|
Is Robin Hood Saved?
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 21, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 22:1-9 Matthew 19:16-26
“You’ll never learn anything of value from those bearded idiots,” said the widower to his young son in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. “You asked about sin and I want to tell you. Are you listening?” “Yes, Baba jan,” the Afghani child muttered. “No matter what the Mullah teaches (the Mullah had taught Amir that his father would be made to answer on Judgment Day for the scotch he was sipping as they talked), there is one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand?” “No, Baba jan,” said the boy wishing he did. “‘When you kill a man, you steal a life,’ Baba said. ‘You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. If there’s a God out there, then I would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork. Now hop down. All this talk about sin has made me thirsty again.” Thou shalt not steal. The meaning of the verb is clear: “to take from another and to do so by stealth”. Yet with no definite object [Thou shalt not steal what?], the trajectory of this command is, as Baba suggests to his young son, expansive… So expansive that when we ask of this commandment what we have asked of the others—For what does God’s command set us free?—the answer comes back in the eighth place: For freedom itself! Do you understand this? “No” we say with our lives bound to our belongings. To understand we first must trace the commandment’s trajectory: from the boundaries of human ownership decreed in the wake of Moses’ descent from Sinai to the boundless redemption promised the thief crucified at Jesus’ right hand on Golgotha and finally back to the rich young man whose sorrowful turn becomes the occasion to remember, as we turn as well, that with God all things are possible Before we go any further, however, the commandment requires a caveat which goes something like is this: in order for stealing to be a sin, ownership must be built into the fabric of our common life. One steals that which belongs to another. Yet in the light of God’s providence [God’s providing for all of God’s creatures], we must ask “Ownership to what end and within what limits?” How are we to discern God’s purpose in our possessions? How are we to behave in relation to the things which belong to us? Luther was astoundingly current in his answer to these questions. “If all who are thieves, though they are unwilling to admit it, were hanged on the gallows, the world would soon be empty and there would be a shortage of both hangmen and gallows.” Even at the close of the Middle Ages, Brother Martin was wise to white collar crime! “At the market and in everyday business,” he wrote, “fraud prevails in full force. One person openly cheats another with defective merchandise, false measures, dishonest weights, bad coins, and takes advantage of him by underhanded tricks…These are called gentleman swindlers…they sit in office chairs and are called…good citizens, and yet with a great show of legality they rob and steal.” Enron must have had an office in Erfurt! “Daily the poor are being defrauded,” Luther continues. “New burdens and high prices are imposed. Everyone misuses the market in his own willful, conceited, arrogant way as if it were his right and privilege to sell his goods as dearly as he pleases without a word of criticism.” He could have written this for today’s op ed page in the New York Times or Philadelphia Inquirer! So the caveat is this: when it comes to ownership of property and stealing from the perspective of the God to whom heaven and earth belong, from the perspective of the God who has made us stewards of this good creation, “goods may be owned soli Deo gloria.” We are stewards to whom things belong in trust for the God who would have none go hungry or homeless or live in a need that another had the means to meet. Suddenly the trajectory of the commandment has come too close for comfort; the noose swinging on the gallows hangs dangerously low and close to our necks! Now we are ready to attend to the problem of the sin this commandment addresses. “Sin,” writes Paul Lehmann of the eighth commandment, “is the transgression of the limit set for us in the world by God the Creator, the consequence of which is a struggle over sovereignty that effectively prevents us from discerning what really belongs to whom and from living accordingly.” That limit was first set in the Deuteronomic Code and the Book of the Covenant. Verse after verse offers up an object for God’s eighth command. Thou shalt not steal…an ox, a sheep, a donkey, leave a field or vine grazed over with nothing left for the widow or the orphan, start a fire in a stack of grain, take money or goods. Yet the heart of the matter has to do not with the object pinched, but with what is thereby taken from a person’s life. What is stolen, in each case, is a person’s livelihood. This is “not a matter of general property rights,” says Patrick Miller, “but of what human beings, a family, need for support, need in order to provide food and clothing.” Suddenly we are not talking about the man who drove off in my new Volvo station wagon the day after I moved to Philadelphia or the person who broke into your home to lift your grandmother’s pearls. We are talking about the just ordering of a society where all may thrive: talking about minimum wages, public education, adequate and available health care, in sum if not in fact, about a modicum of social security! Now, my father would say, I have gone from preaching to meddling! But the Deuteronomic Code goes even farther, forbidding by this command “passivity and inaction”: you may not withhold your help in the face of a neighbor’s economic endangerment and keep this commandment! The commandment requires “an imaginative entry into the interests of others” [a.k.a. Robin Hood!] and so a watchfulness over the least of these that cannot be accomplished, says Miller, by hiding “behind gated communities” or by “the walling-off, literally or figuratively, of the ghettos of the economically endangered.” Still, the heart of the matter awaits us and again it is the Deuteronomist who puts before our lives the commandment’s foundational claim, a claim that had its origin in the selling of Joseph into slavery and in God’s subsequent freeing of the Hebrew people from the yoke of Pharaoh. The commandment forbids the stealing of a person and so the stealing of a person’s freedom. “What profit is it if we kill our brother?” asks Judah. “Come, let us sell him [into slavery].” And whereas the other objects of this commandment required restitution be paid, “If someone is caught stealing the nephesh, the life, of his brother/sister, enslaving or selling him or her, that thief shall die”: in Exodus, theft of livelihood and now in Deuteronomy, the theft of life, of freedom, of the human destiny intended by the God who has destined us all, in Jesus Christ, for life abundantly lived! So in the second place we turn from sin to redemption, from the Old Testament to the New, from Moses to Jesus, from Sinai to Golgotha. Not counting equality with God a thing that belonged to him but emptying himself and taking the form of a slave, Jesus’ death on a cross reveals God’s life both stolen by us and, in the same last breath, laid down for us. On the one hand, the hand that is ours and bloodied, we would take him still into our custody, domesticate his commands, market the gospel to serve our ideologies; which is to say, we would steal the life we are given in him for our own ends and so crucify him. On the other hand, the redemptive hand of the God who has come to us in the flesh to set our flesh free, we are forgiven precisely this—our thievery. Never before had I paid attention to the particular commandment broken by the men who were crucified, one to Jesus’ left and one to his right, outside the city walls. Not between two adulterers or two idolaters or two liars or two murderers, but between two thieves he died. No doubt the Roman laws read differently from the laws of restitution read to the Israelites in the wilderness. Still, the one theft punishable by death according to Moses is the theft of a person, a life, a God-given destiny. These thieves who had stolen another’s life or livelihood, and so freedom and destiny, were dying next to a slave whose life death finally could not steal, could not own, could not posses because in life and in death he belonged—and so we belong through him—to God alone. “There is one sin, only one,” said Baba, “and that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand?” After tracing this commandment’s trajectory, we who stand beneath his cross understand only this: we are thieves deserving of death who, by grace, will be remembered not as the sinners that we are, but as the children of God we are destined to be eternally in him. “Remember me,” we say half afraid that he will. “Truly,” he says to our utter amazement, “today you will be with me in Paradise.” But today you and I have still to face our death, to make a living, to work out our salvation with fear the trembling. It is the interim, says Paul Lehmann, “during which the justified strive to make their calling and election sure.” So with the rich young ruler we cannot help but inquire, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”--all the while hoping to receive a little cheap grace in these days of rising gas prices. “If you wish to enter into life,” said Jesus in response, “keep the commandments.” “Which ones?” we ask so that we may mention how we have kept them all. “You shall not murder,” begins Jesus. “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and your mother; also You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” “I have kept all these,” we say to Jesus with a straight face. And though Jesus could have called our bluff on any one of the commandments, he calls our bluff on the eighth, calls us on the possessions that possess us, on the bondage that keeps us from the freedom God commands, on the things we own whose proper use we have forgotten, on our theft. Thieves we are, in the light of his countenance, thieves who do not know how to pick a lock nor have we the brains to break and enter; we have neither the stomach to shop-lift nor an eye for identity theft! Yet we will go away sorrowful to our gated communities, unaware of the destinies we have stolen by our politics and the livelihoods that have been foreclosed by our neglect of another’s need. So far so good, we say to Jesus and mean it: we have kept the commandments! And we have except for one, the one whose trajectory encompasses all the rest. From that one he is doing his best, this side of the grave, to set us free. Sell all you possess, he says, give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me. “Who can be saved?” we joke as we turn toward home. “Robin Hood?” Thanks be to God that for God, all things are possible! Amen. |