The Sin of Standing Aside
Have you ever benefited from the intervention of a stranger or have you ever come to the aid of a person you didn’t know? What was that experience like? I’ve benefited from the intervention of a stranger when I got a flat tire on a cold winter day and was incredibly grateful for the assistance. I’ve also been able to help people from time to time and felt blessed by the opportunity.
January 11, 2015
Obadiah 1.10-15, The Sin of Standing Aside
Pastor Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
Audio only – below[powerpress]
At the end of the year one of the things I enjoy reading are the stories of the people who have been awarded a Carnegie Medal for extraordinary Civilian Heroism. Two of the recipients were from New England. Frederick J. Levesque, Jr., of Stafford Springs, Connecticut rescued Kerra R. Colgan from a fire in Somers, Connecticut, on December 4, 2013. Kerra, 7, was in her family’s apartment, which was on the second floor of a two-story building, when fire broke out in one of the unit’s bedrooms. Levesque, 52, a retired corrections administrator, was driving by and saw flames and smoke issuing from the bedroom’s window. He stopped at the scene, as did other motorists, who gained entry to the building through its front door. Levesque went to the rear of the building, entered it through the back door, and climbed an interior stairway to the second floor. He forced open the burning apartment’s back door and entered the unit but was forced out because of dense smoke. Entering a second time, shouting, he heard Kerra’s voice, but the smoke forced him out again. A third time Levesque entered the apartment, but crawling. Despite limited visibility, he advanced through the smoke following Kerra’s voice and found her on the floor. Grasping her, he backed to the door, pulling her, and then stood, picked Kerra up, and took her downstairs and outside to safety. Kerra was hospitalized for treatment of smoke inhalation and minor burns, and she recovered. Levesque inhaled smoke and was given oxygen at the scene, and he too recovered.
In another incident in Maine, Pawel L. Kruszewski saved David W. and Ronald R. Call and Robert Hack from a car wreck, in Auburn, Maine, September 10, 2013. David, 40, and Ronald, 48, were passengers in a sport utility vehicle being driven by Hack, 43. In an accident on a rural road, the vehicle left the road and, overturning, came to rest on its roof. Kruszewski, 28, a production supervisor, drove upon the scene and stopped. When flames broke out on the exposed underside of the vehicle, Kruszewski opened the rear, passenger-side door and reached inside and grasped David and pulled him from the vehicle. David walked to safety. Kruszewski then fully entered the vehicle, grasped Ronald by the arm, and, helping him from the front seat into the back-seat area, pulled him out to safety. Despite flames spreading on the vehicle’s underside, Kruszewski entered a third time to find Hack inverted in the driver’s seat, secured by his safety belt and wreckage. Kruszewski released the safety belt and maneuvered Hack to the rear-seat area. With help from Ronald, Kruszewski pulled Hack from the vehicle and walked him away. The vehicle was shortly engulfed by flames. The three victims suffered minor injuries, and Kruszewski sustained lacerations to a hand. He recovered.
Why do people do things like that and take such risks for people they don’t even know? The February 2007 edition of National Geographic Magazine included an interview with one of the world’s most important scientists, Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project and also author of The Language of God in which he describes the scientific basis for his faith in God. In the interview he says, “Some people sacrificially give of themselves to those who are outside their group and with whom they have absolutely nothing in common such as Mother Teresa, Oskar Schindler, many others. That is the nobility of humankind in its purist form.”[1]
Today’s scripture from the prophet Obadiah is not about “the nobility of humankind in its purist form.” In fact, it’s about just the opposite. The Book of Obadiah is the shortest book in the OT and one of the least read. There aren’t a lot of lovely framed calligraphy prints of Obadiah. You won’t find, Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Christian I Learned from Obadiah, in any Christian book store. Obadiah was probably written in the 6th century before Christ. The events referred to would have been the Babylonian attack against Jerusalem (605-585 B.C.) which included a siege and the destruction of most of the city in 586 B.C. Obadiah, whose name means, “Servant of the Lord,” was speaking to a group of people that included a few survivors of that disaster, most of whom would have lost loved ones, homes, and most of their property in the attack, who were returning to their homeland almost 50 years later. While many decades had passed since those terrible days, the memories of the people were still vivid regarding how their neighbors the Edomites had acted. Not only had the Edomites not come to the aid of the people of Jerusalem and Judah. They had done exactly the opposite and grievously exploited and abused them in their time of need. Obadiah states strongly the wrongs done by the Edomites to their brother Jacob and the judgment of God on their behavior. He calls the Edomites and citizens of Judah brothers because they are descended from the same parents Isaac and Rebekah. Esau, the ancestor of the Edomites, and Jacob, the father of the Jews, were twin brothers who struggled and fought with one another in the womb, continued to fight once they came out and their descendants carried on the struggle for hundreds of years. Listen as Obadiah describes all that the Edomites should not have done and the consequences that will result. Obadiah 10-15,
“For the slaughter and violence done to your brother Jacob, shame shall cover you, and you shall be cut off forever.
On the day that you stood aside, on the day that strangers carried off his wealth, and foreigners entered his gates and cast lots for Jerusalem, you too were like one of them. But
you should not have gloated over your brother on the day of his misfortune;
you should not have rejoiced over the people of Judah on the day of their ruin;
you should not have boasted on the day of distress.
You should not have entered the gate of my people on the day of their calamity;
you should not have joined in the gloating over Judah’sdisaster on the day of his calamity;
you should not have looted his goods on the day of his calamity.
You should not have stood at the crossings to cut off his fugitives;
you should not have handed over his survivors on the day of distress.
For the day of the Lord is near against all the nations.
As you have done, it shall be done to you;
your deeds shall return on your own head.”
The hostility between the Edomites and Obadiah’s people was ancient even in the 6th century B.C. From the book of Genesis through the Minor Prophets, the Old Testament is filled with passages about the bitter enmity between the two peoples, even though they shared a common ancestor and were technically related. (See the passages at end of sermon if you’re interested in more background reading). The Edomites, who lived in the red cliffs to the southeast of Judah, took full advantage of the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586. The list of their wrongs is detailed and it gets progressively worse – they stood aside, gloated and rejoiced over the misfortune, disaster, and ruin of the people of Judah, not only that, they joined in entering the fallen city, looting the possessions of the defeated people, and worst of all, cut off the escape of the survivors and even handed some of them over to their enemies, the Babylonians. This was similar to the treatment of the Jews faced in some countries in Europe in the late 1930’s and 1940’s as the Nazi’s extended their domination.
None of us wants to think of ourselves as behaving like the Edomites or people who collaborated with the Nazis, in exploiting people who experienced a disaster, like a war, or a hurricane, or other natural disaster or oppression at the hands of another group. In smaller ways, however, we can be like the Edomites. Have you ever found yourself of being in the position of gloating or rejoicing at someone else’s misfortune? There are more than a few brothers or sisters who have rejoiced at the misfortune of their siblings when they’ve gotten in trouble. Even those of us who are a little older, can be susceptible to being like the Edomites. You’re driving down the highway and a speeding driver goes by and then a mile or two down the road you see the same car only this time sitting behind it is a state trooper with the blue lights flashing. There is a part of you that thinks, “Yeah! He got what was coming to him.” And you give a nice smile and a wave as you pass by.
However, if we are ever driving a little over the speed limit when suddenly we realize there is a trooper coming behind us, or we glance to our left as we go by one of those turnarounds in the median and there is a blue and grey trooper car, and we pull over and much to our great relief, the trooper just keeps on going or never pulls out after us, we’re thankful. We’re thankful because we want other people to get justice, to get what they deserve, but for ourselves we want mercy and grace – unmerited, undeserved favor. There may be a little Edomite in all of us.
God’s judgment on the Edomites is “As you have done, it shall be done to you; your deeds shall return on your own head.” That is a godly way of saying, “what goes around, comes around.” The same things that you rejoiced about happening to the people of Judah, the same things you did to them, will be done to you.
The importance of not standing aside in someone else’s moment of need or weakness is spoken about frequently in both the Old and New Testament. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) is perhaps the best known passage. It’s such a part of western culture that even the most diehard atheist knows what a Good Samaritan is. In fact, if you’re using Microsoft Word and type good Samaritan with a small “g” it underlines it as a mistake because it thinks it should be capitalized because the phrase is so well-known. The irony is that in Jesus’ day, his fellow Jews would not have thought there was such a thing as a good Samaritan because they looked down upon the Samaritans as dogs in the same way the Edomites looked down upon the Jews. Jesus deflects a lawyer’s question about “Who is my neighbor?” and re-frames it through a story to the more meaningful question, “To whom will I be a neighbor?”
Today, if Jesus was telling that story to 21st century American Christians, he’d likely be referring to the good Muslim. We’ve all heard about the two terrible attacks by Muslim extremists in France this past week, however, I wonder how many of us have heard or seen story about Boko Haram, the Muslim extremist group in Nigeria who killed as many as 2,000 people in a terrible attack in that nation. We are right and the world is right to be very concerned about the violence of Muslim extremists. It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that they don’t represent all Muslims. The family of murdered French Muslim police officer Ahmed Merabet, gunned down by the Charlie Hebdo attackers in Paris, appealed for calm. Malek Merabet said his brother had been “very proud of being a policeman and defending the values of the Republic. My brother was a Muslim, and he was killed by people who pretend to be Muslims. They are terrorists – that’s it.”
Lassana Bathily, a Muslim employee at Paris Kosher grocery store Hyper Cacher, saved several people by hiding them in a walk-in freezer when a gunman laid siege to his workplace on Friday.
Amedy Coulibaly burst into the market and opened fire, killing four people. He took several shoppers hostage and threatened to kill them if police stormed the printing shop where Cherif and Said Kouachi, who killed twelve people in an attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier in the week, were holed up in a village to the north.
Bathily, identified by French media as a “Malian Muslim,” helped several customers to safety as the chaos unfolded. “I went down to the freezer, I opened the door, there were several people who went in with me. I turned off the light and the freezer,” Bathily, 24, told French network BFMTV. “I brought them inside and I told them to stay calm here, I’m going to go out. When they got out, they thanked me.”Top of Form
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It’s unclear exactly how many people Bathily managed to hide inside the freezer in the store’s basement. City Councilor Malik Yettou said that six people and a baby escaped the gunman by hiding there, while BFMTV put the number at about 15. Meanwhile, another employee at the market escaped through an emergency exit and delivered the keys to the store to the police.
Bathily managed to get out of the store through the freight elevator and when he encountered police, they seemed to initially mistake him for one of the terrorists. “They told me, get down on the ground, hands over your head,” he said. “They cuffed me and held me for an hour and a half as if I was with them.” He said that he then helped police with his knowledge of the floor plan of the store. The young man is a reminder that it’s wrong to demonize all Muslims in the wake of the attacks.
In Jesus’ description of the Great Judgment in Matthew 25:31-46, those who are called righteous and blessed are those who, rather than standing aside, have responded proactively and generously to those they encountered who were in need of food or drink, clothing or shelter, or a caring visit and the gift of time. James 2:14-17 says, “What good is it, brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works is dead.”
Sadly, the ancient events described in Obadiah, a besieged city destroyed by war, fleeing refugees, looting, and ethnic hatred are still with us in many places around the world. Living 27 centuries after Obadiah, we are aware of needs, disasters, wars, poverty, and oppression and abuse anywhere and everywhere in the globe, not just within 20 miles of where we live. The images of these needs are overwhelming, while our energy and resources are limited. We cannot do everything nor meet every need, but we can do what we can, with what we have where we are.
There are no innocent bystanders. God calls us to be willing wisely and prayerfully, to reach out to our neighbors, those we know and those we may not know at all. When we do, we may even find we are blessed in the process, that we have entertained angels and not realized it, we may even serve Christ himself in the form of a sister or brother.
Blessing:
“Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can.”
John Wesley, English Christian leader (1703 – 1791), founder of the Methodists.
Questions for Refection or Discussion
Have you ever benefited from the intervention of a stranger or have you ever come to the aid of a person you didn’t know? What was that experience like?
What do you think motivates people to risk their own safety and even their lives to help people they don’t even know?
What might cause you or other people to hesitate to help someone who clearly was in distress?
Have you ever found yourself gloating or rejoicing at someone else’s misfortune?
What does Obadiah have to say about “standing aside” while people are hurting or suffering?
How do Jesus and the Letter of James encourage us to look at and respond to other people? How can we do what they say in our own lives?
Reading on the background on the relationship of the Edomites & Israel:
The Edomites were the descendants of Esau, the twin brother of Jacob. The history of the blood feud between the two peoples was old even in the 6th century B.C. The struggle begins with the twins in Rebekah’s womb (Genesis 25:19-34) & the countries they represent, Israel & Edom.
Genesis 27:38-45 Stealing a Blessing & a Desire for Revenge
Chapters 32 & 33 Jacob & Esau reunite.
Chapter 36 – The descendants of Esau.
Exodus 15:15 in the song of Moses & Miriam, the chiefs of Edom will be terrified by God’s deliverance of Israel.
Numbers 20:14-21 Edom denies Israel passage through their land.
Deuteronomy 2:1-6, 22 Passing through Edomite territory.
Deuteronomy 23:7 Who may enter the assembly of the Lord. “Do not despise…”
2 Kings 25
Psalm 137:7
Isaiah 34
Jeremiah 49:7-22 Quoted by Obadiah
Lamentations 4:21-22
Ezekiel 25:12-14, chapter 35 An Oracle against Edom
Joel 3:18-19
Amos 1:11-12
Malachi 1:2-4