If Trump Really Is My Neighbour, What Should I do?

Last Sunday, the Gospel reading was the parable of the Good Samaritan.  I am sure that you know the parable of Jesus where it is the despised Samaritan is the one who saves the traveller who is mugged on his journey ‘from Jerusalem to Jerico and fell among robbers who beat him and left him to die’ – to use the lyrics of the Medical Mission song, ‘Who is My Neighbour’. 

 

This opportunity for Jesus to tell the parable occurred when a lawyer tries to entrap him by asking him the question.  Jesus is confronted by the person who is a trained expert in the law of Moses. The "Lawyer" as the scripture calls him, isn't interested in learning about eternal life from Jesus at all. He hoped to use the law to set Jesus up. He figures this carpenter - from Nazareth no less - will make a fool of himself and possibly even incriminate himself by attempting to answer such a weighty question as... "What do I have to do to go to heaven?"

 

Jesus turns the lawyer’s technique back on him.  He responds to the question with a question.  Jesus lays a trap for him just as the lawyer attempted to do to Jesus.  Jesus plays to his pride and ego.  The lawyer responds, as it is an opportunity to show his knowledge of the law but not his wisdom. His answer in part quotes Deut. 6:5 along with Lev. 19:18 "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."  Jesus’ answer could have ended the encounter, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”  However, the lawyer being true to who he is, does not let it go – he cannot.  I believe that he does just what Jesus expects him to do.  He tries again to entrap Jesus - to show him up - to show those around him that he knows the law better than Jesus does.

 

This arrogance allows Jesus to draw him into Jesus’ world, away from legalism – legalistic interpretation of religion, that Jesus tries to show so many times and in so many ways, is not the way to understand God’s law.  In choosing the hero of the Good Samaritan parable, Jesus is setting a trap for all of us.  The Samaritans were neighbours and relations of the Jews.  They were sort of the black sheep of the family.  They were like someone who claims to be a cousin and is an embarrassment to the family. In Jewish eyes, Samaritans were half-breeds, ethnic traitors, and all-round black sheep of the Jews.

 

A Samaritan was not someone that they would expect to behave like an observant Jew who is called to treat others with charity.  Therefore, the lawyer cannot escape from the conclusion that Jesus forces him into. 

He cannot use his legal maneuvering to give an acceptable answer - acceptable in the eyes of his legalism.  It is the outcast that has acted as the neighbour.  It is the outcast that has fulfilled the law.  And here we come back to our response to the passage.  The plain sense of the text does not let us avoid Jesus’ message.  Jesus does not tell us that we must love our neighbour if that person is loveable and is someone we want to have as a neighbour.  We are to love the neighbour regardless of who he is.  He is the one who we would not normally associate with – whoever that is.   

 

So, today we Christians in Canada are faced with a rather awkward situation regarding our neighbour to the south.  There is no way that we can consider the leader of our closest neighbour, Donald J. Trump, to be a good neighbour.  So, can we ignore the lesson in the Good Samaritan Parable, and, as the commandment requires us, love our neighbour as ourselves?    Not loving my neighbour as myself because my neighbours are not particularly loveable is not fulfilling what Jesus requires of us.  We are to love the neighbour – I won’t say because he is unlovable but whether or not he is loveable. 

 

But, come on!  How can a Canadian love Donald Trump?  It really doesn’t seem possible.  But that is what we Canadian Christians and all Christians are required to do.  What then does it mean to love Donald J. Trump as a neighbour.  Well. I think it means that we don’t allow him to bully us.  We are not doing anything loving, to allow a bully, to bully us or others.  It is not good for either the bully or the bullied.  To allow the bully to continue to bully is to enable him or her to continue to damage his immortal soul.  We hear that friends don’t let friends drive drunk.  In that vein, friends don’t let friends bully friends or anyone else.    

 

So. Let us do all in our power to stand up to Trump as an act of love.  As they say, love is stronger than hate. 

 

 

A Jeremiad for a New Year

 jer·​e·​mi·​ad ˌjer-ə-ˈmī-əd. -ˌad. : a prolonged lamentation or complaint. also : a cautionary or angry harangue.

I am starting this year in a place where I don’t often go - but where I am finding myself more often than I would like.  It is a place where I find myself hooked i.e. have an angry reaction to what is happening in the world generally but especially in Canada.  What seems to be generating more reaction and energy is that which divides rather than what unites. 

On Saturday I listened to the CBC program The House, as I usually do on Saturdays.  It is a thoughtful and intelligent exploration of current affairs which I would recommend to anyone who might want to be engaged on current topics in Canada.  This edition focussed in the Trucker Convoy protest early this year and the hearing on the implementation of the Emergency Act by the Trudeau Government to deal with the protests primarily in Ottawa but at border crossings such as Windsor.

The program played excerpts of the testimony of some of the witnesses at the hearing.  There was much to consider from the testimony including the action and inaction of the police and the relationship between law enforcement and the government, to the less than stellar cooperation between federal, provincial and municipal leaders.  However, what did hook me and caused a strong reaction in me was the testimony of some of the convoy self-appointed or presumed leaders.  There was, what seemed to me, to be an attempt at self-justification which came down to the belief that because they were being treated unfairly by the governments, they had the right and even an almost holy ordained duty to impose their will on anyone and everyone regardless of who they were and whether or not they were involved in the decisions that they were protesting.

Let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate this.  There was one witness who was asked about the impact of the continual round the clock blaring of truck horns for weeks on the residents in the protest area.  He had laughed at this and said to the effect that what’s a few weeks inconvenience when he had to deal with the impact of the COVID mandates for two years.   When asked if he thought this was a laughing matter, he paused and back-tracked and said to my mind disingenuously that, no he was just the kind of person who laughed at everything (this is not a direct quote but my impression of his attitude).  There was also the general feeling by some of those protesting that they had the “right” to protest at the Capital regardless of what laws they were breaking or the impact on others and had at no time been told to leave despite the court orders and direction of the police to leave.  There was no apparent awareness or concern for the impact of their actions on people who had no involvement in what they were protesting including small businesses that had to shut down or people threatened for wearing masks – apparently a mask wearer was a dupe of government conspiracies intended to create fear in the public and had to be confronted.

There was also the case of the freedom loving convoy protesters swarming an Ottawa soup kitchen and demanding food.  Things like that – especially hypocrisy – truly hook me.  The protesters against vaccine and mask mandates apparently want to go back to a time before public health measures and lead a natural life without vaccines and health measure to prevent things such as diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, whooping cough (pertussis) as well as pasteurized milk which prevents such things as listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, Q fever, and brucellosis.  I guess we could go back to a time when there weren’t rules against drinking and driving and wearing seat belts, and smoking in public places and on and on.  After all they are all rules which imping on our freedom and we can live our lives regardless of how it affects others.

I do try to understand the anger and resentment of the protesters and believe that from their perspective they believe they have legitimate complaints.  Perhaps some of the rules went too far and were not well thought out and were overreactions.  Governments do sometimes use a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.  However, my main concern is two-fold.  First how do I respond as a Christian who is called to love my neighbour as myself respond to things which hook me and arose my anger in ways that are not helpful?  Second, how can I work to support the institutions and attitudes which have made Canada the wonderful country I have lived in all my life?  It is certainly been an imperfect union and needs to be held to high standards if it is to remain that way.  There are troubling signs that the fabric of this country is becoming seriously frayed if not breaking down.  We all need to work to strengthen and improve those things which make Canada a place we all want to live in.

I hope each of you have a blessed 2023.

 

 

 

You Can’t Go Home Again

 The phrase, you can’t go home again, has been on my mind quite a bit this week.  This phrase, from novelist Thomas Wolfe, generally encapsulates the idea that you may return to the place which was your home but it will not be the same.  Things about it will have changed from what you remember and that’s putting aside the reality that your memories do not reflect how things actually were.

The phrase came to mind when I was thinking about the COVID restrictions, and dangers we have been under for the last two years, are finally lifted.  Things are not going to be like they were even if stores and restaurants and churches open up fully and even if we no longer have to wear the all-pervasive masks.  This idea was crystalized by the Gospel reading which we heard on Sunday.  It was Luke 4: 14-21 in which Jesus, who has begun his public ministry in Galilee, come to his hometown of Nazareth and holds forth in the synagogue reading from Isaiah which declares that the year of the Lord’s favour – prisoners set free, good news to the poor and more - and proclaims the scripture has been fulfilled. 

Things went well for Jesus initially but the crowd turned on him when he declares that there were foreigners more worthy of salvation than then they were.  They responded as you might expect – rather badly - and were going to throw him off a hill but he managed to miraculously avoid the people and puts them in their proper relation with God.  Jesus certainly found that he couldn’t go home again.  I don’t know if he expected a warm welcome and to be embraced by the people as the local boy who has made good.  Probably not, because he quotes the aphorism that no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.  Indeed, he wasn’t accepted by them.  Perhaps he would have been smart to quit while he was ahead and the crowd was cheering him?  However, this is not who he was and would not have been true to his ministry.

But turning back to our present situation where COVID sets the all-pervasive parameters of day-to-day life, what can we take from the reality that we can’t, as Thomas Wolfe implies, go back to the way things were?  Are we going to bemoan the fact that COVID or some variant will be endemic and will probably be with us permanently in one form or another? Will we be more mistrustful of our institutions?  Will we be more resentful and punitive to those who question authority or protest against government restrictions in our lives?  There certainly is a possibility of all those things and more coming about. 

Of course, I have no way of knowing – my record of prognostication is mixed to say the least.  However, I do know that our response as Christians should be to follow the commandment to love our neighbours.  If non-Christians don’t want to follow that advice, perhaps following the Golden Rule will work – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – or to put it another way, treat other people the way you want to be treated.  If we do that, we will all find our new home a much better place to inhabit. 

May we all be blessed on that journey to our new home.