I have bad luck with neighbors. The first apartment I ever rented was a basement in Bloomington, Indiana. I found out on the day I moved in that the 1^st and 2^nd floors were occupied by a brass ensemble from the school of music, who loved a good late night jam session.

When I got married, Rachelle and I rented a place in Chicago where a couple across the street sat outside their building all day. At a designated time each evening, they would perform what I called “the parade” in which they would solemnly fold up their lawn chairs, take down the American flag they put up each morning, and proceed single-file back into their apartment. None of that made them bad neighbors exactly, but they also held their ears every time our squeaky car drove by and refused to speak to us even after Rachelle baked them chocolate chip cookies.

We left that neighborhood for another place on the third floor of a six-flat. The man who lived in the other apartment on our level – whose front door was not ten feet from our own – constantly had two televisions playing simultaneously and turned up to the highest possible volume. One was broadcasting sports. The other was playing pornography. And from time to time, in response to one or the other, we would hear him screaming, “Lebron James! Lebron James! Lebron James!”

Maybe because of these disastrous relationships, or maybe by my nature, I am not much of a neighbor myself. I am not really present in my neighborhood, seldom share more than a smile or wave with those who live around me. I have no dog to force me to walk around the block; I avoid yardwork at all costs; and I have plenty of community right here, so when I read the scriptural call to love my neighbors, the people whose homes are near mine are the last to come to mind.

And I blame Jesus. In the first scripture passage, from the Sermon on the Mount, when he explains what it means to love one’s neighbor, he says it’s like God, who sends rain on the just and on the unjust. He tells his disciples that, just like God loves everyone, so they should be complete in showing love to all. So, loving my neighbor isn’t really about loving my neighbors, it’s about loving everyone.

And, of course, loving everyone is easy. Just take a second to try it. Don’t you just love everyone? I mean, there are probably one or two people you’re not crazy about or some general categories of people who you don’t know who do bad things. But you can also probably see how, to someone else in some way, they are loveable. They are human beings, after all, so sure, you love them. You wouldn’t kill them or anything. You love everyone. Don’t you? I, at least, love everyone, in just about this way.

When I read passages like this one, I kind of check a box in my mind. Love all 7 billion people in the world…uh, check! What else could I do? I will never meet most of them, so I kind of scrunch up my forehead, and put a serious look on my face and think, yeah, sure, I love them. And I never have to consider those who live on my street, or share my fence-line, or let their dogs defecate in my yard.

But recently I read a book that forced me to rethink my understanding of the command to love my neighbors. It’s called, The Art of Neighboring, and it contains an exercise that the authors jokingly refer to as “The Chart of Shame.” That chart looks like this: picture your house in the center square of a tic-tac-toe board. The 8 other squares are the homes that surround your own. Thinking about them, the book asks three questions:

For how many of those houses can you name the people who live there? For how many can you give some basic personal information, things you can’t know just from observing from your driveway? And finally, for how many of those households do you know something more in-depth about their lives – something about their dreams, their values, their beliefs? Take just a moment now if you haven’t already and consider your own tic-tac-toe box.

I fully expect you did better than I did. I could only name about 3 and a half of the 8. But even if you were 8 for 8 on names, chances are good that once you got to question 3 you knew a lot less. The authors themselves did about as poorly as I did, and that realization led them to ask another question: If the command to love our neighbors does mean we are asked to love everyone, doesn’t it at least also mean that we are asked to love our actual neighbors – those real, specific individuals who live alongside us? And unfortunately, I think Jesus might agree.

I think these specific neighbors might be what Jesus is pointing to in the second story from Luke. If you don’t recognize it, this is the beginning of the story of the Good Samaritan. And this lawyer could be like me. He loves everyone. He’s checked it off. In fact, the story says that he asks the question, “Who is my neighbor?” in order to justify himself. He feels good about the way he loves his neighbors, and he’s looking for Jesus to confirm those good feelings.

But Jesus gives a response that upsets his expectations. Jesus doesn’t say, “love everyone,” or, “be generally nice,” or, “have a friendly disposition.” In response to the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells a story about one person, a specific individual, in specific circumstances, who acts in a specific way. And that answer complicates things. It suggests that, yes, the command to love my neighbor may mean I’m asked to love everyone, but it also means I’m asked to love each one.

It’s the difference between loving neighbors in general and loving a specific neighbor. And that’s a big difference. Neighbors in general don’t play the trombone or root for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Neighbors in general don’t give you dirty looks when you drive by, or refuse your chocolate chip cookies. They don’t call in the middle of the night, or show up at your door asking to borrow something from you. Neighbors in general don’t ask anything from you. And that makes them easy to love.

But neighbors in specific- neighbors in specific have trees that could fall on your house. They have dogs that keep you awake. Neighbors in specific have houses and yards that affect your property values, and your house and yard affect theirs. They want you to roll your garbage can back from the street in a reasonable timeframe. They expect you to let them know if you’re having a party. They want you to keep an eye on their place when they’re gone and store a key in case they lock themselves out.

Neighbors in specific – and not just those with houses around our own, but our coworkers and classmates, the people from whom we buy our groceries and the ones who sit next to us in church – their lives and well-beings are bound up with our own. Their actions affect us and ours affect them. They cause conflict with their weird eccentricities and failures and by pointing out ours. Those are the neighbors we are asked to love. Not just everyone but each one. And each one needs to be loved in a specific way.

If loving everyone is easy, loving each one feels impossible. In a world of 7 billion, how do I even begin? I think the answer lies in the words of the poet Anne Michaels that I used for the call to worship today. In her novel, Fugitive Pieces, she writes, “Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.” If I can learn to love even one specific person well – as well as I am able – maybe I can learn to love another…and another, and another. Maybe I learn to truly love everyone by loving each one, and I learn to love each one by learning to love just one, just one specific person. James Joyce famously said, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

When I think of learning to love one person, of getting to the heart of one neighbor, I think of the theologian, Henri Nouwen, who left his post at Yale Divinity School to live in the L’Arche community in Toronto. L’Arche is a federation of communities in which those with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their assistants live together in a relationship of mutuality. Nouwen’s first job at L’Arche was to care for a man named Adam with severe mental and physical disabilities. Adam couldn’t speak or get around on his own. Nouwen was in charge of bathing him, brushing his teeth, combing his hair and dressing him. The only task that Adam could do was to move a spoon to his mouth to feed himself. Nouwen wasn’t even certain that Adam recognized him from day to day, but he continued to care for Adam for the rest of the young man’s life.

For many of the people who met Adam during his life, loving him specifically seemed too demanding. He was too different, too needy. But taking the time to really know him and care for him, Nouwen learned to love Adam. Not in a pitying or one-sided way, but he came to appreciate the gifts that Adam brought to their relationship: his presence, his peacefulness, his gentleness, an inner light that radiated out to those around him.

And through his love for Adam, Nouwen also learned to recognize his own disabilities: “[his] emotional neediness…impatience and restlessness…[his] many anxieties and fears.” The things that made it hard for others to love him specifically. As he writes, “I, too, was constantly saying, ‘Help me, help me.’” A friend is fond of saying that beneath every interaction we have, all day, every day, is the question, “Do you love me?” I think she’s right. I believe that as we learn to love even one specific person, our ears become tuned to the voice in each person and within ourselves asking, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” As I drive my squeaky car down the street…as you come to complain about my trash can…as I stand alone at the church coffee hour…as I sit on the side of the road…do you love me? As we learn to love just one, we hear the need for love in each one.

There’s another half of the lawyer’s answer to Jesus of course. The two great commandments are to love neighbor and also to love God. That’s another of those boxes I check sometimes. “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.” OK. Sure. I love God. Whatever that means. It’s easy to love God in general. It’s God. God’s silent and invisible most of the time. So, sure. I love you. But what does it take to really love God.

For Nouwen, again the answer was loving Adam. He wrote of Adam and of Jesus, “The divine became manifest in the human so that all things human could become manifestations of the divine.” Loving God and loving neighbor are one. God calls us to love everyone by loving each one, but we can only progress in that challenging work by loving just one. And within that individual, that neighbor, that utterly specific person, we discover The One, the one whose name is love. May that one tune our ears to the voices of our neighbors, asking, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” And may our lives be the answer they need.