Spring has come to an end in the year of our Lord 2015, albeit with a qualification. Here in SE Asia “spring” is summer the hottest time of the year. Here follows my “Spring” (summer) Mission Report. Over the next two weeks, five or six posting will complete this report. It includes capsules of some of my spring teaching lessons, my explorations with three other mission endeavors in Thailand, reports on my meetings with college/seminary leaders. Here follows the first installment of a volley of postings to occur over the next two weeks.

Excerpts from Spring Teaching Lessons: Even though  most of the colleges and seminaries that I serve bring their academic year to a close in March I have continued to work close with ICF (International Christian Fellowship) in Udon Thani, Thailand teaching lessons. ICF is a church and school that serve Thai Christians who want to worship and learn in an English speaking setting, Falang (foreigners) from Australia, Europe and America as well as Laos students who come to Thailand for 6 to 8 weeks at a time to study. ICF gains its funding from many sources including A G churches in the USA.  Here follows terse excerpts from several of these lessons.

The Second Question: In the parable of the Samaritan (which we call the Good Samaritan) we hear the lawyer, a scholar of the law, the Torah, attempting to save face by asking a second question. The lawyer had already asked Jesus one question and from this inquiry he came out looking a little suspect in the eyes of the people standing by. This can be deduced from the fact that he ended up answering his own question. This showed he already knew the answer to the question he had asked. Wanting to save face the lawyer ventured a second question. It goes something like this. “okay Jesus if you affirm that loving one’s neighbor as oneself is the gateway into life eternal who is my neighbor?” Without knowing it this question revealed the root of the lawyers spiritual – ethical disease. He had boundaries and limits to his neighborliness. The lawyer’s problem was sort of like the blinders the Amish put on their horses so that they cannot see anything except what is straight in front of them. He could not envision an application of the love your neighbor ethic beyond the horizons of his own kind. His family and kin, his Judean neighbors that lived in his sector, his Jewish people and the Jewish nation were the horizon of his love your neighbor as yourself ethic. In Jesus’ response to this second question he told the Samaritan story and literally burst the seams of the lawyers constricted ethical circumference.

After Jesus’ story neighbor ceased to be parochial. It referred to anybody in need. The horizon of the love ethic was released from the cramped little religious, ethnic, familial, national spaces and places it was habitually caught in. Jesus’ love your neighbor ethic cast a light on the future world, what it will look like and the way of life it will incarnate, namely a true brotherhood and sisterhood where all care for each other and where difference ceases to divide. At first glance Jesus shows up in this story as its teacher –  a storyteller calling us into a new kind of future. But reading this tale in light of the New Testament Gospel Jesus pedagogy is wrapped in a riddle. He shows up in the human drama clothed in the Samaritan’s garb and is discovered hoisting our half dead bodies onto his donkey and taking us to a place where our souls are safe with and in God.