LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR

Luke 10:25-37

The story of Brother Gibbs

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  This is the core teaching of Jesus which is emphasized in the gospel of Mark with the addition of: “There is no commandment greater than these.” And also, in Matthew it says: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ 

How are we collectively doing with this? Are we loving God with all we are and all we have? Do we love our neighbors sufficiently? Do we love ourselves as well as we might? Does our great Christian nation show love of its neighbors?

   While these are always deeply relevant questions to explore in our walk with Christ, today I want to tell a story of someone who has taught me a lot about loving my neighbor.

   When Jesus was asked by the lawyer who is our neighbor, Jesus answered him by telling him a story. So today I want to tell you a story. So please just sit back and relax for a bit as I share the story of Brother Dennis Gibbs. He is not here today as he is in Idaho, officiating his brother’s wedding. He will be here next week and will be preaching. But I have his permission to share his story but honestly, I don’t need it as it is all written in his beautiful moving book, “Oblivion: Grace in Exile with a Monk Behind Bars.” His book is a powerful testament to transformation and redemption, and I promise you – it is a real page turner.

   Dennis was born into a family riddled with alcoholism and subsequently a total lack of parenting. All the money his father made went to the local bar where his parents’ spent hours upon hours leaving their children waiting in the car. When Dennis was 13 his mother left the family to move in with a violent alcoholic. His dad married a cruel woman who abused and beat Dennis. Needing to escape this situation he moved to his mother’s house which was far worse. For these details you will have to read the book!

   Dennis had one stable person in his life, which was his grandmother Cleda. It seems that she didn’t take a very active role, but Dennis witnessed her faith and somehow her love of Jesus filtered through this chaos and into Dennis’s heart.

   Trying to find his way, Dennis married young, and they had a child, but Dennis was already too far into his own addictions to be able to make a real go of it.

   One day in his attempt to get a job he went to get the newspaper from his dad and his dad said to him, “What’s the point? You’ll never amount to anything anyway.” Those words would haunt Dennis for the next 25 years of his life as he spiraled into extreme alcoholism and drug addiction. It is shame that drives addiction, and Dennis had a giant dose of it.

   At one point Dennis managed to get sober and tried his hand at acting. He worked hard at learning the craft and entered a national competition. He beat out literally hundreds to win the whole thing! He was on a trajectory to have a real career.  He appeared on Days of Our Lives and did a bit of work in movies and then he took one hit of pot and fell harder than ever into oblivion.

   This time Dennis went way down. He lost everything.  At one point he lived in his car in North Hollywood until his car was taken by a dangerous drug dealer for a debt. After that, he lived on the street sleeping on cardboard behind dumpsters to be safe. He has harrowing stories of his time in county jail for petty theft.

   His bottom came the morning of New Years Eve in 1998. He woke up being beaten and realized that if nothing changed, nothing would change, and he would not survive.  He started walking, and walking until he found the A.A. meeting he remembered from years before.

   The wisdom of the program and fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous saved his life. Soon after, he started attending All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills where he felt a call to ordination. He answered God’s call to go back into the jails, the very location of his shame and horror, and Dennis of course, said yes.

   I was fortunate to meet this extraordinary man in 2008 when he gave a talk about his prison ministry at All Saints. We became fast friends, and he invited me to accompany him to the Los Angeles County jails. I never could have imagined in a million years that I would become a prison chaplain, but it has offered me the greatest gifts of my life. This is where I have found purpose and where I find Christ – just as he says in Matthew 25: ‘What you do for the least of these who are my family you do for me.”

   Deacon Dennis has opened the door for me and many others to a powerful way to love our neighbors. And for him it isn’t just the incarcerated but also the unhoused. Every day Dennis stops and engages men and women on the streets of our county asking them where they are from as he writes down their names so he can include them in our daily prayers. He knows the value of being seen and honored.  

   These last seventeen years walking with Dennis have quite honestly been filled with miracles. We have both become better people by walking with our marginalized neighbors. And we have both grown in our love of God through our daily prayer life in Community of Divine Love, the religious community we co-founded in 2010.

    I am immensely grateful that God put this man in my path. By walking with Brother Dennis in our life of prayer and service I have found the joy I always longed for.  Who could have imagined that this badass drug addict would become this upstanding human being living the greatest commandments with all his heart, mind, and soul.

   So, I tell you this real-life parable today because maybe just maybe it might inspire you to reimagine who your neighbors are and how you might love them. Maybe the man or woman who is sleeping on cardboard tonight, or on a bunk bed in jail, is the next monk or deacon in our beloved church family. We can all be a bit more compassionate about who is worthy of our time and attention and live as Brother Dennis does – with these words: “No matter who you are, where you are from, what you have done or had done to you, no one is beyond the grace and love of God.” Amen. 

 Sister Greta