By Rev. Mark Ferrin
Hi, my name is David. God has allowed me to come back to talk with you today from a long time ago, in a faraway place. A place called Palestine. It is quite different from this place that you call Biddeford Pool. I’ve been trying to practice that name God told me about, but we don’t have any names like that in my area. We have Canaan, and people from that region were called Canaanites. Are you called Poolites?
Anyways, I’m here to tell you a story. Do you like stories? Good. I heard your leader, what do you call her? Your Pastor Paula likes stories.
One day when I was 12 years old, I was walking home from Hebrew school. I was walking on a great road that stretched for miles in both directions and was very crowded. Groups of people on foot traveled steadily onward.
Donkeys, heavy-burdened, passed along. A long train of camels, with great bulky loads high on their backs, plodded by.
Do you have any camels around here? When I was at another church in your country someone said something about Camels and smoking, but I di-gress.
Back to my story. As I was walking home, I was watching everything with eager eyes. “Someday, I’ll follow this road for a long, long way” I thought. “I’ll follow it all the way down to the Great Sea, and I’ll not stop even there.”
My eye fell upon a single figure, walking alone, along the crowded road.
“He’s a Roman soldier,” I thought. “I could tell by the way he was dressed.
How I hate the Romans! If it weren’t for them, we Jews would be free again. Then we wouldn’t have to pay their taxes or obey their laws. I hate them all!”
I stared at the Roman soldier who was almost opposite me now in the road. Suddenly, the soldier stopped. He shifted the heavy pack he carried and eased it down to the ground. Then he straightened up again and stood resting a moment. I still stared at him, thinking angry thoughts. Then, just as the soldier turned to pick up his pack once more, he noticed me standing not far off.
“Hey, boy!” he called. “Come here!”
I wanted to turn and run, but I stood frozen in my tracks.
No one dared to disobey one of the soldiers of Rome.
I went nearer, slowly. The soldier motioned to his pack.
“You will carry it for me,” he said.
I knew that there was no help for me now. I knew the hated Roman law.
Any Roman soldier could make any Jewish boy or man carry his load for him in any direction he was traveling for one mile. “But only for one mile!” I thought, angrily, as I unwillingly lifted the pack. (lift pack)
The soldier had already turned away and had started on along the road.
He did not even bother to look back to see that I was following him.
He knew that I would not dare do anything else.
So, I followed. The pack was heavy, but I was a strong young lad.
We walked and walked, and in each step I took, I might have gotten a little weary, but mostly in each step I got angrier and angrier. I wanted to throw the soldier’s pack down in the dirt and stomp on it. I wanted to shout and rage at that hated Roman soldier striding easily ahead of him.
But I could do nothing except follow along, keeping my bitter thoughts to himself. “Just one mile. He can’t make me go a step further. Only one mile.” The words made sort of song in my mind in time to my steps. One mile, 1 mile.
Then, as I plodded along, I suddenly remembered another day when I had walked along this very same road. One day I had gone out a little way from the city with some of my friends, to find a young teacher whom we had heard about. We had found him out on a hillside among a large crowd of people.
I had stopped with the others to listen to him.
“What made me think of him now?” I wondered with one part of my mind. Another part was still repeating over and over, “One-mile-one-mile-one-mile-“
“Of course,” I remembered suddenly. “Jesus used those very same words.
What was it? He said about one mile?” I walked on frowning for a moment before I could remember. Then I said the words to myself. “Whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him two.” That was what He said!
I had not paid very much attention to it at the time. I remembered then other things this prophet had said. “Love your enemies.” “Do good to those that hate you.” Then once more I found himself repeating the strangest of them all, “Whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him two.”
“Does he mean–could he mean–like, now?” I puzzled. “But why? Why should I go more than one mile?”
I was so busy thinking that I did not notice that the soldier had stopped, and so I almost ran into him. “You have come one mile,” said the soldier. “Give the pack to me.” But somehow, I found myself exclaiming, “I will go on.” I did not know why I said it. I continued, “It has not been far, and I am not tired.”
The Roman soldier stared at me in surprise, and for the first time I really looked into his face. I saw that the soldier was very young. I saw, too, that he was very, very tired, in spite of the straight soldierly way in which he stood.
“You have come a long way,” I said.
“Yes,” said the soldier, “a weary way of many miles.”
“Have you far to go?”
“I go to Rome.”
“So far!” I said. “Then let me carry your pack for another mile.
“You are very kind,” said the soldier, & his face was full of surprise. Okay.
So we went on, only now, the Roman soldier waited for me, and walked beside me along the road. And suddenly, I found himself talking to the soldier as if we had known each other for a long time, and he told him all about his home and his family. And I listened while the soldier talked of his travels in faraway places. We were so busy talking that the distance seemed very short.
We talked about growing up learning the sling shot, and a game with stones?
“Tell me, said the soldier at last, “why did you offer to come this second mile?”
I hesitated. “I hardly know, “I said. “It must have been what the Master said, I think.” Then I told the soldier all that happened out on the hill and all that he could remember of the Jesus’s teaching.
“Strange,” said the soldier thoughtfully. “Love your enemies. Do good to those that hate you. That’s a hard teaching. I should like to know this Jesus.”
They had come now to the top of a hill and the end of the second mile.
I looked back along the road toward my home.
“I must go back,” I said. “The hour is late, and my parents will wonder where I have gone.”
The soldier took his pack and shouldered it again. The two clasped hands. “Farewell, friend,” said the soldier.
“Farewell, friend,” I answered, smiling up into the soldier’s eyes. Then we parted.
As I strode back along the road, the words of the Jesus kept running through my mind: “Whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him two.” And as I repeated the words I found myself adding, with a strange, deep joy, “It works! It really works!”
Folks, It’s so very true!
I walked one mile with an enemy — I walked the second mile with a friend.”
Goodbye friends!
Does this work in 2024? Red sox, Yankee game?
Olympics, Ukrainian athletes and Russian?
Israel and Palestinians? How to build a lasting peace.
“This thing is not appropriate in the community we live in,” said Aya Sbeih, a Palestinian member of the group that was meeting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Combatants for Peace. “So I keep it a secret.”
Since the war began, support has increased “for hard-line positions of violence, and you can see that in both Israeli and Palestinian society,” said John Lyndon, the executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, an organization of peace groups.
MNP: Ukrainian word for peace, Russia MIR
Ukrainian pacifist movement. Small group,
Russian, tens of thousands protested & arrested. but now only a handful.