The Ten Words from
God pt 7
“The River of My
Desires”
By Rev Steven R
Mitchell
Mountain View
United, Aurora, CO 2/01/2015
Based on Exodus
20:15 and Acts 4:32-35 & 5:1-4
This
morning I wish to start off by asking two questions. First question: How many of you think that you have stolen this week? The second
question is: What does the eighth
commandment mean to you (You shall not steal)? [read Acts 5:1-4] I suppose the question for this morning’s
discussion is how we define the act “to steal.”
The majority of the answers giving point toward “personal”, generally
about personal property.
When
I was in First grade, there was a classmate of mine, named Vina Mae. Vina Mae was not like the rest of us
physically or mentally. Because of these
differences Vina Mae often was teased in very unkind ways. When I talked to my mother about this, my
mother explained to me that Vina Mae had had an illness that created these
differences and that it was not nice to make fun of her because it wasn’t her
fault for being the way that she was. My
mother thought she was teaching me a lesson about social behavior, of social
graces, and treating people with courtesy, but she was also teaching me “not to
steal!” If I had joined in with the
larger group of children in making fun of Vina Mae, I would have been guilty of
stealing a part of Vina Mae’s dignity as a human being, as a child of God.
Let
me share another example that is more obvious.
In the corporate world the typical CEO’s salary is directly tied to the
profitability of the company. That seems to make sense to most people, at
least to the stock holders of these companies because they continue to support
this philosophy. In Germany, the COE on
the average earns 21 times as much as the average worker; in Japan, 16 times as
much as the average worker. In 1980, the
CEO’s of U.S. corporations received 42 times the wage of the average
worker. By 1990, the ratio had risen to
85 times the pay of the average worker.
In 2000, it was 531 times greater than the workers whose labor made
their profits possible. It is a sad fact
that lobbyists for these Corporations continue to insist that tax breaks are
needed to secure the profit margins of these wealthiest companies, while
working toward cutting Government spending on welfare programs. Pg 87, The Ten Commandments, Laws of the Heart, by
Sister Joan Chittister
I
chose the reading in Acts as an example of how “you shall not steal” was
understood in the Hebrew mind. In the
act of Ananias secretly withholding, he was not only lying to the community and
to God, but more importantly, in this lie he was stealing from the
community. Why was it stealing? Had Ananias said to the community that when
he sold his property that he was going to keep some of it for himself, he would
not have been stealing. But he had pledged
to give all of the proceeds from the sale to the community. When he secretly kept for himself some of the
proceeds, he broke his commitment to the community and stole from the community
that which was rightfully theirs. (There’s a strong message in stewardship in
that story.)
It seems to be
human nature to be greedy and possessive.
Out of this reality, the Israelites wrote laws, not to protect the rich
from the poor but to protect the poor from being exploited by the rich; Laws
that required the outer portions of a field of grain to be left for the poor to
come and glean. There were laws that
forbid the harvesters from picking up any of the grain that fell from the cart
on the way the store houses, so those who had no access to food would have some
way of finding food to eat. Giving money
to beggars was required, even for the poor, there were requirements to give a
few pennies to the general community once a year so that those worse off than
the poor would have resources to meet basic human needs such as food.
The Hebrew mindset
understood this law as being given to protect the larger community from the
greed of the individual. … this commandment was to protect the common
property of the clan: the water well, the grazing land, the sheep, from being
expropriated by the individual for the sake of personal profit. It is very
much like the understanding of the American Indians having about the ownership
of land and goods. Both the ancient
Hebrew and the American Indian, understood that God was the owner of the earth
and all that comes from the earth and that they were only stewards, caretakers
of God’s property and resources. Pg 87, The Ten Commandments, Laws of the Heart, by
Sister Joan Chittister. Sounds a bit
communal or even communistic doesn’t it.
In fact this understanding flies in the face of consumerism.
In today’s world, we understand this commandment (do
not steal) to be the function of criminal law that protects the property of the
rich from the greed of the poor, where as the understanding of the early
listeners was that this commandment was to protect the poor from the greed of
the rich. To the Israelite, God owned
the land; it had been “loaned” to them for the welfare of all. To deprive any member of the community of
their share, to deprive them of their needs, was to sin against God. 87, The Ten Commandments, Laws of the Heart, by Sister
Joan Chittister
There were no
provisions in the laws about cutting off resources of the poor in order for the
rich to become richer. Yet today, our politicians each fiscal year
are looking for ways to trim social service programs in order to increase our
defense budgets and increase their salaries and health benefits at a time when
much of the country is in economic crisis.
What is wrong with this picture? Who
is stealing from who.
Stealing in the
biblical sense, is not so much a private or personal sin as it is a social sin.
To take what we do not need, to destroy
what is useful to another, to deprive those in the community of their basic
needs is stealing. As stock holders in a
corporation we should be outraged at golden parachute scenarios that come at
the expense of giving it’s laborers adequate shares in the profits, yet we do
nothing.
If we dare say
publically that we want to live a biblical life, then we need to seriously
examine what we do with this commandment of “you shall not steal.” As a culture, we are given time and time
again examples of stealing, some acceptable and some when caught are
criminalized. Corporations have skimmed
off the top of employee’s pension funds, sometimes to the point of bankrupting
those funds, leaving the employee without retirement income – stealing. Presidents do it by siphoning off money from
one project to another without submitting the transaction for the Congressional
approval that is required – stealing. Manufacturers
do it by inflating the size of the product box without increasing the product and
then charging more for it – stealing.
Vendors do it by charging what the traffic will bear rather than what
the item is worth – stealing. Now we are
plagued with elections being stolen by banning voters, losing ballot boxes, and
programming computer voting machines – stealing. Any law written and put into practice that is
for the benefit of the few at the expense of the majority is stealing from the
community.
I asked you at the
beginning of this reflection of how many of you stole this week? I ask you to go home and go over your
expenses and ask yourself once again in private if you have been stealing this
week. Take a look at what it is that you
have been spending your money on, what you buy?
To whom do you give? What don’t you buy? To whom do you not give? By looking at your financial report, you will
know your theology of life. Did you
forgo giving something for personal benefit that would have benefited the
larger community? Did you keep back
monies you promised God so that you could gain some personal item or pleasure? Do you forgo pledging a biblical
understanding of giving a tithe because it means you will not be able to take
one of the four vacations you wish to take?
Stealing comes in
many forms and at many levels. Ananias,
didn’t have to give everything to the community, but he broke his commitment to
the community. Possessing goods and
money is not the sin in “you shall not steal”, but taking advantage of those
who have less, supporting systems that deny people the basic necessities of
life, that is stealing. It’s stealing
from them and it is stealing away our personal humanity a little bit at a
time. As citizens in this country, we
all fall subject to the eighth commandment in the most obscene way, the fact
that we rarely think about or recognize how we are stealing. Amen
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