Commanding Fire on Samaritans

(Luke 9:51-62) – When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village.

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." To another he said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

"Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" No, he says. Just love your neighbor as yourself. That's works a little better.

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In my mind's eye I can still see the geography book we used in elementary school, though I don't recall what grade it was, maybe third. Each chapter was dedicated to a different place in the world. We were invited to see that place through the eyes of a child our age. There were lots of pictures and illustrations.

My favorite chapter was about an island atoll in the Pacific. We learned how an old volcano had formed the island; how its center had sunk to create a beautiful lagoon. We followed a little boy growing up on that island, shimmying up coconut trees to harvest the nuts, fishing with his dad in the lagoon and sea, helping his mother cook over a wood-fire oven. It seemed an idyllic life. Much more wonderful than my prosaic existence in small-town Mississippi. Sometimes I would imagine myself living there. What would life be like without television or phone, car or bicycle?

I also wondered about religion. Our geography books didn't say anything about religion, as far as I can recall. I guess that was a "Don't ask; Don't tell" subject for elementary textbooks in those days. But I had heard some of those Bible verses: "No one comes to the Father except through me." "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." My Baptist friends had already tried to save my questionable Episcopal soul, so I knew the Four Spiritual Laws.

I wondered about that little boy growing up on a beautiful island. What if nobody had reached him with the Gospel of Jesus? Or maybe they did, and it didn't take in his foreign land. They had their own culture, their own religion. Maybe his island had turned away the missionaries.

Would that little boy be condemned to hell? Forever? He was a boy like me, so I knew he wasn't sinless. And there was that passage: "the wages of sin is death." I worried about him. Unfortunately, my church hadn't said anything about all of this; it was only my Baptist friends who talked about hell and damnation and getting saved. So I was on my own figuring it out. But it didn't seem fair to me that this other little boy would be sent to hell just because he didn't know Jesus, and I'd go to heaven just because I did. It didn't seem fair that he would be condemned just because he grew up on a Pacific island instead of in America. I figured, if I had been him – if I had grown up there – I would be in the same situation; I wouldn't believe in Jesus; I'd be condemned. It didn't seem fair. But, I figured God is fair. And I decided those Baptists were probably wrong. God would work something out that was fair and good. So I quit worrying about him, and instead, continued to envy him.

It also crossed my mind – what if I had grown up with Baptist parents instead of Episcopalians? I'd probably be handing out the Four Spiritual Laws and trying to save Episcopalians too. They were only following what they were taught.

I also wondered, what if I had grown up black? I lived in the segregated South. Our black neighbors in town had their own schools, their own churches, their own cafe, their own restrooms and water fountains, their own waiting rooms and entrances. I wondered, what's that like for them? They seemed so different. Exotic like the boy from the Pacific. Sometimes it seemed like they spoke a different language, sang different songs. What would I be like if I were black?

The Civil Rights movement was just starting. Not in my town yet, but we saw it on TV. People were sitting-in and getting arrested at drug store soda-fountains. I showed some friends visiting from Ohio how the black people in our town didn't need to come to Leslie's Drug Store where I went for a nickle-Pepsi. I showed them in an alley around the corner. "Here's Bole's Cafe," I told them. "That's where the Negroes go. See on the menu over the counter. Buffalo Fish. They eat different things from us. You can't get Buffalo Fish at Leslie's."

But deep in my soul I wondered. It didn't seem fair. Bole's had a rusted screen door and wasn't air conditioned. Their school wasn't as nice as mine. Their houses and lives didn't seem as privileged as mine. I saw angry black people on TV. If I were a black person, would I be angry too? I figured, I probably would. After all, it all didn't really seem fair.

My friend Bob didn't seem bothered. I remember when the "Black Pride" movement started. He just laughed. "Can you imagine? Being proud of being..." Well, I don't want to finish that sentence in church. But Bob thought the notion of Black Pride was outrageous and hilarious. I liked Bob. He's a pharmacist now, with a nice family.

When riots broke out back in 1962 because a young black man wanted to enroll in our all-white college, things got tense. I couldn't go near the black section of town anymore. I was told to be careful. People were mad. Sometimes bad things happened.

In the fifth and sixth centuries before Christ, Jewish exiles returned home from Babylon. As they began to rebuild their homes and city walls, some of their relatives who had been left behind offered to help. They were rebuffed and treated as outcasts. The purity of their religion and their bloodlines was suspect. Several hundred years later, the animosity was deeply ingrained. A Jew could be rendered unclean if a Samaritan's shadow crossed his path. Samaritans refused hospitality to Jewish travelers headed toward the Jerusalem Temple. The animosity was passed from generation to generation, every historic insult remembered.

Little boys growing up in Samaria were taught to ignore or taunt Jewish travelers on the road south. Little boys growing up in Nazareth were taught that Samaritans were heretic half-breeds, enemies and insults to God. They heard stories in the synagogue, about Elijah calling down fire from heaven on people like them, back in the good old days, when God fought for Israel.

In Luke's Gospel, this story of Jesus and the disciples traveling through the Samaritan village comes not long after the story of the transfiguration, when they had seen Jesus with Moses and Elijah. Maybe James and John are still thinking of Elijah when they react to the insults and rejection from the village. "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?"

But Jesus turned and rebuked them. No reaction. No retaliation. They just went on to another village.

I'm on an email list that comes from a group of people who are ardent Christians. They long for the coming of Christ and the fulfillment of the apocalyptic destruction of evil and triumph of Christ and his people. Their messages are full of fear and outrage, especially at the threat of Islamization and Muslimization of the world and America, particularly since we now have a Muslim president, they say. The emails that aren't about Muslims are about the threat from immigrants. A minister forwards the messages to me. If I were a little boy growing up in his congregation, what he says would make more sense to me.

As we grow up, we believe what we are taught to believe. As we grow up more, we tend to see what we expect to see. If we expect to see enemies, we'll see them, and be fearful, occasionally fearful enough to want to call down fire from heaven upon them. But if we expect to see people, ordinary people in all of their complex beauty and ugliness, we'll see people.

We can focus on our differences. But we can also focus on our similarities. We can amplify how we disagree. But we can also agree to disagree, and remember how much we share.

Theologian F. D. Maurice said, "A man is most often right in what he affirms and wrong in what he denies." Sometimes when I look at people who seem so different from me – a little boy growing up on a Pacific island, someone from another race or culture or belief system – my vision shifts when I begin to consider what it is that they affirm as being more important than what it is they might deny. Often I find that we affirm many things in common, while we deny or disagree on only a few. Oh, those disagreements may be significant, but they tend to pale under the commonality of our shared humanity and loves and loyalties.

Sometimes healing happens when we are able to see in the other some of the fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about today. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and temperance." ¹ Paul says, "Against such things, there is no law."

Whenever we can witness the presence of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness or temperance in another person, race, creed or group, we need to bend our legalistic judgments just a bit in order to recognize the presence of the Spirit even in the unlikeliest of people.

Just after this story of Samaritan inhospitality – when the hostility of the Samaritans prompted in James and John a desire for fire from heaven upon the bad guys – in the very next chapter of Luke's Gospel, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan as Jesus' answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" A Samaritan is the neighborly one who extends hospitality: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and temperance toward a stranger in need, and becomes Jesus' eternal example of great neighborliness.

"Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" No, he says. Just love your neighbor as yourself. That works a little better.

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¹Galatians 5:22-23. I intentionally chose to translate the final fruit of the Spirit as "temperance" following the King James Version. I think the notion of "self-control" has many questionable and troubling components. See Gerald May's Simply Sane.