Abbey the 'wonder-dog' scared the burglars away with her barking!
“Shame on you.”
The police officer shrugged as he said it, as if to say, “Yeah, I know, we all get lax about locking our cars when they’re parked in the garage.”
“Yeah, it’s a group of teenagers – they steal small electronics, wallets, even guns – but only from unlocked cars. They figure if your car’s unlocked, you’re fair game.”
My response – “That’s just WRONG.” Because I write and teach and think in the grid of creation-fall-redemption-restoration, I used that structure to figure out WHY that thinking is so wrong-headed. I thought of at least 3 reasons:
- I am created in the image of God. They are disrespecting me when they transgress my space.
- They are created in the image of God. They should be out mowing the lawns of the elderly, not stealing from people who didn’t lock their cars.
- They are blaming me for their sin. That goes straight back to the Fall, when Adam even dared to blame God for making ‘that woman’!
It also made me think of Leviticus, which I am currently studying for a Sunday school lesson for high school seniors. Many people observe that some of the strangeness of Levitical law is for the healthy functioning of society, and that is of course true. But what we can’t miss is that the core of the Levitical narrative (yes, it is part of the Israelite history) is the HOLINESS of God.
“Be holy; for I am holy” (Lev. 11:44) is the central theme of Leviticus. The reason the teenagers shouldn’t have stolen from an unlocked car is that they are created in the image of God and placed in a cosmos and community where people are meant to live and love in harmony. Because of the Fall, people do steal; shalom is violated. Law is a necessary part, not only of community life, but also of living a holy life.
There’s more to say about how Leviticus led me to hope for redemption for these young people, but it’s time to conclude. I’ll leave you with the verse Eugene Peterson quotes in his introduction to Leviticus in The Message:
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around life – and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12:1-2)
