Hilton Head Island, SC – Sept. 8, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Exodus 23:6-13; Matthew 5:21-26
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat, and what they leave the wild beasts may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard and with your olive orchard.” – Ex. 23:10-11
This sermon is going to deal with the general topic of laws and “the law.” It shall focus on a few of the so-called laws of Moses, the ones he was given by God on Mt. Sinai. The Ten Commandments are the most familiar of those laws to Christians, but Jews, especially rabbinical experts in biblical law, carefully study all of the 600+ laws contained in the Torah. That Hebrew word itself means “law,” but it also denotes the first five books of the Old Testament.
In order further to specify what this sermon is mainly about, I want to differentiate between several words regarding law. We are all vaguely familiar with these words, but we may not understand them specifically. In order to clarify this for myself, I talked to Patsy Brison about this matter a few weeks ago. Patsy is the wife of Scott Camp, our director of music. For years Patsy was an attorney in the city government of Ashville, NC. If I define anything I am going to say incorrectly, it is because I didn’t sufficiently understand what Patsy tried to explain to me. I had previously looked up these words in the dictionary, but to me they were all a lexicographical mishmash. Therefore I talked to the attorney I know best who has the best professional grasp of what these esoteric legal terms actually mean.
First is the word “law” itself. In the United States of America, laws are enacted only by state or national legislatures. Citizens of those jurisdictions are required to follow the laws that are passed. If they don’t, they are subject to penalties which the laws specify.
A statute is a law enacted by a national or state legislature, but it is based on an already enacted law. In other words, it is a further refinement of an already existing law or set of laws. A statute is a requirement that people must follow which is based on a previously adopted law.
An ordinance is a law written by a governing municipal or county council. Congress and the state legislatures make laws, but county or city or town councils make ordinances.
A regulation is a requirement determined by a government agency. To use some of the federal acronyms, regulations are set down, for example, by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) or DOA (Department of Agriculture) or DOJ (Department of Justice) or FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). Regulations are technically not laws or statutes or ordinances, but the people and other government agencies are required to uphold them as though they are laws.
Some people may wonder, “Why it is necessary to have fire codes or building codes?” And what difference does it make if we have seat belts in our cars, or whether we use them or not? Why should cigarette packs say that smoking may cause cancer, or why should ads on television be legal in which litigation lawyers tell us that if we were exposed to unusual levels of asbestos forty years ago, we might receive money in a huge class-action lawsuit? Regulations are involved in all of those issues, and regulations, not laws per se, are the focus of this sermon.
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Those preliminaries having been covered, we now turn to Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has come down from the mountain with the famous two stone tablets, the ones occasionally appearing New Yorker cartoons. The tablets contain only the Ten Commandments. But there are six hundred other laws of God found in the rest of the Book of Exodus, plus the Books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Presumably none of those laws was cut in stone. In modern parlance, many of those biblical laws are more like what we know as regulations rather than laws. They were laid down by the Divine Administrator of all the Hebrew governmental agencies, of which in the time of Moses there were none, because the Hebrews had no official government. In the twelfth century BCE, God was the government for the Israelites in the absence of a government. He was the regulation writer in the absence of anyone who was writing civil regulations.
In our first scripture reading, from Exodus, we find some divine requirements which, to us, may be peculiar in the best light and mystifying in the dimmest light, which to us much of the Torah represents. “You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his suit” (Ex. 23:6). Initially that sounds like not being nice to somebody because of the clothes he is wearing, but that isn’t it at all. It means this: If a poor person brings a lawsuit against you based on any of the regulations in the Torah, you must not take advantage of him before a religious judge because he is poor. He is your equal in the eyes of God, and under God’s laws you must treat him as an equal.
Why would God tell Moses to write that down? It was because the poor are frequently taken advantage of in courts. That happens because they don’t have the money to be represented by the best lawyers. In biblical times the poor probably got trainees in Torah who were at the bottom of their class in the yeshiva lawschool. That still happens. “Keep far from a false charge,…for I will not acquit the wicked” (Ex. 23:7). “I will take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the officials, and subverts the cause of those who are in the right” (Ex. 23:8). “You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9). Don’t take advantage of the immigrants among you, and don’t try to separate yourselves from them.
For many years my father used to regale us with numerous stories of when he was “a boy on the farm.” Few of us in this congregation were ever boys or girls on the farm, so the next divine regulation may be a complete mystery to us. “”For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; what they leave the wild beasts may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard” (Ex. 23:10-11).
Why would God care about any of that, and why would He bother to set down regulations about it? If His regulations were not in writing, though, the people might not follow what they required! First of all, God was concerned about the land itself. If the farmers planted crops on the land every year, especially if they planted the same crops, the land would soon wear out and become infertile. In the Midwest and elsewhere, farmers plant corn one year and soybeans the next. They never plant one crop year after year after year. Farmers care about that, because they have learned they must rotate their crops. But theoretically they do that because God cares about that. It is in the Bible, so for three thousand years crop rotation has been practiced by farmers.
God also cares about the poor people who live on the land. In other regulations in other verses in other parts of the Torah, God tells the farmers to leave the corners of the fields un-harvested. That is so the poor may glean the grain left in the corners. God is concerned about everybody, not just about wealthy landowners. In our text for today, God says that they must allow the fields to lie fallow every seventh year, so that the poor may eat whatever grain happened to re-seed itself in the fallow fields. And if they didn’t get it all, the badgers and rabbits and mice would also have something to eat. God, the Supreme EPA Regulator, is supremely attentive to His whole creation, and He wants His faithful servants to become His primary tenants of the earth.
Jesus came along twelve centuries after Moses, and he re-interpreted parts of the Mosaic law. He reminded people of the fifth commandment, “You shall not kill,” which really means “You shall not commit murder.” “But I say to you,” said Jesus, “that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment, whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to hellfire” (Mt. 5:21-22). By Jesus’ use of the word “council,” we may deduce that by the first century CE there was a religious/political entity which adjudicated such matters. In this passage Jesus seemed to make God look like a relatively loose writer of regulations and himself among the most strict of regulation writers. What may be the historical fact of the matter I will encourage you to decide for yourselves. The point is, in biblical times as in contemporary times regulations are a necessity in creating every civilization.
In the USA, as in every other nation, support for regulations waxes and wanes, depending on the nature and number of regulations. Business people tend to think there are far too many regulations, and they think regulations impede business. Social activists tend to think there are not enough regulations, and that the ones there are are not strict enough.
An example: There are many contemporary religious parents who oppose any level of government insisting that they get their children vaccinated for various childhood diseases. What is the basis of their opposition? They claim that it may cause autism. They point to studies which support that notion, while governments and nearly all medical experts deny that autism is related in any way to vaccines, and they also point to other conflicting studies.
Does it matter? Yes, say the pro-vaccine folks. If children are not vaccinated, they may contract these diseases, and then pass them on to other children who haven’t been vaccinated. Diseases which were virtually eliminated in the past are re-appearing in the present, they claim. Measles outbreaks have occurred in various religious communities throughout our nation, placing other born and unborn children at risk, say the “pro-vaxers.” Not so, say the anti-vaxers, and they strongly proclaim they should not be forced to have their children vaccinated.
It used to be, and maybe it still is, that there was a tag sewn onto every mattress. The tag told what the contents of the mattress were, and it declared that it was illegal to remove the tag. I confess to having removed one or two of those tags in my wild, antinomian years. I haven’t done it for a long time, maybe because I am still sleeping on the same mattress, but frankly, I asked myself in those old, lawless days, who really cares whether the tag is there or not?
Some people ask that about every regulation. Furthermore, they grump, “Who is the government to tell me that I must wear a hard hat on a worksite, or a seat belt when I’m in my car, or a mask when I go into a hospital room? This is the land of the free - - isn’t it?”
As the famous Supreme Court justice noted in a famous Supreme Court case, “No one is free to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” Why? Because the purported freedom of the individual to do that jeopardizes the safety of the entire population in that theater.
Regulations imply that the good of the whole citizenry trumps the good of the individual citizen. My welfare or my pleasure must take second place to our welfare and pleasure. Therefore, for example, people can no longer smoke in most public places, or spit on sidewalks, or throw rubbish onto the streets. It is regulations, not laws as such, which regulate those activities.
Some federal administrations try to decrease the use of coal by regulating its use in creating electricity. Other federal administrations may reverse those regulations. Both types of presidential administrations may regulate by means of executive orders. Presidents, not Congress, sometimes determine what happens, and they fail or succeed on the basis of whatever may be their attitude toward regulation or de-regulation at any given period of time. But the perpetual issue is this: Do regulations financially benefit only a small percentage of the population, or do they benefit the greatest number of people possible?
This summer I stayed a couple of nights in the townhouse of friends who live in Minnesota, which is generally a pro-regulation state. I noticed that they had a sprinkler system in their home. I wondered to myself why they had that and other townhouses in their block of townhouses might not have sprinklers. Then it dawned on me that because it was Minnesota, probably all the other townhouses also had sprinklers, because it was deemed that was in the best interest of every resident in that group of eight or so units. If one house caught fire, the others would not burn. The one would have both fire and water damage, but the others would have no damage at all.
State insurance commissions require us to have personal injury and collision insurance on our cars for other drivers, but we don’t have to buy such insurance for ourselves, if we decline it. Why? Because regulations are in force to protect other people, but if we don’t want to protect ourselves no one is going to force us to do so.
What is too much government regulation? The answer depends on who is asking the question. Surely there have been and there currently are too many regulations about some things, but doing without regulations altogether is not an option in a democracy. My freedom must never take precedence over our wellbeing. In any advanced civilization or society, the good of the whole usually takes precedence over the good of the individual citizen. Human nature brings out selfish behavior in all of us, but we must protect ourselves from ourselves, and regulations are one of the primary ways, and indeed a biblical way, for doing that. The first five books of the Bible are essentially about how people should live together in a society, and the laws and regulations laid down in the Pentateuch are major examples of how God presumably instructed us to live together.
Florida allowed scores of pain clinics to provide billions of opioids to several million people. The federal government decided to step in to prevent that from continuing. Mt. Trashmore in Okatie is slowly burning, and its noxious smoke is wafting over large areas of western Beaufort County. Regulators must step in to punish the perpetrators of this environmental nightmare. Because of sea turtles laying eggs on the Hilton Head beaches, the size of sand shovels used by vacationers has been severely restricted, so that the baby turtles won’t fall into the holes that are dug. Lead has been outlawed in gasoline for years. Catalytic converters on cars have been mandated. Gasoline costs more and cars cost more because of this. You and I can longer purchase gas or cars quite as cheaply as before, because federal regulators decided that represented the greatest good for the greatest number of people, supporting the thinking of Jeremy Bentham, the early nineteenth century philosopher and ethicist.
God created humanity to live in community with one another. Individuals may choose to live entirely alone. I assume God also accepts that. In order for all of us to continue on this planet, however, we must live with one another. That requires regulations. God wants us to be wise regulators. The question always is this: Are we?