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[Music] The Steel Trap, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] The scripture reading of the evening is from Exodus chapter 20,

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beginning the reading at the verse numbered one. The passage of scripture to which we generally refer as the Ten Commandments. And God spoke all these words saying, "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

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You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.

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You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

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In it you shall not do any work. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you. You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery.

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You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his ox or his ass or anything that is your neighbor.

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Now when all the people perceived the thunderings and the lightnings and the sound of the trumpet and the mountains smoking, the people were afraid and trembled. And they stood afar off and said to Moses, "You speak to us and we will hear, but let not God speak to us, lest we die." And Moses said to the people, "Do not fear, for God has come to prove you, and that the fear of him may be before your eyes, that you may not sin."

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And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to the understanding of this inspiration. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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I would ask you to think with me tonight about the Eighth Commandment. "Thou shalt not steal," as it is most frequently recorded. Most people who consider this commandment look upon it as a defense of the right for private property. But in actual fact, the commandment has very little to do with such a concern.

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In the first place, the children of Israel to whom the commandments were given had very little private property. They had just been led out of slavery and servitude in Egypt, and their personal possessions were few indeed. In the second place, there was a concept of corporate personality, which was common in the Old Testament, which led what belonged to one person in large measure to belong to the whole community.

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Thirdly, this commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," is not related specifically to the right to private property, most evidently because it is the Tenth Commandment, "Thou shalt not covet," which is most concerned with questions of private property. In other words, the Eighth Commandment does not deal specifically with what we own or with what we do with what we own.

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In the Old Testament, the greatest concern is not so much the right of private property as it is the proper use of private property. Concrete legislation is laid down concerning the care of the poor and the destitute. Those who have private property are warned lest their vast accumulations get them into trouble. Isaiah says, for example, "Those who join house to house and field to field pervert the purpose of God for the good of all the people."

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The central theme of the Old Testament in this whole regard is, "You children of Israel have come out of slavery. You know what it is to be destitute. You know what it is to be powerless. And therefore you of all people should have the greatest concern for the poor and the destitute of the world." The Old Testament, then, does not so much speak of the right to private property

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as it does to the obligation of using private property in a way that honors God. Now, this is very hard for us as twentieth-century Americans to understand, because we're very much part of a society which exalts the right to private property. We're part of a society which even now is in the process of developing a neutron bomb,

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the principal distinction of which is that it destroys people without destroying property. We often, in our time and place, put property above people. Such an idea finds no support or encouragement in the Bible. The Eighth Commandment is in no sense a defense of the right for private property,

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and it certainly is not to be used, as many people use it today, to justify their selfish accumulation of great riches. The Eighth Commandment concerns the sanctity of the self. Albrecht Alt, the great German scholar, has pretty well convinced the theological and biblically historical world that the earliest version of this commandment did not read "Thou shalt not steal,"

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but rather, "Thou shalt not steal a man." The idea is, "Thou shalt not kidnap, thou shalt not capture, thou shalt not intimidate or dominate another person." We find a parallel construction in the book of Exodus, chapter 21, where we read, "Anyone who kidnaps another and either sells him or still has him when he is caught shall be put to death."

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This same idea is picked up and repeated by the Apostle Paul in the first chapter of his first letter to Timothy. What this commandment says is that no person has the right to manipulate or dominate or intimidate another person. We cannot kidnap another individual's body or spirit. Two truths must be held in balance here.

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On the one hand, we must recognize that God has so made us that we discover ourselves in relationship to other people. We are so made that it is not good for us to dwell alone, and it is as we have to do with others that our own identities come to the fore. It is in the symbiotic relationship that we have with each other that we discover ourselves. Martin Heidegger, the great existentialist philosopher, put it this way, "All existence is co-existence."

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Or a contemporary of his, Gogarten, said it perhaps more succinctly and more accurately, "I am through you." God has so made us, you see, that it is as we relate to others that our real being comes to the front. Yes, he's the God of the individual, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob take up their identity as they relate to the people of God, Israel.

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Yes, God is the God of Peter and James and John. But Peter and James and John take up their identity as they are in relationship to the Church. What we are called to recognize then is that God honors us as individuals, but has so made us that we discover our individuality as we act and react in response to other people.

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And the Eighth Commandment is designed to protect this action and reaction, for it says that in the course of our relating to others, we may never steal them. We may never dominate or intimidate or manipulate them. We may never kidnap either their bodies or their minds.

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This is what it means when it says, "Thou shalt not steal." Now the implications for this I think are very important for us to note. In the first place, and quite obviously, we are forbidden to steal the spirits of other people. Leo Bascaglia is a very distinguished educational psychologist

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who teaches on the faculty of the University of Southern California. He's had a book which is on the bestseller list here in America for the last 20 weeks, the book is entitled "Living, Loving, and Learning." And in that book he tells of going into a San Francisco bookstore

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and finding there a very thin book which was entitled, "I may not be competent and excellent, but I am present." The book consisted of some poems and some drawings done by a young girl named Michelle. I want to quote one of her poems to you.

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"My happiness is me, not you. Not only because you may be temporary, but also because you want me to be when I am not. I cannot be happy when I change merely to satisfy your selfishness. Nor can I feel content when you criticize me for not thinking your thoughts or seeing like you do.

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You call me a rebel, and yet each time I have rejected your beliefs, you have rebelled against mine. I do not try to mold your mind. I know you are trying hard enough to be you. And I cannot allow you to tell me what to be, for I am concentrating on being me.

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You said that I was transparent and easily forgotten. But why then did you try to use my lifetime to prove to yourself who you are?" At the beginning of the book there was a dedication, and in the dedication was noted the fact that this young girl named Michelle

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had committed suicide on a fog-swept California beach at the age of 25. All she left behind was a few poems and drawings. Now what we hear in this poem is the cry of a person who feels that she's being stolen. I don't know to whom these words were directed,

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whether they were to her parents or her friends or her teachers or her lovers. But what she is crying out about is this. "You have no right to take me made in the image of God and to seek to bend me and mold me into the image of yourself."

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She's pleading for obedience to this Eighth Commandment. If the Sixth Commandment says, "Thou shalt not kill another's body," the Eighth Commandment says, "Thou shalt not kill another's spirit." No one has the right to do to anyone what someone did to Michelle.

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You see, most of us come into this world with a rather ill opinion of ourselves. That's been well established through the writings of Eric Erickson and others. We have a tendency to denigrate ourselves, to flagellate ourselves. We even admire those preachers who can thunder at us and make us feel most guilty.

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And we deny ourselves pleasures because we look upon ourselves as being unworthy of them. And we reject quite proper self-esteem. We do these things to ourselves. That's bad enough.

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But it's even worse when somebody else does them to us or when we do them to somebody else. Karen Horney has said that the principal dimension of the neurotic personality of our time is the way in which we constantly criticize and cut at each other.

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You've noticed, haven't you, how so much humor is sarcastic and destructive? How so many stoop in their style of speech, whether it's words spoken or words written, they stoop to the ridiculing of others? Now, there's a place for criticism in the world.

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But when criticism crosses the line of self-respect, then it is out of place. The person whom we criticize is one for whom our Lord Jesus Christ died. We cannot, then, tread on the spirit of that other person. And in like manner, because Christ also died for us,

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no one has the right to tread on our spirits either. Do you know these lines of Kahlil Gibran? "Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one also be alone, even as the strings of the lute are alone, though they quiver to the same music."

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We are in our relationships to quiver to the same music, but we are at the same time to be separate, not to overwhelm or crowd each other. We're like pillars that hold up a great roof. If the pillars are too close together, the weight of the roof will not be supported.

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It is important that the pillars be far enough apart. A cypress tree will not grow in the shadow of an oak tree. No tree will grow in the shadow of another tree. It will wilt and die. We are not to overshadow one another.

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When we do this, you see, we find ourselves caught in what we might call the "steel trap." I mean by this that when we walk through other people's minds with our dirty feet, it doesn't take very long before we find other people walking through our minds with their dirty feet. When we seek to overwhelm, when we seek to be sarcastic or critical of others,

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it does not take long before they reach out in sarcasm and criticism and ridicule. And before much time has passed, the circle is complete, and we are caught in the nexus of the same ugliness we have created. Whenever I think of this, I think of the story in the first chapter of the book of Judges

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about a man named Adonai Bezach. He was a Canaanite chieftain who ruled over a small area and was consistently successful in defeating his enemies. He also was a very cruel man who regularly would take those whom he had defeated

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and would cut off their thumbs and cut off their big toes. When he cut off their thumbs, of course, they could no longer grasp a sword, and when he cut off their big toes, he affected their balance. And to humiliate them even more, he made them crawl around his table like animals,

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throwing food to them like dogs. Well, eventually the day of Adonai Bezach came, and he was himself defeated by Simeon and Judah. When they captured him, they mutilated him exactly as he had mutilated others. They cut off his thumbs and his big toes.

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And the scriptures record that he said, "As I have done, so the Lord hath requited me." Which being translated might read, "As I have whittled away at others, so I now find myself being cut." A film critic said a few years ago about the acting of Marlon Brando that he acted as if there was an angel inside of him struggling to be free.

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Now, whether that's an apt description of Brando's acting or not, I don't know. But I do believe there is an angel inside of each and every one of us, and it's struggling to be free. And whenever we chain another person's angel,

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whenever we seek to dominate or intimidate or manipulate another person's angel, we are breaking this eighth commandment. We are stealing that self, and that kind of theft multiplies, so that very soon we find part of ourselves being stolen away.

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A second implication, I think, of this commandment is that we are not to steal those things, those physical things, which make the self what it is. There is a sense in which a physical thing can be an extension of the self. Now, this is very hard to grasp because of our way of life today.

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We have so many things. Our lives are cluttered with things. And most of these things are made of plastic, and they're made by the hundreds of thousands, and they're made by people that we do not know and never will know, and they are built to become obsolescent and to self-destruct within a few years.

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There are very few things in our lives which continue from generation to generation, which have been made for us by people who really care about us, and which, when we look upon them, give to us a sense of stability and wholeness. The fact that this is so has had very negative impact on the family.

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It's cut back on family stability, it has reduced the value of family play, and it has cheapened our respect for those things which can be made from the things of the world. You know how it is. When something is broken, we just replace it. When something is stolen from us, we just call up the insurance company.

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What we need in our lives are some things that go back away, that root in the history and tradition of our family. F. W. Borum, the great Australian preacher, tells in one of his books of a little boy whose mother and father died,

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and he was taking them to a Christian family that was adopting him. And as they were riding along, he would notice that every once in a while the little boy would turn away, and he would pull something out of his pocket and he would look at it, and then he would put it back again.

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And finally Borum asked him what it was, and the boy showed him a small square of cloth. And he said, "Sir, it's from my mother's dress, and every time I see it or rub it, I feel a little bit better." Well, I don't stand in this pulpit tonight to suggest that we ought to love things,

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but I am suggesting that there ought to be a few things in our lives that when we see them or rub them, they remind us of the people who've loved us and who have made these things possible for us. When you take that kind of thing from a person,

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you are taking that which is really an extension of themselves. [Bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side. As I've thought about that this week, I've thought a lot of these refugees in the world

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who have lost everything that they own. Every single thing they own is gone. Imagine what it would be like for them to have one memento out of their yesterdays, one thing out of the past that helped to make them what they are,

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and then to have that one thing taken away. When we do something like that, we steal that which is an extension of the self. But as I say, that's hard for us to grasp because we have so many things. Let me bring it down then to just one example.

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Think about that kind of theft, of that kind of thing which is an extension of the self, which is most typical in our society. I refer, of course, to the theft of our bodies in acts of sexual promiscuity. We know that our bodies and our souls are closely united.

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We know that the body is not just baggage that the soul carries around, and we know that the soul is not just a bubble of air inside the body. We know that the two are tied tightly together. That means that all genital sex is personal.

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It means that when you climb into bed with anybody, you can't leave your soul parked outside. It means that in the closest physical union which can be known on earth, that moment of orgasmic climax when you utterly abandon yourself to another,

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that in that moment there is a unity that can be discovered in no other way. I think the proof for that is in the fact that once two people have had intercourse together, their relationship is never the same again. They may love each other more.

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They may feel more comfortable with each other. They may have less respect for each other. But their relationship will never be exactly the same. Why? Because the mystery of the unity of the body and the soul in the sexual act

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has become reality for them. Now we do many things with genital sex in our society. We sell our bodies. We loan our bodies. We give away our bodies for the evening.

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What we need to remember is that when we so sell or loan or give, we are selling and loaning and giving not only our bodies, but a part of our very souls, for the body is an extension of the soul. Sex, you see, is very special.

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That's the reason you can't encompass it in describing an orgasm, and you can't photograph it on a little bit of pornographic film, and you can't depict it in some erotic masterpiece, and you can't measure it by applying electrodes to your erogenous zones.

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Oh no, it's much more special than that. This means that there's no such thing as casual sex, that a one-night stand is actually a rip-off. When you take that which is designed to be the most solemn and mysterious union

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and instead make it into a device to take somebody else's body or to give, you think, only your body, when in fact you're taking a soul and you're offering a soul. I saw a cartoon in which a young couple had just completed having sex

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and they rest back on the bed having exhausted themselves, and he says to her, "I thought of Sophia Loren. Who did you think of?" Now that capsules what I'm trying to say. Here's a person who uses another body for the fulfillment of his own fantasies,

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for a moment of thrill and titulation. That is an assault upon another being. And when you do that, you not only desecrate the other being, you desecrate yourself. You're caught again in the steel trap.

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That's the reason prostitutes who enter into the sex act again and again and again are unable to have any healthy, romantic, personal life themselves. They've given away so much, there's nothing more there to live with. That's the reason people who have been married again and again

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are unable to have successful marriages. Statistically speaking, people who have been married to three different people have no chance at a successful marriage at all. That's the reason we have Elizabeth Taylors and Billy Roses and Mickey Roonies

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and George R. Gabor. They have stolen so much from others, and they have had so much stolen from themselves, that there's nothing left on which to build a healthy marriage. And over against it, we have our loving God who says,

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"No, you cannot steal another person, either by a direct assault upon them with your words and criticisms or domination, or by burgling extensions of that soul." Extensions like the body itself.

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Let me suggest just one last implication of this commandment, and then I'm finished. The commandment, it seems to me, also says that we must be careful that we do not deprive another self of its being by taking away that other self's life.

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Now, I'm not referring to murder. The sixth commandment says, "Thou shalt not kill," and it refers to physical death. I'm not talking about that kind of killing. I'm talking about killing another, taking away the life of another

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by the way in which we live. It's a more subtle assassination. We think of it in terms of reincarnation. Now, you know what reincarnation is,

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but I wonder if you're familiar with the fact that the most sophisticated Buddhists do not look upon reincarnation in the terms in which we usually think of it. For example, a man like J.C. Jennings in his book,

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"The Vedantic Buddhism of Buddha," talks about that for most Buddhists today, reincarnation means how we live today and so influence the lifestyle of those who will come after us. You see, what we're doing in the world today, the way we're living now,

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is going to affect the way in which our children live. In a sense, we are going to be born again in them because what they have to live with and live through will be the fruit of the way we are living now.

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If you understand reincarnation in this way, it becomes essentially an ethical idea. It is simply saying that we can, by the way we live today, rip off the future. We can kidnap the bodies and the souls of our own children.

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Now, we've seen this kind of thing happen in the past. North Africa was once referred to as the garden of the Roman Empire. Today it's a place of ruined cities covered with silt and sand. Why? Because of bad grazing, bad lumbering, and bad farming practices.

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We have that area of the world as it is today because those who had it yesterday did not take care of it. The Fertile Crescent is not fertile anymore. The cedars of Lebanon are gone.

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A hundred and eighty miles of land has been pushed out into the Persian Gulf since the biblical days. Why? Because of bad environmental practices. In Turkey, two of the principal seaports were Ephesus and Tarsus,

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both landlocked today, and landlocked because of the improper care of the environment. In Greece and in Spain and in pre-Columbian America, the same kind of things happen. The way people lived yesterday is having significant impact

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on the way people are living today. And just so, the way we're living today is going to have great impact upon tomorrow. There are 350 kinds of birds and 280 kinds of mammals and some 20,000 plants in the world that are presently on the verge of extinction.

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When the last one of each one of those things dies because of our environmental carelessness and abuse, we will have stolen something from our own children. We will have swiped that which belongs to tomorrow.

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We are presently filling the Earth's atmosphere with six billion tons of carbon monoxide. The greenhouse effect, which has been predicted, is beginning to evidence itself.

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The polar caps are beginning to melt. The oceans are rising. When that process goes far enough, some of the principal seaports of the world are going to be underwater.

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Our children will live in a world like that because of the way in which we're living now. We dump phosphates and pesticides and sewage into our waters so that one-third of America's lakes are now sick or dying.

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No seafood that is caught in the Baltic Sea is edible. Even the penguins in Antarctica, thousands of miles from where the pollution occurs, are found to have poison in their bodies.

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San Francisco Bay used to provide 15 million pounds of oysters every year and 3 million pounds of clams. All gone. There are no more. The way we live now has stolen these things from tomorrow.

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But tomorrow, you see, is going to be, because of this, the reincarnation of us. Sometimes, sometimes this steel trap in which we steal from our own children

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evidences itself more quickly. There is a pesticide called "phosphel." Now, it's illegal to sell phosphel in America because it has been indisputably tied to certain nervous disorders.

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So you can't sell it anywhere in America. But the Velsicol Chemical Corporation sells it overseas. We will not poison ourselves, but we'll poison others for profit. But here's what we've discovered.

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We've discovered that 70 to 80 percent of that pesticide being used overseas is being used on products that are exported to Europe and the United States. The poison we sell, we end up eating. That's the steel trap.

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That's what happens when we do these kinds of things. The Ten Commandments were not given to us because God likes to give rules, because He likes to make demands of us, because He was seeking some way to separate the obedient from the disobedient.

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The Ten Commandments were given to us to break the cycle of evil in which we find ourselves. When we lie, other people will soon be lying to us. When we dishonor our parents, our children will soon be dishonoring us. When we covet, other people will be coveting what belongs to us.

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When we commit adultery, our marriage bed will soon no longer be sacred. If we steal, we will be stolen from. Recently, on a Midwestern university campus, they conducted a sociological experiment. They asked every student to bring a dime and an envelope.

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They said to the students, "Now, if you wish, you may give this dime to the hungry of India. There's a famine going on there. The food is desperately needed. If you want to give your money there, put the dime in the envelope and write the word 'India' on the front.

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Your second choice is, there's a family in a ghetto near here. The man is crippled. He is unable to work. They are very destitute. If you would like to give your dime to them, put your dime in an envelope and write across the front of the ghetto, and that's where your money will go.

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Your third alternative is this. We'd like to get a new photocopier here at the university. It would enable you to have your manuscripts copied much more rapidly. If you want to give your dime to that, put a dime in the envelope and write across the front of it, 'Copier.'

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Eighty percent of the students handed in envelopes marked 'Copier.' They were more concerned with meeting their own wants than they were with meeting other people's needs. But see, what happens as a result of that is this. That hungry family is still hungry.

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Welfare goes up. Police protection and fire protection must be increased because with rising poverty comes rising crime and destructiveness. And who pays for all of those things? Those same students on that campus when they become wage earners.

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In India they starve, and in the ground of starvation the seeds of communism catch flower and grow, and India, which teeters back and forth between the free and the unfree world, may cross the line. And with the crossing of the line, communist power is increased, military armaments goes up. Who pays for military armaments?

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The draft is reinstituted. You know the rest of the story. Caught again, you see, in the trap. There isn't any place to hide in this world anymore. An employer comes in and criticizes and attacks an employee in front of other employees.

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The employee is upset. He goes home and yells at his wife. His wife slaps his children. His children kick the dog. The dog defecates on the carpet.

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Where did it start? And where will it end? What we're being called to in the commandments is a recognition of this. God says, "Don't steal other people. Don't be sarcastic and cynical and ridiculing with them.

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Don't seek to overshadow or dominate their lives. Don't take those things which are the fruits of themselves. Don't play fast and loose with their bodies. And don't try to steal tomorrow from your own children.

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In modesty and in responsibility, you will find your peace. Thou shalt not steal another self. Nikos Tsantzakis writes in one of his novels, "You have your brush and you have your colors,

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and you can paint paradise, and in you go." And I suppose that can be true. But because you're free, you can also paint hell. But if you paint it, don't blame your parents,

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and don't blame your friends, and don't blame your society. And above all else, don't blame God. For God has said, "Thou shalt not steal." You know, when Mike Staples came back from India this summer,

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one of our students on the mission field, he told me that Indians quite often greet each other with this word, "Namastakari." I never heard that word, so I did some research on it.

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I found out what "Namastakari" means. It means, "I honor that place in you where the whole universe resides." "I honor that place in you where, when you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, the two of us are one."

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That sums it all. "Namastakari, my friend." "Namastakari." Let us pray.

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"Namastakari, dear God." "Namastakari." And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

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The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves. Amen.

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