A Baptized Neighbor-Neglecting Device

I sent Bo a seven-page show proposal this week, which is roughly six and a half pages more than the bullet points he normally sends me the day before. It came out of a lecture I gave in my Luther Seminary class where I kept telling Bo stories as examples, and finally thought — I should just try this out on Bo instead of writing the essay. He printed it out this morning and the printer asked if he wanted all seven pages. Here’s the idea. The parable of the Good Samaritan answers “who is my neighbor?” by changing the category. The neighbor stops being the man in the ditch and becomes the one who stopped. Which means, in our late-modern moment, the question is not a category question at all. It’s a capacity question. Do you still have the subjectivity to be seized by another person? Or has the achieving subject — optimized, accelerated, scheduled, closed — lost the ability to have a neighbor at all? Bo warned me up front that he was going to be so honest people might think he’s a jerk. He was not a jerk. His house is gutted for air quality, his wife can’t live there, his church is doing fall kickoff, there’s a family crisis, and there’s a guy sleeping on the church steps he had to walk around to let his plumbers in. This one has the Princeton Good Samaritan experiment, a blank check from a man who turned his hearing aids off during my sermons, and a food pantry that had to be completely redesigned once they actually got to know their neighbors. Come sit with it.

Highlights from the conversation

Identity thinking, and the moon. Rosa’s concept: identity thinking is always already finished with everything. Tripp’s illustration — two friends on a mountain, one says “look at the moon, it’s beautiful,” and the other says it’s a rocky body 385,000 kilometers away, cratered, no life. Nothing false in the second response. Completely unrelated to what was happening. It makes the moon cold and silent and possessed. The priest and the Levite saw the man in the ditch exactly that way: hurt, liability, delay, risky profile, dangerous road, crossing to the other side. Everything settled. The Samaritan’s distance from the man stayed open long enough for him to be called.
The priest and the Levite weren’t hypocrites. They had calendars. Don in the chat noticed they were heading away from Jerusalem — religious duties done. So it’s not vocation-versus-neighbor. It’s schedule. Real obligations, a kid’s birthday, a visitation, two missed dinners in a row. Which is exactly Bo’s live problem: Safe Sanctuary requires background checks for anyone around kids, roughly 30% of the unhoused folks who use the air conditioning and free coffee can’t pass one, and school just started with four Girl Scout troops and a middle school drama team in the building. Who do you prioritize? Who do you marginalize? Bo’s line: who is my neighbor would be a really nice thing to have a clean rubric for. And one of Tripp’s students named the diagnosis — a baptized calendar of efficiency that is ultimately a neighbor-neglecting device.
From “should” subjects to “can” subjects. Han’s shift, and the sharpest analytical turn in the hour. Should-subjects ask about rules and prohibitions. Can-subjects ask can I fit it in, can I pursue this, can I optimize. Which sounds like freedom and is actually a more devastating and invisible coercion, because the compulsion comes from inside — Han calls it smart power, operating through seduction of possibility and positive reinforcement. So we’re not kept from the ditch by a rule. We’re kept from it by our own initiative and our own optimized day. And how could God object, since you’re being a good worker, a good parent, a good citizen? The priest and the Levite are simultaneously the perpetuators of that system and its victims. Which connects straight to The Burnout Society: burnout as psychic insolvency, the achieving subject permanently racing an idealized version of itself in a world of its own making, with no neighbor in it and no finish line.
The Princeton experiment. 1970, Advent, Princeton Theological Seminary. Darley and Batson tell students they’re studying religious education. Go prepare a short talk, walk to the next building, record it. Half get the Good Samaritan as their text; half get a passage on career fit for seminary graduates. On the route, in an alleyway, a shabbily dressed man slumped in a doorway coughs twice and groans as each student passes. Sixteen of forty stopped. Among those with time to spare: 63%. Among those told they were running late: 10%. Whether the student was about to preach the Good Samaritan made no significant difference. Neither did any measure of personal religiosity. Several students on their way to give the talk literally stepped over the man. And when asked afterward, the explanations weren’t callous — they were conflict and tunnel vision. They simply never processed the alleyway as a moment calling for a decision while they were inside it.
The blank check, and the second hero. The Samaritan’s second scandal isn’t being interrupted — it’s the open-ended liability. Two denarii, and whatever more you spend, I’ll repay when I come back. No cap, no terms, no exit clause, no receipt. And the innkeeper says yes. He takes on someone in pain, on the strength of a stranger’s promise. Bo’s honest counterpoint from running a benevolence fund: $50 gas cards and hotel rooms while people wait for a rehab bed burn through a thousand dollars fast, and he has to say this is not unlimited, what’s the plan? So he asked Tripp — have you ever actually seen an open-ended gift? Tripp’s one example: a man who turned his hearing aids off during Tripp’s sermons (“too much hippie commy whatnot”), whose wife and grandkids loved him, who came by after two or three years with a signed $20,000 check, blank memo line. Not for the church’s bills — the members have to fund those. Only for the neighbor. And when it clears, he’d drop off another one.
The pantry that had to be redesigned, and the bikes. Bo’s team opened the only pantry in town where people shop for their own groceries instead of getting a uniform box. Then they learned what you can’t know until you start: a third of their folks live in cars with no stove or microwave, a third don’t have teeth, and more than a third can’t read. So the store became a segmented horseshoe with six friendly shoppers who walk the aisles with people. Which is how they learned everyone’s name and story. The people who funded the original model are not thrilled — the phrase used was it requires too much capacity. Bo’s read after this conversation: it isn’t efficient, isn’t reproducible, and is exactly what caring for a neighbor in a ditch requires. Same with the bikes — a refugee family walking two-plus miles to pick up bikes so they can stop walking, arriving an hour late, which blows up the 11:00. People showing up on the wrong day because unemployment or heavy pain meds mean Wednesday and Thursday look the same. And almost nobody picks the bike Bo recommends, which is how you end up hearing the story.

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