Oh Who Are the People

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.14.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 10:25-37

It’s funny, how something can stick in your head forever.  Like a story.  Or a song.

Songs do it to me all the time.  By “forever,” I mean a little snippet of music can be around for decades, bopping around in your brain until you suddenly find yourself humming it for no reason other than that something out there triggered it.  Sometimes, you can’t turn it off, which for things like the entire second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh symphony is just fine.  Other times, it’s not so good.

Like, say, if you’re sitting there on the Fourth of July waiting for the fireworks, and in the back of your head is a stanza of that Katie Perry song from a couple of years back, repeating over and over and over again.   “Something Something FIIII-ER-Works, Blah blah blah blah FIIII-ER-Works.”   That’s pretty much all I can remember of that song, which doesn’t stop it, God help me.

But there are other earworms out there, older ones, and a couple of them came whistling out as I was reading through that classic and familiar passage in today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel.  I’ve known about the parable of the Good Samaritan since I was a little kid, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the music that my mind sings when I read it comes from my childhood.

I hear Mr. Rogers and his soft staccato Ned Flanders voice, offering up that invitation, “Won’t. You. Be. Myneighbor.”

But I mostly heard a song from Sesame Street, back when that place was a place of life and silliness and wonder, and less obviously run by a committee of experts on early childhood behavior.  “Who are the people in your neighborhood,” it went, “in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood.”  I remember it seeming like such a simple song, and such a simple question, but it seems it’s a question that we have a harder and harder time answering these days.

Knowing neighbors is increasingly something Americans don’t do well.  In our scurrying scattered busyness, we often just don’t know one another.  Those essential bonds of community seem, in many places, to be fundamentally diminished.  A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that forty three percent of American adults know most or all of their neighbors.  But most of us now don’t.  Of the fifty-seven percent who don’t, twenty-eight percent of Americans don’t know a single one of the people who live around them.

And in that growing absence, that mutual isolation, we’re just don’t know one another.  In a culture in which profit-driven media stoke our fears to draw our attention, and in which a majority of us live surrounded not by neighbors but by strangers, our responses to those around us are increasingly governed by fear.  We just don’t know those around us.  And if we do, our reactions are ruled by what we have been taught.

That’s not quite the question being asked by the man in conversation with Jesus this morning as we hear the parable of the Good Samaritan.  This story is one of those earworm Jesus stories that sticks around in in your brain once you’ve heard it, and if we were raised in and around the church, we likely heard it waaay back when we were children.  It’s one of those parts of Christian storytelling that’s become such a part of Western Culture that we all take “Good Samaritan” as almost one word.  A Good Samaritan is someone who stops and gets you out of that snow bank.  Or one who stops and sits with you until the ambulance arrives.  It’s just become shorthand for helper.

The man asking the question of Jesus wants more than just a quick lookup in the neighborhood directory.  

When he says, “Who is my neighbor,” he’s not clueless about the folks who come and go as shadows in the cars around him.  Back in first century Judah, social isolation wasn’t the issue for most human beings.  Everyone in first century Judah knew their place, knew where they were expected to be in the social hierarchy.  He’s asking another question, a harder one.

His question, which stirs Jesus to tell the story of the Good Samaritan, only occurs in Luke’s Gospel.  Each of of the three synoptic Gospels contains the opening portion, in which someone confronts Jesus with a question about what’s the most important thing we can be doing.   In Matthew 22 and Mark 12, a scribe or a lawyer rises.  This isn’t someone specializing in corporate law, or what we’d think of as a lawyer today.  It’s someone who studies and is an expert in the Torah.  This religious scholar asks Jesus about the most important commandment.  In each case, Jesus replies with some variant on what we heard in verse 27:  “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.”

In Luke’s version of the story, the question and answer session is flipped.  Though the scholar brings the first question, it is Jesus who asks the question about what is written in the law, and the lawyer who answers, and Jesus who answers him correctly.

But that’s not enough.  This is a debate, and in a debate, there’s always going to be reluctance on the part of the individual who’s just been schooled to actually back off and admit it.

Jesus has just successfully turned this man’s attempt to take him down into an affirmation, and so the religious scholar makes one additional effort.  “Love your neighbor as yourself,” sure.  Jesus has given him three words to parse out.  He could ask what Jesus means by love, but that one’s too big. But the neighbor question?  That has promise as a line of attack.

That’s not a trivial question.  In a culture where each and every individual had their place in the pecking order, answering that question wasn’t as easy as just listing off the names of those who lived right around you.

The now-familiar story Jesus spins out follows a traditional pattern.  There’s a man, traveling the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, a notoriously steep and winding road that was known as dangerous.  He’s set upon and left for dead by bandits, and then we get three passersby.  There’s a priest, then a Levite, then...finally...the incongruous Samaritan, who stops and provides not just help, but significant time and support.

The Samaritan, of course, was the one that every Judean had been trained to carefully hate their whole lives long.  They were the enemy, the ignorant and faithless folk to the North. They talked funny and didn’t worship at the temple in Jerusalem the way they should.  The dislike of Samaritans was a deeply ingrained bias, one that ran back to the time the Northern Kingdom of Israel...which became the area known as Samaria...separated from the Southern Kingdom of Judah.  That happened in the year 930 BCE, meaning it went back nearly a thousand years.

But as Jesus tells this story, it is that person, that complete stranger, that one who is thought of as an enemy, who becomes the one who acts in accordance with the requirement for eternal life. 

There are a hundred ways to play out this story, and echo it across our culture.   The one that seems most pointed this morning is our connectedness to one another, and our tendency to allow our fears to govern us.

From Deland, Florida, there came the story this week of a woman who had been sexually assaulted, who arrived at a doorstep seeking help.  The couple that owned the home were terrified that it might be a setup, and that they might be attacked if they opened the door.  They did call 911, but left the woman on the doorstep and kept the door firmly closed.

Their response was totally comprehensible, and local police acknowledged that they had acted in a way that made sense.  “Fear dictates our response” now, said a police spokesman.

Just as it did in that other newsmess from Florida, tragic media-circus case that’s been dominating the news this last week.  However you responded to the difficult verdict in the Zimmerman trial last night, there is no question that what happened was tragic, unnecessary, and driven by fear.  When the stranger who is different can only be seen through the eyes of fear and bias, tragedy is inescapable.

In this peculiar time, when we can instantly know about anything and everything and yet not even know those around us, what Jesus challenges us to consider is that to inherit the life he promised, we have to be able to step beyond our fear of the other, and our biases about the other, and to see ourselves as able to act in love with boldness.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN

Scorched Earth

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 06.30.2013

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 9: 51-62

When we get mad, well, we don’t always think ideally.

Anger is one of those emotions that we tend to struggle with.  It’s a natural response, a basic aspect of the way we’ve been created.  Faced with a threat, anger stirs us to action, as our body spools up to defend either ourselves or our loved ones.  Our bodies pour out hormones, which fill our bodies with adrenaline and noradrenaline, heightening our ability to either flee in terror or lob a flint-tipped spear at that oncoming sabre-toothed tiger.

In our brains, anger hormones pour out of our lizard brain, which opens up blood flow into our frontal lobe, which counterbalances the great gout of fury hormones, and makes us think more quickly and more clearly.  This helps us to avoid lobbing a flint-tipped spear at that troublesome customer or fleeing in terror from a difficult client.  Both might be tempting, but neither goes over over too well when we reach our annual review.

As someone whose blood is at least one quarter Scot, I’m quite aware of how anger can form and shape reactions to the world.  When stirred to anger, the Scots had this tendency to take off all of their clothes, paint themselves blue, and go running around screaming while brandishing large pointy objects.  And while Presbyterianism was a Scottish tradition, I’m reasonably sure that’s no longer acceptable behavior at congregational meetings, no matter how much you disapprove of the color of the paint in Speer Hall.

My clan, Clan MacDougall, was particularly challenged by anger, perhaps because we weren’t just Scottish.  We were a mix of Scots and Vikings, which isn’t exactly the most mellow genetic blend.

Reading through the histories of that part of my heritage is a bit like watching Game of Thrones, or it would be, if I ever watched Game of Thrones.  It’s a long history of slaughter and butchery, followed by battles, followed by manhunts and stabbings and intrigue.  Brothers turned against brothers, who then turned against uncles, who then vowed eternal vengeance about something done by a third cousin twice removed.

Thankfully, my family gatherings now are nothing at all like this.

But though it’s an integral part of our nature, and a reality whenever there’s disagreement, anger is something we struggle to cope with as human beings.  We can lash out when angry, throwing our fury at the world, only to discover that we’ve shattered relationships that were important to us.  Looking at the damage it can do to relationships, we can often suppress it, which is equally unhealthy.

Anger and the desire for vengeance is woven into the passage today from Luke’s Gospel, as Jesus and his disciples come smack up against a very deep and ancient hatred.

As Luke spins out his story of Jesus, we hear that Jesus and the disciples are on their way to Jerusalem.  It’s the goal of the entire Gospel travelogue in Luke, as Jesus moves from Galilee in the north down towards the center of all of the cultic and ritual life of the Jewish people: Jerusalem.

Problem is, that wasn’t what the people of Samaria believed.  Samaritans play an interesting role in the stories of Jesus, because they were both Jews and not Jews all at the same time.

Samaritans were denizens of what had been the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which split from Judah almost eight hundred years before Jesus arrived on the scene.  The center of the religious life of Samaritans was the city of Samaria, which was established by Jeroboam, the first of the Northern Kings.   The argument between the North and the South was over power, and over how and where to worship.  For Samaritans, Jerusalem wasn’t the Holy of Holies.  It was the place where folks who would oppress and subjugate them worshipped.  It was the place where those who rejected their faith worshipped.

Samaritans, in other words, were not particularly fond of Jerusalem.  And if Jesus was headed there, and declared that this city was the focus and end goal of his ministry, a Samaritan town would not have been particularly eager to put him up for the night.

When word of this rejection got back to the disciples, they were...well...they weren’t happy.  We hear from Luke that James and John were particularly cheesed off.  Having gotten word of their rejection, they asked Jesus about whether they should take out the town.

In ancient Semitic cultures, what that village had done to Jesus was without question a violation of some rather basic expectations.  Within that society, refusing to show welcome to a stranger was a serious slap in in the face.  It was deeply and profoundly disrespectful, and for James and John, it was too much.

“Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”  It’s an outraged response, and angry response, the kind of response you’d have if someone messed with a person you particularly cared about.  Whether or not James and John had either drones or an orbital battle station that would have allowed them to follow through with that threat is besides the point.  They were infuriated.  They were ready to fight.

 But the response they receive doesn’t encourage them in their anger..  In the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, we hear that Jesus “..turned and rebuked them.”  

What we do not hear, not unless we’re working with a decent study bible, is what that rebuke was.  In the ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke, most don’t contain the fullness of what Jesus said when he corrected his ready-to-go-nuclear disciples.  

But a minority report of the ancient versions of Luke do fill in those words for us: “You do not know what spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”

As the majority of the texts we have don’t say this, it doesn’t make it’s way in to our Bibles.  But it works with the rest of Luke, and it would make perfect sense here.

Offense had been given, offense that goes deep and challenges some of the most essential understandings of who they were as human beings.  They are angry, and their anger would have felt, to them, as a completely justified response.  Destroy!  Obliterate!

Jesus, of course, was no stranger to anger. None of the Gospels paint Jesus in soft pastel colors.  Jesus gets angry plenty.  He is angered by injustice, angered by those who misuse faith to abuse the powerless, angered by those who try to use God as an implement to further their own power.  Luke’s version of the Gospel includes Jesus pitching out woes to those who are rich and prosperous in chapter six, and driving the moneychangers out the temple in chapter 19.

But what the Gospel is about is reconciliation.  It’s about the healing of the rift between ourselves and our Creator, and between ourselves and our neighbors.  Jesus challenged James and John not because they were stirred to anger, but because their response would have made healing impossible.   It’s a little bit difficult to restore your relationship with a pile of ashes.

What this little passage teaches us about the Christian response to anger is twofold.

First, anger itself is not the problem.  Anger tells us something has gone badly wrong.  It can stir us challenge injustice or brokenness.  It gives us the energy, the passion, and the focus to deal with things that aren’t as they should be.

Being able to express anger constructively can be powerfully healing and transforming.

Second, we also need to be aware that the energies we find in our anger must be tempered and focused by love.  That they give heat to our actions is fine, so long as we do not take that heat and allow it to tear apart the very thing we want to make better.

Take interactions with one’s children, for example.  Do we ever get angry with them?  Sure.  Of course we do.  But as we express that anger, if we forget the love that underlies that relationship, we can easily do damage.

Don’t fear anger, but don’t call down the fire.  Build up and heal, don’t destroy.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.