Luther Rice Memorial Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD August 26, 1984; First Baptist Church of Wheaton, MD, September 17, 1984; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, October 14, 1984
The most delicious of all the thrillers, the most engrossing of all the movie mysteries, is the kind in which the one-time major criminal, now somewhat reformed – or is he? – is asked to turn his coat and to get on the right side of the law and catch another criminal. That's always good for an especially exciting whodunit, because you never really know when the once-upon-a-time major thief will turn back to his old ways, when he will double cross the law and decide that the lure of illicit gold is too much to pass up. It makes for exciting, powerful, engaging drama.
There is old Cary Grant, for instance, being drawn out of retirement to nab the cat burglar who has been committing robberies everywhere, using the old master's exact techniques. The only person who can catch the new cat burglar, so the police figure, is the old cat burglar. And so he is recruited to catch the imposter, as the police grudgingly admit a kind of oblique respect for Cary's expertise. In a word, as the title of the movie suggests, to catch a thief they have to set a thief. The old proverb has it, “Set a thief to catch a thief.” If you want to deal with a scoundrel, then find another scoundrel who understands the wiles and the ways of scoundrels, and you'll be in business. Set a thief to catch a thief.
The ministry of Jesus as reported in John's Gospel had come to a critical juncture. A crisis was brewing, and Jesus seems to have felt it very deeply. In the depths of his soul he knew that he had come to a breaking point, he had arrived at the place where his work and the work of the Temple establishment were parting company. He had just healed the man born blind, as recorded in the ninth chapter of John, and the reaction to that healing was, if you'll pardon the pun, an eye-opener. The reaction on the part of the religious leaders, the Temple establishment, was to put the man out of the synagogue! How astounding, how negative and how punitive! For all the wrong reasons: healed by the Lord of sight and for that reason and no other excluded from the company of God's people. And so Jesus knew that the breach was irreconcilable, that the split between him and the priests was never to be healed.
And thus it is that Jesus chooses the Feast of the Dedication to make that conclusion explicit. The Feast of the Dedication was a Jewish festival which commemorated the foundation of the Temple; it celebrated the central place which the Temple held in Jewish life and worship. And of course if it celebrated the central place of the Temple, this feast also celebrated what went on in the temple, it was designed to highlight the whole system of sacrifices and burnt offerings and formalized ritual; the whole set of observances which surrounded the Temple. And so with biting words, with acid insight, Jesus penetrates to the heart of the meaning of all this ceremony, all this ritual, Jesus cuts right through all the pageantry and pomp, he slices right through all the psalms and the sanctity, and labels that establishment, labels the priests at work there:
All who come before me are thieves and robbers. All who come before me (and you can read that, all who get in my way) are thieves and robbers. And then he characterized them more fully, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.”
Thieves. That's what we're dealing with this morning. Thieves. And it comes as a shock to the system always, doesn't it, to recognize that Jesus could use such harsh language to mark the religious establishment of his day. The good people, the Temple keepers, thieves. Thieves and robbers. And in the metaphor which marks most of this chapter he speaks of God's people as sheep, as little lambs, and of himself as the shepherd, the good shepherd who cares for and who protects his sheep. Remember that in the Temple the main business, day after day and week after week and year after year, the main business was killing sheep. Slaughtering sheep as sacrifices and as offerings to God. But our Lord sees in that whole business something more than offerings; he sees theft, he sees exploitation. Our Lord understands that the Temple is taking and is not giving; our Lord understands that the church of his day is out after people's money and loyalty and time and energies, but gives nothing of value in return.
All who come and stand in my way, he says, are thieves and robbers. And the thief comes only to steal and kill arid destroy.
I say that it always comes as a shock to know that Jesus would speak of the Temple leadership so harshly. And it comes as even more of a shock to discover that I can see a lot of me in that establishment. I can see a lot of me, my kind of folks; I can see a good deal of church as I know it, as I have helped make it. It is altogether too possible that we too are among those whom Jesus spoke of as thieves and robbers, for we too get caught up, you see, in our religious routines, and we forget too easily about human needs, we forget too easily about people who hurt, people who need to receive from us.
And so, my friends, I am convinced that whenever we as Christ's church as more interested in what we can take from others rather than what we can give, we too are among the thieves and robbers. Whenever we care more about what somebody can contribute to our institutions and to our buildings and to our own comfort than we are about how we might support them and develop them and help them along, then we have become like those Temple officers, working busily at the business of sacrifice, just happily slaughtering the lambs all day long and thinking that this is God's business, but never seeing that the Lord of life thought of them as thieves and robbers who came to steal and kill and destroy. A terrible, terrible indictment.
I remember the layman in a church of which I used to be a member; he criticized the pastor because, he said, the pastor spent too much time reaching out to college students, and he hadn't brought in one good solid tithe-paying family. How easy it is to want to exploit and to take rather than to give!
And I recall too the television evangelist who exhorted his flock to send in their sacrificial offerings in order that his ministry might be housed in more splendid and more palatial surroundings. And if you do not, he said, if you do not give for this glorious edifice how will you be comfortable in the delights of heaven hereafter? Wow. How easy to exploit, how easy to take, how easy to be the thief and the robber.
And we’ve heard the politicians bandying about the name of our Lord, corralling God to their side, but they want power and votes, not the public welfare.
How easy indeed, and you realize, I trust, that I am not speaking of isolated incidents out there somewhere. I am not speaking only of the bizarre, the unusual, the peculiar. No, I am speaking of what lies at the heart of every human being, I am speaking of the larceny that penetrates the very core of human existence, for the scripture insists in every part that you and I are centered on ourselves, we want, want, want. And we take, take, take. As the old popular song has it, “I want what I want when I want it. Thieves and robbers we are.
But, are you still with me? But, however, nevertheless – but God, rich in mercy, had other plans for us. God, rich in mercy and abounding in grace, has given us a new name, has given us another identity. He’s changed things! And isn’t it marvelous, he wants to set a thief to catch a thief. He wants to take our expertise in the ways and wiles of the world and use it for another agenda. Who knows better than we do what kind of life-snatching us going on in the world? We’ve done it! Who knows better than we what sort of exploitation is going on out there? We know, religious people know, because we have been so sorely tempted. Church folks know what it is to be thieves, because by the grace of God we have been allowed to see ourselves as we really are, we have been allowed to know how dangerous it is to want and want and take and take. But we've been changed. We've been transformed. That has lost its grip on us and something else rules us now. And so we out of all the people in the world are best equipped for God's new agenda. We are those whom he can use: set a thief to catch a thief. Use those who are the most sensitive about what it means to take from others, and use them to create a whole new way, use them to destroy the reign of death and theft.
What is this new agenda? What is God’s new way? This Jesus announces in the rest of the text that his mission is something quite different from the mission of the religious establishment. Jesus says that his coming has a whole new meaning, a whole new dimension. All who come and stand in my way are thieves and robbers, and they come to steal and kill and destroy, but I, says the Lord, am come that they may have life and have it abundantly. I want no slaughter, I ask for no exploitation, I command no taking; I have come that there be life, life instead of death, gifts instead of debts, light instead of darkness, joy and release instead of guilt and burdens. Life and life more abundantly. Life that means that full development of all God’s children, that no one suffer want, that not one be denied opportunities, that not even one body be diminished by drugs and alcohol, not one spirit battered, not one moment be wasted by hatred. Life!
Notice that when Jesus announces his mission of life, he does so in positive terms, in fulsome terms. He announces not just life, but life more abundantly, life extravagantly, life that overflows and celebrates, life not just in drips and drabbles, but life abundantly and full; life not just in snippets and snatches, but life that is vital, rich, full of energy, showered with meaning. And he who sets a thief to catch a thief, he who calls us in our brokenness and out of the history of our dealing with death and with disillusionment and with decay – he calls us now enrich life, to give life, to support the fullness of life in all of his children.
Turn on your imagination with me now. Imagine, for example, what it means to be a child in the ghetto of southeast Washington. Imagine what it means to be growing up in a world bounded by rundown public housing, eroded by the failure of almost every human service imaginable, pounded by the violence of bullets and haunted by the ever-present specter of the drug dealer. A lot of life has been snatched, stolen, from that child. And some of it, by the way, by religious people, by the folks who name the name of Christ. All who have gotten in my way are thieves and robbers. They come to steal and kill and destroy. But I have come that they may have life and have in more abundantly. And the Lord who transcends the old order of exploitation calls us, thieves though we may have been, to create and support life and to care for these his little lambs.
Change the scene. Imagine – and some of you will hot have to imagine, some of you know from first-hand experience – imagine what it is like to be on the frontline of teaching, managing a classroom full of children, children of privilege. A few of them are eager to learn, but most are bored, bored stiff. A few of them manage to keep a civil tongue in their heads, but others are abusive, without respect and without joy. And you know that somehow life has been snatched from them, somehow something or someone has come in to steal and kill and destroy. In fact, you feel it happening to you too; you feel it's very hard to maintain the motivation and the ideals with which you began a teaching career. Will not somebody, maybe one of those former thieves on whom God has worked his marvelous work – will not somebody do something to support and strengthen and affirm a teacher? I am come that these all, students and teacher alike, have life and have it more abundantly.
Change the scene again: Imagine that a few years ago you found yourself on a boat, a perilously small boat, headed for unknown shores across troubled waters. It's a dangerous thing to do and you left behind what little security you had but you hoped, just hoped, that out there in the land they call America there was a new possibility. And the hope was all that kept you going. But when you arrived at this land, this great new world of opportunity, they herded you behind fences and they poked at you with needles and asked you questions in a language you could barely understand, and when they let you go there was no job, there was no food, there was no home. There was only the sweet air of freedom, but precious little else. And so now you've come to Washington, the capital city of this land of the free, but life still seems just out of reach, just beyond grasp. Is it to be that here too there will be those who will snatch life away, who will steal what little dignity and what little hope there remains? Or will there be those who once took so bounteously for themselves but who have now had their lives turned around by the one who came that the refugee, the exile, the wanderer might also have life and have it abundantly? We who once ourselves wandered in the spiritual desert wastes – we cannot now be squatters in the promised land and hold it for ourselves alone, else we would again be thieves. And we are not just thieves. We are the thieves set to catch a thief, called to root out the life-snatchers and to give life, life more abundantly.
A few weeks ago in Scotland the General Assembly of the Kirk, the Church of Scotland, met to consider the case of one James Nelson. James Nelson eight years ago had murdered his mother; in a fit of terrible anger he had raised his hand against his own mother and had stolen her life. Thief and murderer he was, and no one contested that. But during his prison years the grace of the living Lord had visited him as few persons experience, and he had not only become a Christian, he had also elected to study for the ministry and was now ready to ask for ordination. But the church authorities in Nelson's hometown had denied him that privilege and had expressed fear and horror and revulsion. So spoke the church of Jesus Christ, the executed criminal; so spoke the church which included Paul the jailbird, Saul the aider and abettor of Stephen's death; so spoke the church, the inheritor of Moses who slew the Egyptian in the desert. But then the General Assembly of the Scottish church heard one of its respected leaders remind them that the New Testament demonstrated that there is a new birth and a new man, that we are all sinners saved by grace, that it applies to every one of us. So today James Nelson, murderer, thief of life, preaches the Gospel and offers life, life more abundantly.
He does so because our Christ has commissioned him and has commissioned us, flawed as we are, to give to others the glorious and abundant, full and fulsome gifts of affirmation. He has set us, thieves though we were, to catch the thieves which prey upon his children. I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.
