Anything Goes

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
December 28, 2008

Anything Goes
Luke 16:10-13

It isn’t cheating if everyone else does it, right?
I mean, everyone cheats on a test from time to time,
and who doesn’t cheat in his income taxes?
What golfer hasn’t improved his lie?
What tennis player hasn’t called an opponent’s serve out
when it was probably in?
What student hasn’t lifted an idea,
or even a direct quote,
from someone else’s work
and tried to pass it off as her own?
What business man or woman
hasn’t tweaked the paperwork just a little
to make the boss happy,
and to assure the commission or the bonus?

What’s the big deal about cheating?
No one really gets hurt,
and it is not as if the cheater is robbing a bank
or engaged in some other major crime.
Cheating really shouldn’t be called a sin, should it?
It really is so insignificant.

Sadly, this has become the way we think in this country:
That cheating is no big deal.
that everyone does it.

Study after study shows that most people cheat in all kinds of ways:
more than 80% of high school students have acknowledged cheating
on exams, tests and papers.
They don’t think they are doing anything wrong.
In fact, they rationalize that since everyone else is cheating,
they have to cheat
so they aren’t at a disadvantage.

The companion to cheating is the “little white lie”,
those times when you say something that isn’t quite true,
that isn’t the complete truth,
that is stretching the truth.
Again, just a little,
no one is hurt.

My mother was an expert at the little white lie;
she honed her skill on Mothers Day each year
when she told my sisters and me
that the breakfast we’d made for her
was absolutely delicious,
even though the toast was burned,
the scrambled eggs had more shell than egg,
the orange juice was watery,
and the coffee was strong enough
to remove paint.
In her little white lies,
my mother made us feel good,
so where was the harm?

But then there’s Jesus standing in front of us
with his lesson, such a simple lesson:
“Whoever is faithful in a very little
is faithful also in much,
and whoever is dishonest in a very little
is dishonest in much.”

Perhaps we should not be surprised
that we find this saying in only one of the four gospels.
If Matthew, Mark, and John were aware of the saying,
perhaps they discarded it as being entirely too impractical?
Even two thousand years ago, people cheated,
people told little white lies.

Is there an out for us here?
Jesus says, “whoever is dishonest in a very little”.
I was trained as a lawyer,
I could easily argue the size of “very little”.
My mother’s culinary comments were such small white lies,
that they don’t even qualify as very little.
Too small, so they really ought to be okay.

Isn’t that how we look at things?
Don’t we make things relative?
Don’t we adapt the words to suit us
and our situation?
Of course, that may be how we look at things,
but that’s not how God looks at things.
The Bible is filled with lessons on honesty,
integrity and moral behavior:
Do business ethically.
Do not lie.
Do not steal.
Do not cheat.
Period.
These are absolute lessons;
There is no rationalizing them,
no putting conditions on them.
No sliding scale.
We are called to adapt ourselves to them,
not adapt the lesson to our particular circumstances.

But that’s what we do when we are confronted
with rules and teachings we don’t like:
either we bend them to suit us,
or we just ignore them.

The economic implosion our country is going through now
has been based largely on cheating and lying,
highly respectable lying and cheating, of course,
going on at the highest levels of business, finance, and law.

Investment firms assuring us that their assets are secure;
Mortgage brokers telling people,
“Of course you can afford this mortgage”;
Homeowners padding their assets
in order to qualify for a bigger mortgage
and get that bigger house.
Banks encouraging people to run up charges on their credit cards,
and then changing the interest rate
and other terms and conditions so frequently
that no one really knows what he’s paying on the card.
But the bank assures the customer,
“Just pay the minimum monthly charge,
and everything will be just fine.”

Of course, get in trouble on your payments,
and the collections agencies will be hounding you;
get in trouble on your mortgage payments and
it is out on the street you go.
Are you as outraged as I am
that there have been so many foreclosures,
people forced to move out of their homes?
Surely there must be a better way,
a way to work things out for the hapless
and helpless homeowner.

It was only a few years ago that we were witness
to the corporate scandals of Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco:
Chief executives who saw their companies
as their own personal playgrounds,
their own sandboxes.
They inflated revenues and profits
to make their business look successful, shiny and strong,
and in the process they collected tens of millions of dollars
in salaries and bonuses.
When their houses of cards collapsed,
they left others to clean up the mess.

In 2004 the respected business magazine The Economist
noted that business people were held in lower regard
than even politicians.
“Corporate leaders are regarded with
cynicism and mistrust everywhere.
In America, the bosses of big companies command
only slightly more respect in public opinion polls
than used-car salesmen.”
I’d hate to think how poll numbers would look now.

We’ve gone from bad to worse.
We seem to live in a world where truly “Anything Goes”
as long as we can make a buck.
Thomas Friedman, the eminent columnist for The New York Times
found himself at a conference in Hong Kong recently
when a person came up to him and asked him quite seriously,
“So, just how corrupt is America?”
(New York Times, Dec. 17, 2008)
and the questioner was not just referring to governors
trying to cash in on selling a Senate seat.

We have always made an idol of money;
that’s nothing new.
Go back 2700 years and read through the book
of the prophet Amos
and you’ll think the book could have been written
just last week.
But it seems that in the last ten years
we’ve have created a tableau of idolatry,
where we envy the wealthy, long to be like them,
want to live the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
and will do anything to get there.
Character is out; celebrity is in.
Honor is out; “how much” is in;
Morals are out; money is in.
serving wealth is so much more exciting
than serving God.

As we look to a new year in which much of our economy
and indeed much of our society is going to have to be rebuilt,
it is the ideal time for us
to re-commit ourselves to a new standard
of Christian behavior:
beyond merely ethical, beyond merely moral,
beyond lives of mere integrity:
to truly the lives that Christ calls us to.
For if we are not faithful and honest in matters of very little,
we have no hope for the larger matters in life.

It all begins with you and me.
living by the standards Christ sets for us.
You and me, living as Jesus calls us to live.
Not, by the way, telling others how to live,
not judging and pointing our fingers,
but looking at our own selves, our own lives.
The standards that Jesus sets are high standards, absolutely,
not easy to live up to;
but then again, Christ never said they would be.
There are no “ifs”, “ands”, or “buts”.

In this simple passage, what Jesus is doing, of course,
is teaching us to turn our focus
from the material world, the consumer world,
to the kingdom of God.
What Christ is doing is calling us away from the idolatry
of worldly goods,
the idolatry of malls, and cars, and things,
that captures us much too easily,
the idolatry of anything goes
as long as you have a credit card.

Now, all this sounds fine in theory,
fine on Sunday morning as we sit here in church,
but tomorrow when we are back in our jobs,
back at school,
back in our Monday through Friday world,
putting theory into practice can be appear all but impossible.
Just as one example, those students who cheat because
they feel they have no choice have my sympathy.
I understand the pressure they feel to get top grades.
When I was in college, I gunned for top grades
because I had my sights set on law school.
I was aiming for Harvard or Yale.
I thought I had the numbers to get in,
even with the fierce competition,
but when those depressingly thin envelopes
arrived from each school,
I was bitterly disappointed.
It is likely that five one hundredths of a point
on my grade point average might have
made the difference.
And the competition for schools has only grown more intense
over the past 25 years.

This is where faith comes in.
My disappointment was real, but it was also short-lived
because I believed that where I went,
Cornell Law School,
was where God wanted me to go.
Of course my ego wanted Yale or Harvard,
but as Jesus teaches us,
it is God’s will that matters, not our own.

The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr observed
that our faith is fragmentary,
bits and pieces that we work on throughout our lives,
stitching together into a more seamless
and more mature faith.
That’s our life’s work: not the accumulation of money
and things.
The more fragmented and fragmentary our faith is,
the more likely we are to rationalize,
and compromise.
As we grow in faith, mature faith,
we understand the standards Jesus calls us to,
and we undestand why Niebuhr wrote,
“faith in God does not involve compromise”.
(Christ and Culture)

The very wise preacher Fred Craddock reminds us
that most of us will not see our names in the newspaper,
most of us will not win Nobel or Pulitzer prizes,
most of us won’t live in 15,000 square foot homes,
with indoor pools and 8-car garages.
Most of us will go about our days in the vocations that God calls us to,
and we’ll be offered countless opportunities
to live our faith in simple acts:
offering someone a seat on a bus,
writing someone a note,
visiting someone at a hospital or nursing home,
delivering a meal to someone who’s homebound,
contributing to a charity,
working on a Habitat project,
dropping clothes off at the Salvation Army,
fixing a meal on Sunday night at SERVE.

To live a life of absolute faith,
faith without compromise,
faith that is not based on “anything goes”
is not to live a strident, angry, judgmental faith;
It is simply to live as Christ teaches us,
the absolute of obedience to Christ
which means living in the absolute of love.

Start there in the New Year,
start small, very small,
and take small steps forward to build
a grace-filled, grace-full life
serving one master, and only one master:
Our Lord Jesus Christ.
AMEN