“Who Is My Neighbor?”
The Rev. Canon William Barnwell
Washington National Cathedral
Epiphany VIII
July 15, 2007, 11 am

Texts: Deuteronomy 30:9–14; Psalm 25:1–9; Luke 10:25–37

The lawyer who came up to Jesus seemed to say just the right thing: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.”

“Do this,” Jesus said, “and you will live”; that is, you will have life abundant, life full of meaning, mountaintop life even when you are in the valley.

The lawyer was well pleased with Jesus’s response, but wanting to justify himself, he asked, “So, who is my neighbor?” The lawyer was no doubt looking for a feel-good answer, expecting Jesus to say that the other lawyers were his neighbor, that those who worshipped with him in the temple were his neighbor, that those who practiced Torah were his neighbor.

Instead of answering the lawyer directly, Jesus told the man the story of the Samaritan, the outsider, the supposed enemy of the Jews. A man was left badly beaten up on the steep, desolate road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The priest and the Levite, another religious figure, passed him by.

But the Samaritan (today’s Palestinian) stops without hesitation, raises the man to his feet, puts him on his own horse, takes him to the innkeeper in Jericho and makes sure that the man will be given whatever long term healing is necessary. He defies custom by reaching out to his supposed enemy not just with band-aide help but with long-term healing.

Who is my neighbor? It is the Samaritan, Jesus says, the one who crosses over from the other side to bring healing…I am always intrigued by how Jesus tells stories, parables, to explain his most profound teaching. His way of teaching invites us to tell our own stories to explain his teaching.

Well, who is my neighbor? I’d like to speak to that question by telling two stories, one written up in the Atlantic Monthly a few years back and one I experienced many years ago in my early ministry in Conway, South Carolina. I chose the South Carolina story because this is the Sunday we celebrate the great people of that state, my home state. The special “neighbors” in both stories are teenage girls. First the story from the Atlantic Monthly.

SuAnne Big Crow was the best girls’ basketball player that the Ogallala Sioux (from the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota) ever produced. And girls’ basketball is big in that part of the country. In 1991 a year after her graduation from high school, SuAnne died tragically in an automobile accident, but she had already become something of a legend before that.

People remember her for her mastery of the basketball court of course, but it was during a particular game during her ninth grade year that SuAnne showed us all the way, the Good Samaritan way of claiming what is best in us and of giving others an opportunity to claim what is best in them. In the Atlantic Monthly issue of December 1999, Ian Frazier told what happened.

The Ogallala Basketball Team was away, far from the Indian Reservation, playing the team from the town of Lead [pronounced LEED]. As SuAnne and her teammates were preparing for the game in the locker room, they could hear the fans mocking them, this visiting team of American Indians. The fans were chanting fake Indian sounds, like “Woo, woo, woo, woo.” Like we used to make when we were children, imitating the Indians we had seen in the movies.

When the girls came out the court, the mock Indian sounds and other heckling became louder. “Where’s your welfare stamps?” “Who let you off the reservation?” some hollered. The Lead High School band joined in with fake Indian drumming and a fake Indian tune.

What would you do in a situation like that? When crowds of people are putting you down, belittling you because of your racial and ethnic identity. What do you do when others mean you harm? Do you declare open war and throw things (as I would do) and yell back? Or do you withdraw and refuse to play? SuAnne did neither.

She was the first of her teammates to come out on the basketball court. Ian Frazier tells the rest of the story this way:

She came running onto the court dribbling the basketball, with her teammates running behind. On the court the noise was deafening. [The mean cat-calls were deafening.] SuAnne went right down the middle and suddenly stopped when she got to center court. Her teammates were taken by surprise, and some bumped into each other as she stopped…SuAnne turned to [a teammate] and tossed her the ball. Then she stepped into the jump-ball circle at the center of the court facing the Lead fans. She unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do…the Lakota shawl dance. SuAnne knew all the traditional dances (she had competed in many powwows as a little girl), and the dance she chose is a young woman’s dance, graceful and modest and show-offy all at the same time. And then she began to sing in Lakota, swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl…The crowd went completely silent.

“All that stuff the Lead fans were yelling—it was like she reversed it somehow,” a teammate recalled. In the sudden quiet all they could hear was her Lakota song. Finally, SuAnne dropped her jacket, took the ball from her teammate, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The audience began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course [her team] went on to win the game.

The Old Testament prophet Micah once said poignantly: “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.” SuAnne insisted on justice. She would not let her brave and beautiful people be put down by the prejudice and mean-ness of others. That was completely unacceptable. But at the same time, she demonstrated her love of kindness, even to those who would be her enemies. She knew somehow, as we might put it, that Christ lives in those same people. And finally, she demonstrated not a weak but a strong humility, a courageous humility, before her God, our God!

SuAnne Big Crow took the very instrument of the fans’ prejudice, their crude mocking Indian calls and fake drumming, and as the teammate said, “reversed it,” changing it into something graceful and lovely and sublime—a Lakota dance and a Lakota song.

Who is my neighbor? SuAnne Big Crow is my neighbor, but so are all of those people in the stands who had been belittling her people but who were able to see, through SuAnne, the loveliness of those same people—they are my neighbor too.

Now let me take you all the way back to 1968 to Conway, South Carolina. The year before, the Supreme Court had outlawed the South Carolina plan to avoid integrating public schools. The next fall, Conway High School finally took in its first black students, something they had put off since the Supreme Court decision of 1954.

In 1968, I was a young priest with everything to learn at St. Paul’s Church in Conway, a small town fifteen miles inland from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Not so long before, the Klan had been strong in Conway. Integrationists were widely viewed as the enemy, as Communists even. The churches were completely segregated.

I had gotten to know Covel and Mary Green (I will call them), two highly respected African-American public school teachers in Conway. Their daughter Cheryl was one of the five students to integrate Conway High. Toward the end of the school year in 1968, some of us at St. Paul’s Church invited Cheryl to tell us what was going on for her and the other black students.

I tell some of Cheryl story now because her story was repeated over and over by young people of good will all over the South, and of course in the North as well. During those very turbulent days of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, the teenagers were our teachers.

It was the teenagers, not the Supreme Court, not the Congress—as important as their work was—it was the teenagers and the school children who taught us adults about what it meant to be a neighbor. Unfortunately, we need to learn their lesson as much now as we did then: The schools and the culture in places like Washington, D.C. seem almost as segregated now as then. In my work as canon missioner here the National Cathedral, I see this segregation up close most every day.

That evening at St. Paul’s Church, Cheryl told her story something like this: She did not want to go the white school. The morning before the first day of school, she cried and cried. “I want to be with my own friends,” she said. “Please, don’t make me go. Please, please.”

But then her daddy came over and put his arm around her. “Cheryl,” he said, “you’ve got to go, not only for your sake, but for the sake of your mother and father, and for the sake of your children that you will have some say. Separate schools are not equal schools, Cheryl. Go and try it for us.”

Cheryl finally agreed to go to the white school. The first day of class the teacher was nice, but none of the other teens said one word to her. She could see out of the corner of her eye that they were looking at her in a funny way. It was a relief to meet with some of her friends also new at this school when class was over.

She had been at school for three weeks before anyone spoke to her. “It sure is lonely there,” she told her parents. And then when someone did speak to her, he called her a bad name. She turned and ran from him and when she got to a place where she was by herself, she cried and cried and wanted to go back to the black school, where all her friends were. When she returned home that day, she told her parents about what happened, and they asked her to please keep trying…Another month went by. Still, no one had talked with her.

It was the custom of the young people after school to cross a white man’s yard in order to get to the school bus. Cheryl had been avoiding walking across his yard even since school started. But all of the other young people walked across the lawn, so one day she thought she’d just take a short cut. When the white man saw her, he yelled at her. “Get off my yard, you black…” I won’t say the rest.

This time Cheryl was really ready to quit. “They don’t want me there, and I don’t want to go there,” she said over and over. Finally her parents agreed. Once again her daddy came and put his arm around his daughter and said, “Okay Cheryl, you’ve tried, you’ve really tried. Finish the week, and we’ll see about getting you transferred back to your own school.”

That made Cheryl happier than she had been in a long time. She would only have to ride on the school bus four more times. But the next day on the school bus, a white girl Cindy made a point of sitting next to her. Tears were in her eyes. “Cheryl,” she said, “I’m real sorry that old man yelled at you for walking across his nasty old yard.”

Cheryl and Cindy began a long conversation that lasted all day at school and wasn’t over until they rode the bus back together that afternoon. They became and still are good friends. Cheryl decided to stay on at Conway High and when she talked to us at St. Paul’s, she was making all A’s and B’s and planning to attend the University of South Carolina.

…I have kept up with her parents, Covel and Mary. Several years ago I visited them and found out that after graduating from Carolina, Cheryl married a physician and that she and her husband are pillars of the Conway community, the white and black Conway community.

Who is my neighbor? It is the Good Samaritans who cross over to the other side to bring healing. It is the Cheryls, who have the courage to do what is best for their people, who are after all, our people. It is the Cindys, who have the courage to stand up in love for those put down. It is all those wonderful people in my home state of South Carolina and in every state who have learned the lesson of Cheryl and Cindy, of SuAnne Big Crow and the people in the grandstands that night.

Who is my neighbor? It is all of you gathered here today. You are my neighbor, our neighbor. Let us all be good neighbors and—when necessary—courageous neighbors to one another and to those who live on the other side.