And that leads us back three weeks to the beginning of this sermon series on “spiritual fitness.” A biblical regimen includes at least three exercises to whip ourselves into spiritual shape: upward exercise, inward exercise, and outward exercise. Because I know how you love alliteration and assonance in my sermons, I have called these three respectively pray, play, and pay. Something tells me you like the sound of the first two better.

To review, we have been using Jesus’ dialogue with the lawyer in Luke 10 as a workout guide. The lawyer wants to know how he can inherit eternal life, and Jesus asks him what he thinks. The man answers correctly, which I find painfully annoying, since it’s usually that way with me—I already know the answer most of the time to what is good for me. Doing it is the hard part, don’t you know?! Jesus says, Do this, and you will live. And he doesn’t just mean that we will live after we die. Eternal life starts in the here and now and extends to the there and then. It’s the quality of life as much as quantity, experience of life as much as endurance of it.

Living this way makes you better prepared for the surprise attacks of life that would otherwise undo you. My sister painted a beautiful picture this week in the wake of Katrina. It’s a house bending in the wind of the storm, but you can see that the foundation of the house looks like the roots of a tree that hold fast because they are sunk so deeply into the ground. The house is not destroyed. She superimposed words of Jesus: The wise man built his house upon a rock. The rains came, the floods rose, the wind blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it was founded upon a rock. And underneath it she wrote, Katrina took my home, but not my roots. Nice, huh? Sometimes I wonder who the real preacher in the family is!

So what is it the lawyer and we already know that we have to keep doing in order to live? How do we sink our roots deep enough or found our souls upon a rock strong enough to weather the weather of life?

The Shema of Israel, repeated by the lawyer in our text and endorsed by Jesus, provides the pattern. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. Premeditate, meditate, and mediate. Pray, play, and pay. Pray premeditatively that God be first in your life. Get yourself out of the way. Before you bring a list of errands you want God to run for you, and before you run the list of errands you believe God wants you to run, run to God yourself. Remember that the will of God for you is first the will of God for YOU. God wants you. Being and doing go together like lovers walking hand in hand. Relationship involves both, because love is always ready to do something for the beloved or do nothing but be with the beloved. Prayer puts God first in your heart, and it puts your heart in the right place first.

So the first exercise is upward—Pray. Open yourself to the living presence of God every day and in every way. There’s a reason you wake in the morning lying flat on your back with your eyes aiming upward. (You stomach sleepers and spooning lovers can find your own analogies.) Let the prone position of first light remind you that you live in and under and by the love of God. Make it your prayer that each day you will love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

The second exercise is inward—Play. Israel realized you cannot love God without loving your neighbor. But loving your neighbor can become a duty that drains the very life out of you if you are not continually refreshed by sabbath rest, reflection, and re-creation. Love your neighbor as yourself, the saying goes. Love comes from God to each of us, and it must flow out of us into others. If we fail to take care of ourselves spiritually, we will clog our spiritual arteries and have a “heart” attack eventually. The flow of love will slow to a trickle, and we will be no good to anyone. We will begin to resent the people we are supposed to love and serve instead of doing it out of the overflow of our very being.

A truly distressing sign of this recently has been the comments about the kind of people that were left behind in New Orleans. Here we were trying help and those people would not help themselves. They didn’t evacuate when they were told to. They acted, some of them, like animals: looting and shooting, raping and pillaging, disrespecting each other and those that tried to help. Much of that is simply true, even if profoundly tragic. But watch what happens when we meditate on that. We begin to lose our identification with them. They become THEM instead of US. We begin to lose our sympathy, and our charity wanes.

Let’s be clear about the poor: they are often infuriatingly hard to help. We must not romanticize the poor; but neither are we permitted as Christians to demonize them. We are joined together as children of God, regardless of our levels of income, ambition, or values. Meditating upon this truth will prepare us better to resist the temptation to run the other way when we see neighbors like these in distress. The fact is, what we hate in them is what we know lurks just below the surface in ourselves, even if we have done a better job of disciplining those devices and desires. We should be asking—now that the character of these neighbors has been revealed, now that the flooding has flushed them into our consciousness instead of keeping them neatly hidden away—what can we do to make all of our lives better instead of just our own lives?

But we will think these thoughts only if we get away from our 24/7, always-on lives to think and meditate upon how connected we are with others instead of separate, how alike rather than different.

Upward exercise, then, and inward. The third exercise is outward—Pay. Are you willing to pay some cost, make some sacrifice for others to show your love? Love your neighbor as if you yourself were your neighbor. This way of reading things makes it clearer. We don’t want for ourselves just tit-for-tat Golden Rule duty: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We want full-blown, no-holds-barred, love-your–neighbor-as-yourself mediating mercy. And this is what we should give to others.

There are signs we are getting this. The outpouring of neighbor love from our church members in nearly $100,000 of contributions and countless hours of volunteer labor demonstrates that we are getting it. We are willing to pay, to give money and manpower to make things right and make things better for our neighbors. I believe there is a connection between these efforts and the increased engagement of our membership in worship, Sunday school attendance, and service around here in the past year or two. We are practicing the faith and realizing that when you put God first and get yourself out of the way and into relationship with all kinds of people, remarkable things happen.

Now some of you are bothered that you have not been able to do more than you have. Good. You are supposed to be bothered in church. It’s the inward exercise! But most of you are over-committed in ways that have you unable to do what you want to do. I am hoping you see the path of progress. You need to pray more and play more in order to free yourself to pay more.

When the lawyer asked Jesus the question Who is my neighbor?, Jesus responded by telling the story of The Good Samaritan. A man suffers attack by thieves on his way down from Jerusalem. He is beaten, stripped, robbed, and left for dead. A priest and rabbi—no, sorry, that’s the start of a joke. A priest and a Levite on their way up to Jerusalem to serve God pass by the man and do nothing to help him. Which is to say, just because you go to church or have clergy credentials doesn’t mean you are any more spiritually fit unless you do your exercises as well. Anyway, along comes a Samaritan. He sees the man and stops. He can tell he is a Jew, which would make him an enemy, but this man knows what it is like to be invisible and vulnerable. He stops. He pities the man. He takes him to a shelter, opens his wallet as wide as his heart, and then even comes back to check to see that he is okay.

When we give of ourselves, we attach our hearts and loyalties to one another as well as transferring our stuff. Rick Reilly writes for Sports Illustrated. He was visiting LSU in Baton Rouge this week and said that everywhere he looked, he saw evacuees wearing LSU purple and gold. The school had opened its heart and given jerseys and T-shirts and other paraphernalia to clothe those in need. One purple-clad patient in the field house turned hospital said it this way: I never used to root for LSU much, but after this, I guess we’re all fans.

We’re all pulling together, in other words. That’s what happens when you love your neighbor as yourself. You realize the deep truth of love that we are all on the same team in this game called life.

One other thing: the Good Samaritan was no fly-by-night carer. I am really proud of the religious community right now. We are showing our faith in action. I was even proud of a Southern Baptist, mega-church pastor in Houston this week. (Pay attention—you don’t always hear me praise Southern Baptists or mega-churches.)  Ed Young, pastor of Second Baptist Church, convened a group of clergy from all religions to respond to the crisis of evacuees pouring into their town. He committed to raising a million dollars himself. And then he looked at his colleagues and said: All those sermons and passions you’ve generated, now’s the time to put up or shut up for every faith or religious community here. Are you willing to coordinate and cooperate with other people and other denominations? If you’re not, sit down. No one sat. And then, knowing how hard it is to help many people and how easy it is do hit-and-run mercy missions, he declared: We’re in this thing for the long haul.

We have to do that. God does that. The Good Samaritan did that. And it all boils down to love. Love goes the distance. Loving God and our neighbors as ourselves. Loving for good and for good.

Wilshire will consider a major commitment in the years ahead to the continent of Africa. The staggering crisis of Katrina raises our compassion at home, but it needs to extend abroad as well. The tragedy of Africa is reversible. But there are literally millions of orphans on that continent due to the plight of AIDS. Mike Douris of Buckner Benevolences was on a fact-finding trip with CBF people in Kenya, looking for ways to develop long-term partnerships in Africa to bring healing and hope. KidsHeart Africa will do just that, and you will hear more about that soon. While he was there, a ten-year old orphan boy came up to him and said, You are like Father Abraham. Mike asked him what he meant. The boy said, You need another son. Mike asked his name, and it turns out the boy is called Isaac. Go figure. And then the boy looked up at Mike and said, I love you. Mike had been there long enough to know that the boy was really saying, Will you love me?

And that is the question after all, isn’t it? Our neighbors in and from New Orleans, our neighbors in and from Mississippi, our neighbors in and from Africa—our neighbors in and from … God … everywhere want to know, Will you love me? Well, will you?