Who Are Your Neighbors?
The scripture lesson of the Good Samaritan is only told in
the Gospel of Luke. According to our Pew Bible, The Gospel of
Luke has 2 main thoughts in its book. First, God’s love is for
everyone, and the second Jesus came into the world to be the
Savior of all people. In John 4:9 Jesus asks a Samaritan women
for a drink of water and she says, “how can you ask me for a drink
of water when Jews and Samaritans won’t have anything to do
with each other?” Once again Luke is the only Gospel who writes
about Zacchaeus, a very rich man in charge of collecting taxes.
According to the song, Zacchaeus was a wee little man who
climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus. Jesus saw him and said
“Zacchaeus, hurry down! I want to stay with you today.” Everyone
who saw this started grumbling, This man Zacchaeus is a sinner!
And Jesus is going home to eat with him. Jesus said to
Zacchaeus, “Today you and your family have been saved. The
Son of Man came to look for and to save people who are lost.
Time after time Jesus used stories about people who are
unclean, despised and different from “US” to make a point of who
we should love. There are so many conflicts in our world: The
Russia and Ukraine, Palestine and Israel, Iran and Syria, and the
list continues to grow. We don’t have to look far to find people we
disagree with. Even in our own village we see influences of the
Chinese and Hasidics infiltrating our once pristine community. Do
we welcome them or do we move to the other side of the street?
This year the Middletown Kiwanis Club sponsored a Key
Club at Northern Campus, formed by the Chinese at the old
Psych Center. The students have helped us at our Pancake
Breakfast, have had a fundraiser and challenged the Middletown
Police Department and their students dressed as Sumo wrestlers
to a basketball game and raised $400 for St Jude and they
helped us with the Middletown City wide clean up day. The
students want to be more involved in our community. Who are
our neighbors?
Today is Father’s Day and I want to welcome all the fathers,
grandfathers and all those who have filled in as a father figure to
those who needed help from time to time. I am going to use this
day to tell you a little bit about my family and my father. My father
and mother were Willem and Aaltje Busser, married on January
23, 1942. My sister, Eibertje(Ellie) was born in 1945 and I
followed in 1947, both of us were born in my Grandmother’s
house in the Netherlands. My grandfather had died when my
mother was 16 and my grandmother was a widow who always
wore a long black dress. My father was the oldest of 13 children
and worked on his father’s farm as a youngster and then studied
to become a mason. After World War II ended my mother , father,
Ellie and I immigrated to the United States in 1950. Back then
you had to have a sponsor and a promise of a job to be able to
come here. My father had a friends Hank and Jennie Duits, who
worked for a farmer Isfried Katzenstein who owned 2 farms. One
was located where Dogwood Acres now stands and the second
one was on Mount Hope Road across the road from where
Harrison Kessler now lives just past the reservoir going to
Middletown, My father couldn’t find a job as a mason but would
be sponsored as a farmer living in the 2 family house and working
on the farm along with Hank and his family. Katzenstein realized
that my father was a mason and asked him to build a large
building for his farm equipment. The house and barn has long
since been taken down but the concrete building still stands. We
started attending OMHPC in 1951 with Rev. Small as its minister.
Ellie and I often wondered how my mother and father could learn
English and enough history to pass the citizenship tests to
become citizens. We figured it out when Ellie began school my
mother and father would practice vocabulary words for our
spelling tests. In 1956, my mother and father became citizens
and we returned to Holland for our first visit with our new
passports.
Years past and my father was now working at the Training
school for boys in Otisville at night as a fireman and then coming
home and working as a mason for George Miller who was busy
building houses in Scotchtown in the town of Wallkill. He built all
the chiminies for all those houses.
In the 1960’s, every Sunday night my family would watch a
documentary show called The Twentieth Century sponsored by
Prudential Insurance and they would show old newsreels with
Walter Cronkite narrating the program. They narrated many films
about World War II. One program was about the Netherlands and
how it was occupied by the Germans during the entire war. It
spoke about the diary of Ann Frank. She was a Jew hiding in an
attic with her family, found by the Germans and died in a
concentration Camp in Germany. But the 6 million people who
died in the concentration camps were not only Jews but also
people like Corrie Ten Boem whose family hid those Jews and
were caught by the Nazis. Corrie wrote the book “The Hiding
Place” and lost both her sister and father in the concentration
camp. My sister, Ellie, asked my mother and father if they knew
about this. My father said everybody was hiding Jews in their
attics but no one would tell others because you weren’t sure who
you could trust. My father said one time they had a family in the
attic and a German soldier came up to him in the backyard and
told him he had lost 4 brothers in the war and was trying to get
home to his mother in Germany. He asked my father for help. My
father already had Jews in the attic so he hid the soldier in the
chicken coop in the backyard until he could move him at night.
My father and mother never spoke about the war and that was the
first time they ever talked about the underground and how they
tried moving people to safer locations. He never asked, Who is
my neighbor?
My father died on January 23, 1987, on his 45 th wedding
anniversary. In November 1999, my cousins were organizing a
Busser family reunion and we ,of course were invited to attend. I
thought it would be nice if we paid for my mother to go but my
sister said she was going with her whole family for the weekend.
OK, I said we’ll go too. On that trip, my mother took all of us to
see lots of places, one was the school where my father went to
become a mason. There still stood an example of the perfect
steps my father had built. Fifteen years later after my father died,
my sister died on January 23, 2002. She had a giablastoma brain
tumor.
Fast forward, on October 6, 2006, my mother died. Chuck and I
were leaving the hospital and in walks Mary and George Miller. I
tell George that my mother had just passed and he asks me did
your father ever tell you how we met. No, I said. In the early
1950’s George was a teenager working on the farm baling hay in
the summer. They were putting the hay bales in the loft and your
father saved my arm and saved my life. George’s shirt was
caught in the Hay bale loader conveyor belt and my father
managed to turn off the machine and pull George’s arm out.
George worked on the farm and must have told his father, George
who hired my father as his mason when he formed Miller Building
Supply and constructing all the houses in Scotchtown. My father
never said a word about this. I was so grateful to George for
stopping to tell me his story. Fathers, if you have stories to tell to
your children, tell them now. I waited half a lifetime to know what
an incredible father I had.
Teach your children by word or example. Talk to them all the time-
whether you’re at home or walking along the road or going to bed
at night or getting up in the morning. If you had a favorite coach,
uncle, father figure take a moment and write them a note and
thank them for being a great influence on your life. Not a day
goes by that I wish I had one more day with my father and he
could have shared his stories with his grandchildren. In Romans
8:15 God’s Spirit doesn’t make us slaves who are afraid of him.
Instead, we become his children and call him our Father.
Luke 6:27-31 Jesus said, Love your enemies, and be good to
everyone who hates you. 28Ask God to bless anyone who curses
you and pray for everyone who is cruel to you. 29 If someone
slaps you on one cheek, don’t stop that person from slapping you
on the other cheek. If someone wants to take your coat, don’t try
to keep back your shirt, 30 Give to everyone who asks and don’t
ask people to return what they have taken from you. 31 Treat
others just as you want to be treated.
Lastly the greatest commandment is written in the Gospels of
Matthew, Mark and Luke- “You have only one Lord and God. You
must love him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. The
second most important commandment says: Love others as much
as you love yourself,’
Jesus said, ‘Go and do the same’
Amen
By Gerda Krogslund