First Rule, Do No Harm

Here is my sermon from Sunday, part one of a 3 part series on the Three Simple Rules. The scripture passage was Matthew 15:10-28. Yesterday, in Ames, Iowa, the republicans participated in the Iowa Straw Poll, which is the first shot towards gaining the republican nomination for President. In preparation for this, candidates have been traveling all over Iowa shaking hands and kissing babies and condensing their very complicated platforms down to bullet points. Now for politicians’ bullet points are important because it’s what they can put on bumper stickers, and more importantly it’s what gets them on the air. Now I would stipulate that reducing political arguments down to bullet points is not good for democracy, but sometimes bullet points can be good. But even when they are they, of course, never tell the whole story. So let me give you some examples. Since we’re doing a blessing for our college age members today I thought I would make this a little relevant for what has dominated books and movies for youths for a little while now. The Harry Potter series is about a boy who an evil man attempts to kill, but fails. Said boy grows up and battles evil man, in the end good triumphs over evil, or does it? I don’t want to give away anything in case you haven’t seen the newest film. The three points sort of tell the tale, but of course they still leave out a lot. Let me try one other. The Twilight series is a story about a girl who loves a vampire and sort of loves a werewolf. Point two, werewolves and vampires don’t get along. Point three, Robert Pattinson and Jacob Lautner are, I am told, OMG hot. That’s what you need to know.* Now in 2007, Reuben Job, who is a retired United Methodist Bishop, sat down to put together a sort of bullet point book of how we should be living our lives as Christians, which he called Three Simple Rules, and it is the basis for this sermon series. But, Bishop Job did not just create these out of thin air, instead he went back into our Methodist heritage and pulled them out of John Wesley’s writings in a document called “The Nature, Design and General Rules of Our United Societies,” a document which is still foundational to Methodist beliefs and doctrines. Now Wesley created these rules because people began coming to him and asking him what they should be doing in order to lead Christian lives, and so he set down three principles. The first is to do no harm, the second is to do good, and the third he said was to attend upon all the ordinances of God, a long winded phrase which Bishop Job has changed to stay in love with God. Wesley was concerned that if people did not follow these rules, that new converts would become, in his words, more “a child of the devil” than before their conversion. Wesley’s three simple rules don’t tell us the whole story of the Bible, nor do they even tell us all of the rules of the bible, like some of the obscure ones such as the fact that you should not wear clothing of mixed fibers, or sow mixed seeds in your fields, or eat rock badgers; it’s true those are all Levitical codes, although they are not ones you will hear politicians railing about and calling for laws to be passed. Wesley’s rules give us a foothold for letting us know where to start in our lives and Christians and where to come back when we have gone astray. They condense ideas down to their core elements Wesley’s original list was certainly geared for its time. Here is a partial list of some of the things he thought we should not be doing in order to avoid doing harm:

• Buying, selling or drinking alcohol, because alcohol can lead to violence in many different forms, as well as the damage it can do to the person drinking it.
• Slaveholding. Wesley was the first theologian of any significance to come out in opposition to slavery.
• Fighting, quarreling, brawling, returning evil for evil, this sort of speaks for itself
• The giving or taking things on usury, which is things at interest. In its basic form understood biblically usury allows the rich to take advantage of the poor, it is a form of economic violence. In Wesley’s day it was for those charging more interest than was allowed by law. There is no such restriction in our day.
• Uncharitable or unprofitable conversation, which certainly includes gossip of any form as well as demeaning opponents or their positions, although I do have to add here as a personal aside that Wesley also particularly points out those who would speak evil of ministers.
• Doing to others as we would not they should do unto us.

In the early Methodist movement, it was expected that you would abide by these rules and if you were not willing to, or if you failed to obey them then you could and usually would be removed from the society until you repented of your ways and pledged again to abide by the rules. Now some have asked why it is that Wesley would start with a negative rule rather than a positive one, and I don’t know the answer to that. He even changes the golden rule, which is do unto others and you would have them do unto you, and reverses it to a negative. It is certainly more like many of the Biblical rules, which tend to have a “thou shall not” flavor rather than a “thou shall do.” But, I suspect that this rule comes first probably because it is the hardest one to undertake, and so it is the one we constantly have to keep coming back to over and over and over again. Because at its heart, at its core, doing no harm is an incredibly difficult task and one that sinks into every single thing that we do and who we are. It calls us into a radical sense of hospitality towards the world that is simply hard to undertake. On its face the rule to do no harm seems easy enough. It’s certainly a rule that we can all understand, but once put into practice it’s not so easy to live out because first where does it end, how far do we extend this principle? The other problem is that when we seek to do no harm in all things then we have to view everything as a creation of God and everyone as a child of God, who is loved by God, just as we are loved and to treat them as such. That’s a hard thing to do. These are pictures that most of you have probably seen before. They are photos of Elizabeth Eckford, who was one of the first black students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On September 4, 1957, a group of nine black students were supposed to meet and proceed to the school together for their first day of classes, but Elizabeth, who was painfully shy, arrived at the school before everyone else wearing a new handmade dress. She was met by an angry crowd, and suddenly she was all alone. As she began walking up to the school, a crowd of some 250 whites gathered around and started shouting at her: “Lynch her!” they cried. “Go back where you came from” “No [n-word] is going to enter our school.” Looking for someone to help her, she turned to an older woman who promptly spit in her face. Knowing she couldn’t go backwards because of the crowd, she said that she wanted to run away but thought she would fall down if she did. So, she decided to walk a block to a bus stop where she thought she would be safe, but the crowd followed her screaming taunts all the way. Can you see the anger on their faces? One of her tormentors was Hazel Bryan, a junior at Central High, who shouted “go home [n-word]! Go back to Africa!” and then told reporters that “[n-words] aren’t the only ones who have rights; whites had rights too…” and that “if God had wanted blacks and whites to go to school together, he would have made us all the same color.” First do no harm. We’ll look at what happened with Elizabeth more next week as we explore the second rule of doing good, but we should ask ourselves if we had been there that day would we have done anything differently? Of course we all want to say that we would, that we would never have participated in what happened to Elizabeth, but is that really true? Hopefully its true today, although we still have our own demeaning phrases that we throw around without thinking of the ramifications they have on the people they are directed at or on us. I heard one of those words several times at the park following the parade yesterday. The people attacking Elizabeth that day were not special people. They were just like us, ordinary people. But they wanted to demean and dehumanize Elizabeth, to bring her down and scare her away by hurling vile names and threats at her. These were not atheists or pagans doing these things. In fact they were almost, if not exclusively, all Christians. They were people who had been in church the Sunday before and would be in church the Sunday after, and who told themselves that there was absolutely nothing wrong with what they were doing. That in fact they were justified in what they were doing, just as a hundred years before those who held slaves felt justified in what they did. In today’s scripture passage, Jesus tells us that it is not what goes into us that defiles us, but that which comes out, because that shows our true hearts, and then he immediately has an encounter with a Canaanite woman. Now the Israelites and Canaanites did not like each other, in fact the animosities between the two groups went back to the Exodus. When the woman approaches Jesus, his first response it to tell her that he has only come to save the lost sheep of Israel, in other words, she is out of luck. But, the woman goes and kneels at his feet, she literally worships him, and then Jesus tells her that she is no more than a dog, only the word he uses is a slur that is much worse than dog. In its severity, he basically calls her what those taunting Elizabeth called her. This is not just a slight rebuke of the woman it is a racial slur, but this would have been the language and the attitude that surrounded Jesus all of his life. What he said would not have been shocking to anyone who was there, neither the disciples nor the woman, in fact a different response would have been more shocking. But the woman persists, and I think this is one of those moments in scripture when we can see Jesus have an “aha” moment and he begins to truly understanding why God has sent him. Jesus is not here only to redeem the lost sheep of Israel, but that he is here to redeem all of God’s children. First, do no harm. Rev. Peter Gomes said that “a surplus of virtue, is more dangerous than a surplus of vice.” Why we might ask? “Because,” Gomes said, “a surplus of virtue is not subject to the constraints of conscience.” Another way of saying this is that moral certitude causes more evil than moral uncertainty because there is nothing to check moral certitude. When we are convinced that we are morally correct in what we say and do, then there is nothing which can dissuade us and tell us we are wrong, not even God. Although we don’t normally worry about that because we are also convinced that God is on our side, after all if we are right than God has to be on our side. Christian author Annie Lamott has written, “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” One of the reasons that doing no harm is so hard, Bishop Job says, is that it requires us “to give up our most cherished possession – the certainty that we are right and others wrong.” In Thomas á Kempis’ seminal work The Imitation of Christ, which was instrumental to Wesley’s thought, á Kempis says “we cannot trust ourselves too much, because we often lack grace and understanding. The light within us is small, and we soon let even this burn out for lack of care. Moreover, we often fail to notice how inwardly blind we are; for example we frequently do wrong, and to make matters worse, we make excuses about it! Sometimes we are moved by passion and think it zeal. We condemn small things in others and pass over serious things in ourselves. We are quick enough to feel it when others hurt us – and we even harbor those feelings – but we do not notice how much we hurt others. A person who honestly examines his own behavior would never judge other people harshly.” So let us return to that picture of Elizabeth Eckford and her taunters including Hazel Bryan. It would be so easy to villanize Hazel, to make her the poster child for everything that we abhor, but to do that to her would be no different from what she did to Elizabeth. Instead, when we do no harm, we begin to see her as a child of God and to look at who she truly is and we find out that Hazel was routinely beaten by her father, had difficulties in school and one point attempted suicide. She was filled and surrounded with hate and fear, so is it any wonder that she acted on that hate and fear in the world? Richard Carlson, the author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, recounts the story of a man on the New York City subway. He was sitting next to a man who came onto the train with two small children, who were running around the train uncontrolled making a lot of noise and disturbing everyone around them. As it continued with no rebuke from the father, the man turned to him to tell him to control his children, but before he could speak the father said “I know I should be yelling at my kids and getting them to behave, but we just came from the hospital where their mother just died, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what to tell them.” When we begin with seeking to do no harm then we are forced to look past the front that people often present to mask their own pain, and to see them as they are, as children of God, even when they are people we think we are supposed to despise. When we seek to do no harm, we realize that when we try and rain on other people’s parades that we get just as wet. When we seek to do no harm, we begin to realize that when we surround ourselves with fear and hate, that we become fearful and hateful. When we seek to do no harm, we become aware that to overcome evil in the world we do not have to become evil ourselves. When we seek to do no harm, we realize that everything we say and everything we do, and everything we do not say and do not do, impacts others. When we seek to do no harm, we realize that we create the world and culture in which we live and that when we inflict pain on others that we inflict it on ourselves. When we seek to do no harm, then we realize that when we are blessing to others that we too will be blessed. When we seek to do no harm, we began to understand that we do not make this journey alone, that Christ has traveled the same path and continues to travel with us and that by doing no harm we live into the image of Christ. In the words of Bishop Job, “to do no harm means that I will be on guard so that all of my actions and even my silence will not add injury to another of God’s children or to any part of God’s creation…. I will determine every day that my life will always be invested in the effort to bring healing instead of hurt; wholeness instead of division; and harmony with the ways of Jesus rather than the ways of the world. When I commit myself to this way, I must see each person as a child of God – a recipient of love unearned, unlimited, and undeserved – just like myself.” Doing no harm is not about the extraordinary occurrences in our lives. It is about the innocuous, bland, occurrences that surround us every day. When we make the first rule to do no harm one of our operating principles we come to understand, just as Jesus did, that we are all God’s children, and that what comes out of our mouths, and what comes out of our actions, can defile or bless not only the world but ourselves as well. When we seek to do no harm, it becomes who we are, we are transformed and through our words and actions we transform each other and we transform the world. Our lives become objects of healing and goodness to all those with whom we interact, and maybe just as importantly we become objects of healing and goodness to ourselves. May it be so. Amen.

*I stole this piece about the Twilight series from a sermon by Rev. Steve Blair.