Who Is My Neighbor?

One of the most segregated parts of our day in high school was lunchtime. In the school lunchroom:
- All the black kids sat together
- All the red necks sat together
- All the jocks sat together
- All the nerds sat together (my table!)
- All the preppies sat together
- All the cheerleaders sat together
When it came time to sit down and eat, all the birds of a feather flocked together.
It seems that for humanity, this flocking together is the norm.
As a fundraiser, this matters to us particularly because, we are called to invite people who eat at different tables to come together and participate in each other's lives.
Jesus saw this "flocking together" as a problem. He called it a "neighbor" problem. When we live our lives with people just like us, we are not being neighborly. That we should love our neighbor as ourselves was His message. He pointed out how our tendency to gravitate toward people like ourselves is problematic. He taught that we should: