Ever wish
you had the power to blast a village to smithereens? One minute everything is peaceful and quiet,
the next, boom, There goes Athabasca, or whoops that was Smith, or kablam
Boyle, whomp so much for Colinton, and maybe if it’s been a particularly rough
day, what the heck, let’s do away with Edmonton altogether. Who needs them, right? Or maybe set our sights really high and boom!
Toronto is no more. Good riddance,
right? Who needs them?
There
certainly is biblical precedence for such things – Sodom and Gomorrah were
destroyed in fire, according to the Genesis story because their citizens were
angry at the thought of having foreigners in their midst. Elijah destroyed the messengers of a king he
didn’t like, and slaughtered the prophets of Baal when he won a prayer
showdown. So it wasn’t like Jesus and
his disciples didn’t know about holy smiting, dare I even say holy hand
grenades, but Jesus rebuked his disciples and hurried on.
There are
enough stories of Jesus encountering the Samaritans that ended more positively
that I wonder why this time had such a negative reaction. Remember the Woman at the Well? Some bible scholars think it was Jesus focusing on getting to Jerusalem, and it was this urgency that led to the
Samarians rejecting him. They too worshipped using the Torah, and the teachings of Moses were very important to
them. However, they disagreed vigorously
on where to worship. Jews worshipped at
Jerusalem, while Samaritans worshipped at Mount Gerizim, where Joshua was
reported to have crossed into the Promised Land with the followers of Moses
after their escape from Egypt. So it
could be that the Samaritans were open to Jesus teaching until he turned his
face to the Holy City. Then their gloves
came off.
And the
disciples, used to warmer welcomes or maybe feeling resentful and scared at
having to go ahead of him to a Samaritan village, lost their tempers. Were they afraid of the Samaritans? Were they frustrated that their preparations
were wasted? Were they mad that Jesus
spoiled it by talking about Jerusalem?
Were they feeling snubbed by not being treated with dignity worthy of
rabbinical disciples?
Whatever
they were feeling, they certainly weren’t feeling loving, joyful, peaceful,
patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle or self-controlled. And they certainly didn’t feel like loving
their neighbours. ‘If we hate them, God
must hate them too’. They were feeling
quite human!
Haven’t we
all been there? Had those moments of
thinking, ‘darn I wish I had something witty to say that would have put him or
her right in their place’, or ‘I’ll show them!
Don’t know how, but I will.” And
in a small town, it’s really tricky. As
I only half-jokingly said to Tim when we first drove up to Athabasca, ‘be nice
to everyone you meet, they might be related to someone at the grocery store who
is packing your eggs for you. Last thing
you want is to find your egg carton under a sack of flour because you were rude
to a waitress the night before.”
Small towns
are challenging when you are angry at someone.
If you passionately love the River Rats Festival, for example, but can’t
stand someone on the board, what do you do when their family works at
BuyLow? Often in towns, people don’t try
to work things out, they just quietly stop going to the club or the
committee. They might grumble behind
peoples’ backs to their friends but they won’t try to work things out. They drop out of the Bowling league or the
Golf tournament, and never say why. And
sometimes the resentment builds.
It’s a very
human reaction. Unfortunately, it can
have some terrible results. Toronto’s
Gay Pride celebration was marred when some people decided to attack others
because they felt they had the right to do so, wearing t-shirts with slogans
like “read the Bible, repent and be born again”. And in Hamilton too, there was a deliberate
intent to inflict harm during the Pride event.
How people can bring a baseball bat to a parade in the name of Christ
who taught us to love our neighbour, forgive our enemy, and pray for those who
hate us, is a mystery I am bewildered by.
But it happens.
There have
been surveys and studies done suggesting that the average high school student
is less empathetic than they were a few decades ago. That there is a sense among immigrants and
minorities that they are less safe in Canada and the USA than they once thought
they were. There are children and
infants living separated from their parents in appalling conditions in the
US.
One black pastor
wrote that if there was even the slightest whiff that he had approached someone
in a sexually inappropriate way, he would lose his job, yet the President of
the United States is on record as saying horrible sexist things, has court
cases pending against him and still has a high enough approval rating from his
voter base that he might get a second term in office.
It boggles
the mind. So many excuses are given as
to why we let such bad behaviour go. It’s
especially heartbreaking when it is done by Christians. Jesus wasn’t calling us to insult our neighbours, judge our neighbours or even attack them. Yet all too often we fall into an us vs them
attitude and have a ready excuse to blow our tempers, get angry, yell or sulk
or pout. These are not gifts of the
Spirit. They are not what we are being
called to.
We are called
to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus.
We are called to be open to the Spirit’s transforming power that builds
love, joy, peace and gentleness and generosity and kindness and self control in
our lives. I don’t know about you, but
I’m still working on it, and I humbly pray that it will grow in me and in each
of you as well. Athabasca, Boyle, Smith
and even Toronto need us now more than ever before.
