Readings: Amos
7:7-15, Luke 10:25-37
We pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations
of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock and our
sustainer. Amen
Sitting at my desk
Friday afternoon, getting on a bit of a roll with Amos and Samaritans,
procrastinating a bit as is my want by flicking across into Stuff – and then I
read about the shooting of 11 people at a protest rally in Dallas – four/five
dead. Those shot were police who were
presumably keeping an eye on a protest ‘black lives matter’ rally about the
shooting of innocent black people by police.
Words fail. Hatred rules. Lives
ripped apart. What is going on?
Those of us
reading through the books of the bible have struggled with the violence and
hatred of the time but we have to honestly ask if our time is any different
from that say of two and a half thousand years ago.
Then as now there
is mindless violence.
Then as now there
is retribution.
Then as now there
is the slaughtering of the innocents.
Now and then there
is greed and a protection of self whatever it takes.
Or, here is a
thought:
Now and then that
is all that seems to make the headlines.
And that got me
thinking. Then and now the world, life
is not all about horrible stuff, there are stories of hope and kindness and
compassion. In first and second Kings
there are stories of peace and gentleness and justice – it’s just that
they are few and far between, rarely reported.
Today there are remarkable and everyday stories of neighbourliness and
compassion and forgiveness. They just
don’t seem to make the headlines.
And I had to ask
the question if we, as a society, have a propensity to wallow in the horror
stories and respond as I did with a complete loss of perspective and a sense of
a black hole that the world has gone down.
Do we allow our
headlines to feed our fears and does the new global communication world we live
in encourage our despair.
Blogger Jeremy
Spain thinks so - in a piece titled ‘A small God in a big world’[1] he reminds us that Jesus
came not as a headline act but as a baby, that the deluge of what is wrong with
the world doesn’t give us much space to contemplate what is right: he says
“Imagine how different the world must have
been even 100 years ago. Imagine how much bigger and more mysterious the world
must have been without Google Maps and Google Earth, without
Buzzfeeds that reduce our ever-shrinking ordinary world to a series of
tragic headlines and newsfeeds that reduce our ever-expanding social world
to a series of one-way conversations 140 characters-deep and 10,000
friends-wide. Imagine what it must have felt like to not feel like you are
at the center of every event and every relationship on earth. Imagine a world with
board games and the great big woods outback. Imagine what it would
feel like to be as small as a human being…..
You’d
almost think the highest point of our nation’s freedom, that of its speech, is
now being used to paralyze us. It’s like the headlines that feed us the bad
news of the world have left us no room to speak about anything else, anything
less important than politics or less complicated than the economy or less
alarming than proofs of the immanent threat of radical Islam. How inconsiderate
it would be to speak needlessly about the daylilies beginning to bloom outside
with all that other stuff happening outside…”
He restates the answer to the
question:
Q: “When did we
see you hungry and feed you and thirsty and give you drink?”
A: “When you
didn’t see me on a screen and when you gave me more than your opinions.”
Let’s think about
the good Samaritan story – even without
the advantage of the world wide web, the bad press for the Samaritans had done
its business – they were despised foreigners, with a faith that had developed
differently and were not to be trusted let alone associated with. Samaritan was the shock word that Jesus used
to tell this story of what it means to be a neighbour – even the lawyer wasn’t
quite able to say Samaritan when asked to identify the neighbour – he skirted
the issue by saying ‘the one who showed him mercy’. Nowadays some could equally say insert the
word Muslim or Asian or Sikh – and what has the western Christian world overtly
despised for two thousand years - Jews.
Different, despised, responsible for all that is wrong with our
world……..easy to demonize.
But actually, says
Jesus – we can’t do that. For kindness
shows us who acts as a neighbour, not culture nor faith nor nationality – but
kindness and compassion.
And our kindness
is personal, relational, small in the scheme of things and unlikely to make the
headlines.
It can come from
the most unlikely of people, be shared into the scariest of places and it is
not to be refused because we think someone unworthy or ‘different’.
So let’s not be
undone by the violence and hatred and inhumanity that we can drown in in the
world today. Let us instead practice
what it is that we are made to be – the loving people of God walking in the way
of Jesus. ‘Let us live in a world close
enough to touch, low enough to look in the eye’; says Jeremy Spain. He reminds
us that God speaks in a still small voice, not with a foghorn, and a still
small voice require physical nearness to be heard.
We can lose
ourselves in caring for the things we can do nothing about and not see the
neighbour over the fence who is in need.
We can despair at
making a difference to a world that seems to be imploding and forget the
teaching of Jesus that from a small seed of love expressed, amazing things can
happen. Each little act of compassion
has the capacity to turn the world on its head.
Believe it!
So instead of
being overwhelmed by the state of the world, let us focus on being who Jesus
tells us to be - a good neighbour, getting to know those around us, offering
and receiving a helping hand and building relationships with all manner of
people, even those, especially those whom society would have us cross the road
away from – for it is there that we will
find God at work in our world.
We finish with
words from Brian Wren
We are your people, Spirit of grace,
you dare to make us to all our neighbours,
Christ’s living voice, hands and face.
Spirit, unite us, make us, by grace,
willing and ready, Christ’s living body,
loving the whole human race.
Margaret Garland
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