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If You Load It, They Will Come! Say to them, “As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Psalm 42:4a)
A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 13, 2006 (Volume 1 Number 8) First United Methodist Church, 605 West Sixth, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653
A recent poll asked a group of young adults what they consider their best opportunity to strike it rich, the pathways to wealth which they considered most accessible. Do you think they listed things like education, hard work, and wise investments? Yes, but very low on the list. Among the top five potential avenues to wealth were “winning the lottery,” “inheritance from an unknown relative,” and even, believe it or not, just “finding” the money, the same way that you might happen upon a dime in a parking lot.
One of the most telling answers among the top five avenues to wealth, providing commentary, I think, on our culture, was, "winning an injury lawsuit.” Being injured by someone else or on someone else’s property or through someone else’s negligence – particularly if that someone else is a large corporation -- is seen as an entirely accessible avenue to wealth. In fact, Wal Mart now averages over 50 lawsuits per day filed against them, giving rise to law firms specializing in suing Wal Mart.
I noticed it at the drive-thru window at Hardees, the big red warning sticker, in plain view, bold letters. “Caution! Our coffees and teas and chocolates are VERY hot!” Is it any wonder Hardees felt compelled to remind customers that coffee is hot? They are painfully aware of the much-celebrated case several years ago when a jury awarded a customer $2.9 million from McDonald’s because a too hot cup of coffee caused burns when it spilled in her lap. Even the judge thought the award outlandish, reducing the settlement to a mere $640,000. But one juror, defending the original award of nearly three million, said, "we wanted to send a message that the coffee's too hot out there."
In our litigation-friendly environment, absurd examples are not hard to find. Consider these: (a) a teenager playing basketball in Nashua, New Hampshire soared high for a slam-dunk. His face gets tangled in the net. Gravity pulls his body back down to the court, but the net fights back, yanking out two teeth. His family sues the manufacturer of the net. The jury turned tooth-fairy awarded him $50,000. (b) A drunken man in Pensacola, Florida passed out on the CSX railroad tracks. As Paul Harvey said it, “a train rumbles and an arm tumbles.” He sues the railroad, and is awarded $600,000. (c) A woman at the Fort Kent Golf Club in Maine lands her ball about ten yards from the railroad tracks bordering the club’s property. Her next shot veers off, hits the tracks, and ricochets to strike her face. (Sounds familiar to me. I’m Gerald Ford dangerous on the golf course, having dodged golf balls bouncing back off railroad tracks, trees, golf carts, rocks, sprinkler systems, and more.) The golf club was found liable for not placing warnings close to the tracks, and a jury awarded the golfer $40,000.
Stories like these abound and, as a result, one of the defining marks of modern American culture is a proliferation of warning labels. We are deluged with hazard advisories from companies not wanting anyone’s blood on their hands. These companies want to be able to say when their day in court comes, “We are absolved from any and all responsibility. We, like Ezekiel’s sentinel on the wall, were careful to alert you, the consumer, to all potential danger associated with the use or misuse of our product. We warned you. We have no blood on our hands.”
Caution advisories cataloguing every conceivable (and some inconceivable) peril from the use of a product have mushroomed. Manufacturers are protecting themselves by issuing every warning they can dream up, treating the consumer with the nervous mentality of a mother trailing a two year old. Most famous is the hair dryer with nineteen different warnings, including warnings not to use while in the shower or while sleeping. But have you heard about the coffee pot which now carries this caution, "Warning! Hot liquid! Do not put hand in coffee pot!" Imagine. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my burns are not my fault. I came in from working in the yard and needed to wash my hands. My wife was using the space in front of the sink at the moment, so I thought I would just dip my hands in the coffee pot. That company should have warned me that I was purchasing a potentially hazardous appliance.”
I can’t resist sharing with you some of my favorites. There’s the warning on a pair of shin guards made for bicyclists, “Shin pads cannot protect any part of the body they do not cover.” Another of my favorites is the warning on an electric rotary tool, “This product not intended for use as a dental drill.” Sounds like they have a fear someone will try to save money with do-it-yourself dentistry in the garage. And you’ve got to wonder about the cardboard sunshield warning on that foldable reflector that keeps the suns rays out of the car, “Do not drive with sunshield in place.” Finally, there’s the stroller warning, “Remove child before folding.”
Americans do love labels. And we pay attention. Candid Camera had a classic episode in the 60’s in which two telephone booths were placed next to each other in New York, one labeled “Men” and the other “Women.” So great is our in-born respect for signs that no one who used the booths violated the labels, or even questioned why telephone booths had to be gender specific, even when they had to wait in line for their booth while the other was empty! The New York Post ran a story on November 30, 1971, reporting that five heavily armed men shot out the glass doors of a New York bank and rushed in firing, wounding twelve people. One of the bank’s tellers slipped out, chased by one of the armed bank robbers. She made it to the women’s restroom upstairs. She refused to come out as he stood outside and shouted profanity and threats. At last he returned to the lobby to help his colleagues finish the job. He might be a thief and a killer, but he would not violate the sanctity of the Ladies’ restroom!
Yes, we pay attention to our labels. Why, as a child, I feared even touching those tags on pillows that said, “Do not remove under penalty of law,” certain that the mattress agents of the FBI would find me out.
Label-conscious we are, so perhaps it’s not surprising that we expect to be forewarned about any and all jeopardy we may face. “Somebody should have warned me not to fold up that stroller with little Jimmy still in it. Somebody should have warned me that my shin pad would not protect my chin, too. Somebody should have warned me that taking a nap on a railroad track may be hazardous to my health. Somebody should have warned me that basketball nets are meant for basketballs, not mid-air flossing.”
Modern America is a warning rich environment, and perhaps – despite the humor we’ve shared this morning -- churches would do well to take advantage. We should, after all, be good at it. From Genesis to Revelation, the bible is full of warnings. God’s earliest relationship with Adam and Eve was not without caution advisories. "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day you eat thereof you shall surely die!" There’s God's first warning label, stuck right on that tree, in plain view and in bold letters.
Indeed, words and phrases like "beware," "watch," "be vigilant," and "guard yourself," are common vocabulary for biblical writers. But surely no warning-meister reaches the level of eloquence and urgency as that attained by Ezekiel. “I have made you a sentinel for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked ones, you shall surely die,’ and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hands.”
Charles Spurgeon playfully instructed his preaching students, "When you preach on heaven, let your face light up with heavenly glow. And when you preach on hell -- well, your everyday face will do!" It seems to have been so with prophets like Ezekiel. Their everyday face was one of warning. And lest we think the New Testament drastically altered this red-alert mentality, consider these words of the apostle Paul. “Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock . . . I know that after I have gone, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock . . . therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to warn everyone with tears” (Acts 20:28,29,31).
Thirty-two years ago I entered the ministry as a Missionary Baptist in Jonesboro, where I was playing basketball for Arkansas State University. A much more Ezekiel-oriented preacher in those days, I had been in the pulpit only two or three times when I was asked by a church in Newark, Arkansas to preach in a Youth-led revival. I think they thought a college basketball player would be a draw for the kids. Now, you may not believe this, but at the conclusion of the Sunday morning service, crowded with young people to hear the young college-aged preacher, I pulled out a 22 pistol. Taking a single bullet, I loaded the gun, spun the cartridge, pointed it to my head, and announced that if they would come back and bring their friends, I would pull the trigger three times in the evening service. I was thinking in my evangelistic Field of Dreams, “If you load it, they will come!”
They came. The evening service was packed. Taking Hebrews 9:27 as my text, "It is appointed to man once to die, and after that, the judgment," I preached my sermon, titled, “Spiritual Russian Roulette.” During the afternoon I had loaded the gun with a single blank, and set it to fire the third time I pulled the trigger, at the very end of the sermon as the emotions mounted toward the Invitation. Oh, if only someone had stupid-proofed that gun with a timely label for a foolish 20 year old preacher, “Warning! Do not fire even a blank at your head during a Youth-led Revival!”
The moment of truth came. The lights, on cue, were turned low. I pulled the trigger. The gun went off. Oh, how I wish it hadn’t. The noise in the small church was deafening. Sparks flew. As I invited the organist to come and play Just As I Am, my head was pounding. I think there was a little fellow in my cranium with a sledge hammer pounding from ear to ear, saying, “Never, never, never do that again! If this is preaching, we go back to Accounting Class!” My hair was smoking from the incineration (you may think my hair turned silver gradually, but I wonder if it didn’t happen that very moment!). And, having scared the devil out of some, three young, terrified boys came shakingly forward to profess faith in Christ.
Now, I’ve not since taken a pistol into the pulpit with me. And while I'm sure I would never adopt that style of preaching again, I do hope that we will never lose the sense of urgency in inviting people to the life-transforming power of a relationship with Jesus Christ. God, in Christ, has done what was necessary to retrieve us from danger.
Speaking of doing what is necessary to retrieve people from danger, I close with the story of Bob and Thelma Sibley, who became our friends during our ten years in Ann Arbor. We attended church together. One day, around Christmas 1994, their five year old daughter Nancy went out to the playground of the daycare center with the rest of the children. She never came back. As the teachers were helping the children take off their coats after recess, they noticed Nancy was absent. She had broken away from the other children and run back to slide down the spiral slide one more time. The drawstring of her coat hung on the slide. She flipped over the side and was caught by the drawstring. The teachers arrived too late.
I suppose Bob and Thelma could have sued. Their interest, however, was in warning others, especially when they discovered that in the previous decade seventeen other children had died and forty-two were injured by drawstring entanglement with slides, cribs, fences, an escalator, a ski chair life, and more. They learned that manufacturers of children’s clothing had taken no action whatsoever to warn others, or to increase the use of velcro and other safer mechanisms to fasten winter clothing. Evidently, the industry considered injury and two or three children’s deaths per year an unavoidable and unfortunate consequence of their product. The blood was on their hands, and Bob and Thelma knew it.
From the day of Nancy’s funeral, Bob and Thelma took upon themselves the work of urgently warning parents and schools and clothing manufacturers, in hope of saving other children. I’ll never forget that funeral, how it gave birth to an Ezekiel-like passion and urgency to warn others, so that no parent would ever have to experience another such funeral. Tirelessly, they sent out warnings. Soon, a campaign was organized enlisting help of family and friends, most of whom were church members. As a result, parents pulled the drawstrings out of their children’s clothing by the thousands and mailed them to Bob and Thelma’s home – and with each one, Thelma saw a potential life saved. Then several state and national politicians got involved. Bob and Thelma were interviewed by Diane Sawyer on PrimeTime Live and featured in 1996 on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Chairman Ann Brown of the Consumer Products Safety Commission joined the chorus. Soon manufacturers had voluntarily agreed to remove hood and neck drawstrings from over 20 million garments. Today, in large part thanks to Bob and Thelma Sibley, consumers would be hard-pressed to find a drawstring on any article of children’s clothing. They sent out a warning, an impassioned warning – turn back, turn back, for why will you have the children die? We have no pleasure in such needless deaths. It was a passionate warning that was heeded.
I spoke with Bob a while back and asked him if I could share this story. He gave me permission to do so. I know Bob and Thelma miss Nancy very much. Nancy would have been 17 years old this year. I know they wish that someone had been there to warn them. But I know also that they are thankful for the lives of several children that have been and are being saved through their efforts.
Francis Schaeffer wrote a famous book several decades ago, titled similarly to a line from our Ezekiel text, How Shall We Then Live? I suggest that the pinnacle of Christian morality is to load our hearts with compassion, with the agape love that seeks the welfare of the other. As Christians, as a church, let’s Load our hearts, our message with just such love, believing that, If we load it, they will come. And may this be, for us, our Field of Dreams.
Sources and notes: “The Jurors’ Message,” by Alex Kozinski in The Wal Street Journal, January 1995. “You Can Sue Anybody for Anything,” by Paul Harvey in The Conservative Chronicle, December 6, 1995. “That’s Outrageous – Spotlighting Absurdities in Our Society Is the First Step Toward Eliminating Them,” in Readers’ Digest, November 1995, page 113. “The Dangers of Drawstrings – Preventing Deaths and Injuries with Swift and Effective Cooperation with Industry,” by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. Ann Brown Remarks at Govt-Industry Day, www.upassoc.org/outreach |