The Right ThinG

By The Rev’d Dawn M. Frankfurt

Glory to the Holy and Undivided Trinity; God who is Three in One and One in Three; Who is beyond us, among us, within us; Who was, and is, and is to come, world without end. Amen.

Our scripture lessons this morning are about obeying God’s commandments and doing the right thing. In the epistle, the following question is asked: “Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?” (1 Peter 3:13). A little later, Peter continues: “Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Peter 3:16b).

In the Gospel of John, we are told that Jesus said: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). And only a few verses later, Jesus makes this promise: “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them” (John 14:21).

This message is so readily understood that at first blush it all sounds like simple, straight-forward stuff. First-grade-level Bible. Fundamentals. As effortless as two plus two. Easy as pie. Why is that? Why does it sound so easy? Is it that we can define God’s commandments without any difficulty? We have the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament and the two commandments which Jesus gave in the New Testament. We are told to love God with all of our heart, soul and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus says that everything God would have us do can be summed up by these two commandments. The Ten commandments certainly don’t contradict them.

As it turns out, though, living life and trying to do the right thing, trying to do what God wants us to do, isn’t always as clear cut as black is from white. It’s hard.

In philosophical conversations about ethics, there is invariably a set of circumstances which gets presented for discussion whenever the topic is determining right from wrong or identifying good vs. evil. The situation is this: It is after midnight. A poor man is desperate to get the medicine his child needs. Without the medicine, the child will most certainly die in the next hour. The father has no money and is out of resources. He breaks into a pharmacy and steals the medicine which will save the life of his child. Did he do the right thing? It’s not always easy to know.

Situations like this teach that not every circumstance is easily defined as either black or white. It shows that right and wrong, or good and evil, are not miles apart – many times they’re separated only by the width of a strand of hair.

On Easter I talked about people who were caught in situations where they felt the only choices available to them were bad ones. Faced with decisions like that, I said, the only place to turn was to God. In God, answers we can’t even imagine are not only possible, but likely.

Today I want to consider the flip-side of a time when it seems only bad choices are available. Let’s consider the many times it seems as if it doesn’t make any difference what we do, when it seems like whatever we choose, nothing bad could possibly happen. I can think of all sorts of examples of this. In fact, I think most of us, because of the fortunate circumstances in which we live, are blessed to have numerous choices like this every day. The red one or the green one? The chunky one or the smooth one?

When I’m at the grocery store, or Wal-Mart, or Target, does it matter if I leave my cart in the parking lot or return it to the spot provided for collecting carts? Does it really make any difference if I cut someone off in traffic? Will it matter whether I am kind to the telemarketer who calls and wakes me up on Saturday morning? Maybe nothing bad will happen to us if we do these things, but what sort of impact does it have on the kid whose job it is to bring the carts back in the store? How does it impact the telephone solicitor trying to do a job in order to pay the bills and put food on the table? Doing the right thing matters – no matter how big or how small. You have to think about what you’re doing.

I imagine, like most of you, I don’t think of myself as constantly making moral decisions. Especially when it comes to seemingly insignificant decisions like some of those I just mentioned. I mean, even when I’m determining a course of action: deciding to tell the truth even when it’s hard, going ahead and being gracious to someone even though they seem to bear ill will toward me, or embracing the interruption of my work in order to let someone into the locked church building – when I’m doing these things, it doesn’t readily occur to me that in my response I’m making a moral decision. But telling the truth, turning the other cheek, and welcoming everyone who seeks God – these are all moral things to do. They’re the right thing to do.

The complication is that not everything is so clear-cut. When an answer isn’t black and white, how do we know what to do? The Bible doesn’t spell out what we should do in every situation under the sun. Therefore, it is our responsibility to understand the gospel message and then decide how to live. We have the commandments about loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves. But what about global warming or courteous driving? Neither Moses nor Jesus talked about the necessity of recycling or caring for the environment. Bumper-to-bumper traffic wasn’t an issue for Jesus or his disciples. Holy Scripture is silent about whether we ought to work to control pollution or if we should have the patience to let somebody pull in front of us in traffic. Once we’ve come to understand the gospel message, then we have to give thought to all that we do. From here it is our responsibility to do the right thing. And it’s not just the big things – it’s the little things we also need to stop and think about. The choices we make do make a difference.

When I am in the church by myself – no service – no one watching – it still makes a difference to me whether I reverence the altar. If I began to walk back and forth in front of the altar without stopping to bow, what other ways of ignoring God would begin to creep into my behavior? When would I stop saying the daily office and reading the Bible passages assigned for each day? How long would it be before I quit praying all together? I don’t want to start down a slippery slope like that. Everything we do is important.

It may seem like it doesn’t make any difference what you do when no one else is looking or when nobody will ever know what you’ve done. From where we stand in this moment, we can’t see the ramifications of what we do. That little thing we do might have long-lasting consequences. Have you seen that commercial on TV where a woman, obviously in an infectiously good mood, is bumped into by a grump as she gets off of the elevator and he makes a rude comment to her. In the next scene, the woman bites the head off of the co-worker she meets at the coffee maker. Her co-worker then walks out of the staff break room and barks at the guy in the cubicle next to him. The guy sitting in the cubicle turns around and speaks brusquely into the phone. The ad illustrates the chain reaction following the one ugly comment made by the grump as he got onto the elevator.

Toss a pebble into a pond and watch the ripples cascade across the surface. See a butterfly flutter its wings off of the coast of Africa and wonder how this will contribute to the weather in the Gulf of Mexico weeks into the future. Every act, no matter how small, generates consequences. Remember Newton’s law of motion: “every action has an equal and opposite re-action.”

When you walk past someone, you don’t know how their day is going or what their life is like. A smile from you could start the domino effect of positive things happening in their life for the rest of the day. A scowl could send the cascade in an entirely different direction. How much more impact, then, do you think important things we do have in the world? Does it matter if we serve a good lunch to 40 hungry people every day? Does it matter if we showed up to help scrape and paint at the Rebuilding Together project? Does it matter if we continue our mission to Honduras? Does it make any difference? We don’t know. We hope it does. But from where we stand the answer isn’t always obvious. We can’t tell what sort of long-range influence our actions will have in weeks and months to come. How will the things you do reverberate in generations to come?

The decision you make today – it has consequences. Always remember, we never know when the consequences of our actions will be eternal ones. Choose to do what’s right. Decide to live according to God’s commandments. The reach of the things you do goes further than you can imagine. Eventually we will see and understand the consequences of everything we did in life. When you see and understand, I pray you won’t cringe with regret and wish for all time that you’d done differently. I pray you’ll hear “Well done, good and faithful servant. Well done.” Standing at the throne of God, you’ll never regret having done the right thing.

AMEN!