Helping Your Neighbor is a good thing...

...it's just not exclusively a Christian thing. You might say that God created us (or, mechanistically, we're made that way) to help each other. You don't need to believe in God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit in order to help someone out. That much is pretty clear, I believe.

So, if you're a Christian, why do you help other people? Is it only because you're made like the rest of us? Or, does your faith in God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit make a difference in why you help people? You can see where I am going with this. If you're helping people, and your faith doesn't make a difference in that helping, why do you practice a faith? If you have a faith, but aren't helping people, how does your faith actually make you LESS human? That is, all humans seem to want to help, but your faith encourages you not to help? So, you're actually denying that portion of your createdness? That seems weird.

So, for this let us assume that we help people, or want to help people, and that we want our faith to make a difference in our "helping." Since everyone helps faith cannot serve as your reason TO help. In other words, it does nothing for your faith to say, "I help because I am a Christian." Clearly, if others without faith are helping, faith cannot be a motivator for helping.

You might say that "faith" in whatever or whomever is required to help. But if it is just faith or "believing in something a lot," then again, your specific Christian faith is irrelevant to your helping. You'd just need some kind of faith in that scenario, and it wouldn't have to be Christian. This, by the way, is the most popular understanding of faith these days. Faith might have a reason to exist, but whatever particularities your faith carries is a matter of taste and opinion.

So the way to ask the question this week after Easter is: does the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God, make any difference in whether you help people or not? Although most of us would wish to say to "Yes," to that question, it's almost impossible for us to know if it is or not. If people help without believing in those events, how can one who believes in those events say they impact their helping? As the great Schleiermacher pointed out long ago, you really can't.

If your Christian faith cannot determined why you help other, perhaps it can help guide HOW you help others? Probably not though because helping people is giving them what they need, and so how you help is often determined by the other. Of course, Christians have tried this road too, and this is why you see so many "meals for homeless" that include a Bible study or some kind of Christian teaching. A hungry person needs food, and no matter how you decorate that food delivery, you still gave them food, which was the point of helping.

So if your Christian faith has no bearing on WHY you help or HOW you help, perhaps it can influence Who, or When, or Where you help? These are questions your Christian faith can begin to make a difference in helping. Who you help? Well, that might depend on your faith. If like the prophets or Jesus you are going to help those God has a predilection for, the widow, the orphan, and the poor, you could say your faith a direct influence on your helping then. However, no matter who you help the person is a person in need, the kind of person you help is often the second question.So although answering the "who" question gets us closer to having our faith influence our helping, it doesn't get us all the way there. When and Where questions follow in the same way.

No matter where or when you help someone, they have a when and a where that determines your helping more so than your own Christian faith. So, we are left after all this with the rather unsettling understanding that our faith seems to have absolutely NO influence or bearing on our helping people. It seems like it should be a influence, but it really is not. So what is faith good for in terms of helping people, others?

For me, faith encourages me to persevere and to keep going until there is no more helping left to do. In other words, faith doesn't influence me to start helping, it allows me to keep helping. You may have heard Jesus of Nazareth once said, "the poor will always be with you." It seems like such a defeatist thing to say. But what he seems to be getting at is that there will always be a need and opportunity to help. But the question is whether you will have the energy to help all the time? Faith is the energy that influences your helping out when you no longer have the human desire or need to help.

From my experience this is why people tend to get  more "conservative" as they age. We no longer have the energy we once had to keep helping all the time, so we pick and choose our helping, and that's the definition of "conserve." But people of strong faith in a God for whom death and failure are not the worst things, they keep helping no matter how old they get. They way they help might change because of age, but they are still helping. In fact, in my experience, once people retire they can help even more, especially those convinced of the temporariness of suffering under the power of a gracious God.

So faith is not about why you help, or how or when or where or who, but rather faith encourages you to keep helping. To not succumb to the inhumane-ness (not being human) of not helping, but rather to keep helping even when the rest of your body, your mind, and your community tells you you don't have to do that anymore. The death and resurrection is nothing else if it is not a testament to God who wants to keep helping even though death wants to win. The resurrection is God sticking with us so we can continue to stick with others and help.

May your tables be full and your conversations be true.