First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Michigan
January 31, 1999
Scriptures: Psalm 1, Matthew 5:17-20
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:
· He calls it sin
· He deems it wrong
· And He judges it harshly.
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 acknowledgement 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.
