you pray for me? Isn’t prayer and our mutual reliance on God transforming us from “us and them” to simply “we” together?

I love the house to house lights of Christmas. I ooh and ahh as I drive through my town. May they guide our way through the sort of thinking that results in divisive pronouns to the us of Christmas.

A multitude of Epiphany stars shine from our roof lines.

The Rev. Cindy Hickman is a retired clergy member of the Iowa Annual Conference. "Abiding in Hope" is a spiritual support series that was initiated by Iowa Conference clergy during the coronavirus epidemic starting in 2020.