Dear Substack Community,
This Sunday, I was invited back to First United Methodist Church in Corning, NY to preach for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. It was good — good to stand among people who are not content to keep their faith tucked away in nostalgia and soft-lit sanctuaries.
Because let’s be honest — there is a temptation, especially in this country, to gather in pews for the comfort of it. To pray polite prayers that cost us nothing. To pass by the wounded lying in the ditches at our feet while we whisper sweet words to a God we hope will not disturb our comfort.
James Baldwin once said, “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” And how true that is of so much of American Christianity: a million prayers offered up for the suffering — and so little real rescue. So much sentimental talk of neighbors — and so few of us willing to cross the road when it matters.
This Sunday I preached from that ancient question: “Who is my neighbor?”
It’s more than a moral riddle — it’s a call to revolutionary togetherness in an age of isolation.
I weave in Black feminist thought on neighborly care, Jacob J. Erickson’s wisdom on creaturely kinship, and the raw, necessary truth that empty prayers are not enough when people’s wounds need tending.
If we say we follow Jesus, then we must become the rescue — not just the pious bystander.
We must become the good news — not just recite it.
We must learn to cross the road, bind up wounds, and refuse the bullshit that keeps us polarized and transactional when what we need is each other, in radical, embodied, neighborly love.
I hope you’ll read, share, wrestle with it — and above all, let it disrupt your comfort a little. That’s how we start composting dead piety into living care.
In neighborly hope and holy unrest,
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza+
🌾 Sermon: “Becoming Neighborly: A Revolution of Togetherness”
Luke 10:25–37 | Colossians 1:1–14
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🕊️ Opening
Beloveds,
there is an ancient question that still echoes in the marrow of our collective bones:
“Who is my neighbor?”
A lawyer asked it of Jesus — not just to test him, but maybe, maybe to test himself, to locate the edges of obligation and the borders of belonging.
We’ve been asking it ever since:
Who do I have to care for?
How far does my circle stretch?
Where can I stop risking my comfort?
But Jesus — as he does — flips the question back:
not who is my neighbor?
but what does it mean to be neighborly?
What does it mean to live as a rescued people who become rescuers?
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🪶 Creaturely Kin
Jacob J. Erickson, the queer theologian of creaturely care, reminds us that we do not live isolated, severed, or disembodied from the world around us.
We are creaturely — porous, interdependent, knotted into the vines and rivers and bloodlines of the earth.
Neighborliness is not just about human charity — it’s about attuning ourselves to the trembling web of aliveness that holds us all.
It’s tending the wounds of the land and the wounds of our neighbor because, in the end, there is no neat line between the two.
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🖤 Black Feminist Care
And Black feminist thought has been telling us this for generations:
Care is not a luxury.
Audre Lorde told us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Black women have carried the theology of neighborly care in their bodies — braiding hair, cooking meals for someone else’s children when theirs are hungry too, holding each other when the empire presses its knee on their necks.
They know that neighborliness is not a Hallmark virtue — it is resistance, it is refusal, it is a living, breathing No to the systems that want us isolated and afraid.
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⚡ Baldwin’s Witness
James Baldwin said: “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
And yet — here we are, in 2025, more polarized than I’ve ever seen.
Our harvest rots while we hoard it.
Our business has become transaction, not relationship.
We walk past one another in our echo chambers — scrolling screens, gated neighborhoods, moral fences that keep out the messy need of our neighbor’s wounds.
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🔥 Harnessing Holy Anger
I am angry about this.
I am angry because the Samaritan didn’t ask for an assessment of worthiness — he saw the wound and drew near.
But we?
We measure the deserving and the undeserving.
We check the story, the politics, the paperwork, the ZIP code.
We have been socialized into transactions — You get my care if you think like me, vote like me, pray like me.
Bullshit.
Holy bullshit that needs composting.
I believe anger can be holy when it leads us to refuse the ways we’ve been patterned by empire.
Fred Moten calls it fugitivity — the underground practice of slipping the noose of empire’s definitions, being ungovernable in our togetherness.
To become neighborly is to become fugitive from the logics that say your pain is not my business.
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🌿 Transferring Ourselves into the Kingdom
Paul says, “You have been rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of his beloved Son.”
That transfer is not just a spiritual metaphor — it’s a re-patterning of how we live.
It means we refuse the shadows that tell us to pass by.
It means we cross the road.
It means we bind wounds.
It means we pay the innkeeper.
It means we take the risk of seeing ourselves in the ditch, too — half-dead and waiting for the mercy of another.
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✨ Becoming Neighborly
So, what does neighborliness look like when we are so polarized?
It looks like relational intimacy that outlives the algorithm.
It looks like staying at the table when you want to slam the door.
It looks like learning to tend each other’s wounds — creaturely, human, and more-than-human — because your wound is bound to mine.
It looks like refusing the transaction — I do this for you, so you owe me — and leaning into the mystery of grace: I do this for you because we belong to each other. Full stop.
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🌱 An Invitation: A Revolution of Togetherness
Beloveds,
“Who is my neighbor?”
It’s not just the one we like.
It’s not just the one who looks like us.
It is the wounded, the left-for-dead, the earth trembling under our neglect, the creature that needs tending, the story we’d rather scroll past.
What if we became a community of Samaritans — creaturely, neighborly, rescuers and rescued all at once?
What if our holy anger at polarization didn’t lead us to retreat but to gather — to harvest each other, to hold each other’s magnitude and bond?
What if togetherness is not just a tactic — but a revolution?
A revolt against the lie that we can be free alone.
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🕊️ Benediction
May you go from this place
resolute to cross the road,
to bind wounds,
to tend creaturely kin,
to refuse the bullshit that clouds our vision.
May we be each other’s harvest,
each other’s business,
each other’s beloved revolution.
Amen.
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