Texts: Acts 5:1-11; Matthew 10:40-42

As the child of deaf parents, there were many words and phrases that I never heard, such as expletives. Whenever I heard a new word and used it in speech, I would gauge the reaction of people around me to figure out how it should be used. One summer when I had been sent south to Alabama, ostensibly for a vacation – my parents were the ones who had the vacation – I must have been around eight years old – my Aunt Ruby had taken me to Panama City, about two hours south of Dothan, the nearest excuse for a city to that God-forsaken place where my aunt lived.

We had gone to see my Uncle Paul and his family. When around other adults, Uncle Paul swore like a sailor – he had been one in World War II and survived both Pearl Harbor and Guadacanal – and he swore. Well, I heard him use the word “damn,” a new word to my burgeoning vocaulary and so as an eight year old, I used it to better understand what it really meant. What I least expected was the next thing I felt – my aunt's hand slamming across my mouth. She looked at me with her eyes blazing and told me that God would strike me dead like Ananias and Sapphira and I would spend eternity in hell with them. She made such an impression on me that I think I did not use that word again until after I had graduated from college, even after I had rejected the Southern Baptist theology with which I had been raised.

Punishments and rewards. We've all been raised with an idea of what they are, what they mean to us, and sometimes even the old ideas that we've discarded intellectually stay with us emotionally. Animal trainers used the reward system to train dogs, horses, even cats – though they are difficult to “train” as are horses – too independent. One would think that we would use the same approach with our children, but we don't. We use a mixed system of punishments and rewards, thinking somehow that a punishment for bad behavior makes sense. Taken to its extreme, some parents are abusive in their application of so-called punishments.

Historically, religion hasn't been much different. For some reason, what we know works with animals, we don't use with people. Our religious myths include stories of the banishment from the garden, the flood, the destruction of cities and entire nations of people, to mention a few ways that the God of Hebrew Scripture dealt with disobedience. The destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity are directly attributed to the disobedience of the people and their rulers.

By the time we get to the time of Jesus, punishment has been extended to an afterlife. In the story of Lazarus the poor man and the rich man who ignores him, the tables get turned when both die. This morning's readings contain two versions of punishment and rewards. Matthew's Jesus makes it clear that those who receive him, receive the One who sent him; those who receive prophets and the righteous will receive the rewards of prophets and the righteous, although considering how both are treated in today's world, one should be careful what one wants.

The story from Acts presents a different picture. The “crime,” for which the punishment is given, is not withholding the money but lying about it – to God. Knowing this story as a young child, my aunt struck great fear in me, to be sure, because at that point in my life I believed in an absolute God who meted out punishment more than reward.

Historically, the church has been really good about that – meting out punishment more than reward. The early church fathers – and they were all men – created systems of punishments that were really pretty extraordinary. In a time when people were old by the time they were forty and almost half the children born died before the end of their first year, eternity took on a special meaning. The church saw itself as the instrument of order in a world gone mad when civilizations were being destroyed by invasions from people with whom one could not reason or negotiate: the Goths, the Huns, and later, of course, the Vikings. They did not share a common world view with Christian Europe; they did not have a place called hell where punishment would be meted out for eternity. It seems, unlike our pets, we humans need to have fear, in this case, the fear of God, as a motivating force for the decent human behavior we call civilization. Doesn't say much for us humans, does it?

Our reliance on the fear of punishment extends into our social policy as well. When a dog does something right, we give the dog a treat. But after those cute little stars we give children in the first few grades of school for coloring inside the lines or printing out their names, education moves into a system of punishment as well as reward. Though we no longer sit kids in the corner with a dunce cap, we do the equivalent in our treatment of students politely called slow learners or behavior problems. Really good teachers have figured out how to get around this by creating a reward system that welcomes independent thinking and problem solving; they rarely need to “punish.” In fact, the best movies about teaching, such as To sir, with love and Stand And Deliver show how rewards work better than punishments.

So, why do we humans use punishment instead of reward? Some of it goes back to that old quote by Machiavelli about princes: It is better to be loved than feared but it is safer to be feared than loved. Machiavelli, as well as our Puritan reformers, Baptist and Congregational, did not have a good image of humankind: We are “ungrateful, inconsistent, feigners... eager for gain” and, according to this pessimistic view of human nature, will offer our offspring if it is to our gain. Christian theologians aren't much different in their pessimism regarding human beings; most likely, they attributed their own bad nature to others. But, be that as it may.

The question for us in this day and age is whether we can use reward instead of punishment or whether we need to look at our behavior in a pessimistic – some would say realistic – way to get the results we ought to have. Obviously, our own history in this country is replete with punishment as well as reward. Well, we are different than the rest of the animal kingdom. We are sentient beings and do have consciences. We have created an understanding of right and wrong that goes beyond a doggie biscuit or two. The question for us is how we act on our understanding.

We understand – or should understand – that often our behavior creates its own system of punishment as well as rewards. When we ignore entire portions of society, judgment is visited upon us, not by God hurling some thunderbolt from the sky but by the consequences of our own behavior. We use the figurative words of God's judgment because we know what we are supposed to be doing and how we have not done it. The sins of omission are as great as, if not greater than, the sins of commission. Or, to put it in common parlance, what goes around, comes around. And there's truth in that statement whether it relates to us personally or to our society.

When we lie to ourselves about what our responsibilities to others are, as Peter put it, we lie not to people but to God. We cannot continue our present way of living in this Nation and expect things to lump along as they have in the past. If we do ,b>not take responsibility for others in society, we will fall apart as a society. The preamble of the Constitution makes it clear what our responsibilities are in order to form that more perfect Union: establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and to promote the general welfare. All those items apply to all of us.

As we consider this coming week and its meaning for our lives, let us consider how to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and to promote the general welfare through a more balanced system of punishment and reward, one that speaks to our better natures without disregarding our capacity for evil. If we are to survive and thrive as a society and a Nation, we need to be more creative in our approach towards societal problems.

Let us pray: Giver of all good gifts, help us to receive your gift of wisdom so we are able to follow the way of the One you sent to show us the way, even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.