Out of Order!!

Out of Order!  Can you believe it?  But that’s what the sign said!  This isn’t how it was supposed to go, it’s not how my situation was supposed to resolve itself.  I was hungry.  I had money.  I needed food.  But the sign on that vending machine made it very clear to me that I wasn’t going to get food no matter how hard I tried.  It was nonsense!  It was uncalled for!  Why I’d even go so far as to say that it broke with inherent logic of the universe.  These things have a certain flow to them, you see, a particular chain of reason that goes all the way back to God Himself.  I had money, I went to a machine that was specifically designed to trade food items for money, and…it wouldn’t take my money.  The machine was out of order!  Not only was it out of order in the sense that it needed to be fixed but it was also out order in the sense that it was out of line.  I was hungry, and now I needed to spend 10 whole minutes to find some other place to get my food.  That’s 600 seconds!  4200 in dog seconds.  I swore that that when all was said and done somebody was going to pay for this travesty of injustice. 

We humans are such silly creatures, aren’t we? Dangerously ridiculous creatures, really.  Most people think that when we get this way because we hate having our expectations crossed.  That’s not quite true.  It goes deeper than that.  It’s not just about expectation and surprise, it is about clean and unclean.  Now when clean and unclean in this sense have very little to do with hygiene.  To the human psyche clean and unclean are much more about the perceived order of things, a deep and inherent belief in a universal order.  A gut feeling about what is proper and what is logical, and we can get rather unfriendly about the whole affair if we don’t get what we think ought to be coming.  Don’t believe me?  If somebody visited your homes and drew a single giant black circle on your living room wall, I don’t think any of us would like it very much.  I mean, it’s clean.  No one is going to get sick from it.  But it offends the sense of the proper, it violates how we believe things ought to be, and we react accordingly. 

We are a broken paradox.  We live in bodies that are the very incarnation of change, with a thousand cells moving and replacing themselves and doing those things that cells do, and yet we desire stability, we desire sameness, we love inertness rather than inertia, even though the only true stability is death.  Dead things don’t change.  Yes the rock might wear down, the rock might have change inflicted upon it, but ultimately the rock is incapable of change, incapable of life.  And yet it is the stone that we value, value to the point that we make even our own hearts out of it.

Now today didn’t go exactly according to script, did it?  I mean the script was still there, everything that we all normally get in a service is still here.  Nothing was missing.  We still communed, we still repented of our sins and received forgiveness, everything that we need to be filled and renewed for the week is here and yet I guarantee the only thing that you are currently happy about this morning is that you finally know who is to blame for all of it.  There is a part of us that is like, “Yes I got everything I needed, yes I got fed with the body of Christ, yes I was clothed in holy presence of God, but dagnabit Keven these things have a certain flow to them, and by mixing up the service you’ve broken the inherent logic of the universe.  As sinful broken human beings in need of God’s salvation, isn’t it our preferences that are really important? 

Now, why did I do this?  Why did mess things up so thoroughly?  I did so for two reasons.  First, everything that you’re feeling right now: the confusion, the anxiety, maybe even the irritation and the anger.  If you take all that frustration and multiply it by a thousand, if you pretend that everything you’ve felt here today is in fact what you’ve felt for every single Sunday of your life then you will begin to understand just how much the Jews hated the Samaritans. 

A Jew looked at a Samaritan and shouted “Out of Order!” You are out of line and need to be fixed!  Jews, after all, they said, are supposed to be pure-blooded Israelites.  Our lines are supposed to be untainted by Gentile Blood.  As a Jew, of course, you would have been there for every act of copulation your ancestors ever did, so clearly you could hold a Samaritan to that standard and not be a hypocrite.  The Samaritans were seen as half breeds, the descendents of the poorest Israelites who were not exiled to Babylon with the rest of their countrymen.  But the Jews also worshiped through the Torah, that was a box that had to be checked, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Samaritan Bible, was only 99.99% the same.  That wasn’t in the Script!  Clearly all the Samaritans were just going to have to die.

We read the text of our Scriptures, we read this very short line of words, and because it is so small we fail to be invited into the larger world that this gospel has in store for us.  We read it and pay it no heed, filing whatever wisdom we glean from it as we would an anecdote or a particularly witty fortune cookie.  But what would be evident to anybody at all familiar with that part of the world is the deep history of hate between these two peoples.  There was no love loss between Samaritan and Jew and they were well known for the antagonism they showed to the other.  It is not for no reason that James and John wanted them destroyed in the most fantastic fiery way possible.  They didn’t fit the bill, they weren’t following the Schedule, and when it came to getting all their boxes checked as Jews they didn’t even try.  The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was that the Samaritans were denying them hospitality, and all because they were on their way to Jerusalem.

Now hospitality wasn’t like it is today.  Hospitality today we think of as fresh pillows at a hotel we had to pay for and all the below standard coffee that comes with it.  Hospitality back then was very different, it was a matter of deep personal identity.  Inns and hotels were in short supply in the ancient world, and indeed most people would have been too poor to afford one anyway.  If you were traveling at all, be you a merchant or a pilgrim, you relied on other people opening their homes and their pantries to you, otherwise you had to often poach for food and sleep out in the open where you would be vulnerable to robbers and raiders.  And as a home owner you wanted to invite strangers under your roof.  For one, it was a means of social status.  Whoever could provide lavishly for travelers caught the eye of your family and townsmen, earning their respect.  For two, it was the only real way to get news from far off lands.  There was no newspapers back then, no channel nine helicopters to report when the huns were invading again, so hospitality was often the only way to get the news of an invading army or a band of thieves that had moved into your area.  Lastly, if there was going to be an invading army the best thing you could do as an ancient home-owner to get them to spare you was to show them hospitality.  To be denied hospitality today is much like my story with the vending machine, irritating at worst, but to deny hospitality in the ancient world was a grievous and foolish insult.  It would be no wonder that James and John want them destroyed in the same manner as Sodom and Gomorra.

But Jesus will hear none of it.  The text says that Jesus “epitamao’s” his disciples, he rebukes, he strongly and sternly charges them in the same manner that he rebuked and sternly charged the devil and his demons.  God said in that moment of anger, in that high point of frustration and rage, “Don’t…you..dare.”  It is you that is out of order. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I asked to mix up the service today for two reasons.  One was to get you to understand and enter the emotional world of our gospel story, to see why the disciples did what they did and why God stopped them.  The other reason is so that you realize we are not any different.  We read this story as we often do, selfishly, and think, “Oh, this is just them.  THEY are doing something wrong.  THEY are the ones being rebuked.”  Ladies and gentlemen, we ARE them.  We are the people who insist on Order, who think righteousness amounts to checking boxes on a list, we are the ones who cannot stand certain people because they offend our sense of how the world should be.  We hope the other side presents us with an excuse for violence.  We cry “Out of Order” and we will demand blood on its account.  We have always been this way.

Jews not only did this to Samaritans, but Jew did this to Christian and Roman did this to both.  Saul stood by crying “Out of Order!” as Stephen was struck with stones. Around 70 A.D. Roman guards went into the temple treasury to take its wealth and when the Jews rebelled Rome struck.  Crosses arose around Jerusalem like a forest, and Rome cried “Out of order!  Out of order!”  When Nero made Christians into torches he cried “Out of order!”  Christian Orthodox Russians shouted it as they raided Jewish weddings to murder the bride.  Charlemagne shouted it as he went on to butcher the polytheists still living in his land.  Protestants exclaimed it as they drowned the Anabaptists and set fire to Catholic Priests.  American settlers yelled it in a rage, “Out of order!” as they took native American babies by the ankles and shattered their heads on rocks.   And on June 12, 2016 a native-born American Muslim cried “Out of order!” as he gleefully reloaded his assault rifle and killed or wounded over a hundred people at a Gay Latino nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  We think it is them, it is not.  It is us.  It is all of us.

As Pastor Don said last week, the first step in exorcizing any demon is extracting its name.  This demon’s name is self-righteousness.  Any time we think of another human being as less than human for acting improper, anytime we get enraged because life and people aren’t going according to the way we want them to we are engaging in that demon and that …has…consequences.  Take Jesus’ rebuke seriously, it is meant for every single one of us because we all desperately need it. 

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, in the wake of Orlando, in the wake of all the death and the violence facing us this year, we all need to realize this problem is never going to resolve itself unless we do one and only one thing.  We stop insisting on our rights and we start talking about our Samaritans.  Amen and Amen.