Eric Lemonholm

August 2, 2009

Off Lectionary – 7^th Commandment

Romans 13:9-10, Exodus 20:15, Matthew 6:19-24

Living Open-Handed

When I was in elementary school, there was a boy named Don[i] in my class.

Now, Don was not a very popular kid, but he was kind and honest, and an active member of his church.

One day, Don found a bunch of cash in an unmarked envelope – over $100.

Back in about 1980, that was quite a bit of money.

Don could have bought himself a fancy new bike.

But Don didn’t keep it.

He brought it to the police, who through the newspaper revealed that the money had been found – but they did not say how much.

An elderly man came forward and knew exactly how much he had lost.  He was very grateful for what Don had done – that money was all he had to pay his bills.

I remember how most of our class was dumbfounded that Don had turned the money in.

If one of us had found it, would we have kept it?

Or would we have been like Don and tried to find the person who had lost it?

If you find a dollar bill, or even a $20 on the street, you will probably not be able to find whoever lost it.

We’ve all found loose change or bills; you find some, you lose some.[ii]

But, Don found a specific amount of money in an envelope, and he did the right thing.

He followed the Golden Rule: Love your neighbor as yourself,” or “Do to others what you would have them do to you.”

He also specifically obeyed the 7^th commandment: “You shall not steal.”

We’ve seen a lot of stealing in the news lately.

Bernie Madoff comes to mind; so does Tom Petters, and all the people who made millions in the financial industry while causing others to lose their life savings.

But we break this commandment more often in small ways.

Here is Luther’s explanation of this commandment from the Catechism: “What is this? We must fear and love God so that we will neither take our neighbor’s money or property, nor acquire it by fraud or by selling him poorly made products, but will help him improve and protect his property and career.”

One may steal by actually taking something that belongs to someone else.

One may also steal by selling someone shoddy workmanship.

One may steal from one’s employer by stealing time: sloughing off when one is getting paid to work.

One may steal from another by failing to help them when they need help.

That is especially how we steal from the poor: by denying them a hand up when they need one.

The poor understand this well: in my experience, if a poor person has a sandwich and the person next to them is hungry, they give them half. 

If a friend is homeless, they open their home and let them sleep on the couch.

The point is the Golden Rule.

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

As someone said: “Life is short and we have not much time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us. Oh, be swift to love; make haste to be kind.”[iii]

Listen to one of Oscar Wilde's beautiful fairy tales The Happy Prince (1888):

The Prince in this story was nothing more than an exquisite statue, gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold.

He looked down on his city with priceless blue sapphire eyes and guarded his domain with a sword bejeweled with an enormous red ruby.

From his tall column the Happy Prince statue kept watch over his people.

One night a small swallow, lost on his yearly migration to the warm regions of Egypt, landed wearily at the Prince's feet to rest.

But before he could fall asleep, a cascade of water began to douse him. It was tears from the eyes of the Happy Prince.

From his high vantage point, the Prince could see a sick child begging his mother for an orange, while the poor woman worked with bleeding fingers embroidering a piece of fancy satin for a noble woman's ball gown.

"Swallow, please stay with me tonight and be my messenger," begged the Prince. "That boy is so thirsty, and the mother so sad."

The little bird agreed.

Doing as the Prince instructed, the bird took the fabulous ruby from its sword hilt and dropped it on the table next to the thimble of the woman.

The next day, the Happy Prince begged the swallow to be his messenger once again.

The Prince had seen a young writer so cold and hungry and despairing that he could no longer hold his pen.

This time, the Prince had the swallow take one of his beautiful sapphire eyes to the poor young man so that he could buy food and firewood and finish his play.

On the third day, the Happy Prince, with his one remaining eye, spied a pitiful little match girl.

She was sobbing because she had dropped her matches in the gutter and now had nothing to sell. She knew her father would beat her for her carelessness.

Again, the Prince convinced the swallow to stay and play the messenger for him. Reluctantly, the little bird plucked out the Prince's second sapphire eye and delivered it into the weeping girl's hands.

The swallow knew he could not leave the now-blind Prince.

So he stayed on, acting as the Prince's eyes and one-by-one pulling off the gold leaves covering the Prince's body to give them to those who were suffering and hurting, cold and hungry.

Finally, on one freezing day, the Prince was completely stripped of all his riches.

He had given everything - his ruby, his sapphires, his gold, to those in need.

The swallow too had given his all. The cold he should have flown away from long ago penetrated his body.

With a parting kiss to the Happy Prince's lips, the swallow fell dead at his feet.

At that moment, the leaden heart of the Happy Prince statue snapped in two.

Disgusted at the ugly eyesore the statue had become, the people of the city tore it down and melted it in the blast furnace.

But the broken lead heart refused to melt.

They scrapped it and threw it in the dust heap next to the body of the dead swallow.

Looking down on the earth, God said to one of his angels, "Bring me the two most precious things in that city."

The angel returned to God with the leaden heart and the dead bird.

"You have rightly chosen," said God, "for in my garden of Paradise the little bird shall sing forevermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me."[iv]

If the Happy Prince had kept the gold and jewels that adorned him, in the face of his people’s needs, would he not have been stealing from them?

By giving them away, he and the swallow were following the Golden Rule.  They were sharing God’s heart of love for the people of their city.

The artist Marc Chagall once said, “In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life. It is the color of love.” [v]

Love is the color with which my old friend Don painted his life in elementary school; love is the color with which God calls us to paint our lives.

To live, not with clenched fists but open hands.

To live, not with cold, closed hearts but open, generous hearts.

“Life is short and we have not much time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us. Oh, be swift to love; make haste to be kind.”

Let us pray a prayer by Henri Nouwen:

May all your expectations be frustrated.

May all your plans be thwarted.

May all your desires be withered into nothingness.

That you may experience the powerlessness and the poverty of a child and sing and dance

in the love of God the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

And may we all do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly… today.[vi]

Amen.