“And he gave unto Moses when he had made an end of communing with him upon Mount Sinai, two tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”

(Exodus 31:18)

The Sunday closing laws for the city of Memphis and the State of Tennessee have been a subject of controversy among us for months.  Arrests have been made and cases taken to court in order to demonstrate the antiquarian nature and nuisance value of these Blue Laws.  Everyone has been laughing at the ridiculous aspect of the articles prohibited from sale on Sunday and those permitted for sale on Sunday in our contemporary society.

The City Council has wrestled with the problem of what to do with our Blue Laws.   The editors of the newspapers have delivered themselves.  The legislators and politicians have made various proposals for dealing with this matter in our pluralistic, technological, urban society.  Suggestions varying all the way from complete repeal of all Sunday Closing Laws to various refinements of existing legislation have been advanced.  What should be done?

Many searching questions have been raised by this community controversy which should be pondered by every responsible person – be he Christian or Jew, Catholic or Protestant, employer or employee, shop-keeper or customer, religious or irreligious.  Here are some of the questions:  Are Sunday buying and selling purely personal matters or are they properly public affairs?  Is this an area of religious concern, or is it an area for municipal legislation?  What are the permanent and the transient elements in all moral and ethical standards?  These are questions we should think about for something is at stake more important than whether or not we can buy a bottle of milk or a bottle of beer on Sunday.

The religious person is inclined to turn to scripture for guidance on moral and ethical problems.  We just read what the Bible states very clearly in one place about Blue Laws.  If your response is anything like mine to this passage from Exodus, your sentiments will sound very much like the antiphonal chorus from the “Virginia Thins” advertisement on TV:  “You’ve come a long way, Baby.”

In the Book of Exodus the Sabbatarian law is laid heavily on the whole Hebrew agrarian community.  Every one is commanded to keep one day in seven completely free from all work.  Violations of the law are punishable by death.  The reason given for the law is theological – because God, the Creator, made all things in heaven and on earth in six days and rested on the Sabbath, man, His creature, is to respond to the divine example by resting on the Seventh Day, remembering both the Creator and the day which commemorates the Creator’s work and rest.

This law of the Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments contained in the Decalogue, all of which are written, so this passage concludes, “by the finger of God.”

Are we to accept this Biblical precept as ethically binding on our society today just as it was on the wilderness wandering Hebrews, or are we to consider it nothing more than an old superstition which should be junked?

In the same book of Exodus (in fact, just two chapters away), recorded with the same holy authority as the Sabbath Law, is the institution of the religious rite for consecrating the priest when he performs the burnt offering ceremony.  There the priest is commanded to put on his “curious garments for glory and beauty.”  He is given instructions exactly on how to kill the animals, and to put the blood of the bulls and the rams, and the little lambs on the altar; how to cut out the liver and the kidneys and pile them on the altar and then kindle a fire and burn them with an awful smoke and stench; he is commanded to put blood on the lobes of his ears, his forehead, his little finger, and his big toe, and then sprinkle the assembled worshipers with the animal blood; all this to show thanksgiving, or to ask for forgiveness from God. (Exodus 29)

Is the Sabbath commandment of one piece with this ancient, primitive, cultic rite of blood and sacrifice, recorded in scripture, but completely shunted aside by the most pious of Biblical literalist today?

Jesus in his day, according to the Gospel record, deliberately violated the Sabbath Blue Laws of his contemporaries.  The ethical and religious rules of the first century prohibited any form of work on the seventh day of the week.  When the religious leaders criticized Jesus for healing the sick and performing other merciful deeds on their holy Sabbath day, Jesus countered by saying: “the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.”

So Jesus taught that into the fabric of the social, religious, economic and political life of God’s covenant people, the Sabbath laws and traditions had been woven primarily for man’s safe-keeping, for man’s protection from unscrupulous lords, masters, and employers.  That man might rest, that he might have time for leisure, for friends and family; that he might cultivate the mind and the soul, these were the purposes of the Creator,  said Jesus, in the establishment of the work stoppage in the Hebrew economy one day in seven.

Isn’t Jesus teaching us by His personal example and exhortation that every age of man must reconsider and sift carefully through the practices and sacred traditions of the past to discover what is outmoded, or only superstition, and what is still relevant?  So in our time everything that is oppressive to man’s well-being, in meaningless rituals of church and state, in archaic laws, and sacrosanct systems which enslave or impoverish man rather than serving man’s best interests must be stripped way.

In a recent TV interview, that articulate attorney, Mr. Nader, observed that our society, in insisting on law and order, imposes harsh restrictions on individual breaches of legal restrictions, but is most indulgent toward corporate breaches of legal restrictions in such matters as safety measures for automobile manufacturers and air and water pollution by chemical, plastic, and paper manufacturing companies.

Jesus, who said, “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath,” surely is saying to our technological, urban culture: “The machine was made for man, and not man for the machine; so also are the corporations and labor unions, and trade cartels and news media made for man, not man for any of these principalities and powers.”

But even more than this clear teaching of Jesus that man’s well-being stands above every ethical and moral arrangement, judging it as good or evil, usable or passé, on the basis of what it does for man – even more forcibly and persistently, Jesus taught that man must be subject to a Heavenly Father’s love and will and purpose in all things.  Man’s personal behavior patterns and his corporate ethical framework must be held responsible, even accountable to God as the ultimate source of all moral and ethical standards.

The supreme value of the Sabbath in the Hebrew society and in the thinking of Jesus was as a symbol of man’s relationship to God and of man’s accountability to God.  So in our society and  in every society that will ever be in this world, the common life of man must have such a symbol of Eternal God’s sovereignty and redeeming grace. If more forceful and inspiring symbols can be found, glory be!  Let us use them and enthrone them.  But let us be sure we have such superior symbols to lift up before we destroy the old one!

In one of his famous memorandums to the President, Daniel Moynihan wrote:  “The coding authority of a society’s institutions is little understood, but very dangerous. . . All we know is that the sense of institutions being legitimate, especially the institutions of government, is the glue that holds societies together.”

David Read, in his treatise on Christian ethics, asserts that always for man ethics become nothing more than etiquette, unless ethics is linked with theology – unless man feels he is ultimately responsible to God for his behavior.  Therefore, unless there is under girding our whole system of right and wrong, the faith, the strong belief, that God has ordained, that God has spoken, that the finger of God has written in large letters for man to see and know the difference between right and wrong, then the whole human ethical system crumbles.

The Book of Judges depicts one of the most chaotic. anarchic, distressing periods of Biblical history.  The book ends with this verse: “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

Is this what is happening in our time?  Have we come down to the leveling of all authorities until nothing stands higher than each man’s judgment of what is right?  Is this an old text with fresh meaning for this enlightened age which has found that man is the measure of all things in a new and fearsome way, where all rules are relative and God has been eclipsed by man come of age?

Is this the explanation of the rash of bombings in New York, and the destruction of the 47 lives in the Swiss plane crash rerouted from Zurich to Tel-Aviv, blown up by a bomb set to go off when the plane reached an altitude of 14,000 feet?  Is this a time again when every man does that which is right in his own eyes?”  Is the explanation of the slow slipping of safety from our Memphis streets and homes, that ours is a time when every man does that which is right in his own eyes.

One wonders how much longer it will be before credit will be destroyed, when people will no longer accept, for services rendered or goods delivered, a mere piece of paper with a few ink marks on it denoting the name of a firm and a fixed amount in exact dollars and cents – even thousands and tens of thousands of dollars – and only the two or three word flourish of a signature to validate the transaction?  When will only the long green be accepted and after that only the precious gold or silver?

You see, this is exactly what we are talking about in faith and trust which is the basis of society and ethics – “of the coding of authority for a society’s institutions,” in Moynihan’s phrase – “the glue that holds a society together.”

For if men cease to believe in God, they soon cease to believe in man.  “Our fathers were saddened when they could no longer believe in God, “wrote Harry Emerson Fosdick.  “Now their children are more deeply saddened to discover that they can no longer believe in man.”  This is the inevitable chronological progression of a failure of faith, a lapse of religion.

Pope Paul VI refers to the expression “The Cord from Above,” which he says, “sums up in a simple image the string holding up the whole web of life.  If that cord is broken, all life sickens and declines, loses its true meaning and its immense value.  That cord is our relationship with God.  It holds us up and gives us a very rich range of feelings; the marvel of existing; the joy and responsibility of living.”  (Easter Message – Pope Paul VI – 1970)

A wealthy American traveler abroad was watching a medical missionary nurse at a leper hospital change a corruption filled, unpleasant smelling bandage for a patient far-gone with leprosy.  Turning in revulsion from the nauseous sight, the rich American exclaimed, “I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars.” Looking up from her service for a brief moment the nurse said, “I wouldn’t do it for a million dollars either.”  But why does she do it?  Why?

The ethical response needed in our kind of chaotic, anarchic, even demonic world, will never be bought with any kind of money (see the failure of millions in foreign aid to halt communism); neither can it be taught (see our failure to stop drug abuse among our young through education) ; nor can it be brought about by fear.  (My nephew from his trip to Perry, Florida to view the eclipse brought back special edition copies of a newspaper put out by a Pentecostal church warning in scripture text that the eclipse with its total darkness at noon-day heralded the end of the world.  But he did not see any who were scared into exemplary ethical behavior.)

The only suitable ethical response in our needy world will come for us, as with that nurse, through response in kind to that One who said He came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life as a ransom for many. . .  Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. . . in response to Jesus’ words, “If I, by the finger of God, cast out demons, then is the Kingdom of God come among you,” through believing that He was talking about our time, too, and describing what He is even now accomplishing through men and women of faith.