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On a day,
not so long ago that I can't remember it, I made an illegal
left hand turn ... blatantly ... with my wife in the car.
This is the same wife upon whom God once laid the responsibility
of reminding me that I have been granted no immunity from
such things as winter flu, cholesterol in the arteries, the
after effects of burning the candle at both ends, and ordinary
traffic laws.
My only
defense to that wife, on that day, was that that law was stupid.
If anything, I said, left hand turns ought to be encouraged
at that corner, not prohibited. It would improve things 100
percent from the way they are now. Still, it was ... and is
... illegal.
My point
is not to paint myself as one of the world's great transgressors.
I am not. Most every hour of most every day, I am the epitome
of one who colors between the lines. Rather, my point has
to do with how easy it is to circumvent, ignore, or completely
lay aside the basic rules that have been established to govern
human behavior, when we find them not to our liking or convenience.
Which is when we take the law into our own hands ... and heads.
My assumption
was that I ought to be able to turn left, not because I wanted
to (I'm not that immature), but because the rule against it
made no sense ... to me. Of course, I only operate that way
in small things. Other people ... the really great transgressors
... operate that way in big things. But isn't it funny how
the line between small things and big things is always drawn
to the left of what I do, but to the right of what you do.
There
are not a whole lot of people putting in good words for "law"
these days ... given that such talk seems to be confining
and unpleasantly restrictive. I can't recall the last time
I met anyone who "meditates on the delights of the law,
day and night" (Psalm 1) or "believes that the law,
like the sun, brings life to all it touches" (Psalm 19).
We do not see the law as a source of life and light. We see
the law as a necessary nuisance, something we put up with
because, in some sense, we know it is the only thing holding
us back from chaos.
Our attitude
about attorneys betrays the ambivalence we feel about the
role of law in our society. All but gone is the heroic image
once associated with the great titans of the legal profession.
If I were to say the word "shyster" and ask you
to write the first occupation that springs to mind, the majority
of you would write "lawyer." Unfortunately, a few
of you would also write "preacher." Still others
would write "auto mechanic." Once upon a time, you
would have written "salesman."
Lawyers
are the brunt of every joke in which they appear. A man who
loves the law every bit as much as I do, asked if I had heard
about the night the devil appeared in the office of an attorney.
Said the devil to the lawyer: "I have a proposition for
you. You can win every case for the rest of your life. Your
clients will adore you. Your colleagues will stand in awe
of you. You will make embarrassing sums of money. All I want
in exchange is your soul, your wife's soul, your children's
souls, and the souls of your friends and law partners."
The lawyer thought about this for a moment and then asked:
"So, what's the catch?"
I suspect
our laughter says more about us than it says about the practice
of law. An excellent attorney of my acquaintance has learned
to greet such humor with a thick skin. But, sensitive man
that he is, it affects him deeply. For he knows that the mockery
of his profession has less to do with the occasional bad apples
who practice it, than with our declining appreciation of the
law itself, along with our inability to see the law as an
object of beauty (as well as a practical necessity). I suspect
that, without the law, we are but one year removed from rampant
injustice, five years removed from total anarchy, and a scant
decade removed from utter barbarism.
"I
delight in thy statutes," says the Psalmist. And he was
not alone. The Hebrew people saw the law as a great gift.
Rather than crushing the human spirit, they saw the law as
reviving it ... lifting it from the morass of a life devoid
of guidance. Now I know I am jumping back and forth between
law in the religious sense and law in the secular sense, but
stay with me. I'll clean things up soon enough. What I want
you to see is that "law," in the generic sense,
has known a certain reverence in the past, which is in the
process of being lost in the present, to the peril of the
future.
Let me
illustrate. Suppose, in cleaning out your attic this afternoon,
you were to find an old board game in a dusty box. It is a
game much like Monopoly or Parcheesi. But it is not Monopoly
or Parcheesi. It is something less well known, but no less
intriguing. You blow off the cobwebs and bring it downstairs.
The prospect of playing it delights the entire family. For,
in truth, they are bored up to here with Monopoly and Parcheesi.
You open the box and find you are in luck. The game seems
to be intact. The board is there. The pieces are there. The
dice are there. All the necessary cards are there. One thing,
however, is not there. The rules are missing. You try playing
anyway. But nobody is sure what to do ... in what order to
do it ... what the penalties are for doing it incorrectly
... what the ultimate objective is ... and how in the world
anybody wins. Without the rules, nothing is possible beyond
the pointless shuffling of pieces. Let me say that again.
Without the rules, nothing is possible beyond the pointless
shuffling of pieces.
Sometimes
we can't find the rules. Other times we can't agree upon the
rules. As a youngster, I remember any number of occasions
when a board game or card game disintegrated into chaos because
"the way we played the game at our house" was not
the way you played the game at your house. One of the most
volatile fights of my childhood had to do with whether you
could put a house on a Monopoly property anytime it became
your turn, or whether you had to wait until you landed on
that property as a result of tossing the dice. I can't remember
which side I argued. I can't even remember the proper interpretation
of the rule. All I can remember is that I never played Monopoly
with Tommy Teeter again.
Beyond
some basic agreement about which rules apply, there also needs
to be agreement about how the rules will be interpreted and
enforced. Who will decide? Who will arbitrate? Who will adjudicate?
You probably don't know this, but one of my heroes is A. Bartlett
Giamatti, late beloved teacher, late president of Yale, late
commissioner of baseball. Some of you will remember that it
was Bart Giamatti who went toe to toe with Pete Rose before
throwing him out of baseball. Then he collapsed of a fatal
heart attack on Martha's Vineyard at the tender age of 51.
Giamatti
loved baseball. He felt that the structure of the game was
a paradigm of the human journey in which all of us seek to
break from the box, make a wide turn and get home safely.
At his memorial service, Giamatti's son recalled endless hours
in which his father (clad in a vest, a tie and a Red Sox cap)
pitched them in to him. His son also recalled a word of advice,
forcefully delivered after a Little League argument at first
base (with father admonishing son): "Never curse the
umpire. He's the only one who knows the rules."
It was
Giamatti's contention, you see, that the beauty of the game
... indeed, the very ballet of the game ... required someone
who could define the difference between ball and strike, fair
and foul, safe and out, and who could also articulate the
rules that give the game its structure. For the rules are
to baseball as the law is to life. They are not the game.
But without them, the game has no meaning. Or, as a character
exclaims in Woody Allen's excellent film Crimes and Misdemeanors:
"Without the law, all is darkness."
Only a
good Jew could push this discussion in a profoundly religious
direction. Fortunately, we have one in the person of America's
favorite rabbi, Harold Kushner. One day, in teaching the rudiments
of twentieth century Jewish history, Kushner engaged a group
of teenagers in an extensive discussion of the Holocaust.
It was awful, he said. It was awful, they agreed. And then,
as they were working up a wonderful lather over the awfulness
of it all, he turned on them and asked: "Why was Hitler
wrong?"
Someone
shouted: "Why was he wrong? You can't just take people
out and kill them because you don't like them."
"But
remember," the rabbi responded, "the Nazis were
careful to pass laws sanctioning everything they did. Much
of it was well within the law. The atrocities were not necessarily
illegalities. What, then, made them wrong?"
It was,
of course, a marvelous teaching technique. For in describing
the subversion of ordinary German law so that it was no longer
able to protect the lives of millions of Jews, the rabbi was
forcing his students to come to grips with the deeper foundations
of human morality. For if Hitler operated within the established
structures of German jurisprudence, precisely what law ...
or whose law ... did he violate? And if he violated no law,
in what sense was he wrong?
Some would
argue there is a moral foundation undergirding such things,
but are shy about naming it. Edmund Cahn, former law professor
at New York University, suggests that there is something akin
to "a universal sense of injustice." We may not
be able to define it, he argues, but we all recognize it when
we see it.
Charles
Darwin hinted at the same thing. In response to the question,
"Is there anything that is true only of man," he
answered: "Man is the only animal that blushes."
And what does it mean to blush? It means that there is an
innate capacity for embarrassment. And what is "an innate
capacity for embarrassment," if not an internal awareness
that one is falling short of expected standards of behavior
and deportment? Consider Adam and Eve. When the Bible says
that "their eyes were opened and they knew they were
naked," who told them they were naked? I think we are
talking about the world's first blush, as recorded in the
world's first story.
But biblical
religion goes beyond all this. Biblical religion argues that
Hitler was wrong ... and human beings blush ... not simply
because of conscience, not simply because of culture, not
simply because of a vague consensus that we "know wrong
when we see it," but because there is a God who holds
certain expectations concerning what we will do ... what we
will refrain from doing ... and how we will treat each other
in the process. Biblical religion allows us ample latitude
to define "the sweet life." But biblical religion
maintains that God, alone, has the prerogative to define "the
good life." Our moral compass is never the product of
public consensus ... no matter how overwhelming the consensus,
nor how informed the public. Our mothers had a much simpler
way of putting it. For they reminded us (ad nauseum): "You
will not do what everybody else does, simply because everybody
else is doing it."
Our morality
is rooted in nothing less than the expectations of a God who
is not afraid to make moral demands upon us, and has built
certain moral structures into us ... to the degree that violating
them with impunity will cause us to fall.
Which
brings me to President Clinton ... about whose year-long travail
I have already said three sermonic words (not whole sermons,
mind you, but slices of sermons, where theme and text seemed
to permit, even warrant). And on three other occasions, I
have interrupted the printed flow of the service to lead us
in intercessory prayer for everyone involved. Some of you
have proclaimed my efforts to be "just about right."
Of late, however, others of you have chided me for not saying
enough. To a person, everyone who has asked for something
"more" has asked for something "harder"
(you interpret the words "more" and "harder"
however you like).
As to
whether we are nearing the end of this ordeal, who can say?
Certainly not me. It is hard to believe that over a year has
passed since we first heard the name "Monica." "It
feels," says James Wall, "more like a decade since
we entered this Slough of Despond" ... which (as you
John Bunyan fans will remember) was one of the tougher ports
of call in Pilgrim's Progress ... and which also included
the Valley of Humiliation, another location all-too-familiar
to all-too-many in this seedy scenario.
One reason
for parceling my words is not the politics involved, but my
fear of adding to what has already become an overkill of voices.
Yet, pastoral conversations keep putting me in the middle
... certainly weekly, if not daily. A government teacher calls
to talk about his Christian understanding of "principle"
and his academic understanding of "process" ...
lamenting his inability to reconcile the two. While another
good friend and church member, happily headed for next Thursday's
National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., calls to talk
about what he should do with his hands when the President
enters and they play "Hail to the Chief."
Those,
like many others, were good discussions. But since they were
private ones, I shall not replay them here. But, in keeping
with our text ... and my premise (about the moral expectations
of God) ... let me (in the words of another troubled and tumbled
president) be perfectly clear. Concerning those things with
which the President has been charged ... including those to
which he has already admitted:
All
of them may be rationalizable
A few
of them may be explainable
But
none of them is justifiable.
In the
eyes of the church, these things are morally wrong and spiritually
bankrupt. And concerning God's opinion:
There
are no presidents in the Bible. No democracies, either. But
there are kings. Lots of kings. Some of them, called by God.
Some of them, permitted by God. Some of them, endured by God.
In my search of God's dealings with them, he consistently
held them to a higher line than those below them ... placing,
in the mouths of priests and prophets, harsh words for those
who fell down or fouled up. So much for the argument that
we should lower the bar for the leader, because the bar has
already been lowered by everybody else.
Now, as
to whether he should be deposed as well as denounced, on that
the Bible is less clear. Some kings were found wanting and
sent packing. Others were not. Of the ones who stayed, some
were redeemed ... some were overthrown eventually ... and
some reigned until death. While a few, like Cyrus of Persia,
were used as instruments of God's will in spite of their wicked
ways. As concerns the outcome of President Clinton's trial
(be it conviction, censure, acquittal or finding-of-fact),
I know what I might like. But I do not know what God might
say.
Were it
I (in the President's place), we wouldn't be here today. For
I would be gone ... with a resignation that expressed repentance,
sought forgiveness and offered restitution. I would have resigned
in an effort to salvage whatever remained of my integrity
and I would have tendered that resignation as a gift to the
church (or, in Bill's case, the nation). But he has not chosen
that route. The route he has chosen is championed by some
as a marvelous act of perseverance (which it surely is), and
by others as the ultimate act of arrogance (which it also
is). I tilt toward the latter, finding myself unable to fathom
the idea that only I could (and, therefore, should) lead this
church ... or this nation.
But my
call is not his call. And so I trust the process. Which some
would like to lengthen, while others would like to shorten.
But this impeachment process ... at whatever length ... is
the present rule of law. And it may ... just may ... be the
gift of God.
Like the
rules to the game in the attic, now that we've found them,
they're old ... they're rusty ... they're badly in need of
revision ... and more than a little archaic. But they're what
we have. And while few would call them "a delight"
(Psalm 1), they are steering us through the Valley of Anarchy.
Which
brings me to the need for a grace-full exit. Every time I
talk about a God who might conceivably expect something ...
let alone demand something ... of us, some of you begin to
squirm. I think it's performance anxiety. "Don't tell
us about that God," you say. "Tell us about the
graceful God ... the merciful God ... the God who forgives
and forgives, and then forgives some more. You describe that
God so well, Billy. Keep doing it."
And you're
right. I do ... describe that God, so well. And I will ...
keep doing it, that is. But it has occurred to me that God's
forgiveness has absolutely no meaning until there has first
been a quarrel with God. And there can be no quarrel without
an acknowledgment that God might have good reason to be hacked
off, given the measurements He sets and the marks we achieve.
What's
more, I think that deep inside, all of us want to face the
force of God's expectations. We want to be taken seriously.
We want to feel that our work, our decisions, our choices
... even our failings ... matter at the highest level.
Let the
rabbi put a wrap on this with one last remembrance:
My grandfather
was a house painter in Lithuania, eking out a modest living.
But in addition to his public life as a painter, he had
a secret identity. My grandfather was one of God's agents
on earth, maintaining literacy and kindness in a sea of
ignorance and cruelty. His days, his every act, became important,
because he believed it mattered to God what he ate ... where
he went ... what he read ... how he earned and spent his
money ... how he respected his wife ... how he treated his
children ... and how he acknowledged his neighbors. That
sense of having to live up to God's standards redeemed my
grandfather's life from anonymity and insignificance. And
it can do the same for us.
Sad to
say, that Lithuanian can never be elected President. But all
of us can offer a daily prayer that his tribe may increase.
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