St.
Paul’s United Church Sunday,
September 25, 2005
The Rules of the Road – Rev. David Mundy
Exodus
20:1-20 Matthew
21:23-32
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A lot of us take a sabbath from the news in the summertime but if you
did pay attention you may have noticed that it was not a good summer for the
former CEO’s of several corporations. For a while we
heard about the huge thefts from Enron and Worldcom
and Tyco by the very people who were entrusted to run these companies wisely.
As a result of this greed, thousands of employees lost their jobs and their
pensions. These innocent employees were encouraged to invest in the companies
even though the executives knew they were on the verge of financial collapse.
The shock was so great in America that new laws were enacted to try to ensure
that this sort of theft couldn’t happen again.
The chickens finally came home to
roost for these execs. Several of them were either convicted or sentenced
during the summer months. Even though all this happened in the U.S. the most
notorious of the bunch is a Canadian, or at least a former Canadian named
Bernie Evers.
Evers’ lawyers mounted what ended up
being called the “aw shucks” defence. They argued that their client, Bernie,
was a fairly simple guy who didn’t know much about accounting and really didn’t
understand what was going on in his company, Worldcom.
The judge and jury didn’t buy this claim to innocence. After all it was a ten
billion-dollar scam and even when you aren’t good with money it’s hard to
misplace a few billion. Mr. Evers will now spend many years in prison, where
most of us probably agree he belongs.
One commentator noted that a number
of these infamous defendants were churchgoers and avowed born-again Christians.
The writer, a Christian himself, wondered how they could have engaged in what
they had to know was illegal activity which did have such a negative effect on the lives of so many. He answered his own question
with the speculation that their “brand” of Christianity with its emphasis on
the forgiving, saving love of Christ let them “off the hook” in their own
minds. Then he said that they forgot that the life of faith has moral and
ethical implications that could have guided them past the greed. There is a
popular billboard in the U.S. which says “What part of ‘thou shalt not’ don’t you understand?” Apparently Mr Evers
and the other CEO’s didn’t fill in the word “steal”
at the end of “thou shalt not.”
We have a moral and ethical code and
we heard it this morning in the form of the Ten Commandments. Perhaps two
thousand years before Jesus walked this earth these ethical “do’s and
don’ts” became part of the fabric of society for a people on the move. The
people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt but they aren’t going to be slaves
anymore. They are on their way to the Promised Land. Except that there are many different ways of
being enslaved and so they receive this solid, substantial code for living
which they believe is a gift from God.
Do these commandments still apply?
After all we live in a very different world and every effort is made to push
the commandments into the background. You may be aware of the huge fuss in the
U.S. over the public display of the Ten Commandments and the rather odd ruling
by the Supreme Court that they can be visible in public places if the understanding
is that they are historical rather than for current application. In other
words, it’s okay to have them on the wall as long as you don’t actually take
them to heart!
While
we aren’t wandering on foot through a wilderness we do lead very fast-paced
lives that need some rules for the road, don’t we? Most churches don’t display the Ten
Commandments but the rumour is we still think it’s a good idea to obey them. We
are blowing the dust off the Ten Commandments for our Sunday School.
Last week the children saw a movie on the Ten Commandments and this week they
begin to learn and discuss.
I’m
sure we appreciate that these commandments aren’t just for children. In
fact commandments are deceptive in their simplicity. When we take time to
consider them carefully and prayerfully we begin to see how they do address essential aspects of our daily
living. Chris Hedges has written a book called Losing Moses on the
Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America. He believes that
The commandments are one of
the earliest attempts to lay down rules and guidelines to sustain community.
The commandments include the most severe violations and moral dilemmas in human
life, although these violations are often beyond the scope of the law. They
were for the ancients, and are for us, the rules that, when honored, hold us
together and when dishonored lead to alienation, discord and violence.
It’s not hard to find high profile examples of
how this is true. We all saw how quickly the veneer of social structure can be
washed away in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Lawlessness and inhumanity
were the second devastating wave in the city of New Orleans. Alongside the folk
who were simply trying to find food there were the looters with shopping carts
full of televisions and DVD players. What were they thinking?
Of course we shake our heads and say
“look what’s happening in America.” Or we can say that
those corrupt CEO’s deserve to go to jail and to have
the keys thrown away. Or we can accept that while these are “cautionary
tales” to which we should pay attention we would do well to pay attention to
what the commandments say to us.
We couldn’t possibly give fair consideration
today to all the commandments this morning, so how about just one? Why not the shortest one. There are two with only four
words. You shall not murder, which the majority of us have been able to
observe, and you shall not steal which we have probably all broken, so lets go with that one.
Even
this commandment is not so simple. I recall another cartoon from a few years ago which showed a father
scolding his son who was been caught stealing pencils from school. That tells
you how old the cartoon is because today the boy would be chastised for
stealing a laptop computer. The boy had his head down before his stern father
and the caption read something like “Don’t you ever steal from school! If
you need pencils I’ll bring some home from work!”
I would never stick a gun in the
face of a bank teller and demand money and I would never shoplift from a store.
I am much more tempted to sit in front of a computer screen and quietly take
someone else’s music by downloading it off the internet. I don’t do this, bye
the way, but it is the sort of theft that appeals to me, and after all,
everybody does it. We might take part in the underground economy, where money
is exchanged without the pesky government knowing. Churches are notoriously bad
for breaking copyright laws, which is the theft of intellectual property.
Suddenly those four words and four
syllables become quite challenging. There are times when I wonder if the
lifestyle my Baby Boom generation has led is a form of theft from my
grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There were verses in today’s reading
that we were actually supposed to leave out because they are rather disturbing,
speaking of the sins of the parents being visited on future generations. Is
that what is happening when we take the earth’s resources and leave nothing for
our kids? I would like to use an “aw shucks” defence, claiming that I didn’t
know I was cooking the ecological books, but that would be false. I’m just
reluctant to change my ways.
Perhaps the hardest part of hearing
the Ten Commandments is that they can seem so restrictive. Most of them are
about what we shouldn’t do, which is never popular. And we don’t really like it
when rules are “carved in stone.”Yet we all learn
that choosing certain restrictions can benefit us. Convincing children to
comply with the law to wear a bicycle helmet properly can seem like more
trouble than its worth, but this regulation has dramatically reduced head
injuries, as helmets have done with motorcycle riders. When we first had a law
about wearing our seatbelts, people griped and complained and wrote letters to
the editor, but deaths in car accidents have been reduced dramatically even as
the population has grown and the number of vehicles on the roads has increased.
Sometimes what seems like an imposition or an intrusion actually makes life
better and fuller.
And ultimately it is the fullness
and abundance of life that we are here for.
This may be why Jesus, who embodied love and the grace of God was careful to say that he didn’t come to discard the
law but to fulfill it. The message to Bernie Evers
and to each one of us is that the rules of the road are still relevant and will
lead us toward abundant life. I’ll
return to Chris Hedges who also comments that
The commandments guide us toward
relationships built on trust rather than fear. Only through trust can there be
love. Those who ignore the commandments diminish the possibility of love, the
single force that keeps us connected, whole and saved from our physical and psychological
torment. A life where the commandments are routinely dishonored becomes a life
of solitude, anger, and remorse . . .
They lead us to love, the essence of life.
Wherever the commandments take us,
it is important to let them become personal, to change and enhance our way of
being. For the first time I noticed that seven of the ten
commandments begin with the same word –“you.” Of course in the King
James version it is “thou” but it is essentially the
same thing. It doesn’t allow us to push them very far away. The commandments
could say that murder is a crime and stealing is a punishable offense and adultery violates marriage vows. They expect more of us
than that. And if I take these prohibitions and put them in the first person
then I shouldn’t create idols and I shouldn’t
slander my neighbour and I shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to
me.
Last Sunday I invited everyone to
read the Ten Commandments in preparation for today’s service, which I imagine
you all dutifully did! This morning I will encourage you to revisit the rules
for the road and ask how they might apply to you and how they will lead to a
fuller life. You may see more clearly where you need to change your ways or
make restitution or seek forgiveness.
We can all be encouraged that Christ
will travel with us as we learn the rules of the road.
