Pastor Don Mackintosh, Pastor of the Weimar Campus Church, gives the horrible account of the death of George Floyd and the injustice he was given that sparked a nation protest. Racism is alive and well today as it was during the time of Christ. The answer to racism is found in the scriptures.

<p>Pastor Don Mackintosh, Pastor of the Weimar Campus Church, gives the horrible account of the death of George Floyd and the injustice he was given that sparked a nation protest. Racism is alive and well today as it was during the time of Christ. The answer to racism is found in the scriptures.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Weimar University

Samaritans Lives Matter

Don Mackintosh

Samaritans Lives Matter - Part 1

Father in heaven, Lord, we're so thankful today that we can come together and worship you, and we ask that your Spirit would be with us to teach us from your Word today, and we thank you.

So the parable of the Good Samaritan is of course 1 that maybe is familiar to you, but perhaps the context is not.

And as I thought about what has gripped many in our nation, in fact I would say everybody who's not tone deaf or can't see, the tragedy of watching someone die that was filmed, and seeing that happen was not only traumatizing, it should be waking us up to the inhumanity of man to man.

And I don't know about you, but it led me to search my heart to see if I have love for others like Christ did.

And as we look at the parable of the Good Samaritan, this is what it really is dealing with.

If you wanna turn in your Bibles, it's Luke chapter 10.

The entire chapter is actually, fits together something very important, but let's just read verse 25 and on.

And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

And he said to him, what is written in the law?

The attorney comes to question him and he questions the attorney.

And so he answered and said, "'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 said to him, you have answered rightly.

Now, then it says, but he, that is the young attorney, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

So, this was a good question, because back then, they took this text in Leviticus 19.18 to answer that question.

In fact, if Jesus would have answered in a politically correct manner, he would actually have quoted this text, which says, Leviticus 19.18, Thou shalt not avenge nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

I don't know why my program says they people, but it's actually thy people.

And so thy people, that was just a cut and paste by the way, Thy people was defining what the neighbor was.

So they said, if you want to know who the neighbor is, it's the Jews.

So, love your neighbor as yourself meant, love the people within your ethnic group, the Jews, as yourself.

As a matter of fact, although he was hoping that Jesus would affirm what he had already believed, and that this was the Jews that Nabor was talking about, Jewish belief at that time actually went further and held that this specifically excluded Samaritans and foreigners.

So when you say love your neighbor as yourself it meant love the Jews but do not love the Samaritans and do not love Gentiles at all.

In response Jesus told the parable of the Samaritan.

Some people suggested by saying good Samaritan, that would be a slur against the Samaritans.

So in the text itself it says, the Samaritan.

So this particular parable was actually meant in Jesus' culture to address an issue of racism in that century.

That's specifically why he tells the story.

Jesus said, A certain man went down to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his clothing, wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

Now If you've ever walked from Jerusalem to Jericho, it's a winding road that goes down about 2, 500 feet, and it's dark, and it was very treacherous.

Now by chance going down that road a certain priest came down the road and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.

Likewise a Levite when he arrived at the place came and looked and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion.

And so he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine, and he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

And on the next day when he departed, he took out 2 denarii, gave them to the innkeeper and said, take care of him and whatever you spend when I come again, I will repay you.

So which of these 3 do you think was neighbor?

Jesus now coming back to his comment about the neighbor, which was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves.

And the rich, or that lawyer said, he who showed mercy on him.

And then Jesus said to him, go and do likewise.

Now this should get our attention because it was specifically speaking about a racial disparity.

And when Jesus told the story, the Jews and the Samaritans hated each other.

And this had developed over several hundred years' time.

Actually, when the Northern Kingdom had apostatized and gone after Jeroboam, he had set up a altar.

When we go on trips to Jerusalem, you should go sometime, that altar is still there.

They had their own setup, And the Samaritans were part of the ones that followed that.

And so every Jew says, look, you know, they were part of a schismatic thing.

And by the way, then they started intermarrying with some of the Assyrians and they said, by the way, they're intermarrying.

And they had a whole list of reasons why they should not associate with Samaritans and why they should hate them.

While Coponius was procurator in AD 6 through 9, Some Samaritans secretly joined some Jewish Passover pilgrims and entered the temple with them.

Once inside the temple, they desecrated it by spreading human bones in the porticos and in the sanctuary.

The only thing worse you could do is to take a pig, which some people did later on.

And so they said, you see what Samaritans do?

This is the worst possible desecration And if 1 Samaritan did it, all the Samaritans will do it.

Now I recognize that some of these things happen after the story of the Good Samaritan, but Luke was probably not read until right around the time this happened.

Because the first 2 books of the Bible that were written were 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, and then you later on had the Gospels coming out.

And Some who have studied the chronology of the Gospels believe that this story would have been fresh in the minds immediately after Luke was written or very close to when Luke was, you know, hot off the press.

8051, people from Samarian village of Ginné murdered 1 or more Jewish pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem for the Passover.

Bad enough they went and put bones in there.

They appealed to the Roman rulers for justice, but the Romans ignored them.

An overwhelming mob from Jerusalem then went down to Ginnei, massacred all the inhabitants, and burned the village to the ground, probably did some looting too.

They arrested and executed several of the Jews involved.

But this was a turning point between Roman and Jewish relations.

In fact, the scholars say that the Jews, driven by their hatred for the Samaritans and the fact the Romans helped them in any way, began to rise up And it led finally to the destruction of Jerusalem in 8070.

And this event is seen as the turning point, and it's at this time that the Gospel of Luke, written by a physician who wants to heal a hurting world, says the only way we're going to heal this world is by listening to this parable.

How many think that sounds kind of intense?

So now this parable is actually maybe a little more relevant to us today.

Number 2, the story challenged the perceived morality of Jews and their religious leaders.

There were other stories out there, other parables circulating at the time.

I have a book in my library called They Also Taught in Parables, which looks at all the parables.

And by the way, this is not really a parable.

It's actually able to be literally applied.

Call it a parable, but it's not symbolic.

It actually was literally applied in that day in people's mind.

But these particular stories were like this.

Example number 1, a rabbi helping a leper.

Samaritans Lives Matter - Part 2

Acts 1932, some therefore cried 1 thing and some another, for the assembly was confused, and most of them did not know why they had come together.

That kind of reminds me of what I saw on the news this last week when I was watching some of these protests and different things.

People are told to stay home for a couple of years, sheltering at home.

And so someone says, hey, let's go protest.

They actually said in the news last week in California here, 2 things are okay, going to church and protesting.

How many think that we're a Protestant church, so it's pretty good to come to church here?

We should be protesting all the time, so.

But sometimes, you know, people are wondering, what should I do?

There's all kinds of confusion and people are stressed out.

Maybe they, you know, have or know someone who has COVID-19.

You know, someone was talking to me this last week and said, you know, people are not taking this serious enough.

There can be people that don't take it seriously.

Usually the people that take COVID-19 serious are those who have worked with people who have died or people that have relatives who have died and they take it fairly seriously.

And usually people that are upset about racial problems are those that are the recipients of racism.

But nobody else understands and many other people minimize it.

So how many of you wanna think about the people that maybe are having problems, not just about yourself, right?

So I got a graphic from somebody this last week that says, pity the poor pastor when they come back to church because some people think the church should never have closed and why was the pastor such an idiot to close the church.

Some people think the church will still not be open.

He's such an idiot to open the church up.

Some people, and it had like 10 options, I was like, that's good, that's really good.

So let's pray together and then we'll get into our message.

Father in heaven, Lord, thank you today that we can again come together and study your Word and we ask your blessing on it.

You've already blessed it, you protected your word through millennia.

People have tried to get rid of it, and yet it still is here.

Only 2 things that last forever, your word and people who accept your word.

And we want to be those people who accept your word today.

So bless us as we study in Christ's name, amen.

Last week, we looked at the story of the Samaritan, the Samaritan man who had helped that person who had been injured on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.

And we begin to realize how dramatic and radical that story really was.

It's like sitting on the front row, that's radical.

So we, because Samaritans in that time were hated and they were discriminated against.

And Jesus, rather than using a rabbinical story that elevated the piety and goodness of rabbis, actually told a story where the hero was a Samaritan.

This would have been totally radical in that day, as we mentioned, because there had been just recently attacks on Jews.

There had been actually a mob that went down and looted a Samaritan city and protested and everything and that story came out right then.

You know there's a couple editors that got fired from various newspapers last week or resigned I think it was, because they had published things they should not have published the paper thought.

And I'm sure there were people that said to Jesus, it's not good to publish that or Luke, that's a very bad thing to publish.

Because Christ was a person that addressed the issues and problems in society directly.

And he did it in a way that would make sense.

Open our hearts and minds to your wondrous love.

That's really what we need, to be startled.

I think people genuinely today are wondering what to do.

Should we vote out officials we don't like?

And the question really is, what would Jesus do?

Would he gather a group for public protest?

1 time he was asked to actually do a public protest in John 5 and they wanted to make him king because they saw that he could feed the 5, 000 and he could also raise the dead.

You could do anything you wanted and get through it.

But what he did was He just actually said, get on the boat, let's go to the other side of the lake.

He actually ran away from the protests, interestingly enough.

But that doesn't mean he didn't do anything.

Like we said, he shared that exemplary story, example story of an unusual hero, the Samaritan.

But I want to look today at another Samaritan story in John Chapter 4.

John Chapter 4, go with me there, and we're going to see Samaritan story number 2.

By the way, there's, I think, 8 of them in the New Testament.

I could do a whole series on Samaritan lives matter, but I I'm just I don't know that I will, but I could.

Let's look, first of all, John chapter 4.

Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, though Jesus himself did not baptize but his disciples, he left Judea and departed again to Galilee.

So here he is, he's baptizing all these people, or people are being baptized because he normally didn't baptize anybody, other people baptized for him.

And he realizes the scribes and the Pharisees are gonna get upset.

They're actually kind of prejudiced against Jesus.

And so he goes, I better get out of town.

Now going to Galilee from down south where he was in Jerusalem, if you wanted to go to Galilee, the quickest way from Judea was directly through Samaria.

So if you were a pious Jew, you never would go through Samaria.

Instead, you'd go east, across the Jordan River, adding extra hours and days to your travel, but you because you hated the Samaritans so much would go across the river, enter the region of Perea and then go north.

You would go up, here's Judea, here's Galilee, here's Samaria, but you're not going there.

You're going across the river and up and around so you don't have to go through Samaria.

Because you don't want to see a Samaritan, you certainly don't want to touch a Samaritan, you want to socially distance to the extreme level.

So, by design, and because of racial prejudice, they would not go through Samaria.

Because the Samaritans, they really thought they had messed up way back about 400 years before.

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Samaritans Lives Matter

Samaritans Lives Matter - Part 1

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Samaritans Lives Matter - Part 1

1h 7m

Samaritans Lives Matter - Part 2

1h 2m

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