When I was in my second year of
Seminary, training to become a minister, one of the biggest surprises of my
life was to see Zeb Osborne walk up the front steps and start attending
classes. I had met Zeb Osborne a couple
of years earlier. Before I entered the
ministry, I worked with the South Carolina Department of Corrections as a
counselor, working with the inmates. And
Zeb Osborne was one of those inmates.
Zeb was once described as the
"meanest man in South Carolina prisons." He was an impressive person, physically,
because he had no nose. Someone had
bitten it off in a fight in the prison cafeteria.
But Zeb had experienced a
conversion, and unlike many jail house conversions, Zeb's experience was
real. He eventually got out of prison
and went to seminary, and from there started a prison ministry that is continues
to be well respected in South Carolina.
I invited Zeb to come to a
church I served several years ago to be our revival preacher. When I suggested his name to the Session,
there were some concerns. After all,
that church was in South Carolina, and a few of the people knew who Zeb Osborne
was. Naturally, some were still
concerned that his conversion had not been real, but was a hoax to help him get
a parole. Others worried about what
might happen and what Zeb might do.
"Suppose someone loses
some money and they want to blame Zeb," someone asked.
Another was more direct,
"Suppose we catch Zeb stealing the money?"
One of the members of the
Session, aware of Zeb's police record, tried to reassure the other elders, but failed
to select carefully his words. "I
don't see why you worry about every little thing. Zeb's not going to steal anything. Zeb was not in prison for stealing. He was in prison for killing a man."
Needless to say, that did not
comfort anyone. But I share that story
because it illustrates how we in our society feel toward someone who would
steal. We have a low regard for
them. And once they steal, we don't ever
trust them again. Or if we do trust
them, it is because they have done what Zeb Osborne has done, making a dramatic
and complete turn around from the life style of stealing. We feel this way because most of us at one
time in our lives have been the victim of someone who has violated this
commandment, "Thou shalt not steal."
We have returned home from
vacation to find an open door, or a broken window, and grandmother's silver is
gone, the TV is missing, or the computer has vanished. Or we have stepped into our car to find
someone has stolen our anti-theft device.
Many of us, at one time or
other, have felt the anger, the helpless frustration, the feeling of being
violated that comes from being the victim of someone who broke the commandment,
"thou shalt not steal."
And if we have not had the
misfortune of being the victim, we certainly know what it is like to live in
FEAR of becoming a target of some nameless thief. We lock our odors and windows, we buy
elaborate alarm systems, we buy a gun, and still at night when we wake up at
3:00 in the morning we are like children in our fears. We listen carefully at the silence, trying to
find out if the noise that woke us up was the noise of someone opening the door
or window.
Or course, if we listen
carefully to what we have said this morning, we are always the VICTIMS of
stealing. We are never the guilty
ones. It is the Zed Osbornes of the
world who steal, not us. It is the man
whose face is covered by a mask, who enters a store with a gun, whose only
identifying mark is an obscene tattoo on his forearm. It is the nameless, faceless persons who come
in the darkness and steals from our home. It is the teenager who has been hanging
around the wrong crowd, or the old man who knows no other way of life. But it is NEVER US. WE would never steal.
And
I would like to think that none of my parishioners would ever steal anything.
But
then I came across this interesting statistic.
According
to shoplifting prevention groups, an
estimated 27 million Americans shoplift each year, or one in 11
people. Wow – that means that if we are
a representation of America, about ten people in our first worship service and
about 30 in our second service people here have shoplifted something.
Tax time is coming up, and most Americans pay
their taxes and are honest about it.
However, studies have shown that 17% purposefully under-report their
income to the IRS.
You shall not steal – maybe we are not so
innocent after all. Maybe we need to
ponder our guilt in this area and consider how to come clean.
In fact, if one does to this commandment
what Jesus
does to most of the commandments,
which is to broaden their meaning,
then we may find that 100% of us are somehow
guilty of violating this commandment.
Remember when we were talking about the
commandment, you shall not kill –
Jesus applied that to even having hate or anger
in one’s heart as committing murder.
And when we were talking about adultery--
Jesus said that even lust within one’s heart is
tantamount to committing adultery.
And so what of stealing?
How innocent are we?
Tax time is coming – how honest will we be?
Have we paid our student loans? Just a few days ago a man in Houston Texas
was arrested by SEVEN U.S. Marshalls. He
had neglected to pay $1,500 of a school loan he took out in 1987. School loans are a heavy debt, but there are
ways to legally deal with that burden if it cannot be paid. Paul said in Romans, “Let no debt remain
outstanding.” To simply refuse to pay or
even show up in court to address the issue is to steal.
Have we taken someone’s idea and claimed them
as our own. It might be a student plagiarizing
at school, or someone in the work place taking a coworker’s idea to the boss
and presenting it as his or her own.
Any time we are taking something that has not
been rightfully given to us, or that we have not rightfully earned, we are
stealing.
John Calvin broadened this commandment even one
step further. He said that this
commandment required that we should all be content with our own lot. This is not to say that we cannot set goals
to have better things or nicer homes – but it is to say that until those things
are earned rightly and justly, we are to be content with what we have now, as
we work for something better in the future.
John Calvin and Martin Luther both agreed that
the heart of this commandment about stealing is a matter of trust.
Years
ago I had a parishioner who told that he was having trouble with his son. His son was about 7 or 8 years old and Dad
was noticing that things were disappearing in the house.
Mostly
it was food.
The
unopened box of cereal.
A
loaf of bread.
Cheese.
Donuts.
Quite
by accident, he solved the mystery. He
was cleaning his son’s room and he noticed that the area under his son’s bed
was stuffed with all sorts of things.
Ah
– here was the food that had been stolen.
But
that mystery was replaced with another mystery.
The 8 year old was not hoarding all of the food for himself. He was taking it to his room and then
distributing it to his younger brother and sister.
As
I listened to this story, I thought I knew what might be going on here. This couple had taken three siblings into
their family as foster kids. Eventually,
they adopted these children.
Being
in foster care, going from one home to another, these kids sometimes did not
know if they were going to be properly fed or not. It had become the older boy’s responsibility
to hide food under his bed so that they would not go to hungry at night.
Now
that they were adopted into this loving family, they were going to have to
learn to trust. And for these kids,
trust was going to take some time to build up and to really take root.
You
shall not steal – at the heart of that commandment is the directive that we are
to trust in God.
When
we steal, it is because we do not trust that God is able, or that God willing,
to provide us with the things we need.
What God would have of us is for us to develop
a trusting attitude, but also a giving attitude rather than a taking attitude.
A thief takes.
A righteous soul both trusts in God, and gives
to others.
In
the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells us, “Give
to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not
demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
The
heart of what Jesus is saying here, and the heart of what this 8th
Commandment is teaching us here, is that we should trust God, and love our
neighbors MORE than we love things.
Copyright
2016.
Dr.
W. Maynard Pittendreigh
All
rights reserved
Ministers
may feel free to use some or all of this sermon in their own ministries as long
as they do not publish in print or on the Internet without ascribing credit to
the author.
