May 20, 2014
In the Day
A little girl presented her
Sunday school teacher with five wadded up one-dollar bills for the offering.
The teacher didn’t quite know what to do with the money because normally they
don’t take up a collection. A few of us standing around lamented that we’ve
lost the element of tithing-training in today’s church. In our day we wouldn’t
go into Sunday school without first getting nickels and dimes from out parents
for the offering. The teacher continued with a chuckle, “And there’s more — her
younger brother handed me three quarters to pay me for being his teacher.”
Jesus said of the disciples, “… the worker is worth his keep” (Matt 10:10b
NIV).
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Gail;
-----I don’t think it is just by happenstance that the oldest social-psychological theory is still the most fundamental one today. Maybe it was by happenstance that it emerged from the Scottish Moralists. Being men of study and reason, their theory would be shaped more by what they observed and less by what they desired. And it was assembled from their observations of how man carried civility, affections, and familial relationships from generation to generation. Desired and accepted behavior is encouraged and applauded while disdained and rejected behavior is discouraged and ridiculed on subconscious levels through emotional expressions and reactions long before consciously deliberated responses are even expressed. We maintain radars for these cues in order to learn sociable fits amongst others.
-----I remember the days when this was not a “bad” process. Yes, I remember also stuffing the nickels and dimes into my pockets to drop in the offering plate. It was a part of the culture of going to church. It was what we did, well, because it was what people did. It was tradition. And life then was full of traditions providing basic guidelines and clues for character and personality development. These were times before the dogs.
-----Don’t get me wrong about the dogs. They growled and snapped and bit at tradition like it was a confining leash. I call them dumb, but they are smart. Every one of them had the right to turn its own back on tradition. But they knew the looking-glass principle of the oldest social-psychological theory. They knew their turned backs would equate to aberrant behavior disdained of the communities. They wanted to do their things with impunity. So they bit and tore and gnashed and ripped at the concepts of tradition and normality so nastily and constantly until any expectation of tradition or normality itself would become a community disdain.
-----Well, it was rather thoughtless to laud the mere dropping of a couple coins into an offering plate. But it instilled a behavior which could later fill up with reasons and meanings. And that is the way tradition has served intimacy unto civility. But it also was the Achilles tendon the dogs tore away, “For what,” they accused, “is the worth of doing anything just because somebody else does it. If you don‘t know why you‘re doing it, don‘t do it.” And certainly, every deceit must accumulate in the proximity of some grain of truth. So also, every deceit is known by its latent hypocrisy. “Try it; you’ll like it!” In other words, there was no reason to buck tradition other than to buck tradition (unless you knew the actual plot of the deception was to instill a new tradition more serving to the dogs‘ desires.)
-----So we arrive today at this cauldron roiling with the boiling hot chaos of everyone trying to be untraditional for the sake of being himself, yet only showing how vacuous can be the worthlessness of a gadget having no machine of which to be a part. The richness of those nickels and dimes clinking in the collection plate wasn’t the fifteen cents of church support they made. It was the belonging to a relationship; it was the guidance of a behavior; it was the abiding in a community of goodness which their clinking afforded. And that's no leash!
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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