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Pat once gave me a cartoon that
showed a man one would assume to be Moses, since he was
standing on a mountaintop with two stone tablets. He was
looking up at the sky and saying, “Of course, you realize it
will need to be voted on by the membership.”
We do not like to be told what
we cannot do. You have noticed that, haven’t you? Has anyone
ever got paint on your finger after reading a sign that
said, “Wet Paint: Do Not Touch”? I rest my case.
Some time ago, Reader’s
Digest carried a story about a couple touring a large,
restored mansion in Florida. In the exquisitely furnished
master bedroom, they were surprised to see signs on the
bedspread and curtains reading, “WASH HANDS IMMEDIATELY
AFTER TOUCHING.” They admired the furnishings from a safe
distance, but on leaving, they decided to ask the guard if
the fabric had been treated with some harmful preserving
chemical.
The guard replied, “Oh, no,
ma’am. There’s nothing on ’em. We just never did have much
luck with the ‘Do Not Touch’ signs.” Neither has God.
It is the “Do Not” that gets us,
isn’t it? That is the way it all started, remember? Adam and
Eve in the Garden with all that fruit to eat and one
tree they were told to leave alone. And which one did they
head for?
I grant you that negatives can
get ridiculous, and even ludicrous at times. In Bible study
classes we sometimes look at the extremes that things had
come to in Jesus’ day, but we don’t have to go there. We can
give them a run for the money. Every now and then you can
find a list of the negatives that some legislature has felt
they needed to vote into place. How about these examples:
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In New York City, you are
not allowed to open an umbrella in front of a horse.
(Actually, that one probably makes a great deal of sense
to the riders of the horses.)
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In Natome, Kansas, it is
illegal to practice knife throwing at someone wearing a
striped suit. (Don’t ask!)
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In the Pine Island District
of Minnesota, a man must tip his hat when passing a cow.
(The dairy lobby has obviously been busy there.)
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There is a Michigan law that
prohibits hitching a crocodile to a fire hydrant. (It
must be all those people coming back from Florida.).
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When we were in Fairbanks,
Alaska, we heard of a law that said it was illegal for a
moose to walk on the sidewalk.
With a bit of research, one
could go on like this for a long time. With a bit of
research you can trace most of those negatives back to
reasoning that, to use an expression I have found a great
deal of use for: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
As contradictory as it may
sound, I would suggest that there is a connection between
our profusion of laws and our dislike of them. Would you
consider that the root of our problem lies in our resistance
to the rules for living that were given on Sinai; that is,
because we have resisted those basic guidelines for life, we
have had to resort to the multiplicity of legalisms to save
us from each other and from ourselves.
Let me be clear that I affirm
that you cannot live the Christian life on the basis of what
you don’t do. Christian living is very much about
doing—doing the right thing. But I invite you to
consider that the Commandments were not given as restrictive
rules dreamed up by a God who simply wanted to complicate
our lives or have something for which to blame us. So, you
say, if we need a list, why not just a list of things to
do? Jesus did offer that as a summary, after all: “Love
the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength,
and your neighbor as yourself.” Aside from the fact that
humanity has no better record on observing that summary than
it does on the longer version, some things just seem to need
the negative to communicate properly. Think about it.
One of the exercises that we
have tried in Disciple classes over the years has been to
rewrite the Ten Commandments in positive form. Some of them
seem to come out reasonably well, but for the most part, for
some reason, it seems to weaken them. Try it for yourself.
They seem to lose something of their imperative.
One day when I was serving in
the Marine Corps in Korea, we were moving along a narrow
road toward some distant mountains. Suddenly there was an
explosion near the front of the column. There had been no
scream of artillery shell, no flutter of an incoming mortar
fire. Some Marines started to get off the road and take
cover when a second explosion went off. On the heels of that
one, someone shouted, “Mine field! Don’t anyone move! Don’t
leave the path!”
We had a new, rather green
lieutenant leading the column that day who evidently didn’t
do very well in his map reading class. At the trail junction
a little ways back, we had turned left. We evidently should
have turned right.
The orders that came to us
during those next few moments were almost entirely negative.
“Don’t leave the path!” “Don’t step on or sit on or pick up
any rocks!” “Don’t touch anything on the side of the road.”
Negatives. But the impact of those negative orders in the
lives of that company of Marines was very positive! We made
it out without any other casualties.
That is the spirit in which we
need to hear these words that came to Moses on the mountain.
They are rules that are meant for our health and well being;
they are not just a list of things not to do, given to annoy
us or cause us inconvenience. They were, and they are, words
of life. Ignore them and we risk disaster.
During the investigation that
followed the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, an
engineer at Morton Thiokol testified that he advised his
superiors that weather conditions at Cape Kennedy were too
cold to guarantee the safety of the spacecraft’s O-ring
sealants. He told them they should not proceed with the
launch. Management pressed for more specifics. How cold was
too cold? Forty degrees? Thirty-seven degrees? Could they
launch at forty-one degrees? The engineer resisted pinning
down an exact temperature that was dangerous. He said that
he couldn’t be that precise because he hadn’t run those kind
of tests.
The man used an interesting
expression to try to tell them his concerns. All he could
tell them, he said, was that the weather predicted for
launching time was “away from goodness.” He said that what
he knew about the O-rings and the proposed launch during
cold weather didn’t “fit.” But because he couldn’t describe
this lack of fit any better than it being “away from
goodness,” his warnings went unheeded. (Robert H. Waterman,
Jr., The Renewal Factor, New York: Bantam Books,
1987, p. 50, reported in Seven World Publications)
The negatives in the
commandments are a bit like that. They may not spell out all
the problems or give details of all the consequences, but
they warn us about a path that leads “away from goodness.”
Disaster comes because the paths those “Noes” warn us about
lead to danger. We need these warnings the same way children
need to learn not to run into the street, not to play with
fire, not to swim in the ocean when the rip tides are
running.
You can go down the line with
this list of negatives and verify that. In his book To My
People With Love, John Killinger tells the story of a
man who was the president of a bank, a leader in his
community and active in his church. But he ignored this law
about covetousness and stealing. Dr. Killinger writes,
He wanted a big house and a
swimming pool. (For his family, no doubt.) He wanted fancy
cars for his children to drive. He began embezzling funds
from his bank. He took only a little at first, for it seemed
a fearful thing to do. But then, when nobody noticed, he
began taking more and more.
When his wife asked him, “Honey,
can we afford such and such?” He would say, “Yes, go ahead
and get it.” And he took more money to cover the cost.
Nine years later, his kingdom
came apart. An investigation was launched, he was tried and
convicted and went to prison. His family lost their home,
his children lost their cars. Their whole world fell apart.
In prison he found the God whose law he had broken. Dr.
Killinger says that he now gives talks to young people about
the dangers of working on their dreams at the expense of
ignoring the warnings found in the laws of God. (John
Killinger, To My People With Love, p. 27-28)
You don’t have to read too many
newspaper headlines to find other examples of the same
lessons. Many of the commandments are stated in the
negative, but obeying them yields positive results.
A few years ago there was a
television series entitled Touched By An Angel. The
story line varied from week to week, but the recurring
theme was the work of a small group of angels trying to
communicate God’s care and save people, usually from
themselves. One of the episodes dealt with one of these
“emotional triangles” that TV is fond of—a man, his wife and
his mistress. But in this story, instead of fixating on
steamy bedroom scenes with people jumping in and out of bed,
it dealt with the wrongness of what was going on.
The mistress in the drama does
not consider herself an evil woman. She has one especially
good line. At one point, says she knew the man had a wife,
but she didn’t know that he was married. Now there is a fine
distinction for you! The angel brings them all together in
one place, and in the dialogue, the unfaithful man says that
he is struggling with that “male syndrome, death complex.”
That is a rephrasing of “mid-life crisis.”
Tess, the angel played by Della
Reese, responds, “That’s what you call it? Well, get over
it!” And then she tells him, “You will recognize
infidelity.” I guess you could call that putting it in the
affirmative.
There is a place for negatives.
Discipline by distraction is not always enough. There comes
a time when you simply need to tell the three year old not
to put kitty in the potty and not just show him (or her) a
new tricycle or a new dolly. The tricycle or the dolly may
not always be handy; and that approach has a way of growing
into larger and more elaborate distractions that can end up
causing more problems than they cure.
We have already noted that the
earliest story in the Bible involved a Divine “No!”
laid upon the man and woman in the garden. I realize that it
is tempting to debunk this story because it does not seem to
fit with evolutionary theories. But friends, the early
stories in the Bible are not so much about science and time
lines as they are about human beings and their relationship
to God and one another. And a great number of those stories
point to the consequences of doing things that we ought not
do.
Understand that the point of
this sermon is not to beat on us for all the things we do
that we shouldn’t. I have no desire to tie us up in some new
or ancient legalism and make our salvation dependent on how
measurably and minutely we keep the law. We have been down
that road before and secular society walks it every day.
Jesus Christ delivers us from that kind of struggle and God
offers us forgiveness. But even the forgiven life has to be
lived in this world, and the point of this sermon is to
remind us that the negatives that God has given help us to
do that. They are not a list of things to avoid because they
make God angry. They are for our good. They are like the
calls to that column of Marines on that path in Korea.
Remember that Outback Steakhouse
sign I referred to in Steeple Notes that started this
line of thinking? “No Rules. Just Right.” At one point I
found myself wondering if it was the food or the slogan that
attracted some of the cars. I thought that was probably just
my preaching genes working overtime. Then, on Friday, I got
an email from Roger and Barbara Timm. They had read the
Steeple Notes article and did a bit of a search on my
behalf. They sent me a link to an article in the St.
Petersburg Times last September. It was an interview
with Nancy Schneid, whom the reporter called “one of the
chief branding officers” of the restaurant chain. It seems
that the slogan originally came from a Tampa ad agency, but
in reflecting on the slogan, Ms. Schneid said:
“No rules, just right” meant you
could have anything any way you liked it, and we would take
care of you. As time evolved, it also meant you could dress
any way you like... “No rules” not only became an external
marketing message but an internal cry, the very core of our
culture, which is that there are no rules to making a
customer happy.
Well, maybe it wasn’t just those
sermon genes after all. It sounds so…so…positive.
Understand, this is not intended as a criticism of the
slogan for the restaurant, for food or dress code. “No
rules, just right” may be fine. But when that becomes an
approach to life, it has a way of getting interpreted as
what is “right” for me. We see the results in the
surveys that report the numbers that see no harm in cheating
on exams; in the work ethic (or lack thereof) in the market
place; in the lawsuits that seem to be focused more on the
depth of the pockets than the responsibility for the action;
in the drivers that go roaring past you while you are
sitting in line for the merging traffic, expecting that
someone up ahead will let them back in.
I say again that I recognize
that we cannot live the Christian life simply on the basis
of what we don’t do. And I agree that we need to live
life in the positive. But sometimes it needs to be a
positive that grows out of recognizing the right negatives.
A few weeks ago, I was on an
errand with three of our grandsons. Exercising a
grandfather’s prerogative in the absence of parents, I asked
if on our way back they would like to stop some place for
ice cream. I had two immediate agreements from Mike and
Chris, the twelve-year-old twins, and a qualified yes from
seven-year-old Benjamin. Ben said, “I can eat non-dairy ice
cream.” Ben has a serious allergy to dairy projects and I
had forgotten that for a moment. Not a problem; we knew a
place that had a non-dairy alternative. And in fact, we
ended up with four non-dairy cones and they were really
good.
I thought Ben had a wonderful
way of expressing his situation in a positive manner. Not “I
can’t eat ice cream” but “I can eat non-dairy ice cream.”
But Ben’s learning to accentuate the positive was rooted in
the reality of his need to recognize a negative. When I
commented on the experience to his parents, his dad said,
“Three late night trips to the emergency ward can be a good
teacher.”
Think of the Commandments as a
teacher. In fact, that is what the Apostle Paul called them.
In his letter to the Galatians, he wrote, “The law was our
schoolmaster to bring us to Christ” (Galatians 3:24).
Think of the commandments like
that, and we discover that non-dairy ice cream is not the
only pretty good stuff. Think of them as a map through a
minefield. And because we know where not to walk, we
can discover the joys in where we are to walk.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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