Who are your Samaritans?

Oh, you have them. I have them. Read the comment section—we all have them. These are the folks, the group, the people you can’t stand.

“Well, I’m enlightened. I don’t have those people in my life.”

But you do.
The communist-socialists (never mind those are two separate economic theories).
The red-hat people.
Immigrants.
People who text and drive.
Folks who clap on 1 and 3.
We have them.

Once in college, I took a Native American History class. This was before the DNA test showed that our “native ancestry” came from Dances with Wolves. I was at dinner with my mom and her then-boyfriend. They asked, “What did you learn at school?”

I said, “I’m really excited about my Native American History class. The first sentence out of the professor’s mouth just blew my mind. He said, ‘This class is like the game of Cowboys and Indians—but here, the Indians are the good guys and the cowboys are the bad guys.’ That just blew my mind. It was something I’d never considered before.”

My mom sighed and said, “I’m going to need another drink.”
Her then-boyfriend, a real John Wayne fan, just went ballistic. He couldn’t handle it. He refused to believe that other people could have a different telling of history.

He had found his Samaritans. These are the folks that you have an immediate reaction to. Maybe you were taught to hate them. Maybe this group of people were always the punchline to jokes. Who are your Samaritans?

The disciples had them. They were Jewish so they had literal Samaritans. In Luke chapter 9, a Samaritan village refuses to accept Jesus and his message that the kingdom of God has come near. James and John wanted to call down fire from heaven and consume them. The message wasn’t received, so the Sons of Thunder—wanted to call in a tactical drone strike from heaven.

Do you have this feeling? Someone cuts you off in traffic or is tailgating you. Do you wish you could just… IDK… make them go away? Whether they disappear or are obliterated by your newly equipped .50 caliber on your car? Or you drive past that house with that sign in the yard?

Yeah. Human reaction. When I’m feeling frustrated, I often joke with Sam, “What solves all our problems?”
“Violence,” he replies. And we chuckle. Others aren’t in on the joke though.

Instead of calling down fire from heaven, maybe laugh. Take a walk. Throw up two fingers in the sign of peace instead of one to your tailgaters.

What James and John are doing is very biblical. In fact, they’re referencing 2 Kings, chapter one. Ahaziah assumes the throne of Samaria. The prophet Elijah denounces him. So the king sends a captain with 50 men to “inquire.” Elijah is up on the hill and the captain calls up, “O man of God, the king says, ‘Come down.’” But Elijah is prickly. He says, “If I am a man of God, let fire come down and consume you and your 50.” And it does.

Again, the king sends another captain and another 50. “O man of God, this is the king’s order: ‘Come down quickly.’” Same result. Same fire.

We now have 102 burnt corpses around this hill. The king sends a third detachment, but this captain falls on his knees and says, “O man of God, please let my life, and the lives of these 50 servants of yours, be precious in your sight.”

He comes not with authority or threat of force, but with humility.

For Elijah, the 102 others were not precious, however. They were disposable. And an angel comes and talks to Elijah. The angel says, “Stop being afraid! Go talk with him!”

Stop being afraid. In our culture, we’re seeing people use their fear to dehumanize others. That’s what Elijah was doing. He was using his power to harm. Hiding behind his faith and hurling fire at others. Elijah went toward what he feared—and nothing bad happened to him. The deaths of 102 men were pointless.

Elijah was acting very human. Abusing his power. Using his religion to call down fire on others. It is still happening today. That’s what James and John wanted to do. “It’s biblical!” See?
Those folks don’t practice baptism like we do.
They don’t have an open table for communion like we do!
They don’t ordain women or gay folk.
Let’s call down fire!
It’s biblical.

Pastor Brian Zahnd states, “You can find a lot of things in the Bible that are biblical but aren’t the spirit of Christ.”[1]

There are so many folks who frustrate me to the point of wanting to call down fire.
These are my Samaritans. I know you have yours. Yet Jesus tells us a story today where the Samaritan is the good guy. Jesus is expanding the concept of neighbor. In telling this story, Jesus is teaching us that even our enemy is our neighbor. We must face the uncomfortable question: What if God resides in my neighbor, even the ones I don’t want to acknowledge?

Jesus is asked 187 questions in the gospels and answers 8 of them directly. He asks 307. Maybe faith is learning to ask and sit in the complexity of good questions.

The good question in front of us today is: Who are your Samaritans? And what if they are the ones who will save you?

I think it’s good to learn. We can learn the most from our enemies. My grandfather fought in WWII against Hitler and Nazi Germany. We heard on our mission trip last Sunday that Hitler was inspired by the camps that held the Cherokee before the Trail of Tears. It was a shock to realize that the worst villain of modern history drew inspiration from something our country did.

It’s good to learn this, because we’re not always the good guy. Sometimes, we’re the bad guy in someone else’s story. We can learn from that. We can repent and reconcile.

Reading about the history of the Nazis helped me confront my inner Nazi. This is the human impulse that says, “If we just remove those people over there, then we wouldn’t have these problems.”

It’s a very tempting premise. And it’s been tried out in history time and time again:
In the Holocaust. In Rwanda. In the building of Alligator Alcatraz.

It’s the same narrative, coming again: “If they weren’t here, all would be well.”
But that’s a lie. It’s how the Israelites treated the Samaritans. And the Canaanites.
And the Moabites. You can find a lot of things in the Bible that aren’t the spirit of Christ.

Jesus is always reaching out. He even goes to the cross, as if to say: “You think this will stop my love? It doesn’t.”

There’s a line of thinking that says Jesus died for our sins.
Here’s how much our sin matters to God: God dies on Friday at 3 p.m., is buried before sundown, spends all Saturday in the grave, and is up and out of the tomb before sunrise. Jesus didn’t even take a weekend to deal with sin. Then comes back and says, “As I was saying: love. Love. Love.”

All the sin, all the hate, all the scapegoating the world could throw at God—it failed. It gave Jesus a 35-hour nap, and then he was back about the Good News. One day, we’ll get the message.

I’m still learning to overcome my inner Nazi.

I read about how the Southern Baptists voted earlier this summer to condemn same-sex marriage. I’m tempted to call down fire. This only harms our neighbor. It doesn’t affirm anything. And it’s not good news. Ah, there are my Samaritans. I’m called to love them.

Last week, Alligator Alcatraz was unveiled. People were buying merchandise with a prison’s name on it—a prison specifically for undocumented people. This is evil. It reminds me of the Trail of Tears. It reminds me of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. It reminds me of the racist trope from Jim Crow America of Black and Brown people being fed to alligators.[2] And the folks backing this… those are my Samaritans. I can learn a lot from them. You can learn a lot from yours, too. Even if it’s how not to live. It teaches us something.

It teaches me that the things we try to bury—in our lives, in our family histories, in our country—those parts of our past, if we bury them, they act as seeds. They come back. They bloom again later in our lives.

If you don’t want weeds in your garden, you must pull them up by the roots.

That is true in history. And it’s true in us.

We must face the hard parts. Make our peace. Otherwise, there’s a cyclical nature to history that Carmen Wolff mentioned last week: History repeats. And if it doesn’t repeat, it sure does rhyme.

I’m tired of folks hiding behind their faith, calling down fire on others. In Christ, there’s nothing to fear. We are called to step out and consider others. To tell stories where those people are the good guys. We are called to say that the grace of God, the love of Christ, and the movement of the Holy Spirit extends to all people. All. People. Even the ones we’d rather not acknowledge.

It’s the hardest part of our faith. It is easy to love those who love me. Anyone can do that. But to learn from our enemies? To pray for them and wish them well, and not harm? That’s Christ-like. For Christ teaches that there is no they, there is only us. I am a work in progress. This is not something I have mastered. But I hope I’m failing my way toward doing it more often than not.

In that spirit, I’ll end with a prayer by Pádraig Ó Tuama, who writes:

We disinvite the unkind from our tables,
unfriend them, unfollow them,
oftentimes for good reason.
Whatever the reason,
may we be safe enough—eventually—
to consider
wishing well for them
even if they stray far
from the ways that could help them.
Amen.[3]

Works Cited

[1] His sermon is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91yQCiLZHa8

[2] “Alligator bait,” an extreme and dehumanizing trope in Jim Crow-era popular culture in the American South—depicting Black children used to lure alligators—was widespread in newspapers, postcards, songs, and sheet music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even though no credible evidence supports actual occurrence. For further discussion, see “Alligator bait,” *Wikipedia*, last modified June 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_bait

[3] Day 15 Collect of the Day, Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love. Eerdman’s Publishing, Grand Rapids, MI. 2025.