Out Our Way: Lest we forget - Mark 12:28-31

Out our way, folks tend to adopt a "live and let live" attitude. I know people get angry and riled up, but you don't see much "road rage" on rural roads like you do on city streets. Also there is a tendency to want to help. My son, Andrew, went off the road into a ditch while working at the Hays/Lodge Pole schools and within a short time a wonderful stranger in a pickup drove by, stopped, hooked up some chains and hauled him out. No questions asked, no hesitation - just what neighbors do.

There is a story told of a famous rabbi who was asked if he could recite the entire Law while standing on one leg. "Easily," he replied. " You shall love the Lord your God with all your being, and you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. The rest is all just commentary." I know another Rabbi who said the same thing and Whose word is literally "Gospel."

We joke about our good natured mentality - towns erect welcome signs stating "Home to 304 great people and 1 old sorehead" and even hold a town vote to "elect" the "sorehead" Having lived in many places before "coming home to a place I'd never been before," I have found this sense of neighborliness pretty common in most places. I found it on the Hi-Line ... on the Rez ... in the big towns ... and across the nation. I found neighborly folks in Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. Or at least I did. 

The "hate culture" that has become a major industry in the USA as the "Golden Rule" is replaced with the "Rule for Gold," presently dominating and controlling our culture. Millions are being made by those who manipulate the gullible into hating their neighbor, encouraging to divide rather than unite, to seek to wound rather than to heal, and fight evil by becoming even more evil. As the ancient Desert Fathers/Mothers of early Christianity discovered and warned, "The Devil attacks from both the left and the right."

I recall in seminary a German professor showed us pictures of pastors in their church robes wearing the Nazi armband in Church services. It was the culture of the time. Few dared to oppose it. But some, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor, did. He openly opposed Hitler and the Nazis and sought to create an "underground Church" and seminary. Branded a "traitor" by the Nazis, they ultimately executed him. He was "disloyal" to the dominant culture that controlled the media, academics and the ruling government. Seems the idea of loving your neighbor - even if he or she was a Jew, a homosexual, a minority, or mentally challenged (remember Down Syndrome and other such folk went to the gas chambers long before the Jews) - was "offensive" to the elitists because it challenged their agenda. Bonhoeffer put God and neighbor first and was condemned and eventually hanged for it.

My son slid off the road in a blizzard and into a ditch. He is white. A stranger came by and stopped and pulled him out. He was a Nakoda. But that day on a back road none of that mattered. It was not a white man and an Indian, it was two neighbors who met and behaved as neighbors ought to. And God was pleased.

Be blessed and be a blessing!

Brother John

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The Rev. John Bruington is the retired pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Havre. He now lives in Colorado, but continues to write "Out Our Way."