From Sampler to Sower

Weekend Teaching Series: Write them On My Heart (A series on the 10 Commandments)

Message Title: Word Eight: No Stealing!

Sermon in a Sentence: We must not steal anyone’s stuff, livelihood or freedom.

Text(s): Exodus 21:16, 22:1, 7; Deuteronomy 5:19, 24:7; Joshua 7;

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 of 10; I’m just now realizing how arbitrary these numbers are, but I went with 6 because there was one video to worry about.

Message Summary:

We began with the story of Achan’s sin.  In a nutshell, during the battle of Jericho, Joshua instructed his soldiers that anything made out of metal was devoted to God and could not be taken from the city.  Achan disobeyed, taking for himself a robe, 5 pounds of silver coins, and a wedge of gold that weighed a little more than a pound.  Burying them in his tent, he assumed no one knew.  But when Joshua sent a force of about 3,000 men to attack the small and relatively weak town of Ai, Isreal’s army was defeated.  God revealed to Joshua that it was the result of Achan’s sin of stealing.  Achan and everything he had, his tent, his belongings, his livestock, even his family were brought before Joshua.  They were all stoned until dead, and the entire lot was burned.  Finally, a monument of stones was piled over the ashes to remind Isreal in coming generations of how seriously God took Achan’s sin.

Of course it should come as no surprise that God condemns theft.  After all it is covered in the eighth command – you will not steal.

We examined the language of the eighth command, looking at the Hebrew word for “steal.”  It is ganab which literally means to take something that isn’t yours without the owner’s knowledge or consent. (See the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament).  I realize how deeply profound such a definition is.  But we did talk about the difference between gazal (to take by force) and ganab (to take by sneakiness).

But what can be ganab-ed?

You can ganab someone’s stuff.

Exodus 22:7 says that if someone leaves their money or their stuff with a neighbor and someone ganabs it, the thief, when caught must repay double.  That way the victim gets their property back, and the thief, loses the same amount they attempted to gain wrongly by theft.

It is in this sense that we typically understand this command.  Stealing is taking my stuff, and the Bible says that if you steal my stuff, you owe me twice as much back.

We noted how throughout history this command has been used to protect the property of the haves from the needs and wants of the have nots.  “Don’t steal” is the rich person’s favorite command.  What’s mine is mine and you can’t take it.  And it is this command that forms the foundation of the idea of private property.  Our entire economic system is build around the idea that what I have belongs to me and you can’t take it.

Of course, we should probably note that the Israelite community into which this word was spoken had very limited ideas of private property.  Most things that were owned were not owned by individuals, but by families.  Inheritances were managed in the best interests of the family, not the individual.  And what wasn’t owned by families was often considered community property, to be used for the good of the entire community.

What is more, while we tend to think of stealing in terms of the poor taking things from the rich, when the Bible talks about theft, it is often the rich taking what little the poor have to call their own, whether it’s King Ahab and Jezebel stealing Naboth’s vineyard, or David who had more wives that he could name stealing Uriah’s one and only wife, or Judas, the treasurer for the disciples, stealing money that had been given for the benefit of the poor.

While we, as rich Americans, like to tout “Don’t steal” in defense of our stuff, we should probably notice that this command is directed at the haves who never seem to have enough.

You can ganab someone’s livelihood.

Here we looked at Exodus 22:1, which notes that if someone steals an ox or a sheep and either kills or sells it, they are to repay either five head of cattle for the stolen ox, or four sheep for the stolen sheep.  It’s interesting that the penalty is higher.

But when you consider the nature of such a theft, you begin to understand why.  If you steal my stuff, you take away what I have right now.  If you steal my livestock you place my entire future in jeopardy.  You strike a blow against my ability to make a living and provide for my family.  Steal my stuff, you hurt my present.  Take my livelihood and you steal my future.

And there really isn’t any room for the argument that I took your ox or your sheep because my family was in desperate need.  Isrealite law made provisions for the essential needs of the poor, whether it was laws about not harvesting everything you planted so that anyone who is hungry can glean a harvest for their families, or laws about not keeping a cloak that was taken as security on a loan overnight.  Whether it is my need for food, or my need for warmth and shelter, Isrealite law made provisions to meet my essential needs.

Instead, if I steal the livelihood of another I show that, at least in my mind, my desire to have more is more important that your need to provide for your future.  And this is an idea that God not only condemns, he punishes severely.

Finally, you can ganab someone.

Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7 both speak of kidnapping someone to become your slave or to sell them as slaves to anyone else.  The word translated as “kidnap” is ganab.  You can ganab someone’s stuff.  You can ganab someone’s livelihood.  But you can also ganab someone.

And the Bible says that the punishment for ganabing someone isn’t to pay back double, or even four or five times as much.  The penalty for kidnapping is death.

Kidnapping and theft are both crimes against the community.  If you steal someone’s stuff you leave them feeling threatened and vulnerable and you strip from them the security community is supposed to provide.  But if you kidnap them, you remove them entirely from their community, cutting them off from home, family, friends, from everything that really matters.  And so this most serious type of theft is punished under the strictest terms by Isrealite law.

Then we noted that these last few commandments have been easy ones for us to study because they don’t really apply to us.  Most of us will never be tempted to commit an act of premeditated fatal violence.  Murder really isn’t something we’re tempted to do.  Likewise, for my teens, adultery isn’t much of a temptation yet.  Adultery is something that married people do, and since my teens aren’t married, this too is a commandment that really applies to others.

The same’s true of stealing right?  After all we’re not thieves.

Only we are.

We steal people’s stuff all the time.

I challenged them to think about the stuff in their room at home that wasn’t theirs.  That thing they borrowed from a friend and never returned, keeping it until their friend forgot they even had it.  Or that term paper in which they stole words from a website in order to make the deadline (after all cut and paste is so easy).  Or the things they flat out stole: five-finger discount from the store, brought home from the supply room at work, bought with money they grabbed out of mom’s purse.

The fact is American teenagers have a problem with stealing.  Just this week a study was released that showed, out of  of American high school students:

• 30% said they had stolen something from a store in the last 12 months
• 23% said they had stolen something from a parent or relative in the last 12 months
• 20% said they had stolen something from a friend in the last 12 months

(Associated Press, “Lie, cheat and steal: high school ethics surveyed” By David Crary)

But it’s not just stuff we steal.

We also steal people’s livelihood.

We steal from the rich — and here we talked about piracy of music, videos and software.  We can try to rationalize it all we want, but we are taking away someone’s livelihood.

We also steal from the poor — and here we talked about globalization.  Globalization itself isn’t a bad thing – it opens up worlds of opportunities for a world full of people, but it also creates incredible market forces which can threaten people’s livelihoods.

We talked about Walmart as an example of this.  Most people don’t have any concept of the Walmart’s corporate size.  In terms of revenue it brings in more than $378 billion a year (2006 figures).  That’s more than 3 times its closest retail competitor – French retailer Carrefour ($115 billion) – and more than four times more than its closest American retail competitor – Home Depot ($80 billion).  It’s revenues total more than the #2, #3 and #4 world retailers combined.

And in terms of employees it is the largest corporate employer in the world, employing roughly 1.8 million people worldwide.  Again that’s more than 3 times more than #2 employer Deutsche Post, the former German postal service, now private company known in the US as DHL.  And again, Walmart employs more people than the world’s #2, #3, and #4 employers combined.

We have no concept of just how big Walmart – the largest corporation in the history of the world – really is.

And as a result we have no concept of how much market pressure it can create.  Sometimes that’s a good thing.  Walmart’s drive to lower prices has led to a reduction in packaging waste.  Charles Fishman’s book The Walmart Effect tells the story of how a simple change like asking deodorant companies to no longer ship their product in unnecessary cardboard boxes has spared acres of forests, saved billions of dollars and kept tons of cardboard out of our landfills.  But Sometimes Walmart’s influence isn’t so benign.

Take their corporate mantra “Save more, live better” and before that “Always low prices.”  That corporate mindset has led to a low-wage, low benefit business model.  Walmart employs more people than any employer on the planet, and it provides living wages and simple health benefits to a frightening few of them.  They have revolutionized retail technology, so that almost any employee with almost no training can be slotted into almost any job at the store – but the reason such innovation was necessary is because they have a turnover rate of more than 50% (some say as high as 70%).  In other words, well over half of their employees quit before working there for a year.  And this is not a problem for Walmart; it is their plan for success.  The late Sam Walton is quoted as saying “I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We’re going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.”  Low prices for us means low wages for the person helping us at the store.

And it’s not just sales associates.  Walmart exerts a constant pressure on suppliers to cut costs.  Sometimes that’s good.  (Reduction of packaging savings were split between the deodorant companies and consumers.)  Sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes businesses decide the only way they can keep cutting costs is to move production off-shore where they can pay workers well below standard wages and do business in ways that are not environmentally sustainable.  After all, Walmart sells exponentially more product that any retailer in the world, and if you can’t meet Walmart’s demand for “Always low prices” you take your product out of the one store at which the most consumers in the world shop.

But what would happen if that changed?

What would happen if instead of “Always low prices” Walmart began to value “Always living wages” or “Always sustainable industry”?

That same force which has the power to affect working conditions worldwide would begin to exert pressure on suppliers to ensure better working conditions for their employees.

We can argue that will never happen.  But it might.  Walmart brags about always low prices because that’s what we, the consumers, demand.  If we decided that a living wage was as important to our choice about where to shop as low prices are, trust me, it wouldn’t be long until Walmart started bragging about how competitive their wages are.

Of course we don’t think about the livelihoods of those who are supplying goods for us when we choose where to shop.  We only think about our (legitimate) need to save money.  But isn’t it possible sometimes that is the same thing as deciding my desire to have more is more important than their need to earn a living?  Isn’t that another symptom of the mindset this commandment condemns?

Finally we talked about the fact that we steal people’s future.

Well, maybe not us.  But slavery is alive and well in our world today and most Americans are completely oblivious to it.  Whether it’s children being conscripted into armies in the Congo, or women being sold in the sex trade in Thailand, people are losing their freedom every day.  And we don’t even notice.

Here in Senior High we watched Highway Video’s “Selling Innocence” mini-documentary.

I closed by challenging teens to change the way they live.  To stop taking people’s stuff.   To stop stealing people’s livelihood.  And to stop sitting silently by while people have their freedom stolen.

Volunteer/Student Involvement: It was awesome.  The stage was filled with musicians (at least for the Junior High service.)  Exciting to see new student talent develop musically.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: This week I took extra time for storytelling, specifically the story of Achan’s sin.  I especially liked the part about the battle of Ai which (as I explained to my students after scaring them half-to-death with a top-of-my-lungs scream) surely was pronounced AAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIII!  I was hoping to have some FLIX footage of it, but the teen that thought it would be funny to video Pastor Brad screaming hasn’t sent it to me yet.

Worship Set: Holy is the Lord, How Great is our God, You Never Let Go, and Famous One

Favorite Moment: I love it when people walk right into things.  I was explaining to the Junior Highers that unlike murder and adultery this command applies directly to us.  We steal things all the time.  One of my teens said. “Yeah right.  Like what?”   I’m so glad you asked . . .  Talk about a teachable moment.