I volunteered for lay speaking in United Methodist Church in about 1971  During the forty-plus years that I was active as a lay speaker, I probably spoke in over 100 Churches; maybe 150.  I spoke in many different settings and contexts, often using the same talks more than once.  I usually spoke extemporaneously, but occasionally recorded  talks and transcribed them. Some of them were preserved.  These are good samples of my talks.

The earliest talks were mainly in my geographic area.  Often they were in small rural churches. Lay speakers would fill pulpits in the absence of an ordained minister. 

I was elected Lay Leader of the Alabama West Florida Conference in 1985.  The number of invitations to speak increased dramatically.  I had opportunities for speaking all over south and west Alabama and in the Florida Panhandle.  As a busy Circuit Judge, I had little time for preparation.  I usually prepared at least an outline, but chose the words as they came to me.

In addition to churches I had other opportunities for speaking, and some of those were preserved also.  

The talks presented here developed at various times over a period of forty years.  My thinking was also developing during that time.  I have tried to present the talks here as best I could in the chronology of their development.

La Place UMC, February 4, 1979

EXODUS – Chapter Three:

“2.  And the Angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush:  and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

3.  And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.

4.  And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses.  And he said, Here am I.

5.  And he said, Draw not nigh hither:  put off thy shoes from off they feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

In 1934, Miss Mary Debardeleben prepared a brief history of LaPlace Methodist Church on the occasion of its 100th Anniversary.  The following are excerpts from her narrative:

“West’s History of Alabama Methodism has this to say about the beginning of Methodism in this community:

“Tradition says that the Rev. John Boswell (1789-1853), he then being presiding Elder of the Chattahoochee District, organized a (Methodist) Society in 1834 in the house of James Howard (1776-1856) at Cross Keys (now Shorter) about 16 miles west of Tuskegee, and that a log house was built soon after the organization of that society for a place of worship.

“As regards the building of the present house of worship, Mrs. Judkins of our community thinks it was done in 1859, for as a girl attending the old school at LaPlace, on its site on the hill yonder opposite the church – she remembered the boys getting putty from the workmen here and bringing it in mischief to the girls at the school as chewing gum.

“The Church was formerly known as Payne Chapel in honor of Bishop Payne.

“The late Dr. J. S. Lightfoot and I were trying to recall how the Church looked before it was remodeled years ago:  (1904 – 1905 D.S.).  There was a white fence around it with fancy-cut palings; two gates, two doors, and two distinct divisions inside.  For male and female created he them and there must be no undue freedom of the sexes in those days.  Of course, this did not prevent your best boyfriend from making a race for it and sitting just across the partition from you.

“…Another event that took place during Brother Skipper’s term of service was a district conference.  Didn’t we turn things inside out and upside down to entertain such an illustrious gathering?  Not since I could remember, had there been such a gathering of the faithful.”

All of this has come from Miss Debardeleben’s comments during this church’s centennial celebration in 1934.  Perhaps a bit more historical framework will deepen our appreciation.

When this church was organized in 1834, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, which occurred in 1813, was more recent than the Korean conflict is to our own time.  One of the precipitating causes for the Creek Indian Wars was the opening of the Federal Road by Lieutenant Luckett in 1811–that is the road on which this church fronts.  In fact, only two years before the beginning of this church in 1834, was this area ceded from the Indians.  That treaty was signed in 1832, while Andrew Jackson was President.  Our land records here in Macon County commence in the 1830’s, usually the late 1830’s.

The establishment of this church in 1834 was nearer in point of time to John Wesley’s heartwarming experience at Aldersgate in 1738 than it is to our own day.  Methodism itself was still less than 100 years of age when the great history of this church embarked.

Speaking of Gettysburg, Lincoln said, “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground; for the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”  Certainly, the same is true of this Holy Place.

If we listen in the stillness of this hour, we can almost hear the children who were our forefathers playing in the school yard across on the hill; the people gathering; the old organ; the fine preaching.  The anti-can’t class was organized here and met here–we recently buried the last charter member.  Can you imagine the excitement of a District Conference here at La Place?

Truly, this church has touched the lives of thousands.  Yet even its glorious history is now fading in memory, and the lives of its faithful members in those early days seems far removed from us.

That was a different day and age, before we were touched by the technological revolution.  The economy was cotton:  small patches–tenant farms–plantations.  The country stores weren’t novelties; they were necessities.  Cotton gins dotted the countryside.  What credit there was centered around the stores and gins and landowners.  But the economy was built on personal relationships.

This church was a nerve center in the network of that society.  But it was more than just a place to meet and exchange the stories of the day.  Young brides brought their grooms to this altar to establish Christian homes.  Young souls dedicated themselves to Christ here.  And, after the soul departed, friends and loved ones gathered here to mourn the passing.

Perhaps we who have seen this area gradually lose its character as a strong community, close to the soil, find our thoughts reflected in the words of Thomas Gray in his Elegy (Written in a Country Churchyard):

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn

Or busy housewife ply her evening care;

No children run to lisp their sire’s return,

Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

The short and simple annals of the Poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave

Awaits alike th’ inevitable house; –

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

It’s good to turn to the past from time to time–to realize that our very existence rests on the struggles of dimly remembered pioneers who, among the many activities in their hard and busy lives, founded and nurtured this church.

But the struggle of life is unrelenting, and we must also look forward.  In five years, we will be entitled, by years, to a sesquicentennial celebration in this church.  This church is the oldest Methodist Society in Macon County.  Will we, of this generation, allow the light of the world, which has flickered within these walls as a beacon to seven generations, to be forever darkened?  John Donne said, “If a clod falls into the sea, Europe is the less; send not to know for whom the bell tolls, my brother, it tolls for Thee.”

Let’s again let these old walls ring the mighty hymns of this church; let’s let the word of God breathe from this pulpit and teach us to live and to die; let’s let our children go forth from this church into the world with a faith that prepares them for the 21st Century.

We have turned aside tonight, like Moses, to behold a miracle.  We might ask why this church, like the bush, is not at last consumed.  But the miracle only attracts our attention.  The voice of God tells us to take off our shoes, that the ground on which we are standing is Holy Ground.  Even more important is for us to remember that it was from that bush that Moses went forth and lead the Exodus, the deliverance of the children of God.

 Place UMC, March 4, 1979

ISAIAH:  1:2-9:

2 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.

3 The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.

4 Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: They have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.

5 Why should ye be stricken any more? Ye will revolt more and more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.

6 From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores:  they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.

7 Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.

8 And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.

9 Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant….

A few weeks ago, I spoke to you concerning the history of this church.  Together we decided that this ground, like the ground on which Moses stood beside the burning bush, is holy ground.  I reminded you of District Conferences that have been held in this church, of a centennial celebration that was held here, and we were reminded that the influence of this church for the past 145 years has spread throughout this nation.

We attempted to paint a picture of a day and age which was different from ours.  It was at this altar that young brides brought their grooms to establish Christian homes.  it was at this altar that men, women, boys, and girls dedicated their lives to Christ.  And it was into these pews that friends and kindred came to mourn the loss of souls departed.  The church was a part of the life and times of the people.

In closing, we pointed out that the real purpose in the message from the burning bush was not to tell Moses that the ground on which he was standing was holy ground, but rather to lead the children of Israel to their deliverance.

The book of Isaiah deals with a period of Biblical history in which Isaiah pointed to a time when the nation of Israel would be virtually destroyed.  Recurring throughout the book of Isaiah was the theme, “A Remnant Shall be Left.”

It was God’s promise to the children of Israel that regardless of the difficulties and regardless of the punishment inflicted on them, God would not utterly destroy the nation of Israel.  It would always be the function of the remnant that was left to remember the true God and to return the children of Israel to the paths of righteousness.

We might wonder in a church so small as ours what is the use in continuing to struggle for existence.  The character of the community has changed.  Lifestyles of the people have changed, and it would be easy simply to drift into the future and to allow our church to lapse into oblivion.  But from the book of Isaiah, the message rings clear as to our purpose–“Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant…”

The problem confronting this small rural church is the same problem facing many small rural churches in America today.  The economic ties in the community have changed; and no doubt, if there were no church here, we would probably not be meeting to establish a new one here.  The church does not appear to be the wave of the future.

Back when Edward Gibbon recounted the causes for the fall of the Roman Empire in his grand work entitled The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the precipitating changes which he listed was the changing configuration of the population.

Practically within our own lifetime we have seen this country move from a rural society to an urban society.  We have seen the personal relationships which grew out of the rural society and agricultural economy deteriorate; and in many instances, there is no relationship at all now among the various segments of our population.  Raw emotion can flow freely under such circumstances where there is no appropriate relationship.

Perhaps some examples need to be given of the changes in personal relationships to which we refer.  As one enters the church, to the right there are four bronze memorials.  Mrs. Mary DeBardelaben was the person from whom we quoted extensively in our last talk on the history of the church.  She had made a presentation 45 years ago on the occasion of the church’s centennial celebration.  Speaking of 45 years, that’s how long Fletcher Robinson served as Sunday School Superintendent; and he is also memorialized.  Dr. P. M. Lightfoot was one of the corner stones of the community, a country doctor, and land owner.  Mrs. Bibb was our teacher, school principal, and friend.

In the economic, political, and agricultural life there have been people in the community like Mr. Herbert Henderson who operated a 40-mule farm and cotton gin; Mrs. Carrie Carr who operated a cotton gin and “carried” a good many of the community’s farmers.  Mangum and Bessie Carr had a substantial operation employing many people; Mr. Arch Segrest was a substantial landowner, farmer and County Commissioner, and a person of considerable renown.  There are others too numerous to mention.  These were strong individuals; and as people of this type have slipped away from us, so has the character of the community which they represented.  Without dwelling on the point, our credit is now impersonal, coming from large corporations for the most part; and that, in and of itself, has a considerable impact on the way people live and think and act.

It was from communities such as the Shorter Community that young men went forth to protect this country in World Wars I and II.  I remember very well the Roll of Honor which hung on the wall at Shorter High School, and I remember that there were stars by five names, indicating that those five had paid the supreme sacrifice.

Suppose that the world today were faced with a Hitler.  Where are the fountainheads–the branch heads, if you wish–in these United States from which the young men would leave, perhaps never to return, but proudly to defend?

But the prospect of cataclysmic warfare should not be required in order to illustrate the decay of our moral fiber and the courage to protect it.  I believe that our rural churches are the key to calling the people into a new relationship with God and, thus, with each other.  It is only on this firm foundation that the moral structure of our society can be reconstructed.

I can recall in duck ponds on cold wintry afternoons, and perhaps just after the sun has dipped beneath the horizon, a few mallards making it in to safety through the approaching night.  These few issue their call to their brothers flying high overhead.  Though danger might lie between the high skies and the safe lake, it would be necessary for the others to find their way through the darkness.

In the same manner, we, the remnant which is left, must issue our call.

c. 1984

He had very little to live for as he stood on the bridge at the outskirts of the city.  No one could think of anything in particular to say to discourage him.  He had lost his wife to cancer a few years earlier, and their only son had died before the death of his wife.  So, he stood there, obviously dejected and depressed, and no one could think of anything to say or do.  “Well, maybe we can get Gus to come and talk with him,” they said. Gus was the town policemen.  “He knows how to handle situation like this.”  So, they sent for Ole Gus, the town’s policeman, and Ole Gus came.  He went out on the bridge, and he talked to his old friend, the old man on the bridge.  They talked for a couple of hours.  Then slowly, Gus put his arm around the old man, and slowly, arm-in-arm, they jumped off the bridge together.

The story sort of sets the stage for what I am going to talk to you about–at least the first part of what I am going to talk to you about.

In seeking for my scripture for today’s lesson, I ran across a small bit of scripture that was interesting to me; and I’m going to try to remember it.  It’s not my text for today, but it is one that I will share with you.  It comes from Ecclesiastes.  It says, “Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefor, the heart of the sons of the men is set fully in them to do evil.”  I subscribe to that theory in my court and attempt to eliminate that particular problem.

I’ll come to the text in a few minutes; but before I begin the text, I want to present what is perhaps the dilemma of modern times.  If I were required to state the two most prevalent problems that I have encountered as Circuit Judge–the most pervasive, and the ones that seem to have almost daily impact in my court–it would be these two things.  The first would be drinking and drugs.  I have been totally appalled at the amount of drug and alcohol abuse, and its relationship– not just to the criminal problem–but to everything that comes before my court.  When I get around later to writing the several books that I intend someday to write, one of them is going to be entitled “Just a Couple,” because I have heard those words so frequently since becoming a judge. “Just a Couple.”

Speaking of “just a couple,” that leads me to the next problem that I encounter most frequently, and that is that the breakdown of marriages.  The breakdown of marriages and the custody of children is a constant and ongoing problem in our society.  In today’s talk, I am going to try to look for the common denominator in these problems.  You might, at first, when I say I am going to look for the common denominator, think that I am talking about a relationship between the two. I don’t know. It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg proposition.  I’ve seen some marriage problems that were caused by drinking, and I’ve seen some drinking problems that were caused by marriage.  And I don’t know which causes which more often.  I’m not seeking the relationship between the two, but the common denominator that they both share.

 A thousand years before Jesus Christ was born, a man who called himself “The Preacher” wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, and I am reading from verses 13 through 24:

“Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly as far as light excelleth darkness.  The wise man’s eyes  are in his head but the fool walketh in darkness.  I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me.  And why was I then more wise?  Then said in my heart that this is also vanity, for there is no remembrance of the wise man more than the fool, forever.  Seeing that which now is and the days to come shall all be forgotten.  Dieth the wise man, as the fool.  Therefore, I hated life because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous to me.  For all is vanity and vexation of spirit.  Yea I hated all my labor which I had taken under then sun, because I shall leave it unto the man that shall be after me.  And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool?  Yet shall he have rule over all my labor wherein I have labored and wherein I have showed myself wise under the sun.  This is also vanity.  Therefore, I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labor which I took under the sun.  For the man whose labor is in wisdom and in knowledge and in equity.  Yet to a man that hath not labored therein shall he leave it for his portion.  This is also vanity and for great evil.  For what hath man of all his labored under the sun?  For all his days and sorrows and his travail grief.  Yea his heart taketh no rest in the night.  this is also vanity.  There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink, that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor.  This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.

There is an element of despair in the words of the preacher.  That element of despair is common thread that runs through the pursuit of knowledge.  It runs through the striving on one’s own and through one’s own labors to achieve that which is good.  The problem of existence in the present-day world has been described by one of the great modern philosophers. He says that “the masses of people are living in quiet desperation.”

Life is a series of disillusionment, going from point to point.  We are born into the world and we have certain so-called milestones that we accomplish.  One of the ones that we all remember is graduation.  When I speak of graduation, I’m talking about graduation from high school.  We set for ourselves a graduation night and that is a rite of passage in our society.  Through twelve years of school, or K through twelve, as they now say–the goal is to achieve graduation.  I remember my own graduation, and I’m sure most of you that have graduated from high school remember that event.  I remember a sense of emptiness that occurred. Actually, you’d been to graduations before and you know pretty well what was going to be said.  You knew that it had all been said before and that it would all be said again; and it had happened to you, sort of like passing a bump in the road, and it was over.  And you ask yourself, “Is that all there is?”

And then you have the next event:  marriage.  I counselled with many people during the time that I was an attorney in private practice.  I remember one young lady sharing with me her marital problems.  She described how she was of the old school and never engaged in pre-marital sex, and then she was married; and for the first time, she experienced sex, and she said to me that her reaction was, “Is that all there is to it?”

We go on and we get into our life’s vocation, or occupation.  And we work hard, and we learn what there is to know about our jobs.  And all of a sudden, we look at it one day and there is a feeling of emptiness; and we say to ourselves, “is that all?”

We bring children into the world, and our expectations are high and great for our children.  I don’t know why we all think that despite our own inability to be great achievers, we all think that we are going to raise presidents of the United States!  But we do!  We think it!

We set high aspirations and goals for our children.  It really doesn’t make any difference, we say, as long as our children do a little better than we were able to do.  Now, if everybody’s children since the beginning of time had done a little bit better than the parents did, we would be living in a glowing society today!  But that’s not really the way that it works.  Many of our children do well, and they are the happiness of our very lives; but for so many, we see saintly mothers and fathers who have sons and daughters who wind up in trouble of one type or another, either with the law or with their personal affairs.  And in despair, we can almost hear them saying, “Is that all?”

Ultimately, the time comes when the big black van arrives and six friends or companions or respectable gentlemen out of the community carry our body to the last place it will ever go on this earth; and as the family leaves, they say to themselves, “Is that all?”  We really hide ourselves from death.  We cover it over with flowers, and we hesitate to experience it all in one blow.  But as that breath is breathed the last, there is a strong element of finality to it. Nevertheless, it is so simple, and we simply are left with the great question, “Is that all?”

When we consider this panorama of events from the cradle to the grave, like a descending staircase with each step having the question written on it, ‘Is that all,’ we can understand the gloomy message of the Preacher–the writer of Ecclesiastes.  With him, we are tempted to say, “all is vanity and vexation of the spirit.” With him we are tempted to say “There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink and should make his soul enjoy good in his labor.”  And as a result of all of this seeming lack of meaning, we experience a terrible emptiness–a despair.

We, along with the masses, live in quiet desperation.  This is the common denominator in the breakdown of marriage, and in drinking, and in the many other problems that we face in our society.  The emptiness that will not be filled.  The emptiness that we have to try to fill in whatever way that we can, because it demands filling.  It must be filled.  And it is this emptiness that demands filling that leads to the problem.  Like a black hole, as described in the science of the universe today, that draws everything, even light, into itself.

Because of the emptiness, we reach for power; we reach for money; we reach experiences with sex; we reach for drugs; we reach for whisky; we reach for anything to eliminate that gnawing emptiness.  When that grasp and reach exceeds the bounds acceptable in our society, then we are governed by the law; and the law should take its course.  The law is necessary, because there are those who will never be able to satisfy that deep emptiness without the strong arm of the law calling to account acts such as murder, robbery, burglary, rape, incest, and the host of other things that are brought on by the terrible problem of emptiness.

I mentioned that The Preacher shared his wisdom by writing the Book of Ecclesiastes a thousand years before Christ.  We’ve all experienced the uneasiness of stormy nights, only to see bright sun rising the following morning, driving away our fear.  Like the sunrise after an uneasy, stormy night, Jesus came.  He told those who listened that he could not put his new wine into old skins. Or a new patch in an old garment.  He gave a new commandment–to love.  He turned down all else in order to live in perfect love.  He filled the emptiness to overflowing, and showed us the way.  He told Nicodemus, a man who knew the law, that following the new commandment would be for Nicodemus, like being born again.  And it would have been.  To put away the idea that the way to perfection is to obey the law, and to turn instead in a direction of a positive affirmation of life, would certainly be much like being born again–like entering into his mother’s womb for a second time of coming forth with a completely new outlook on life.

Jesus’ ministry reached out and touched another man in biblical history who knew the law.  This man, as far as we know, never saw Christ in person.  This man was trained at the feet of the high priest.  He knew the law.  He knew the Law of Moses, and I’m sure that he was well-acquainted with imponderable questions that had been raised by The Preacher–the message that had been delivered in the book of Ecclesiastes.  But somehow or someway, while this man was pursuing excellence in his own way, while he was following the law and holding the coats of the people who stoned down one of the early Christians, the message came to him.  In a blinding flash, Saul realized that the goal and purpose of life is not mere obedience to the law.  That experience gave him a new identity, and afterwards, St. Paul was instrumental in spreading Christ’s message of love throughout the world.  Many times, he shows in his writings how Christ had come to fulfill the law and prophecies, and he developed the theme that Christ’s message–that the new wine which Christ brought was the wine of love–and that you could not put it into the old skin of mere obedience to the law.

Writing to the Corinthians, he answered once and for all the gloomy message of The Preacher in Ecclesiastes.

1  Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling symbol.

2  And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.

3  And though I bestow all my good to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

4  Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself; is not puffed up,

5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

6  Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

7  Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8  Love never faileth: but whether  there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease;.  whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

9  For we know in part, and we prophecy in part.

10  But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

There is that which fills the emptiness and it can be found in the message of Christ.  So, we don’t have to go about with emptiness, and we don’t have to go without answers.  To that graduate, we can say, “There’s more.”  To the newly weds, we can say “There’s more.”  To that man or woman buried in a vocation, we can say, “Yes, there’s more.”  And to the loved ones gathered at the grave, we can say, “Yes, there’s more.”

The poet, William Cullen Bryant, saw the scheme of things in nature and drew the comparison in beautiful words.  He walked through the Adirondack Mountains; and in the twilight, he saw a lone water fowl flying into the sunset that inspired him to pen the familiar poem, “Ode to a Water Fowl.”  I still remember a few verses from some memory work we did back at Shorter High School.

“Whither, midst falling dew,

 while glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

 Far through their rosy depths dost they pursue,

thou solitary way? 

Seekest thou the plashy brink of reedy lake

 or marge of river wide? 

Or where the rocking billows rise and sink

on the chafed ocean side?

***.

There is a power whose care

 teaches thy way along the pathless coast. 

The desert and illimitable air,

lone, wandering, but not lost. 

He who from zone to zone

guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

in the long way that I must tread alone

will lead by steps aright.”

I thank you for the opportunity to be here.

c. 1984

There is always danger, as a society matures, that it will become hidebound in the law.  An examination of the problem of legalism can also give insight into the nature and purpose of law.  A major thought in comparing the New Testament to the Old Testament is the problem of overcoming legalism.

In order to focus on the problem, it is necessary that we examine several different, but related, passages of scripture.  First is the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, verses one through eleven:

1. And it came to pass on the second Sabbath after the first, that he went through the corn fields; and his disciples plucked the ears of corn, and did eat, rubbing them in their hands.
2. And certain of the Pharisees said unto them, “Why do ye that which is now lawful to do on the Sabbath days?”
3. And Jesus answering them said, have ye not read so much as this, What David did, when himself was hungered, and they which were with him;
4. How he went into the house of God, and did take and eat the shewbread, and gave also to them that were with him; which it is not lawful to eat but for the priests alone?
5. And he said until them, That the son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath.
6. And it came to pass along on another Sabbath, that he entered into the synagogue and taught: and there was a man whose right hand was withered.
7. And the scribes and Pharisees watched him, whether he would heal on the Sabbath day; that they might find an accusation against him.
8. But he knew their thoughts, and said to the man which has the withered hand. Rise up, and stand forth in the midst.  And he arose and stood forth.
9. Then said Jesus unto them, I will ask you one thing; Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do evil? To save life, or to destroy it?
10. And looking round about upon them all, he said unto the man, Stretch forth the hand. And he did so: and his hand was restored whole as the other.
11. And they were filled with madness; and communed one with another what they might do to Jesus. 

Jesus was in conflict with the authorities.  He was in trouble with the law.  He was doing something that the authorities thought was illegal.  He was working on Sunday.  How could this be?  Because his disciples ate corn, and He healed a man’s hand, he was being charged with violating the law of the Sabbath.  How could this be?  How could  the authorities take such a ridiculous position?  Well, as we go to the Old Testament, we find that law of the Sabbath is spelled out as one of the Ten Commandments.  One of the Ten Commandments says don’t work on Sunday.  The Ten Commandments, by the time of Jesus, had been embellished by the Tradition of the Elders.

But the Law of the Sabbath finds even earlier origins.  You will recall from the Book of Genesis God that created the world in six days; and on the seventh, He rested.  He “blessed the seventh day and sanctified it.”  I mention this early reference to the Sabbath, because one aspect of law is that you find it in the legends of our civilization.  You find the bases for law from the earliest beginnings, and there is very little that is new as far as real law is concerned.  The concept of the law of the Sabbath was “codified” in Exodus.  The giving of the law was a very dramatic event.  It was not a very democratic event.  (Exodus 19:16-21) 

16. And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightning, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled.
17. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at nether part of the mount.
18. And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof  ascended as the smoke of the furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.
19. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice.
20. And the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up.
21. And the Lord said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish. 

The commandment in question, taken from the Ten Commandments is found in the 20^th chapter of Exodus, the eighth verse, and it is as follows:

8. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work.
10. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord they God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it. 

The giving of the law was a wondrous event.  The words are beautiful in their simplicity–“Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.”

Now, by the time of Jesus, those people who were in charge of interpreting had embellished the law.  They had developed what is known as the “tradition of the Elders.”  This resulted from interpretations, similar to the way court decisions in our society tend to refine our law to greater and greater detail.  In doing so, they applied the broad general principle of “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy” to each and every practical aspect of life.  And it was with this tradition of the elders that Jesus found himself in conflict.

One of the dangers of legalism is its tendency to become more and more specific.  I remember a number of years ago, in the private practice of law, I had a case in which I dealt with the “Fair Packaging and Labeling Act,” which was being administered by the Federal Trade Commission.  I learned in the course of my research that the proper abbreviation for inch is “in.” as opposed to ditto marks.  Now, what I’m about to say–and I don’t recommend to anybody that they violate any rules and regulations of the Federal Trade Commission–but I am going to say that legalism of that nature never arises to the majesty of law.  There wasn’t any thundering and there wasn’t any lightning when whoever wrote down that you’ve got to say “in.” rather than ditto marks.  That was not accompanied by anything majestic.

In the accounts of the creation, one does not find that God created abbreviations for all words, and saw which ones were good.  As stated previously, the sources of real law can often be traced to the earliest legends and stories.  A great deal could be said about the importance of folk tales and fairy tales in weaving the fabric of understanding of religious, moral, ethical, and legal issues.

Real law is not concerned with trivial things.  Real law has a source that simply does not concern itself with things that are unimportant.  There is a sense in which a distinction can be drawn between ethics and morality, on the one hand, as opposed to law, on the other.  Ethics and morality deal with the things that ought to be.  Law deals with the things that must be.

If there is a violation of law, then it is imperative that we do something about it.  Law is limited to those things that must be.  It is a mighty current from a silent and magnificently powerful source instilled by God, springing from the depths of our collective being, demanding its own expression and effect.  The law is deeply embedded in the psychology of the human  race.  It springs from that psychology and in that psychology finds its moving force.  All written laws are simply evidence or symbols of this force.  The principles of real law are so simple and basic that they are eloquent beyond words,“Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” “Thou shalt not covet.”  Like a mighty drum beat, they pound their way through history and religion and into the core of our being.  In the Old Testament, we read that the Hebrews were instructed to write these simple commandments on their lintels and on their foreheads.

The Ten Commandments have not been repealed.  Jesus didn’t come to do away with the law.  He had definite problems with legalism, but it was not his purpose to destroy the law.  Just the contrary is true.  In Matthew Five, verses 17 through 22, we find the following passages of scripture:

17. Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.
18. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
19. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, and same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
20. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.
21. Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:
22. But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. 

So, the Ten Commandments definitely were not repealed by Jesus teachings.  The Scribes and the Pharisees that he mentioned in this passage in Matthew were those people who were most noted for their practice of following the law.  They made a fetish of following the law, and they were believed to be very good people.  Now, what Jesus was saying was, “I’m not doing away with the law,” and “You’ve got to be even better than they are in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.”  And this is what it’s all about.  Nevertheless, Jesus found himself accused of violating the law of the Sabbath.  His response was, in a sense, a return to basics.  What he was doing when he healed the withered hand was in harmony with the mighty drum beat of the law.  The tradition of the elders, concerning itself with trivia, was mere interpretation, far off course from the original principle.

Today, there is a real need for us to return to basics.  To understand what the law can and cannot do for us.  A characteristic of real law is that it is found in our heritage.  There are not many improvisations in the law.  If we read the Ten Commandments, then a great deal of what we regard as law is going to be covered.  And, yet, you can go to any lawyer’s library and find books about what the law is.

Let’s move on.  Christ’s ministry was more than a mere call to return to basics.  More than a call to repentance–the prophets had done that.  John the Baptist had done that.  Jesus brought a new wine that could not be placed in old skins.  He stated that he had come that we might have life and have it more abundantly.  Now when he said that, he was not merely restating the law.  He gave the great commandment that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and our neighbor as ourselves.  His love has been described as “the love that passeth all understanding.”

The mystery of Jesus’ ministry is a transcendent love, and it is by finding ourselves totally engulfed in this love and by losing ourselves and our selfishness in that love and in the act of loving that we fulfill the great commandment.  That is more than just the opposite of the Ten Commandments.  It is very true that if a person lives by the great commandment given by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount–he won’t go out and steal; he won’t go out and covet–the commandments will be fulfilled.  That’s what Jesus said.  He didn’t come to do away with the law, but to fulfill the law.  But what he said was a great deal more.  A person could live a lifetime without once violating the law, but never experience the rich fullness of life.  There is more to life than just obeying the law.  Love is the central focus of Jesus’ ministry.  Life is a mighty stream, and the law could be compared to the banks of the stream.  We certainly should not get out of the mainstream of life–there has to be some focusing of our powers and attention; but, nevertheless, the force of life is a moving, vital, vibrant force.  It is not a dead confinement.  The law is vital and moving.  Saint Paul expressed it well: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

With effortless grace, love lifts the Christian up out of the endless grinding efforts to justify oneself under the law, to the ecstasy of abundant life.  We cannot justify ourselves under the law.  Jesus, in one act of perfect love, ushered us into the kingdom of God.  The life of a Christian is in perfect harmony and rhythm with the might drumbeat of the law.  In Christ, the law was not destroyed, but fulfilled.  Christianity takes the policeman off the street and places him in the hearts of the citizens.

Liberty UMC, Sunday, May 29, 1994 

I want to share with you some Scripture before I begin my remarks, and the Scripture that I want to share with you is found in the 11th Chapter of Genesis.  It begins with the first verse, and I’ll read several verses of that Chapter:

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

2  And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east,  that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

3  And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.  And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar;

4  And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

5  And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6  And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do:  and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7  Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

8  So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth:  and they left off to build the city.

9  Therefore was its name called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth:  and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

When I received the call from Brother Healey yesterday, I was proof-reading the final proof of a book that I have written entitled Conscience and Command.  I don’t know if you know anything about publishing; but when you get down to this stage, you have to push things through real fast and so I had spent a number of hours Friday night and yesterday proof-reading so that I could send it back and say that it was all alright.  So, I was rather tied up then and I had to push on through and finish that; and to make a long story short, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to prepare for this talk.  But that’s not a problem because I have found that my greatest problem is not figuring out something to say, but figuring out how to cut it off; figuring out how not to say too much before I get through.

As Bobby mentioned, it was my pleasure to serve is the president of the MYF Subdistrict here in this area.  Do you know it’s been 35 years since I presided over sub-district meetings here in this church.  Time does have a way of getting on.  We were talking before the service started about my glasses.  I was trying to get them cleaned up a little so I could see well enough to read the Bible, but I’m not going to have to read the other stuff because I didn’t write a speech for you.

Anyway, I’ve had a long time to study about what I might say when I get invitations to speak–a whole lifetime.  I won’t have any trouble thinking of the things to say, even without having it all written out.

Each of us is called to our own vocation as a Christian.  We read in the Bible about the Body of Christ.  But always there is the danger that the Body of Christ, or the society–the group of people–will become so intent on themselves–on building on their own powers–as they did on the Plain of Shinar–that we lose the commonality.  And that’s what I want to visit with you about this morning.  I know very little about the things that you as individuals do to make a living.  I suspect that you don’t know a great deal about my work as a judge.  Yet, it is extremely important that each of  makes our contribution to society and that we do it well.  Because that’s the plan of the New Testament.  That’s the plan of the Body of Christ.  We as Christians must go about our vocations doing the things that we are called to do.  Merely coming to church is not what the Body of Christ is all about.  The Body of Christ has to do with what we do in our everyday affairs and in our calling.

This morning I will be visiting with you from my perspective as a judge.  My calling is the law.  And I can tell you after eleven years on the bench that the process works all right.  We don’t have a whole lot of problems with the way the court system works.  In our circuit, we are current with our dockets—just as current as we reasonably can be.  People don’t have to wait a long time as they do in other places.  And I can honestly say that I conscientiously apply the rules to the controversies that come before me.  I’m not always right, but at least I’m always honest; and I always try to do the right thing; and I call things according to the best judgment that God gives me to call the shots with.  But nevertheless, when I look at our world, I don’t see the quality of life in our circuit being a great deal better today than it was eleven years ago when I took office.  In fact, if anything, things may be a little worse off.  Why?  I’m going to suggest to you that that is the problem that confronts the church.  While the process of law works all right, the results are disappointing.  The reason is that you have got to have the right formulas…you have got to have the right relationships…you have got to have the right beliefs in society in order for any system to work.

I can tell you this for a fact:  if everybody decides that they are going to do what they want to….do you remember in the Old Testament when things disintegrated after the children of Israel had moved into the Promised Land, at the end of the period of Judges, and before the advent of Kings, there’s a passage of Scripture that says, “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” It’s right at the end of the Book of Judges.  That’s anarchy.  We can’t all do as we see fit.  In the last eleven years, I’ve watched as the family has further disintegrated; I’ve watched as the schools have not really improved.  The glue that seems to hold us together seems to become weaker and weaker.

In the area of law, we’ve seen the decisions about prayer in public schools.  Now, the Constitution of the United States says Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or preventing the free exercise thereof.  That’s the clause.  That’s the Establishment Clause; that’s the Freedom of Expression Clause; and the right to gather and to worship is a tremendous privilege on this Memorial Day.  There are people who laid down their lives so that we would have the opportunity to be here today.  Now, I don’t disagree violently with the court decisions about prayer in public schools.  We need to be teaching people to pray right here in this church.  I do disagree, and I say that the Supreme Court over-extended its authority to the extent that it said  that people can’t pray in school if they want to.  People are not making a law respecting the establishment of religion when they pray in public school.  If  the Legislature were to pass in act saying what prayer needs to be prayed, now that would be a fairly major problem as far as the Constitution is concerned.  While I disagree mildly with the Court’s approach,  I think that as church people we need to be more concerned with what we can do with the freedom that is ours.

I see a lot of opportunity right here.  I see a lot of empty seats in this church; and if they were full, we might be having some greater impact on the world than what we are having.  So the problem might not really lie in the legal system; it might lie in our society.  It may not be that our Legislature doesn’t represent us as well as they should; it could be that they are the spitting image of us–that they represent us too well–that the values we hold are the values that are ultimately reflected in our legislatures and courts.  The values that we hold are ultimately the values that are reflected in our Legislature and that come to bear on the problems that we share.   We have the opportunity through our religion to come to one mind–to follow one God–to worship one Christ; and if we do that, then we arrive at common values on which law can dwell.  Without those things, then we can’t hire enough policemen.  It won’t work that way.

We need to concentrate on family values.  We need to restore the power of our churches.  We need to restore the integrity of our schools and to arrive at a common language in which we can discuss the problems that confront us.  We need to have morality in all of those places and in our places of employment.  There is nothing to keep us from worshiping God as we see fit.  Why don’t we do it, I wonder?  Why don’t we understand that the only answer is to turn to God and lay the problems that we have at His feet.

Part of the problem is, perhaps, that we make our God far too small, as J. B. Phillips suggested.  In order for Christianity to have any meaning in the world in which we live– and you may chuckle when I say this–we’ve got to believe in a God that understands computers.  We’ve got to believe in a God that understands nuclear physics.  We’ve got to believe in a God that understands sparrows and a God that understands kittens.  From the top to the bottom.  From everlasting to everlasting.  Alpha and Omega.  Beginning to end.  The whole works.  The created order.  The highest abstractions to the lowest central theme.  We’ve got to believe in a God that created those.  We’ve got to believe that He sent His son who suffered and died in order to atone for our sins.  He was raised from the dead on a powerful Easter morning and 40 days later, a week ago today in our church calendar, sent the Holy Spirit into this world and we can commune with that Holy Spirit.

All of our efforts to achieve justice through our courts, through our own machinations, amount to nothing more than what those people who tried on the Plain of Shinar to do it on their own were doing.  Because our tongues are confounded.  We don’t know how to talk with the Black folks who surround us.  We don’t know how to talk with the engineers that are around us.  We don’t know how to talk to the people in occupations that are different from ours.  We live in a world of confounded tongues.  We live in the Tower of Babel; and that is the reason we can’t put it all together, because we are not any longer speaking the same language, because we tried to do it on our own, and we did not incorporate the Almighty God.  He sends Jesus Christ in the form of the Holy Spirit into the effort.

Now what would happen if we just relied for a moment on that Holy Spirit?  The Bible provides an answer to that too.  And I’ve always been intrigued by the way that the Tower of Babel compares to the Power of Pentecost.  In the New Testament, in the Book of Acts, Chapter Two:

1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.

2  And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

3  And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them4  And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

5  And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.

6  Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.

7  And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans?

8  And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?

9  Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,

10  Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes

11  Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.

12  And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this?

13  Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine.

I think that as we set about finding orderliness, we have got to understand that our own efforts lead us always into the Tower of Babel.  What we need is the Power of Pentecost that comes through the church.  Now, there will always be those who mock.  There will be those who laugh.  The scoffing little dogs will laugh every time the cow tries to jump over the moon, but that is not any reason why through the Grace of God it can’t happen.  I think that in the message that I have brought to you this morning there is a way to understand the problems that we have encountered in our efforts to deal with the world on our own.  There’s a way to understand why our courts are not more effective.

Now, the law is my calling.  I suspect that if you will take what I have said this morning and lay it up against your own calling–the things that you do every day–I suspect that you will find that it has meaning and application for you and your calling just as it does for me and my calling.  The Spirit is involved in the relationships that we have with each other.  We are called on to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourself; and we don’t do that.

Let us pray.  Most gracious Heavenly Father, we come before you today convicted of sin.  We come to you directly from the Tower of Babel.  We come to you from the world that is torn and hurt and broken and bleeding; a world that is in need of the Great Physician.  We ask for the Power of Pentecost to be substituted for the Tower of Babel in our own lives.  We ask for Your grace, so that we can find solutions to our problems on our own, but at the same time that we not forsake what You have given us in terms of talent; that we turn our talents to Your use in the building of Your kingdom, for it is in the holy and powerful name of Jesus Christ that we pray.  Amen.

[In my frequent opportunities for lay speaking in numerous churches, I often used one or more of these stories.]

Oak Valley Station UMC, October 10, 1993

I appreciate your perseverance.  I guess I have been invited at least a half dozen times to be here, and I’m just glad that you kept extending the invitation.  On one earlier occasion, back in 1989, I was fully committed to be here.  But a few days earlier, I went to a church in Tuskegee to a meeting and I slipped down and broke my knee and that was the reason that I wasn’t here then.  I told people later that I had heard about lying down in green valleys, but I hadn’t heard about falling down in black churches.  In any event, I’m just glad that you invited me again.  My speaking engagements have slowed down a little since I am no longer Conference Lay Leader.  I still have a good many opportunities to speak, but not nearly as many as back between 1985 and 1990.  Back then, during the Laity Sunday season, I would usually have engagements every Sunday for about three months.  I had the opportunity to speak in churches all over the Alabama-West Florida Conference, and it was a great joy to have that experience.  One of the great joys of that experience is that I didn’t  have to have but one talk–I never went back to the same place, anyway!  The only problem this morning is whether I have kept that talk well enough in my mind so that I can give it to you.  I made a few notes, just in case something slipped my mind.

I appreciate Don mentioning the continuing work that I am engaged in.  It might sound strange for a circuit judge to be teaching a course in law and religion on the side.  But I think that the work is important.  Part of what I’ll be telling you this morning is why it’s important.  My book, Conscience and Command, will be published next year; and I think that it’s important for me to write about the world of law and society that I have experienced.  The book is not just a narrative.  It is a study about what makes law work.  I think that there is a close relationship between the moral values that sustain the church and arise from our belief system, and the moral values that sustain law.  It’s important for us to realize that relationship, so that in this day when we hear so much about separation of church and state, we realize that the founders of our country were committed to the proposition that the Christian faith is important.  It’s important for us to realize that the founders of our nation had that commitment.  Mine is not a simplistic knee-jerk reaction as far as the relationship between church and state is concerned.  We need a very modern-day approach to it, and that’s part of what I’m trying to do.

Let me tell you why I think the work is important.  We live in a broken world.  Nobody knows that better than a circuit court judge.  Before my bench parades the broken lives of our people, and it is so distressing.  It reminds me of a story that I’ve told many times before.  Back when I was in about the seventh grade, and we had a first-aid course.  The lady came down to Shorter where I lived from Tuskegee and taught that course, and she told us about another student that had taken the course some time previously.  It seems that this student had the opportunity to put her first-aid into practice.  The teach told us that the student came back after the course and said, “Oh, I am so glad that I have had this course in first-aid.”  And she said, “Really, why?”  She said, “Well, there was a terrible accident out on the highway, and I was the first one there.”  “Oh, really?  What did you do?”  “Oh, I knew exactly what to do.”  “Well, what did you do?”  She said, “I sat down flat on the ground, and I put my head down between my legs to keep from fainting.”  So, there, amidst all the mangled bodies, we have somebody practicing first-aid.

Isn’t that exactly what our church does today?  In a world that is hurting and broken and bleeding, we don’t even put on a band-aid until the Great Physician can get there.  What do I mean by a world that is broken and hurting and bleeding?  Every day, I deal with broken families.  The family is in trouble.  Dealing with broken families is not easy; it’s not fun; but I’ll guarantee you, there’s not a person sitting here who has not been touched by one of those family conflicts that cut so deeply.  It doesn’t just affect the nuclear family.  The grandparents so often are separated from their grandchildren.  And all the moral formation that comes from the extended family, in the broken world in which we live, that power is escaping us.  All that power for good–that power for morality, is escaping from the structure of our society.

When I’m not dealing with the broken, dysfunctional family, I’m dealing with criminal cases and civil cases.  I’m helping to fill our prisons to overflowing, at the cost of fifteen or sixteen thousand dollars a year for each inmate.  It sort of reminds me of that commercial that used to be on television.  Pay me now, or pay me later.  And that’s the position that we are in.  Are we not willing to use the influence of the church for good, to overcome the problems that we have?  Are we not willing to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to bear on the problem?

And then, not veiled at all before my bench, are the problems of race relations that we encounter.  Now, back in the sixties, I guess people had sort of an easy time looking at race relations.  It was easy to decide what’s good and what’s bad.  But have we through all of our legislation and through of all our decided cases, cured the problem of people not getting along with each other?  And the answer is no.  We have not legislated morality, nor can we legislate morality.  But, when we call ourselves Christians, there’s certain ways that we ought to behave; and that’s what I mean when I say that there is relationship between law and religion.  The solutions to these problems comes through our faith systems.  We can’t prove everything by science.  In order to be human beings, we’ve got to live by faith.  That’s not a choice on our  part.  We will believe certain things, and it’s simply a question of what we will believe.

I remember another story, and I’ve used it a lot of times.  I’m going to share with you all three of my stories.  I’m going to give you all of them.  There was this teacher who had this very bright student.  Little Johnny could just do everything that a student ought to do, and he could do it fast.  The teacher couldn’t keep little Johnny busy.  So, one day, she got this brilliant idea about how she would deal with the matter.  She found a magazine that had a map of the world in it.  She took her scissors and cut the map up into little strips—just tiny pieces—and she gave it to Johnny, and said, “All right.  When you get this page out of the magazine put back together, just like a jig-saw puzzle, then I’ll give you your next job.”  Well, in less than three minutes, “Teacher, I’ve got it.”  Well, she just couldn’t believe it  “Well, Johnny, how did you do that?” He said, “Well, I figured it out.  There was a picture of a man on the other side of the page.  I knew that if I got the man right, the world would be right.”

Johnny was right.  That’s the way it works.  If we get the people right, then the world will be right.  Now, just the fact that I told a story about getting a man right and the world being right, that tells you how old that story is.  You can’t talk like that anymore.  I mean, I should have been talking about getting a woman right, or getting a person right.  I’m really tempted to change that story all around and make it about getting the woman right.  Women are responsible for about as many problems in this world as the men are.  Women have control of a lot of the things that make for morality in the world that I see that is so broken.  So maybe we need to get the men and the women into the story.  Only whenwe get both right will the world be right.  Because it’s only by getting relationships right that a person becomes right.  I guess we could be Robinson Crusoe out on an island somewhere and be all right without concern for relationships, but in order to be right in this world, we’ve got to be right with our neighbors.  And that includes a whole lot of people.  We’ve got to have the right sort of relationships with everyone.  All of our relationships have to be right in order for the system in which we live and move and have our being to operate properly.  That includes all of our essential institutions: government, schools, churches and the family.

The family organization must work right.  That’s where moral values originate and are perpetuated.  Sigmund Freud, an atheist, taught us that moral formation is brought about by internalization of the commands of the parent.  Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, all of the people in social science who have taught us about moral formation understood that it is internalization of the commands surrounding us—and of the images surrounding us—that causes us to have certain moral qualities.  And without those qualities, our legal system won’t work.  Nothing will work.  So, we are in a great deal of danger when the family is in trouble.

I’m not going to talk a terribly long time today.  I’ve got one more story that I’ve got to tell you, because it’s on my list that I carry everywhere that I go.  When I was about eight years old, one morning while I was out playing, I saw a mama mockingbird building a nest in a crepe myrtle tree close to the house.  She wasn’t having a whole lot of luck with it.  She would take the little sticks and leaves and put them up on the fork in the limb, but they would fall right off.  They wouldn’t stay up there.  She had the right place in the limb and everything, but she just couldn’t make the building material stay up there.  So, I decided that I needed to help her.  I went in the house and got Mama’s good scissors and got some string and started cutting little strips and hanging them across the crepe myrtle limbs.  Unfortunately, the bird was stupid.  She didn’t pay a bit of attention to all of the strings that I put on the limbs.  She couldn’t build that nest; couldn’t see the strings.  She was—well–just a simple-minded bird.  So, anyway, like little eight-year-old boys will do, I lost interest after a while and quit watching and went on about my business.

That was early in the spring, and I didn’t think about the bird or the nest or the strings until late that fall.  The leaves fell off the crepe myrtle.  I thought about the nest, and I looked, and there it was!  She did get it built!  And there, right in the heart of the nest, right where the little clutch of eggs had been, there were my strings.  She knew where to put them.  She used them.  Now, that story is one you can use to retire preachers or school teachers.  Or you can use it to demonstrate the importance of witnessing.  It’s a multi-purpose story.  My friend, Henry Roberts who preaches in Pensacola told me that he would have invited me to Pensacola to speak, but he had already used my bird-nest story; and that he had made it his bird-nest; and if he ever did invite me down there, I could not use that story when I got there.

But isn’t that exactly what we as Christians do when we witness?  We hang those strings.  And there’s something in the nature of strings that allows those who need the witness to pick them up and use them at exactly the right time.  I hope that some of you have had the opportunity to see some of the strings that you have laid out during your lifetime put to use.  I hope that after  the leaves have fallen, you have have seen some of the strings incorporated into the nest. 

It was a pleasure being here with you.  I’m tempted to go on for another hour or so, but do you sort of understand why it’s important for me to do a little bit of teaching now?  I’m going to have a seminar for attorneys up at our church this week.  I’m teaching at Huntingdon Monday and teaching at Tallassee Tuesday and Thursday of this week.  I have a Council on Ministries Meeting–I’m the chair of that this year– on Wednesday, so I’ve got a pretty full week.  It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.  But, we just have to keep moving and doing the best we can, because the stakes are awfully high.  We must keep hanging the strings if we want the nests to be right–if we want the relationships to be right.  There’s a lot that’s important that needs to be done.  I haven’t sounded like a preacher, have I?  And that’s because I’m a lay person.  I’m an unrepentant lay person…perfectly pleased to be a lay person with a lay occupation; and I’ve very pleased to be here with you to celebrate the ministry of laity today and to share with you my own perceptions of ministry of laity.  Each one of our callings…the callings for each one of us is very precise to our own jobs, our own occupations, our own role in life.  If I had read the Scripture this morning, it would have been from the Twelfth Chapter of Corinthians, which describes the body of Christ.  Each person participates in that body with his or her own gifts and talents.

Will you pray with me?  Our Father and Our God, you know all things, you see all things.  You are present at all times and in all places, and we celebrate your presence here and now.  We celebrate the opportunity as lay persons to engage in the powerful work of your Kingdom.  Show us the things that you would have us to do.  Help each of us to realize that we have a role and a purpose in life.  Help us to execute on the plans that you have laid for us.  These things we ask in the Holy and powerful name of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

FUMC Brundidge

December, 1997

I came in a little early this morning and sat here as the organist was practicing and soaked up a little of the tradition that exudes from this beautiful sanctuary.  And I’ve enjoyed the music program this morning.  I can tell that this is a church with tradition, and I’ve been in a lot of churches.  I know that you have a great deal to be proud of.  I admired the stained glass windows.  You’ve also got a lot of places where people could sit in here.  So, you’ve got an almost unlimited opportunity for growth.  You don’t have to build a new sanctuary in order for the Kingdom of God to expand here in Brundidge.

Some of you that I met earlier were kind enough to remember that I ran for political office in this area one time.  Do you know that that’s been twenty years ago?  The few of you who remember that race for the state senate, that sort of sets a good background for what I am going to be talking with you about this morning.  We don’t always succeed in the things that we try to do; and yet though unsuccessful, those experiences may be very important to us in our faith journey and in our growth as persons.

As we enter in this advent season, what does it mean that Christ came into the world and lived in the world?  Does it mean that suffering is over?  No, I think that you have lived in the world long enough to know that that didn’t happen that way.  And yet when we begin to approach the meaning of religion, we often wonder why do bad things happen to good people?  Why the trials and tribulations?  But even that is not exactly what I want to talk with you about this morning.  And from the scriptures, we get mixed messages.  “Come, my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”  “Deny yourself; take up your cross daily and follow me.”  Now, toting crosses and a light yoke don’t sound to be exactly the same, do they?  And the scriptures talk about the peace that passes all understanding.  Yet Jesus said, “I’ve not come to bring peace but a sword.”  How can we reconcile all of this?  What is the benefit of suffering?

Now, why would I talk about something like this here at the beginning of advent season?  For one thing, Christmas is not only the happiest time of the year, it is the saddest time of the year.  Can you think of anything more melancholy than to remember…those of you who were older…the Christmases when you were a child?  The haunting thoughts of the people who were there who are not there now.  I venture to say that in this audience, there will be those people who are struggling with business reversal, who are struggling with family problems, who are struggling with wayward children, with sickness and, indeed, even death.  How do we as Christians contend with those kinds of things?

Yet, in our civilization, suffering is a very important element.  Progress, through suffering, is the cornerstone of faith that undergirds our civilization.  We remember the soldiers who died that we can have freedom and liberty.  We remember people like Sir Thomas Moore, who died for freedom of religion.  We remember Socrates, who took the hemlock for the sake of law.  We remember Jesus Christ, who died to bear our sins.  But we wince a little if someone suggests, as Jobs comforters did, that sin causes stress.  And I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone who suffers stress has committed some sinful act, and that’s their punishment.  That’s not my point at all.  But mental health counselors, indeed all health counselors, would have us believe that stress is the great enemy and evil.  We should avoid it.  But haven’t we come full circle when we begin to try to avoid all of the stress that comes our way?  Religious leaders follow suit by touting the peace that comes from religious experience.  Good people don’t suffer, they seem to be saying.  Well, now, that’s not true.  Good people do suffer.  So, how do we reconcile all of this?  How do we reconcile the easy yoke with the cross that we must take up?

I want to call your attention to a couple of different passages of scripture as we move through what we are talking about.  First, I want to point to Genesis, 32, verse 24.  Now, let me give you the background, rather than reading the whole story.  You remember Jacob had stolen his brother’s birthright, and he had gone off and as we would say here, “done good.”  He had spent twenty-some-odd years, and he had accumulated great wealth.  And now leaving his father-in-law, he had decided to go back to his home, which he had left, you will remember, in a bit of a hurry because Esau was not really glad of what he had done. And as he got nearer and nearer home, he became more and more apprehensive.  We would say he suffered stress.  And on the night before he was to meet Esau, he….and I’ll just pick up with the scripture there.

24  And Jacob was left alone and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. 

25 When he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him;

26  And he said, ‘Let me go for the day breaketh,’ and he said, ‘I will not let thee go except thou bless me,’

27  And he said unto him, ‘What is thy name?’ and he said, ‘Jacob,’

28  And he said ‘Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel, for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men and hath prevailed.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but my experience in my faith’s journey has often seemed like wrestling with that man in the night.  That’s a part of the challenge that we must face.  What happened to Israel as a result of his experience?  He gained a new identity according to the commentaries.  His old name, Jacob, meant “the Supplanter.”  He had taken away what rightly belonged to Esau.  His new name, Israel, means “God rules.”  God rules.  And there is a lesson in our stress that “God rules” brings very clear to us and brings home to us.  Now, the message of stress is not ended there.  Do you remember Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?  What did they say when confronting the fiery furnace?  Did they say, “God will deliver me?”  No.  They said, “God can deliver me.”  And God did, in fact, deliver them; but the remarkable thing about that story is their faith in God and their willingness to walk into the furnace because they knew that God could deliver.

We come to church to get the peace that passes all understanding, but we don’t take it out into the world with us.  Of course, you can’t talk about the topic of this nature without talking about Job.  Job had all of his possessions removed…all of his family removed…and yet he maintained his faith.  You know, we play in our minds with God.  During the past week, I had occasion to sentence a number of people up in Wedowee, and I think about the first five who came up for sentencing told me that everything was going to be all right…that they had found the Lord.  Now, really.  I finally turned to the Sheriff and said, “You must be doing a wonderful job over in that jail…with all of these people finding the Lord.”  I resisted the temptation to go further and say, “That is wonderful, because where I am about to send you, the field is white to the harvest.”  I didn’t do that.

But we have to be a little skeptical of these things.  During the past week, I heard a T.V. evangelist saying if you give money, a blessing will come to you.  And he told stories about people people who had given money and how money came right back to them.  Using God as a gambling device, I guess.  One guy gave a hundred dollars, and, gosh, he got a house in the mail, or something like that.  Now, our minds are skeptical about such claims.  Certainly, we don’t…any of us…think that God is in the business of granting our bets.  I’ll stay away from the Auburn/Alabama football game; but, you know, it’s bad enough to have to beat the other team and the referees, let alone when God gets on the other side, as well.  Forgive me for that.  I just couldn’t resist it.

But what all does God intervene in?  God intervenes in anything He wants to intervene in.  If He wants to run a football game, He can.  But there’s somebody out there on the other side, too.  And that’s something that we all have to remember.  And I’m sure that in all of these things God’s will is, in fact, done.  At least, these things do not happen in violation of the Will of God.

Is God just there for us to tempt, for us to say, ‘if we’ll do this…’ … Have you ever bargained with God?  ‘If we’ll do this, will you relieve me of that?  If I’ll do this, will you give me that?’  I’m afraid that most of us have some tendency to do that.  That is not the faith that undergirds the world.  That is not what brings us the peace that passes all understanding.

Let me bring another passage of scripture that involves a bit of suffering to your attention.  Luke, the 22nd chapter, the 39th verse.  Now, let me give you the stage here.  Jesus Christ, Our Savior, was in the process of being betrayed by his friend.  He was in Gethsemane.  “And he came out and went as he was to the Mount of Olives; and His disciples also followed Him; and when he was at the place, He said unto them: ‘Pray that ye enter not into temptation,’ and He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast and kneeled down and prayed, saying,  ‘Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done;’ and there appeared an angel unto Him from Heaven strengthening Him; and being in agony, He prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground; and when He rose up from prayer and was come to His disciples, He found them sleeping for sorrow; and He said to them, ‘Why sleep ye?  Rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation.'”  Can you feel the agony…the stress…and yet, our religion is supposed to take stress away from us.  What a shallow, what a shallow concept of religion that is.  God, indeed, calls us to take up our cross daily; but do you know what?  When you are surrounded and undergirded by a faith in God the Creator, the yoke is easy and the burden is light.  It is the reassurance of God’s living presence.

It’s not when we experiment with God with our little minds that God comes to us.  It’s when we experience him in our inner-most depths…when He takes charge of that part of us that makes decisions…when we know that He is.  When we know that because He lives, we can face tomorrow.  Because He lives, all fear is gone.  That is the relief that comes from experience.  Not all of the problems go away.

As a judge, I see plenty of life’s suffering and brokenness; and it is a matter of concern to me, and I can’t help but meditate what the experience of Christmas—what the advent of Christ—means in all of this.  We act out our callings against the background of faith.  I think that I was called to be a judge, but that doesn’t make the decisions that I have to make easy.  It doesn’t eliminate the sleepless nights.  You were called to the work that you do in the world, and you must take Christ with you into that work; but that doesn’t make the experience easy.  The ultimate issues of life are not easy; the stress is there.  But an understanding of the power of God and of the nature of God will carry us through it.

Five years ago, during the advent season, I lost my father.  He was 82.  He’d lived a good life.  I remember as we called the family in, because we knew that he was going…and I can never tell this story without feeling some emotion.  My son, Mike, came in and I said, “Mike’s here, Daddy, do you see him?”  “Yeah.” and Daddy said, “Hi, Mike.”  Mike said, “Hi, Paw.”   And then Daddy turned to me and said, in whatever world he was living in at that point, “I think we are all here now.  Y’all go ahead to the table and eat.  Save me a place by El.”  Ella is my mama, his wife of 56 years.  Save me a place at the table by Ell.  All of the grief, all of the sorrow that I could feel, was brought to bear on my soul in that moment.  But I understood the meaning of the table.  There he lay with a tube in every aperture of his body…and yet he was dreaming of a table…a table that had one end there in that hospital room and the other end in eternity.  I’ll never experience the 23rd Psalm in the same way again.  Because I know that He prepares a table for us, in the presence of our enemies.  In the very presence of the deepest stress that we can feel.  God is there.  And that’s what makes the yoke light.

I have said that I suspect that there are those here who have wayward children, who experience broken homes.  There are those for whom Christmas will not necessarily be a joy, because of the melancholy of Christmases remembered.  But there is a great joy in the Christ child.  There is hope because of the man who experienced sweat drops of blood as he went through his agony; and if he could face that, we can face whatever we have to face, because of our faith.  It is our faith that bears us through the tide.  When we can say,

 ‘Oh God our help in ages past,

our hope for years to come,

Be thou our strength while life shall last,

and our eternal home.’ 

That is the kind of faith that can carry us through whatever we are called on to do in this world.

I hope that the advent season will be good to you.  And I hope that for those of you who may be struggling with some soul-searching problem, my visit will have been meaningful.  It’s been helpful to me to prepare these thoughts, and it’s been a pleasure for me to be with you.

East Tallassee UMC

June 26, 1994

A time to kill and a time to heal.  A time to break down and a time to build up.  A time to weep and a time to laugh.  A time to mourn and a time to dance.  A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.  A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.  A time to seek and a time to leave.  A time to keep and a time to cast away.  A time to rend and a time to sew.  A time to keep silent and a time to speak.  A time to love and a time to hate.  A time for war and a time for peace.  What gain has the worker from his toil?

It seems that death is a given in this life, and I want to explore that with you. In talking with you on this subject, I am drawing from a larger context that I have been exploring for several years.  You may have seen where I have taught a class or two down at Huntingdon dealing with the relationship between law and religion.  And my remarks this morning fit into that context of the relationships between law and morality and religion.  And I say at the front end that I don’t think that in the absence of morality there is any law.  I think that the motive force for law comes from morality.  And I don’t think that without religion there is any real morality.  So I think that these concepts are inextricably woven together.

Now, Hollis was with me during the last couple of weeks at a time when I dealt with cases that involve death.  There were two beautiful young men–one black and one white–whose bodies were penetrated by bullets; and we were dealing with the person who pulled the trigger.  And this has become a common place of my experience over the last twelve years.  What I want to convey to you about that is the ultimate reality of what we were dealing with.  Of course, we only had pictures, but we were dealing with people who had lived and who had died.  They weren’t here anymore.  Their families had had to pray and place them in a casket and bury them in the ground.  And we explore today some of the meaning of that.

A couple of years ago, I was assigned by the Chief Justice to try a capital murder case up in Limestone County.  Now, you of course know the significance of a capital murder case…that means that the person that did the killing could be put to death.  I believe in capital punishment and think that anyone who tries to find an argument against capital punishment in the Bible has to search awfully, awfully hard to do so and has to almost twist the meaning of the Scripture to do so.  I don’t have any embarrassment in approaching capital murder cases.  But trying a capital murder case is a very unique sort of experience.  You go into the courtroom and when the purpose is announced, there is quiet.  I’ll say there’s a deathly quiet.  There is a brooding presence about those proceedings.  And so here I am in a North Alabama county where I don’t know a soul other than Curtis Coleman who happened to be my preacher years ago.  He was teaching at Athens State University and of course I called him because I needed some friendly contact there.

I was staying over at a motel, and every morning, I would get up a go over to Hardee’s and eat a sausage biscuit and drink a cup of coffee.  Well, the first morning, I went over there and they charged me a dollar a sixty-nine cents for my coffee and biscuit.  And the next morning, they charged a dollar and nine cents.  I was going to say something about it, being the honest person that I am, until I looked down and saw that senior citizen’s discount on there.  I’m not sure I was qualified for it, but I didn’t even ask about.  I figured that if I looked that old, it was time for me to accept that with grace and go on about my business.

During the very same case, I was up there behind the bench trying to read the small print on some of the things that I was supposed to read,  and I noticed that my arms had got too short, and so I called Betty and asked her to make an appointment for me to go to the eye doctor.

Well, you say why in the world are you telling us all about that?  We know you try capital murder cases occasionally.  There’s a point in it.  Because, you see, that represents my own gradual process of growing older and the fact that we all do that.  I have probably dealt with thirteen or fourteen other capital murder cases in my life, and in fact I have one that y’all might be interested in now.  Hardee’s seems to enter my life in a lot of different ways.  I got my sausage biscuit at Hardee’s in Limestone County, and the latest capital murder cases here in our county involves the killing of someone who worked at Hardee’s here in Tallassee.  I am dealing with that case.  When you turn on the television, it’s so interesting to watch O.J. go down the interstate that you almost forget that in the background of that entire production there lie two corpses.  I have had lots of experience in various ways with death, and maybe that’s why I am thinking about it this morning.  I have been a pall bearer more times than I could possibly count and remember, and in most of those instances the people who were buried meant a great deal to me.  That doesn’t happen quite as often now that I have become a senior citizen and perhaps closer to Jordan than I was at an earlier time in my life.

I have even had the experience very recently of conducting a funeral.  Now, there’s an experience where the preachers earn their keep.  To stand near an open grave with a casket over it, and to talk about the Valley of the Shadow of Death and in my Father’s house are many mansions– it’s a lot easier to stand here and talk about it than it is to stand there and do it.  Especially when that person means a great deal to you.  I admire preachers.  I don’t know how they can possibly handle those situations.  I say that I don’t understand it, but really, I do understand it–even though I would have a difficult time doing it on a regular basis.  They are grounded in faith that transcends this mortal realm.

In the last two years, I have lost family members.  Aunt Irene was the first to die and then my Daddy and then Uncle R.V., and then Aunt Willie, and then Uncle Raymond.  I’ve lost five or six in the last two years, and that trip to the graveyard has become entirely too frequent.  The things that cause me to start thinking about death and start talking with you about death, however, have nothing to do with these personal experiences that I have had but have to do with a course of study in which I recently participated.  I told you earlier that my general area of interest and my witness to you comes from the area of the inter-relationship between law and morals and religion.  And you may wonder, well, he’s gotten way afield now.  I don’t think so.  I think that I’ll be able to bring it back into focus for you because I have been studying this week for a course that I am about to take.  I’m glad that the State encourages judges to continue to study and to learn as we carry out our duties.  We surely don’t know enough about things to ever stop applying just as much understanding as we possibly can about life and human nature, do we?

Included in the material that I was to study was a discussion of euthanasia.  Euthanasia.  Everybody knows what euthanasia is…mercy killing.  We were looking at the ethical and moral and legal problems associated with euthanasia.  It was interesting reading, and what they were talking about is whether with the consent of the person who is to die, the doctor ought to assist in the death of that person.  That is a very important issue in our world.  To put it in a very crass sense, we are talking about medical costs.  We are talking about society’s health care plan.  Eighty percent of the money that is spent on health care is spent during the last six months of the lives of the terminally ill.  Often this money is spent at a time when there is no quality of life.  Under these circumstances, it’s natural that someone begins to talk about “is there a simpler way…is there some other way we can approach this matter?”

We have long since passed the point in our society where we would force life on someone.  If a person can knowingly make the decision, a person does not have to accept medical support systems or heroic efforts.   It does not necessarily depend on that person being totally conscious.  Sometimes family members or surrogates are allowed to make that difficult decision for the person.  But beyond the matter of simply not accepting further treatment lies a more difficult ethical and moral and legal question:  since somebody has to pull the plug to remove life support, what’s the difference between that and giving the lethal injection to avoid all of the pain and suffering when there is no real hope of recovery.  Well, it was interesting to me to read the arguments pro and con.

They first talked about the difference being active assistance in allowing a person to die and assisting in allowing a person to commit suicide.  They talked about a person’s right of self-determination.  And then came the counter-argument.  There are two persons involved in making this decision to assist in death.  It’s not just one.  It’s not just the person who is going to die, but the doctor has to knowingly participate in that decision.  Is that right?  Is it appropriate for doctors to assist in bringing about death? There is a strong argument that doctors are in the business of preserving life.  Never under any circumstances should they kill.  I’ve given you these arguments not for the merits of the arguments but simply for you to begin to understand how law and morals and religion intersect in this important issue as in many other issues.  There is more to it than this.

I brought the book that I was reading from, because none of these arguments that were advanced said anything about religion other than this: 

“The ‘rights’ view of the wrongness of killing (that is a person’s right not to be killed) is not of course universally shared.  Many people’s moral views about killing have their origins in religious views that human life comes from God and cannot be justifiably destroyed or taken away either by the person whose life it is or by another.  But in a pluralistic society like our own with a strong commitment to freedom of religion, public policy should not be grounded on religious beliefs which many in that society reject.”

The idea that there is a correct moral answer to the question is rejected summarily.  The idea that religion even has a place in the debate is summarily rejected.  We’re free to believe whatever we wish, since it really makes no difference what we believe.

I turn now to the general evaluation of public policy on euthanasia.  Now we come to the point.  Public policy about euthanasia, public policy in the absence of religion!  Back in the days when Christianity was taking its form, the Romans put deformed babies out on the hillside to die.  There is nothing irrational about that.  If we look to our own rationality, it makes perfect sense not to be burdened with those deformed and defective children.  It makes perfect sense not to be bothered with the elderly…to go ahead and let them….  Among the Eskimos, the elderly just walk on out on the ice flow because their families can’t support them.  They don’t return.  The notion can even be romanticized.  All of that makes perfect sense in the absence of religion–especially Christianity. 

But somehow through the drumbeat of the ages there comes the message Thou shalt not kill.  And that commandment is revealed truth.  If we propose to adopt any form of euthanasia, we will turn loose of the truth that is revealed in that commandment

All morality is received and revealed truth.  Science cannot create a moral system–that’s what the Nazi’s tried to do.  There is a difference between removing life support so that nature takes a life, and simply killing somebody.  And if we ever release our grip on our belief–our deep conviction– that killing is wrong, then where, pray tell, does it stop?  And the very idea that a conscious decision by anybody is a self-determination.  Does that assume that a soul is just consciousness, that it does not penetrate into eternity… that there is no soul?

Let me relate from my own experience.  My mom and dad married in 1936, and they raised three sons.  Daddy died a year ago last December 19th.  As he approached his death, we didn’t know that he was going to die right then; but we knew he was going to die eventually.  I carried him in for a regular check-up on a Friday, and they put him in the hospital because they were going to need to adjust his medicine.  He was 82 years old.  I won’t say something went wrong, but he didn’t do well; and wound up in intensive care with kidneys failing, liver failing, and all of his systems shutting down.  We knew then that the end was coming soon.  My youngest son showed up on Sunday.  Daddy was slipping into and out of consciousness at that point in time.  He certainly could not be said to be rational.  Mike came in, and Daddy said, “Hi, Mike.”  And then he turned to me and he said, “I think that we are all here now.  Y’all go ahead and eat, and save me a place at the table by El.”  Ella is my mama.  There wasn’t any table.  Nobody was going to eat, but I’ll tell you this:  The same power that directs us in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is the one that prepares a table before us in the presence of our enemies.  And as my Daddy lay there with a tube through every aperture in his body, in a place where he didn’t want to be, I came to an understanding of the 23rd Psalm that will never be erased. It was one of the most deeply moving religious experience of my entire life.  I understand the communion table much better now.  I understand how it has one end in this world and one end in eternity where my Daddy’s soul was visiting.  It was from the first communion table that Jesus went to Gethsemane, where the sweat drops were like blood.

Now, before that time came, we could have already made the decision, you know, life is not worth living.  But I think that the greatest witness in my whole life came to me at a time after hope of continued existence in this vale of tears was gone.  We need to experience it all.

Sometimes, you try to write things to try to express your feelings; and I wrote something back then that I found at the house this week.  I set up a little studio at home recently.  When you move things around, you find things that you have forgotten about.  And I picked up this piece of paper that I had written back then; and here it is:

 The King of Terror stood at hand,

silently watching those of us

in whom light and life and flesh

was still firmly united.

His icy fingers touched and chilled us

to the bone.

Though we would follow

and eventually we must,

we must now turn back

as His black curtain

waves gently between us,

and he who lay at His mercy.

Lay at His mercy

with the black curtain

settling

ever more gently

and permanently. 

Until light no longer penetrated

and we could not see

Beyond the Black Veil

This was the way I expressed my sense of loss, desperate frustration and deep grief when my father lay dying.

There is no case for euthanasia in this world of ours.  There is no case for intentionally killing.  There is no stopping point.  There is nothing that makes it wrong other than our deep-seated revealed faith, and this is where law and morality and religion all interact.  Because, you see, it’s not death that is the great mystery.  It’s life.  Life is the mystery.  Who we are, why we are here, and our connection to whatever is meaningful in this universe–that is what is real, but totally unclear, except for the eyes of faith.

This talk was delivered to a Bench and Bar celebration of Law Day in an Episcopal Church in Baldwin County, Alabama  on Sunday, May 15, 1994.  I was invited to make this presentation by my colleague, Judge Pamela Baschab, then a Circuit Judge, and who later served as a Justice on the Alabama Supreme Court. The group may have expected a different approach, such as the approach of Judge Roy Moore, and some may have been disappointed with this approach.

.

Baldwin County –

Sunday, May 15, 1994

“Law Day”

When the relationship between law and faith is mentioned in a meeting of lawyers, there is an immediate knee-jerk reaction that causes us to think of the Doctrine of Separation of Church and State.  That idea is embraced in the United States Constitution; and, basically, there are two parts to the idea–the freedom of expression clause and the establishment clause.  Basically, the Constitution says in one sentence that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or preventing the free exercise thereof.  Despite the existence of this sentence in the Constitution and all of its practical wisdom, there is a growing realization that there is a necessary relationship between law and faith which we will ignore at our peril.  Neutrality, the official position of our courts, is as pretentious and unrealistic as the value-free observer in the social sciences.  At an institutional level, the Doctrine of Separation of Church and State is entirely sound; however, at a personal level, one cannot separate what he or she believes from behavior in which he or she engages.  In order to understand the dimensions of the problem, we must look beyond the mere wording and interpretation of our Constitution.  We must look to the history of our culture and the effect of the Judeo-Christian heritage. 

When we look to the origin of law in the mythical past of our culture, we find many examples of the gods delivering the law for the benefit of the people.  God delivered the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai; and in the Shavuos Celebration, the Jewish people still celebrate the gift of law as one of the great gifts of God.  The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known code of law, is depicted in a stele discovered in 1901 as delivered by the god Shamash to Hammurabi, seated on the top of a mountain.  Such examples are numerous.  At the time the Roman Empire was entering its finest hour, the great jurist Cicero argued that in matters of law it was necessary first to cause the people to believe that all things are ordained of the gods. 

The trajectory of the evolution of law has not been a steady one.  In the New Testament, we find Jesus in trouble with the law for healing a man’s withered hand and for allowing his Disciples to eat corn on the Sabbath.  In the central redemptive act of Jesus Christ, we are introduced to the concept of grace which overcame some of the legalism that had crept into the law.  In the waning days of the greatness of the Roman Empire and after the first invasion from the Germanic tribes from the north, we find St. Augustine writing in The City of God a comparison of the City of Jerusalem and the City of Babylon.  Both cities of course were used in an analogical sense, and the comparison shows how God’s grace is the source of human orderliness.  In the Eastern Empire a hundred forty years later, Justinian compiled his code of Roman laws.  Then intellectual darkness spread over the events that we have come to regard as civilization.  Despite a brief Carolingian revival in the ninth century, it was not until the twelfth century that the concept of law began again to stir the hearts of humankind in western civilization.

The great Roman-Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas then described what is now known as the first modern theory of natural law.  According to Aquinas, by the exercise of right reason, humankind can discern the existence of law in the created moral order which was established by God.  He synthesized the philosophy of Aristotle, which had arrived through the great Islamic philosophers through Moorish Spain, with the Platonic tradition that came through the church.  You will notice a slight twist in the kaleidoscope from the earlier belief in a law that originated in the divine mind and was physically handed to the people as a gift.  At the same time, both the church and the fledgling nation states were searching for the remnants of Roman law in order to justify their respective positions.  The Justinian Code was discovered in the City of Pisa.  The University of Bologna, the first university established in Europe, obtained the Code of Justinian and became the law school of the whole of Europe.  Through this route Roman law found its way even into the English law through the chancery courts and concepts of equity.

There has been a purpose in the reciting of these events other than simply to remind you of things you have probably known in the past but may not have thought about lately.  In the entire panorama of events that I have described, there is a common thread.  The Creator God is the author of all human orderliness.  This is firmly entrenched in our belief systems and in the basis of our culture.  The existence–the authenticity–of law always depends on its acceptance in the deepest system of beliefs of the people.  When our attempts at law and justice fall short of the mark, we appeal to a “higher justice,” as Dr. King did in his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail.  In doing so, we implicitly recognize a higher authority, as did the patriots in the Declaration of Independence.

At the time that Aquinas described his theory of natural law in the twelfth century, the church and state were engaged in a tremendous struggle for control of the social order.  When Aquinas used the term moral order, the church was standing in the wings to pronounce the meaning of morality.  In those days, there was no void of metaphysics to yawn at the mere mention of platonic ideals.  The universality of law was firmly contained in the belief systems.  But, of course, you recall what happened next.  The Bubonic Plague–Black Death–swept over Europe in the next century or two, killing twenty-five percent of the population.  The Catholic Church became a bit corrupt and received sharp criticism because of the sale of indulgences.  There was renaissance and reformation.  The age of science ushered in a new basis for the ascertainment of truth in matters natural.  The power of social control directly administered by the church was splintered and diminished by the reformation.  The power of social control gradually came to be firmly planted in the nation state. 

The mighty dreamers of the age of enlightenment introduced the blue print for the modern world.  Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus planted the earth far from the center of the universe.  Newton described laws of nature which provided a predictable cosmos that would yield its truths to the scientific method.  Descartes said, “I think and therefore I am,” thereby establishing the duality of man as a mind that has a body and establishing rationality as the god that should rule over the emotions and nature.  And law became the rule of reason.  Thomas More described Utopia; Francis Bacon described the New Atlantis in which the world would be ruled by philosopher kings and by men of science.  Thomas Hobbes described life in an imagined state of nature that was short and brutish.  He described government—Leviathan—as the artificial creation of the human mind.  A little later, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.  The world was a great clock that God created and wound in the beginning, and deserted for us to discover.  These great dreamers searched in vain for natural formulas for human law that would correspond to the physical laws of nature.  The nation state, de facto became the source if not the origin of law.

Against this background, it was not difficult for Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, a little over 200 years ago, to come forward with the theory of legal positivism.  The nation state makes the law.  “Law is the command of the sovereign,” they said.  “When courts act as an agent of the sovereign, they legitimately make law,” John Austin echoed.  Bentham and Austin could not have drawn the same conclusions six hundred years earlier, when the church was still a temporal power to be reckoned with.  Their contemporary, Blackstone, still mouthed the ancient theories of natural law but with a strangely positivistic tone.  Blackstone’s works were published in America in the 1770s, which were very critical years, you may recall.  Bentham and Austin probably did not carry nearly as much weight as Blackstone with the writers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  But the point is that prior to Bentham and Austin, there was no theory of law that did not depend in some way on God’s creative power.  Even the pagans ascribed law to the gods or at least to an ominous power of fate, of definite moral and religious bent.  Fate was consulted through oracles and augury to ascertain divine approbation.  When we reflect on the death of Socrates, we often forget that the administration of hemlock awaited the arrival of the ship from Delos—which fate could surely have aborted.

Natural law is evident in the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”  Men who framed the Constitution had a firm belief in the importance of religion.  They did not write a clause into the Constitution separating the function of church and state, and guaranteeing the freedom of exercising religion, as an attack on religion or on religious practices.  It was about 1940 before anybody even dreamed that the framers of the Constitution had anything like this in mind.  David Smolin of Cumberland Law School writes:

“The religion clauses of the first amendment originally were conceived to regulate competition between Christian denominations.  It was the splintering of the church and the ugly specter of intra-Christian religious wars, rather than relations with those who professed other religions, or no religion, that produced America’s separation of church and state.”

At the height of the Civil War when this nation was struggling for its own soul, President Abraham Lincoln declared a National Day of Prayer and Humiliation.  He did so at the request of the Senate of the United States.  His proclamation declared, “Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the supreme authority and just government of Almighty God in all the affairs of men and of nations, has by a resolution requested the President to designate and set apart a day of national prayer and humiliation;” and he went on to set aside the 30th day of April, 1863, as such a day.  He called on the people to engage in prayer and fasting.  In 1871, Dean Langdale established the case method at Harvard Law School.  What better way to study law than to observe what courts actually do?  It’s empirical and scientific.  In 1882, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Civil War Veteran, suggested that law is what a court does, or that law is a reasonable prediction of what a court will do.  This is sage advice, if not taken literally.  It, in shorthand form, incorporates the actual forces of the social and moral order that create law.  But positivists seized upon these statements to prove that it is the function of courts to make law.  The case method is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We might as well conclude that butchers make ham.  The courts have adeptly moved from the curtailment of congressional law in Marbury vs. Madison, to the declaration of positive law in Miranda vs. Arizona.

We must recognize our Constitution for what it is.  It may be the greatest document ever written to describe a formula for the governance of the affairs of humankind.  Today we celebrate the wisdom and power reflected in our Constitution, and the liberty that it protects.  It is not, however, an oracle which can provide mystical answers to each and every moral crisis which may confront us.

Until a little over two hundred years ago, there was little or no suggestion in western civilization that law has its origin solely in the artificial activities of the human mind.  There was little or no question that law is a part of the handiwork of God’s order of creation.  The history of positive law—law created by human artifice—coincides with the history of our country.  But there is more to law than our own creative power.  Faith in law as a gift of God, a part of the order of creation, is essential to its moral force.  We approach law and justice only through the Grace of God.  There is no question that whatever orderliness exists in society depends on our faith.  It depends on what we really believe–and what we believe is not immaterial.

There is no question that we will live by faith.  We cannot possibly scientifically prove the very things that are necessary even to be human.  Science does not address the great questions of love, of loyalty, of dedication, of devotion.  Science and rationality can invent atomic bombs and weapons of mass destruction as easily as they can invent Salk vaccines.  We have no guarantee that the Congress of the United States will always act wisely in the enactment of law.  We have no assurance that the Supreme Court of the United States will always make the right decisions in interpreting the fundamental documents that constitute our national existence.  We have no assurance that the State of Alabama and its courts and legislatures will always be correct and will always truly enact those measures which are just and needful.  The origin of law should not be confused with its immediate human sources.  Law is entitled to veneration and respect because it originates in the realm of justice and is created by a power greater than our own minds.  We search for just answers because we believe they are there.

To utilize Plato’s parable, we may be forever chained in the cave and always see mere shadows of justice and other ideals, but we must have a faith in a reality that is in the bright light beyond the cave.  Like St. Paul, we may see only through a glass darkly; but, nevertheless, we have confidence that there is truth and justice which we will someday see face to face.  Unquestionably, law comes into our immediate view through the medium of human beings.  Law is always a mere approximation of justice.  Nevertheless, justice which is the polestar of our aspirations to law, is the greatest article of faith which was ever posited in the belief system of western civilization.  We must not lose the essential connection between our law and our faith.

Lest you think that I have departed from the tradition of our law, rather than giving it powerful affirmation on this Law Day, in which we celebrate law, let me close with these haunting words from George Washington’s Farewell Address.

“Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion, and Morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens.  The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.  A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity.  Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?  And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.  Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure–reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

” ‘Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.  The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of Free Government.  Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”

.

Alexander City Civitan, March, 1994

How appropriate it is that we honor the spiritual leaders of this community.  I have opportunities frequently to think of the importance of the work that our spiritual leaders do.  After all, people do what they do because of what they believe.  That’s a very simple statement, but when you think about it a little bit, it means that law and religion are closely related.  Think about it.  We do what we do because of what we believe.  Do we ever act inconsistently with what we believe?  The Bible talks about beliefs.  The Bible talks about the fruits of what we believe.

I’m deeply honored to be here.  I was here just a few months ago, and you may have invited me back too soon.  Everybody might remember what I said last time, and I might say the same thing again!  I always run that risk.  When I was Conference Lay Leader for the Alabama West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, I didn’t ever have to worry about that.  We had 700 churches down there, and I seldom went to the same one twice, so I really didn’t need but one speech.  So, I just always said the same thing.  It must be terrible to be a preacher and have to go back in front of the same people every Sunday and try to remember what you’ve said.  And the longer you stay at one church, the more likely you are to use the same stuff twice, and there’s always some smart-alec who thinks he remembers what you said.  But you can always say, well you haven’t done anything about it yet, so….

What we believe affects what we do.  We live in a world that is deeply hurting.  It is deeply in trouble.  We hear about crime.  Our President (Clinton) talks about the necessity of putting an additional hundred thousand policemen on the streets.  We still hear about drugs.  I can attest to the breakdown of the family.  I can attest to the breakdown of community.  I’m aware of the overcrowding of our prisons.  I’m aware of the sky-rocketing medical costs, and of the sky-rocketing verdicts in civil cases.  We are living in a troubled society.

It reminds me of a story that I always tell, ***(the first aid story)***

Now, folks, I’m afraid that sometimes that’s what the church does today.  We may not even be applying a band-aid until the Great Physician can arrive, in a world that is broken and hurting and bleeding.  In my judgment, all orderliness in our society comes from our system of beliefs—our system of faith.  Science is not going to produce order for us or tell us how to live together.  The ability to live life together comes from our faith system.  Religion—which is an important part of our faith system—is about how we relate to each other and to God.  Because, you see, we do what we do because of what we believe; and religion shapes our belief systems.  That makes religion extremely important.

When we examine the history of our country, we immediately think about separation of church and state.  Now, separation of church and state is a sound constitutional principle, but that concept is in trouble today.  The founders of our country were not atheists.  They were devoutly religious people. They protected freedom of religion.  They founded this country with the assumption that the churches would be here and would do what churches are supposed to do and that the people would be deeply affected by religious faith.  They put a clause in our United States Constitution which says that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or preventing the free exercise thereof.  That’s a powerful clause.  In the hands of non-believers, however, it can become a real tool for the secular humanists in our society to go far beyond anything that the founders of our country had in mind in proclaiming the necessity for separating religion from everything that is important.  While separation of Church and State is important, separation of law and religion is impossible.

The relationship between law and faith is not new.  You remember that Christ had a few encounters with the law himself.  He went through a corn field and his Disciples ate corn and got in trouble with the law.  He healed a man’s withered hand on Sunday, and He got in trouble with the law.  And He said man is not made for the law, but law is made for man.  And confronting the law, He said that He had not come to destroy the law but to fulfill the law.  But all through the Bible, there is a recurrent theme—and all through our civilization there is a recurrent theme—of the relationship between law and grace. How does fallen sinful human kind become a law-abiding, law-producing people?  And that presents some rather interesting things to speculate about.  Things that have troubled our theologians.  Things that troubled St. Thomas Aquinas; things that troubled the Dutch-Calvinist Movement– Calvin and Luther and all of those individuals.

Throughout our history, our church leaders have struggled for a handle for the problem:  How does sinful humankind produce an orderly society?  If sinful humankind can’t do it, how do we justify a separation of church and state?  St. James said that faith without works is dead, and he was talking about works of the law.  But, of course, it is by grace that we are saved through faith.  Not by our works.  And that brings me back to the subject of faith.

In the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus said, “you will know them by their fruits.  Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”  If we are Christians, we will produce good fruit.  Law and an orderly society is a part of that good fruit.  We do it not as sinful man turned away from God through Adam, but through the grace of God.  The theologians have talked about a common grace that precedes the grace that is found through the Holy Spirit.  I think that in these concepts, we find the basis and the only basis on which we can build an orderly society.

While separation of church and state is a very fine principle, it expresses itself in two or three different ways.  One of the ways is when we talk about the Constitution and the Constitutional provisions that I’ve mentioned.  I was running for office down in Macon County one time, and my opponent was for dog racing, and I wasn’t.  And they questioned me pretty carefully about why I was not in favor of dog racing, and I told them that among other things, it violates the principles of my religion.  And my opponent said you are not supposed to let your religion affect your politics.  Now, folks, that’s not what separation of church and state means.  If you’ve got any religion, it’s going to affect everything you do.  So, my opponent, in my judgment, didn’t let his religion affect his politics.  I lost that election.  That was not a race for judge, and the people got a dog track.

Where does law come from?  Why do we do the things that amount to law?  I’m not sure that we can answer the metaphysical question “what is law.”  But maybe if we explore it from a standpoint of human motivation–if we can determine something about why we do what we do– we can put it all together in a concept that we call law.  To that end, I have studied a great deal about human motivation–why we do what we do.  I agree with Abraham Maslow that we do what we do to get what we need.  It’s a simple proposition.  We do what we do to get what we need.  We need meaning and purpose in life.  St. Augustine said “my soul was restless until it found rest in Thee”.  And we cannot find that kind of meaning anywhere except in the right relationship with God Almighty.  That is the basis of family; that is the basis of the church.  We have to keep the institutional church and the institutional state separate, for sound reasons, but when it comes to individuals who do everything that is done, law and religion cannot be separated.  We act consistently with our beliefs, and we do what we do to get what we need.  We cannot separate law and religion at their fountainhead in human motivational force.  To do so would be to embrace something akin to schizophrenia. Now, there’s danger of that very thing happening.  There’s the danger that people can sit in church on Sunday morning and smile and not have religion affect the way they live their lives at all. 

Now, the challenge before this group is tremendous.  I think that we need to do two things.  We need to say we appreciate what you’re doing and what I’ve tried to say tonight is “I understand.” I understand that sacred burden that you carry.  Perhaps I understand as no one else here understands the importance of what you’re doing, because I experience that broken world that you are trying hard to mend.  I know how important your work is.  It is time that we pause and express our appreciation to you for all that you do.  Abraham Lincoln paused in the middle of the Civil War at Gettysburg and said “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground, for the brave men, living and dead who fought here have already hallowed it far beyond our small ability to add or detract.”  And the same is true of your sanctuary.  The fight that you are making, the battle that you are waging, is of critical importance.

I think sometimes about those old Methodist preachers of the last century–the circuit riders.  It might not have been so much their hell fire and brimstone sermons as the fact that they rode those old horses hundreds of miles to get there that caused them to be so successful.  If anybody rides a horse hundreds of miles and comes across mountains and through floods and through all sorts of other problems, the people are going to listen at them when they get there!  Because the people are going to figure, if he thinks it’s that important, there must be something to it!  How important is our dedication to our work?  Very important.  So, we are here to recognize you; we are here to encourage you; and we are here to tell you that the fight is not over yet.  We’ve got to move forward from this point.

I do what I can in this endeavor.  I served my church as Conference Lay Leader for five years.  I have taken the opportunity to get to know the people over at Emory University who have a Law and Religion Program.  We live in a world in which there is a God who understands computers.  There is a God who understands Freudian psychology.  There is a God who understands whatever we can understand.  There is a God who, as Paul Tillich said, is the ground of our being.  We can’t minimize our minds and deal with the world that idealizes and idolizes rationality and science.  We can’t minister to that world with less than our entire mind.  We’ve got to take them as they come.

We’ve got to attract young people to the ordained ministry.  I think about it a lot of times.  We have so many people going into law practice, when they ought to be going into full time Christian ministry.  What they want to do is change the world, and I’m convinced that the only way to change the world is by changing people one at a time.  If a young person wants to do that vocationally, then he should consider a fulltime Christian ministry.

Incidentally, I understand some exciting things are going on up at Samford University and Cumberland.  They have a law and religion program that is up and coming.  We’ve got to marshal all our forces. We must not lose the battle.  The light of the world has flickered through the Christian Religion into western civilization for 2000 years.  Are we going to let it fade and die out in our generation?  Our civilization is built on it.  Even secular humanism and its values draw directly on the matrix of ideas and beliefs that have come from our Judeo–Christian tradition.

The most important question that has ever been asked, I suppose, is when God was walking in the Garden, and he confronted Adam and Eve and asked them, “Who told thee thou art naked?”  Who tells anybody that they are sinful?  It’s the conscience.  And where does that come from?  It comes from being reared, as Sigmund Freud says, in a home where there’s a mama and a daddy that cause us to distinguish right and wrong.

I’m seeing a generation of people today that is a little different than the generation of people that I dealt with when I first became a judge eleven years ago.  I’m dealing with people who have much less a grip on what is right and what is wrong in this world.  And the reason for that is because the family is breaking down.  We went to no-fault divorces in 1969, and we’ve been having to expand the prisons ever since then.  I don’t think I could do a sociological study that would prove my point, but I think the point is there and is well taken.

In the very structure of our community, we are losing moral force.  For all of its righteousness, the Civil Rights Movement may have substituted no structure at all for what was bad structure.  No relationship….do you understand what I mean by structure?  The family structure, the community structure, the relationship that people have and expectations they have of each other.  We might have lost something.  By gaining something in individual rights, we might have lost something in our spirit of communities in the very effort to do good. 

When I get into something, I guess I don’t ever come to a good stopping place.  I’m burdened with these thoughts, as you can see.  I enjoy the opportunity from time to time discuss them, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here.  A fellow hasn’t got but 30 or 40 or 50 more years to do this, so I’m going to talk about it every chance I get. There is nothing more important to talk about.  I haven’t seen anybody go to sleep in here yet-not even a blink, but I know how difficult it is to talk about what I’m trying to get across.  We must not go to sleep.  We must think about these things and talk about them, and we must let that Gospel light lead us into the next thousand years.

It’s been a pure pleasure being here.

First United Methodist Church, Tallassee

October 24, 1993

Thank you, Larry.  It’s a privilege to share with you—for about eight minutes is what I think they told me I could have—about stewardship.  I want to talk about the concept of stewardship.  A few months ago, we decided to embark on a building ministry in this church.  We decided it was appropriate for us to do a little work on our building, and always the concept of a building ministry is very exciting, and it’s always attractive to give to a building ministry.  We want to talk about the building ministry now but in a slightly different intonation of the word.  We want to talk about building ministry because what we are really here about is building ministry.  After all, why build a church if we are not going to build ministry?

Rev. B. Gene Williams used to use a verse of scripture that goes like this.  The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.  He said that experts had told him that that is not a stewardship verse, but he used it for that purpose anyway; and I agree with him wholeheartedly.  What we are here about is managing God’s resources.  Managing those resources that He has entrusted to us.  And that is very Biblical in its origin.  Sometimes we think or even say that when the preacher starts preaching about money or about our relationship to material things, he’s quit preaching and gone to meddling.  But if our religion doesn’t have something to do with our relationship to the material things of the world, then what in the world does it have to do with?  After all, this is a theological concept—you don’t have to go very far in the Bible until you find Jesus telling the rich young ruler “sell all of your possessions and give to the poor”.  And saying “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”  You hear the parable about the man who tore down his barn to build a bigger barn and the word that came to him was “thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee.”  So, there is ample basis in Scripture to consider our relationship to the material things of the world.  For after all, what profit is there if a man gains the whole world that but loses his soul?  These are just a few verses that came to my mind as I was going over my remarks for today. 

Several years ago, Bishop Hancock and I made stewardship speeches in every district in the Alabama-West Florida Conference.  Of course, Bishop Hancock was the principal speaker.  We were to share fifty-fifty, but after the first night, I knew that his fifty-fifty was going to eat up my fifty-fifty, and so I cut it down to about 10 or 12 minutes while we were talking.  He told a story that I’m going to borrow from him.  He said that he talked to this man one time about tithing, and the man said, you know, you’re talking about giving ten percent, but I can’t possibly…do you know how much money you are talking about?  To which the Bishop responded, “I’m going to pray for you, and I’m going to pray that you become poor so that you are able to tithe.”

What does our church do for us?  What does it do for the community?  We’ll be looking at that a little further as we proceed through the evening, but for me personally, the church is a place and a time of renewal.  It prepares me for the events of the week.  And our ministry to ourselves is very important.  The ministry of each congregation internally, what we do for each other in the name of Christ is extremely important.  Our ministry to others is also very important.  Having charged our batteries, so to speak, then we have our tasks in the world, and we all—each of us—has our own calling. 

We are in the laity season; that is, the season of laity Sundays, and I’ve been away for the last three Sundays delivering the laity message in other churches in other congregations.  And the message always is the same:  We meet in church on Sunday morning so that we know how to be the Body of Christ in the world.  And the work we do in the world is a very important part of our ministry.  My work is to be a judge.  In the last five years, I’ve dealt with at least seven different people who were charged with capital murder arising within a five-mile radius of this church.  All of those, as far as I can tell, with perhaps one exception, all of them were related to drugs.  Specifically, in all of them the deceased person was an informer for the police–a snitch, as the drug dealers call them.  Now, the last time I went through a term of court in Dadeville, we didn’t have as many drug cases to deal with.  I’ll let you figure out whether to worry about that or to be glad about it. 

Our ministry in our community is very important.  For every person that I send to the penitentiary, we will spend in tax dollars fifteen thousand dollars a year.  There was an ad on television a few years ago that went something like this:  it had this mechanic on, and he more or less said “pay me now or pay me later.”  So, in a sense, we will either do our ministry here or pay later.  We talk all the time about we ought to spend more money on education instead of on the penitentiary.  We ought to spend more on the Christian religion and we ought to reach out to the entire community. 

We have the opportunity in this country to exercise our freedom of religion, and I think that religion has a more important role to play in moral formation than the schools do.  So, from my vantage point, it seems to me that stewardship—ministry in the community—ministry in the world—is extremely important.  Our ministry is significant and it’s true that we probably don’t do enough.  Stewardship is a big concept.  It’s a theological concept.  It’s a commitment of not just money but of time and talent, resources, services, to the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God.  It is our total response to God’s Grace.  If God has been good to us and we have confidence in Him, then it is through our stewardship that we respond to God.  When I made my rounds through the conference with Bishop Hancock, I always closed with a verse from one of my favorite hymns—When I Survey the Wondrous Cross—not the first verse, but the verse that follows: 

Were the whole realm of nature mine/

that were an offering far too small/

love so amazing, so divine/

demands my soul, my life, my all. 

This is what stewardship is about. 

Stewardship is not just a matter of committing X-number of dollars to this church.  It’s a matter of committing everything that we have to the Kingdom of God, including the support of this Church.  Thank you.

I approach the topic of today’s talk with “fear and trembling” to use Kierkegard’s application of St. Paul’s phrase.  The topic is “the calling of a layperson.”  We are all a bit reluctant to assign to God the reasons for our behavior, and with good cause.  We are careful always to present ourselves in the best light, and to say that we are doing something because God called us to do it can threaten the image that we want to project in a number of ways.  Instinctively, we know that others, particular persons who don’t know us well, will be very skeptical of such a claim.  We tend to identify persons who claim that kind of relationship with God with the fringe element.  If someone goes so far as to say that the voice of God told them to do something, he or she is a candidate for institutionalization.  It is not just the amorphous “they” who say these things–it’s us!  We who profess to be Christians are just as skeptical of claimed calls from God as everyone else.  Yet nothing could be more important to us than to know that we are doing what God wants us to do.  So how do we discern God’s will in and for our lives?

I trust that you will understand my fear and trembling as I approach this topic–especially since the only real way to delve into the matter is by telling you about my personal experience.  Now before you start calling in witnesses as to my mental infirmity, let me assure you that all my still small voices, all my voices from a whirlwind, all my burning bushes, all my visitations from angels  have been metaphorical only!  I think that in the Old Testament, there was even a dumb ass that rebuked Balaam.  Given the nature of my work as a judge, I’m not at all sure that I have missed out on that completely.  But before I launch into specifics, let me make a bit of a philosophical point.

When we look to the past, everything seems to be clear enough.  We can see, at least in most events, why things occurred as they did.  Even in tragedies that cause us to question the ultimate victory of good over evil, we can usually understand causation in some sense.  Even as we ask why it was necessary that a good person die or suffer, we can usually understand the physical cause for the suffering.  If we can’t explain things, we believe that the explanation is there and we just haven’t figured it out yet.  We can explain, or at least rationalize, things that have occurred in the past.  Not so with the future.  Our vision for the future is as uncertain as the weather forecast.  Most of the time, we can’t get it right even one day in advance, let alone for a month or a year or a century.  There are too many variables.  The future always appears chaotic.

Yet the call of God is the call of the future.  More specifically, it is the call of the present–the eternal now as Paul Tillich called it.  It is the call to engage the future in the present moment in the meaningful, creative way that is prescribed by God.

Well, I guess that I have beat around the burning bush for as long as I can. Let me be specific.  At the first of this month, I attended the first meeting of the Connectional Process Team in Chicago.  The Connectional Process Team is a group of 38 persons chosen by the General Conference of our Church to strategize for carrying out the church’s mission in the future.  Our work could affect the very structure of the denomination.  For me, it is strange that I find myself in this position.  Is this work a calling?

Next Thursday, I will chair a meeting of the Board of Trustees of Huntingdon College.  If anyone had told Coach Posey and me thirty-six years ago when he recruited me to Huntingdon after finding me out in Shorter in a peach orchard that I would someday be the Chairman of the Board, we would have both laughed.  Am I called by God to do this job?

I serve on the Episcopacy Committee for the Southeast Jurisdiction, and will chair a task force that will deal with rules and ethical standards governing the election of Bishops.  In the past, I served as Conference Layleader of our conference from 1985-1990, and I currently serve as Lay Leader of the Montgomery District.  I’ve written a book, entitled Conscience and Command, in which I attempt to deal with the complex interface between law and faith.  I have served the Church in lots of other capacities, at Local Church, District, Annual Conference, Jurisdictional and General Church Levels.  It is not necessary for me to bore you further with the details in order to present the question.

How can I be sure that any of this is the will of God, as opposed to my own ego and pride?  By the way, I don’t work for the Church full-time–I am very much a full-time Circuit Judge.  I tried jury cases last week and will try jury cases next week.  At this time, I am riding herd over 12-15 Capital murder trials which I hope to complete within the next year.

I feel an intense call to judicial education.  In November, a group of approximately 40 judges will gather at Tuskegee University to study the impact of black history and literature on law.  Why?  O. J. and Rodney King did not create the racial divide that exists in this country, but their cases certainly evidence that division.  The implications for the legal system is ominous.  I have spearheaded the effort to have judges explore the differences by studying the available literature.  What we believe impacts on our behavior.  Faith–beliefs–are recognized through fruits–behavior.  I believe that for every lay person, the most important calling of all is our vocation.  This is where the paddle hits the water.  If the Christian Religion is going to continue to be relevant to the world, it must take to the highways and byways.  It must pursue us in our daily tasks, and impact on our day to day activities.  It has been in church for too long.

So how did I come to experience my call to these activities?  It would be possible to suggest very plausible and rational explanations for all these activities, by looking to the past, but that would be a mistake.  It is precisely because of the unlikelihood of the various turns that my life has taken that I feel comfortable in the knowledge that I am responding to the call of God.  I suspect that it is only that faith–that belief–that provides the strength and energy for the response.  The rational explanation would say that I was born into the Methodist Church, attended a Methodist College, attended law school, maintained a strong interest in the church, and wound up in the present positions.  But that is much much too simple.  The real reasons are much more complex, and cannot be reduced to principles.  They happened in very precise ways.

If Coach Neal Posey had not found me in that peach orchard, I never would have attended Huntingdon.  Of course there were many other things that pointed me in that direction.  I am convinced, that if Moses had gone around the other side of the mountain, there would have been a burning bush around there.  Strangely, I suspect that if George Wallace had not visited Huntingdon in 1963, just when lots of things were happening in my home county of Macon, I would have ended up in medicine rather than law.  If T.B. Hill had not left a note on the bulletin board concerning a job opening in Montgomery, my life may have taken a different course.  I felt a strong call to remain close to home, and an intense interest in the social order of things and the role of religion in it all. If, if, if. 

After I had practiced for a few years, with more and more activity in Macon County, Eddie Mallard, the black circuit clerk in Macon County suggested that I run for Circuit Judge.  What a strange call!  Then after being elected, and serving for two or three years, there was a letter from Huey Emfinger, from Red Bay Florida, whom I did not know, telling me that my name had been suggested as Conference Lay Leader, and asking for information.  I’ve learned since that often there are folks who seek that office, but strangely, I was selected although I had no real prior experience suggesting that I should be selected.  I could go on and on with similar narratives of the strange events that have directed my steps to the place where I now find myself.  The Connectional Process Team is a particularly strange occurrence.  After a couple of days at General Conference, I was a bit down-hearted about the goings- on.  By phone, I told Betty that I felt I had to try to do something about it.  Donde Ashmos from Texas and I were  on the same legislative committee.  We visited, and discovered a certain amount of mutual concern.  One morning, she pointed out the possibility of the creation of the Connectional Process Team, and suggested that we should try to get on Connectional Process Team,  since it would be dealing with some of our concerns.  I mentioned it to Bishop Morris and a couple of other folks, and it happened.  The interesting thing is that it happened after I had made a commitment to the need, not having any idea how I could serve.

Events that have surrounded my elections to General and Jurisdictional Conferences have been strange.  In one instance, I gave up my nomination from the District to allow another person to serve, only to learn that one of the other nominees would not be able to serve, so I was elected anyway.  At the Jurisdictional Conference that year, I had a great deal to do with bringing Bishop Morris to this conference.

I wrote an article for the Alabama Lawyer describing the judicial education project at Tuskegee University that I mentioned a moment ago.  A judge who chairs the education committee of the Judicial Section of the American Bar Association read the article and invited me to submit a proposal to his committee for inclusion in the Annual Meeting of the Section next August.  In his letter, he mentioned Judge Deannel Tacha, who serves on the 10th Federal Circuit Court Court of Appeals, and who is immediate past Chair of the Judicial Division.  In the same mail, I received the final listing of the membership of the Connectional Process Team, and Judge Tacha was one of the members!  I had the opportunity to visit with her at the meeting in Chicago.  I believe there’s a still small voice in that story somewhere, and I’m listening with great interest. 

But still, how do I know that all this is the will of God?  Last week as I was on my way to court in Lafayette.  As always, I drove from Tallassee, across the Saugahatchee Creek, whose long valley cuts far into the piedmont area that embraces most of my circuit.  The ridges are in rows like dominoes, and fog envelopes the valleys.  Often I see deer, and turkeys, but on this particular morning it was a squirrel that caught my eye.  He scampered accross the road in front of me, carrying a pecan.  He made it across, and I’ll probably never see him again.  He experienced what he was trying to do very directly.  He was trying to get across the road with that pecan.  I’m not quite as direct in my purposes.  I reflect on the meaning of my activities, and he probably doesn’t reflect on his.  But the first thing that occurs to me in my reflections is that the squirrel is just as close as I am to the infinite magnificent God who created us both.  The only real difference is probably my awareness of the distance between us and the God of the sparrows and lilies and the hairs of our heads.  But despite the infinite distance between us and that God, I am sure that God is both there and here.  And once you get to that certainty, everything else is neither here nor there.  To act, act in the living present, as Longfellow suggested, is all that we can do.

I believe that it is not in the easy, rational explanations of our activities that we find our way to God.  It is in the strangeness, the mystery of the circumstances, carefully considered, that we realize that our call could have come from no other source than God.  And only armed with that conviction can we really act out the assigned role.  The witness within is the Holy Spirit–the Comforter sent by God’s only Son.  This is the way of discernment.  Every day, in a thousand small and strange ways, the Grace of God reassures us that we are on the right course. That is, provided that we are on the right course.  If we are not, we receive reminders of that also.

Even as we sit here, radio waves and television images surround us.  But they are not decoded, and we do not receive them.  Naturally we do not think about them often.  An old country gospel song says “turn your radio on, and listen to the music in the air, turn your radio on, heaven’s glory share.” Jesus often said “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”  The reason we don’t hear the still small voices, the voice of God saying “whom shall I send, and who will go for me,” or  the voices from whirlwinds, saying “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth–when the morning stars sang together,” or the voice from heaven saying of Jesus, “this is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased,” or the voice of Jesus himself saying “go make of all disciples,” or even the occasional well deserved rebuke from a dumb ass, is because we are not tuned in.  The circumstances surrounding the call evidence its authenticity as unerringly as the creation itself testifies to the existence of the Creator.  The voice of God thunders all around us but we lack ears to hear.

Thank you for indulging me these moments to share my innermost convictions with you.  I hope that in some way they will be helpful to you in your faith journey

Tuesday, November 15, 1994

Meeting of Bankers Institute

As I speak to various groups, one of the questions most frequently raised concerns huge verdicts rendered in civil cases.  Efforts at tort reform, and how those efforts have failed in court, was an important issue in the recent elections.  Bankers have both a direct and an indirect interest in tort reform–banks are the targets of lawsuits and their customers–the business community is also targeted.  Since I can seldom provide a satisfactory answer to the questions that arise at the end of a talk in the minute or two that is available, I decided to dwell on that topic tonight.

In my recent book–Conscience and Command–I tried to describe the forces that cause law to happen.  We can understand the problems only if we understand the forces that are at work in the legal arena.  My book deals with those forces–not with the myriad problems that confront our legal system.  Although I did not deal with tort reform as such, I think that to understand the problems in our civil justice system, we must understand the kinds of factors that I described in Conscience and Command.

Let me describe some of those factors for you:

(1)  Law cannot be separated from the prevailing faith system.  It is intimately connected to what we believe.

(2)  In order to be operative, law must draw on the force of human motive–or passions.  Law is not merely the rule of reason.  It only works if we care about the outcome.

(3)  We do what we do to get what we need.  We need security, among other things.

(4)  Law always arises from a history or mythology.  It does not just arrive out of the blue sky.  That history–that mythology–shapes the way we think.

 could enumerate additional factors, but these are enough to get us started.  If you followed those factors closely, you will realize that they are inter-related.  Our need for security causes us to act–it presses us into action–and we act consistently with what we really and truly believe–as opposed to what we say we believe.  Law and faith are related:  separation of church and faith is sound legal policy, but separation of law and religion is impossible. Let me illustrate these underlying principles a bit further before I apply them to the civil justice system.

We seldom associate Monday with the moon, although the work month comes from that source.  The word month was named for the moon, in some primitive religion.  In France, it’s Lundi, and the association with lunar is clear.  Likewise, the word month is obviously, and for obvious reasons associated with the moon.  The abstraction has long been separated from the physical object.  Yet these abstractions are essential, and we vigorously enforce them in our belief system.  November of course is month, but we don’t think about the moon when we mention November.  Tuesday is named after an ancient Norse god.  We maintain our faith in numbers, which are pure abstractions, existing only in the mental realm.  November 15th enabled us to know to be here now, and we all got here.  We order our lives by this system of beliefs.  It is almost totally a product of our faith.  One day differs little from another.  But if I tried to convince you that this is March 11, 1972, you’d be ready to haul me out of here–that’s how strong our faith is.  We enforce that concept with a greater energy than we enforce the taboo against murder!

When the Germans and Russians prepared for the Battle of Austerlitz in the Napoleonic Wars, for some strange reason they failed to take into account the fact that there was a 12-day difference in their calendars–the difference between Eastern Orthodox and Western calendars.  The Russians were hundreds of miles away when the Battle was fought.  Needless to say, Napoleon won the battle, which probably would not have happened if the calendars had been synchronized.

Law also operates on belief–an unquestioning reliance on commonly-held values.  But it is possible for undergirding faith systems to differ widely–just as the eastern and western calendars differed.  These differences arise from differences in the beliefs of groups of which we are a part.  The present age must deal with pluralism, and a multiplicity of conflicting belief systems.  The legal community itself is a sort of group, and has its own way of looking at things.  To maintain the overarching common beliefs that support the legal system may prove increasingly difficult as we enter more completely into the era of pluralism, often called the postmodern world.

Even within a group, such as the legal community, there can be startling differences in beliefs.  Sometimes we, in the legal community, fail to recognize the stark contradiction in the things we accept.  We recognize the right of a fetus to recover damages for injuries, but ignore the rights of a fetus in the abortion controversy.  A teenager must have parental consent for marriage, but not for an abortion.  How do these ridiculous anomalies arise?  They have different histories, and we compartmentalize our thinking. 

I think that by now I have created an understanding of the factors that are necessary to understand the crisis in the civil justice system.  History; belief systems; different ways of interpreting the same facts; and human motive:  acting to get what one wants or needs.  At this point in time in this analysis, you will not be surprised to learn that there are two legal communities–with starkly different beliefs.  The veneer of belief in common values is painfully thin.  Let me tell you how this came about.

When Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln practiced law the common method of training for lawyers was “reading” the law in an established attorney’s office.  Law school training for lawyers became firmly entrenched only after the Civil War.  Development of law schools paralleled the burgeoning industrial and corporate development in America.  Ownership and control of American assets changed dramatically during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Before, individuals owned the assets‑‑afterwards, corporations owned the assets and individuals owned only interests in corporations.  Control shifted to professional managers.  Law schools‑‑and the legal profession‑‑responded to the needs of corporate America.

Large corporate law firms developed to serve the large corporations.  These law firms hired the top law students.  Since these firms spoke the language of law, and represented the wealth of the nation, they wielded considerable political power.  The lawyers not hired by these corporate firms spread out in the country side.  They made decent livings with local clients who needed deeds, wills, criminal representation, collection work and the like.  Local businesses continued to thrive, and continued to hire local counsel.  Often solo practitioners and small partnerships possessed considerable political power in the local community.

Business centralized even more during the last half of this century‑‑with shopping malls, chain stores and banking conglomerates.   Centralization steadily eroded the ability of small partnerships and solo practitioners to make a living.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Something dramatically important happened early this century when Henry Ford began to produce automobiles on the assembly line.  Highway carnage.  Lawsuits.  Insurance companies.  Sure, there had been insurance before that‑‑but insurance was the institutional response to the automobile and its carnage.  Plaintiff’s work became a possible source of income for lawyers not hired by big firms.  Naturally, the defense work gravitated to the established corporate law firms.

We need to say that while plaintiff’s lawyers make the decisions on one side, insurance companies call the shots on the other‑‑not the defense lawyers who work by the hour.  We also need to say that both insurance companies and plaintiff’s lawyers make a great deal of money in the process.  Their relationship is symbiotic.

Inevitably, attorneys who work primarily for plaintiff’s began to compare notes.  The Trial Lawyers Association emerged.  Plaintiff’s work became lucrative.  And although defense attorneys no doubt sympathize with their friends at the insurance company, they also make money when their client is sued.  The struggle, or perhaps we should call it the dance between perfectly matched partners, began.  No fault insurance temporarily hampered the plaintiffs’ side.  Fraud and bad faith then took on new meaning‑‑and refilled the plaintiffs’ cups.  The dance moved into the legislature with tort reform.  An organized, politically active plaintiffs’ bar found that it could have an impact on judicial selection.  And they also found that  courts can make law‑‑and are in charge of interpreting the constitution.  Insurance companies, with faithful support from the business community, found that like trial lawyers, they could become involved in judicial elections.  In fact, they had known it all along.

Our civil justice system concentrates on the interests of these two specialized groups and often departs from the needs of the people.  The beleaguered public must stop the dance.  The first step is to insist that courts get out of the politics of law making.  If judges simply decide cases and avoid ambitions to make law, judicial races will not attract the political money.  Judges and judicial candidates should avoid the rift between trial lawyers and insurance companies.

Courts should avoid the politics of law making.  Advocates of court made law are quick to point out that courts can’t avoid making law.  When a court decides a case, consistency requires that similar cases that arise later should be treated the same.  This gives rise to the legal doctrine of stare decisis‑‑precedent is given the force of law.  Most common law developed in precisely this way‑‑from court decisions.  Even the criminal law‑‑murder, robbery, burglary‑‑did not originate in statutes but in case law.

The common law started in England, before the birth of the United States.  Judges of the common law courts did not admit that they were “making” law.  They firmly believed in natural law.  They believed that they could discover in nature the laws that govern human conduct‑‑similar to the way that scientists discovered laws of science.  The role of the judge is to find the law, declare it, and apply it.  To say that courts make law is as foolish as saying that butchers make ham.

But the legal community no longer subscribes to the natural law theory.  About 200 years ago an Englishman named John Austin suggested that courts actually make law‑‑they don’t just find it.  The modern nation state had firmly established itself.  The thought had emerged that the nation state makes law.  Law is the command of the sovereign.  The social compact or social contract theory of government had arrived.  Law is merely a product of human reason.  No ham here‑‑just butchers.  Validity for law is purely a matter of genealogy: did the person or agency declaring the principle have authority?  This new theory of law, legal positivism, differed radically from the natural law viewpoint.  Courts properly make law as a legitimate part of the sovereign.  We should note that in English law, the King‑‑or Parliament‑‑could reverse the decisions of courts.  Courts do not have the last word in the English system.

Our constitution assigned lawmaking power to the legislative branch.  Courts were to resolve cases by applying principles adopted by the legislative branch.  Then came the inevitable problem‑‑who decides whether a statute violates the constitution?  The U. S. Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison decided courts can declare legislative enactments unconstitutional.  Unlike the Parliamentary system in the England, courts here have the last word.

Another factor subtly promotes the law-making role of courts.  In 1871, Dean Langdell established the “case method” of legal instruction at the Harvard Law School.  Students read appellate opinions to learn the law.  Law schools throughout the nation quickly adopted this effective teaching tool.  Law schools became the predominant method of law study, replacing the old system of “reading” the law.  The case method of study inevitably created a powerful impression in the minds of lawyers that courts make law.  Future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard professor, proclaimed “Law is what a court does.”

Lawmaking by the courts probably reached an all-time high with the Warren court.  No longer content to simply strike down legislative measures that the court deemed unconstitutional; the Warren Court began to actually declare positive law in the name of the Constitution.  In the famous Miranda case, for instance, our Supreme Court prescribed a litany a rights that law enforcement officials must describe to a suspect before questioning begins.  The Supreme Court now intentionally selects cases to declare principles with prospective operation.

Step by step the courts have moved into the political arena of lawmaking.  They have moved far beyond merely making law as precedent when they decide cases.  They decide whether legislation is unconstitutional, and even use the constitution as a basis for declaring new law.  Their own logic and ingenuity‑‑not natural law which incorporates the collective wisdom of the community‑‑is the basis for their decisions.  The case method of instruction in law school reinforces the impression among lawyers that all law comes from courts.

The problem is that the advocates of natural law had a point.  Law must draw its real force from the deep‑‑seated beliefs of the people‑‑the wisdom of the entire culture.  The court endangers it own authority and the very concept of law if it sets aside legislative enactments which the people want, or declare principles that are repugnant to the beliefs of the people.  Courts necessarily establish law by deciding cases.  This is okay, as long as they are really deciding cases‑‑and not intentionally making law.

The problem is that the law of the lawyers and courts can slip away from our social reality.  It becomes law for the lawyers, and lawyers even believe that only they are qualified to pass on the qualifications of judges.  The economics of law practice–the needs of the lawyers, has an ever-increasing impact on the substantive content of law.

The problem is not one sided.  As I pointed out earlier, there are two parts to the legal profession: the part that used to represent the establishment, and the recently arrived plaintiff’s bar.  They were both called into existence by powerful needs.  What possible justification for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, you may want to ask?  Let me suggest a few:

(1) There is immorality in the market place.  It is real.  Many businesses do not operate morally and ethically, and have little concern for the human element.  The problem of immorality in the market place is real.

(2) There is no one other than the plaintiff’s lawyers to tackle the problem.  Efforts at self-regulation has proven futile, and governmental bureaucracy is even worse.

(3) Governmental bureaucracy is totally ineffective.  It is more a part of the problem than of the solution.  The banking department, for instance, may regulate some things quite well, but I saw one computation of credit life insurance, approved by the department, arguing that although the premium was almost twenty percent of the principle of the loan, that it did not exceed one dollar per one hundred dollars per year, which was the legal limitation for such premiums.

But on the other hand the jobs—the goose that laid the golden egg—is in danger of being roasted, in the present environment of runaway verdicts that exists in this state.  The law of the legal community has truly departed the social reality with which it should be dealing.  The answers lie in reality crashing through the artificial, non-workable paradigms that the legal community has created.  The following things could bring that about:

1)  The resurgence of faith in transcendent values — that right and wrong have a basis in reality and are not merely mothers of individual opinion.  One belief is not really just as good as another.

2)  The values of the legal community must be brought in line with the values of the larger community.

(A)       The adversarial system is not always the best way to resolve disputes.

(B)       The constitution is important but not sacred and not infinitely flexible.

(C)       Absolute zeal for the cause of an immoral client is not a part of professionalism.

(D)       Legal and judicial ethics must embody the moral aspirations of the larger community–not just those of the legal profession.

(E)       The legal profession must merge its belief system and arrive at commonly-held values. Our leaders must first understand the problem.  Stop-gap measures won’t work.  And Judges must differentiate the judicial profession from the legal profession The work of judges differs greatly from that of lawyers, although they both deal with the law.

(F)       The business community must behave morally.  Morals must have given a larger role in the process of social regulation.

How do we do all of this?  Reform of the magnitudes of which I speak may only be possible in the realm of religion.  There must be major shifts in our belief system.  When our actions on Monday are consistent with what we say we believe on Sunday, there will be hope.  When we realize that science can’t create or even recognize morality, there will be hope.

This is a talk that I made to the Board of Laity of the Alabama West Florida Conference in Andalusia, Alabama, on December 11, 1993.  Any organization that has elections must deal with politics, and the Board of Laity was apparently considering rules in an attempt to regulate elections in the Annual Conference.

Andalusia

December 11, 1993

I knew when I got the letter from Marvin Grunzke inviting me here today that this was something that I needed to do.  So, I gladly accepted the invitation, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here because I realize that I am here to talk about policy rather than politics.  Both those words perhaps have the same root word in the Greek word polis, and we’re all about the same mission here in protecting our Christian community and the interest of our community.  I would say that the objective of the task force–the goals of the task force are the same goals ideals that I hold up for our behavior in the political matters of the Conference.  However, I think that there are different approaches that can be taken and perhaps between that end goal of the behavior that we would hope for among our preachers and among our laity, there might be different philosophies and different approaches that we can talk about. 

I’ll have to be a bit personal in my own experience, I think, in order to share my philosophy completely with you.  Although I haven’t looked at the task force report since the Annual Conference, I think that I recall that there are essentially three issues. 

First, there is the matter of preachers getting together and talking about political issues in prior to conference and what ought to govern those types of meetings.  Secondly, there is the issue of endorsement of lay delegates by groups, or clergy persons.  And thirdly, there was the issue of the mandatory district caucuses and how people could be elected without going through the caucuses in the districts.  If I’m wrong about the precise issues before the task force, at least those are the three areas that I have become concerned about.  Before the task force pursues its approach to conclusion, I wanted to be heard.  I think that the difference in approach might be reflected in the title to a book that I have written and that is going to be published by Scholars Press at Emory University next year, entitled Conscience and Command.  I’m thinking that the areas that we are dealing with here have more to do with conscience and less to do with command.  I think that we need to find a way to pull the fiery brands out of the eternal flame and imprint it indelibly in the hearts of people as opposed to trying to find ways to regulate talk about church politics, as to which discussion seems to me to be almost inevitable. 

As I mentioned, I’ll have to be a little personal.  As I came down this morning turning over in my mind what I would say, I realized that I needed at least three quick hours to do this.  That’s no exaggeration.  I even then began to meditate on the possibility of us getting back together.  Maybe we could get together and talk about philosophy of leadership for a laity group within the church.  But let me use the time that you have now given me.  I remember approximately forty years ago, my first turning to the church.  Roy Sublette was our preacher then at Bradford’s Chapel, and I was about eleven years old and lived in a house without a bathroom in it.  And the Sublettes picked us up and carried us to MYF, and even to the sub-district meetings.  There was a preacher from another church at one of the sub-district meetings who didn’t think that eleven-year-olds ought to be going to sub-district meetings.  We weren’t old enough.  That was the rule, according to him.  Roy Sublette got up and said, you know, it’s my car and my gas and this is my ministry and I’m going to bring those people here.  You know, I remember that to this day.  The things that mean most to us…let me apologize…I didn’t talk about this a whole lot when I was Conference Lay Leader but it has meaning to a depth that I can’t begin to express because the images are so powerful.  These are the things that shape our lives. 

It wasn’t too many years after that until I attended Huntingdon College, and I was President of the Student Government there and quite active in campus life.  That, too, has had a tremendous impact on my life. Our Methodist Church-related College set me on a lifetime course of study, a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of ministry from a laity perspective.  They gave me a Bible when I graduated from Huntingdon, and I have it with me today.  While I was Conference Lay Leader,  I still carried this Bible; and you notice that it’s a little worse for wear.  I have a new Bible now, and I carry it most places; but I pulled this one out for a particular purpose this morning because, you see, it says “presented by Huntingdon College ….”  I got that in 1964 when I graduated, so it’s been almost thirty years. 

I drifted on through law school and entered law practice in 1967, and was elected Circuit Judge in 1982.  In 1985 I got a letter from Hughie Emfinger that said, “you are among the people who are being considered for Conference Lay Leader…would you please send a little more information about yourself.”  This was a total surprise to me.  My first reaction to that was to call my Brother, Wade, who had been District Lay Leader in the Montgomery District and say, “Wade I think they have made a mistake here…you know…I think they have sent this letter to the wrong person…are you expecting to be nominated for Conference Lay Leader or anything?”  And he said, “No, it’s not mine.” 

And so Betty and I prayed about it and I got my resume’ together and sent it in, thinking that that would be the end of it.  But I was elected.  I was elected to the office that Dwayne now holds in this Conference.  Now, of course, the first thing I did was to come down to see Roy Sublette, the Council Director.  He was occupying the chair that Bill now holds, and so I thought it appropriate for me to come down and find out the state of the Board of Laity.  I got here, and I noticed that he had some difficulty in finding who the members of the Board of Laity were.  And I also learned at about the same time that we hadn’t found it necessary in the Board of Laity to request a new budget for three years.  And basically, what I’m telling you was that I found that we weren’t doing anything…that we were inactive.  And I set about doing some things to activate the Board of Laity.

There’s another piece of background that you need to know.  It wasn’t too long before that that we had a church trial in our Conference involving one of our leading members of the clergy, and that trial and the controversies surrounding it had torn our Conference right down the middle; and we were in need of a healing ministry at that point in time.  The laity and clergy alike were divided along theological lines, along….I don’t know what all lines. 

As I set about the work of being Conference Lay Leader, what I am about to describe are the underlying policies that governed every action and every decision that I made.  Number one, get the laity involved…not in a retreat, but in an advance.  Get the laity involved in significant ministry.  Get the laity involved in participating in the boards and agencies that make the decisions in this Church.  Schedule meetings where the laity can attend.  Look for the people in the Conference who can provide leadership, and then through sound structure in our church organization make sure that the most capable people are included.  Then make sure that they get the recognition and all of the motivational factors that they need in order to do the work that is necessary.  I was blessed with a Bishop that felt like that was the right thing to do and regardless how any of the clergy may have felt, he gave me every opportunity that I could possibly ask for as a Lay Leader to implement those policies that I am describing.

An undergirding policy that I adopted and followed was to avoid preacher politics like the plague.  Don’t let the laity get drawn into whatever it is that preacher politics involve.  That includes avoiding theological controversies.  Liberal vs. Evangelical—any of those types of divisions. 

The reason that I was willing to be Conference Lay Leader is because of what I saw parading before my bench—moral meltdown in the world in which we live.  I saw the tremendous need for the church to be involved in the world—in a world of real ministry—in a world that is broken and hurting and bleeding, I saw the need for structural leadership of laity in the church.  We need to be doing–not talking.

But what do you do to implement those kinds of policies?  I engaged in five years of the most intensive traveling and speaking that you would ever expect any Lay Leader to do.  I was in every District in this Conference at least once a year, and most of them several times a year.  And if the District Superintendent, for whatever reason, failed to recognize the District Lay Leader, the District President of the United Methodist Men, the District President of the United Methodist Women, Bishop Knox always saw to it that I had a place on the podium, and I recognized those people.  I saw to it that the kinds of motivational forces and commitment that arise from recognition were given full support.  These actions were needed to cause things to happen.  We defined the jobs.  We had educational events, and we emphasized stewardship. 

One of the first things that Reverend Sublette told me was that we didn’t have a good stewardship program in this Conference, and we set about creating one.  I thought for five years that we were a failure.  I know that Marvin was working like a Trojan and so were other people, but we just, you know, seemed to be keeping our heads above water.  But then I looked around the rest of Methodism, I found that others weren’t keeping their heads above water and that our stewardship program had been extremely important and meaningful to the life of this Conference.  It was significant at that point in time just to keep our heads above water. 

Then came the 1988 elections, and I was elected to the General and Jurisdictional Conferences.  I was the first person elected.  I was the first Lay Leader in this Conference ever to be elected, as far as I know, and especially the first one to ever be elected on the first ballot and to lead the lay portion of the delegation.  And that brings us to where we are now in terms of talking about how people get elected.  Of course, I was nominated in the Montgomery District, and so forth.  I remember the pain and chagrin that I felt when I learned that the Pensacola District Lay Leader was unable to attend the meeting in his District, and for some strange reason, the Pensacola District did not nominate their own District Lay Leader to General Conference.  I felt the pain of his being slipped over.  You know, I had been there and I had recognized him. Other people who have made tremendous contributions to the life of the Church have failed to get through the nomination process, and it can be a painful experience.  However, today that former District Lay Leader sits before you as the lay leader of this Conference.  And he was elected to General Conference on the first ballot in 1992, as I recall it.  He received the second highest vote tally on that ballot, I think. 

Of course, all of you are familiar with the process that takes place.  Five people are nominated from each District; and then those names together with a picture and biographical information are published in the Brochure of Reports.  There is no other special recognition during the sessions of the Annual Conference.  Any qualified local church member in the Annual Conference can be elected, and sometimes persons who are not nominated are in fact, elected.  The proposal that comes from the task force would have involved people who hadn’t been nominated in their districts receiving special recognition at the orientation session of lay people during the Annual Conference.  Physically, that would require an inordinate amount of time because it would be totally unfair to recognize people who hadn’t been nominated in their District and not recognize the people who had been nominated from their District.  It would give an unfair advantage to those people who didn’t receive the nomination. 

So, the system is imperfect but perfecting it is more than just a notion.  If we have a laity program that puts the most effective lay leadership before the members of the district and conference most of the time, then most of the time the right people are going to get nominated.  And we are not likely to encounter serious problems.  There is wisdom in the nomination process.

In the 1992 election, I was elected again after some other people had been elected.  I went to the district caucus where people were to be nominated.  There were six people nominated.  One of those was a Edna Williams, a black lady who had served as the chairperson of the Council on Ministries in this Conference.  When the voting was through, everybody but Edna had been nominated from our district.  I had already been to conferences before, so I stood up and I said, “I choose not to go at this point in time.  We have to nominate Edna.  We have talked for years about being inclusive and here is a black person who has served in a high position of leadership and yet we have not nominated her.  So y’all nominate Edna, and I’ll stay home.”  Some people thought that was a wonderful thing, but it really was not.  I really didn’t care whether I went or not.  I had been to the church meetings before, and legislating is not my biggest thing.  The strangest thing in the world, though…a couple of days later a preacher called me and said that one of the persons who had been nominated was not qualified because she hadn’t been a member of the United Methodist Church long enough.  And asked would I go.  They had made some arrangements to that effect at the caucus so that if anybody else couldn’t go that I would receive the nomination.  I said, “Well, I suppose so.” 

I was beginning to wonder just exactly what the Lord had in mind for me.  And I tell you I went all the way through the General Conference still wondering that.  But when I got to the Jurisdictional Conference, Bishop Morris, I realized what my role in life serving on the Episcopacy Committee was and why the Lord wanted me to be there.  I was sent to bring you home with us.

The hand of the Lord is in this stuff that we do.  There are those who have said to me “campaigning is fine, because, you know, you didn’t need to campaign.  I have never asked anybody to vote for me for anything in the United Methodist Church.  Not one time.  Yet I have been elected to the highest offices in this Conference and been elected to General and Jurisdictional Conferences. I think that the hand of the Lord was in it.  Some say, well, your name was already known.  My name wasn’t known to hardly anybody in this Conference, except God, as far as I know when I got elected Conference Lay Leader.  Hughie Emfinger got it from somewhere, and I never have understood how I got elected Conference Lay Leader.  But I can see the plan unfolding throughout all of those years.  And it’s an awesome experience to feel the hand of Almighty God on your shoulder and to know that you have a job to do.

In the course of being a Conference Lay Leader, I spoke in a lot of churches in this Conference.  I have probably spoken in 150 or 200 of them by now.  I have had the experience of speaking in a small church and having the preacher’s wife prepare dinner for me and then, after eating, the lady had to get up and go to work in a mill so that the preacher and his wife could make ends meet and feed their family.  I understand some of the pressures that go along with ministry, and I’m going to tell you about preacher politics.  As long as people are in the position that our clergy folks are in, we are not going to keep preachers from talking to each other about appointments and about places in the Church.  It’s totally unrealistic to think like that. 

And when I begin to look at it that way, the theological differences begin to melt away, and you see things in their raw form.  These clergy persons are children of God, too, and they’ve got to make it in the world, and they are going to band together in whatever groups they can, and they are going to talk about the things like appointments that so vitally affect them and their families.  And when we come to the point where preachers are not talking to each other about politics of the church, we are going to have a church that is deader than a doornail and people who are moving out of it worse than they are now. 

Now, our conference has grown in membership.  Our Conference has grown in the last ten years.  I hope it’s still growing.  It was growing the last time that I knew anything about it, and the reason that I’ve given you these intense personal experiences is because I think that the policies that I described for you at the outset have something to do with what we ought to do about the matters that the task force is considering.

I never dreamed when they gave me this bright, beautiful, shiny Bible on the day that I graduated, that 30 years later, it would look like it does today.  But there are some words of God inside.  This whole book will physically disintegrate and become dust, but that Word will keep right on going.  What we have got to have in the Church are people who are committed to intensely follow the words that are there.  “Whoever would be great among you must be servant of all.”  “Don’t seek the head of the table…get moved up later on.”  And then there’s that magnificent passage found in two different places about the Body of Christ and how each member has a function and a role to serve. 

On the three points that we are talking about, I say that we ought not to have any legislation coming from the Board of Laity attempting to define the standards for preachers.  If we’ve got preachers who have an education, who have devoted themselves to a life of service to the church, but who can’t find the ethical norms by which they ought to live, then the process that we ought to be following is closing the church rather than trying to ask them to find those norms.

There’s a way to do what we are trying to do that doesn’t involve legislation.  If we participate as I suggested in the decision-making process, if we hold up for the preachers a mirror of their personal existence so that they see themselves reflected in our eyes, if they know that we are there and that we see the foolishness as well as the wisdom of the things that they do sometimes, that’s self-correcting.  And the same is true of the laity.

Let me give an example of what I am talking about.  A leading lay person in our conference made a tremendous campaign in 1991, and was elected first.  He was endorsed by his minister, who is very influential, and that probably carried him about three-fourths of the way toward getting elected.  He was also, perhaps unofficially, endorsed by a couple of the working agencies.  I don’t try to categorize that, but I don’t like that approach.  I wouldn’t have done that; I don’t approve that; I don’t disapprove of the person who did; I love him very much; but that resulted in him getting elected on the very first ballot.  Otherwise, the Conference Lay Leader probably would have been elected first.  The results may be troubling.  But is legislation the way to deal with that issue?  I don’t think so.  My response as a lay person is to say, no, let’s don’t do that.  Let’s live with the results.  I don’t think we’ll see that same thing happening again because of the internal forces that regulate such matters if there is any regulation to be done.  I think that the existential reality of that situation is self-correcting.  Regulation is not necessary.  Sure, we don’t have a perfect system. 

But to try to anticipate those kinds of problems with legislation as opposed to Christian love and Christian morality is probably a great mistake.  So, I would say let’s leave preacher politics alone.  I would say we can’t really improve on the system of nominating five people from the district.  The system that we have is as well calculated as anything to get that job done fairly.  And let’s let the moral force of the conference regulate the matter of endorsement.  Let’s let the people within those boards and agencies say, you know, we really ought not to be doing this.  Let’s leave some realm for morality and ethics to do what they ought to do.  Let’s have a morality and ethics.  

You know, we had a dog-track issue up in my area several years ago, and I’ve never been in that place, but a lot of people who voted against it have since gone in there.  It makes me wonder if they were wanting something other than a conscience to regulate themselves to start with. 

Well, I tell you.  I hope I get elected to General Conference next quadrennium.  I may even write a few letters asking for votes, because I’ve been involved in educational work and I want to get involved in the higher education business of our great United Methodist Church.  I’m interested in that.  But I’m not going to engage in any underhanded politics, and if I don’t get it, the hand of the Lord is going to be in on that too. 

Let me say this.  I know that the Task Force spent a great deal of time and effort working on this project, and I know that they did some serious thinking about it, and I know that the problems that we are dealing with are serious enough to warrant that consideration.  I just appreciate the opportunity to present my views on the issues.

Tuesday, November 15, 1994

Meeting of Bankers Institute

As I speak to various groups, one of the questions most frequently raised concerns huge verdicts rendered in civil cases.  Efforts at tort reform, and how those efforts have failed in court, was an important issue in the recent elections.  Bankers have both a direct and an indirect interest in tort reform–banks are the targets of lawsuits and their customers–the business community is also targeted.  Since I can seldom provide a satisfactory answer to the questions that arise at the end of a talk in the minute or two that is available, I decided to dwell on that topic tonight.

In my recent book–Conscience and Command–I tried to describe the forces that cause law to happen.  We can understand the problems only if we understand the forces that are at work in the legal arena.  My book deals with those forces–not with the myriad problems that confront our legal system.  Although I did not deal with tort reform as such, I think that to understand the problems in our civil justice system, we must understand the kinds of factors that I described in Conscience and Command.

Let me describe some of those factors for you:

(1)  Law cannot be separated from the prevailing faith system.  It is intimately connected to what we believe.

(2)  In order to be operative, law must draw on the force of human motive–or passions.  Law is not merely the rule of reason.  It only works if we care about the outcome.

(3)  We do what we do to get what we need.  We need security, among other things.

(4)  Law always arises from a history or mythology.  It does not just arrive out of the blue sky.  That history–that mythology–shapes the way we think.

 could enumerate additional factors, but these are enough to get us started.  If you followed those factors closely, you will realize that they are inter-related.  Our need for security causes us to act–it presses us into action–and we act consistently with what we really and truly believe–as opposed to what we say we believe.  Law and faith are related:  separation of church and faith is sound legal policy, but separation of law and religion is impossible. Let me illustrate these underlying principles a bit further before I apply them to the civil justice system.

We seldom associate Monday with the moon, although the work month comes from that source.  The word month was named for the moon, in some primitive religion.  In France, it’s Lundi, and the association with lunar is clear.  Likewise, the word month is obviously, and for obvious reasons associated with the moon.  The abstraction has long been separated from the physical object.  Yet these abstractions are essential, and we vigorously enforce them in our belief system.  November of course is month, but we don’t think about the moon when we mention November.  Tuesday is named after an ancient Norse god.  We maintain our faith in numbers, which are pure abstractions, existing only in the mental realm.  November 15th enabled us to know to be here now, and we all got here.  We order our lives by this system of beliefs.  It is almost totally a product of our faith.  One day differs little from another.  But if I tried to convince you that this is March 11, 1972, you’d be ready to haul me out of here–that’s how strong our faith is.  We enforce that concept with a greater energy than we enforce the taboo against murder!

When the Germans and Russians prepared for the Battle of Austerlitz in the Napoleonic Wars, for some strange reason they failed to take into account the fact that there was a 12-day difference in their calendars–the difference between Eastern Orthodox and Western calendars.  The Russians were hundreds of miles away when the Battle was fought.  Needless to say, Napoleon won the battle, which probably would not have happened if the calendars had been synchronized.

Law also operates on belief–an unquestioning reliance on commonly-held values.  But it is possible for undergirding faith systems to differ widely–just as the eastern and western calendars differed.  These differences arise from differences in the beliefs of groups of which we are a part.  The present age must deal with pluralism, and a multiplicity of conflicting belief systems.  The legal community itself is a sort of group, and has its own way of looking at things.  To maintain the overarching common beliefs that support the legal system may prove increasingly difficult as we enter more completely into the era of pluralism, often called the postmodern world.

Even within a group, such as the legal community, there can be startling differences in beliefs.  Sometimes we, in the legal community, fail to recognize the stark contradiction in the things we accept.  We recognize the right of a fetus to recover damages for injuries, but ignore the rights of a fetus in the abortion controversy.  A teenager must have parental consent for marriage, but not for an abortion.  How do these ridiculous anomalies arise?  They have different histories, and we compartmentalize our thinking. 

I think that by now I have created an understanding of the factors that are necessary to understand the crisis in the civil justice system.  History; belief systems; different ways of interpreting the same facts; and human motive:  acting to get what one wants or needs.  At this point in time in this analysis, you will not be surprised to learn that there are two legal communities–with starkly different beliefs.  The veneer of belief in common values is painfully thin.  Let me tell you how this came about.

When Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln practiced law the common method of training for lawyers was “reading” the law in an established attorney’s office.  Law school training for lawyers became firmly entrenched only after the Civil War.  Development of law schools paralleled the burgeoning industrial and corporate development in America.  Ownership and control of American assets changed dramatically during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Before, individuals owned the assets‑‑afterwards, corporations owned the assets and individuals owned only interests in corporations.  Control shifted to professional managers.  Law schools‑‑and the legal profession‑‑responded to the needs of corporate America.

Large corporate law firms developed to serve the large corporations.  These law firms hired the top law students.  Since these firms spoke the language of law, and represented the wealth of the nation, they wielded considerable political power.  The lawyers not hired by these corporate firms spread out in the country side.  They made decent livings with local clients who needed deeds, wills, criminal representation, collection work and the like.  Local businesses continued to thrive, and continued to hire local counsel.  Often solo practitioners and small partnerships possessed considerable political power in the local community.

Business centralized even more during the last half of this century‑‑with shopping malls, chain stores and banking conglomerates.   Centralization steadily eroded the ability of small partnerships and solo practitioners to make a living.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Something dramatically important happened early this century when Henry Ford began to produce automobiles on the assembly line.  Highway carnage.  Lawsuits.  Insurance companies.  Sure, there had been insurance before that‑‑but insurance was the institutional response to the automobile and its carnage.  Plaintiff’s work became a possible source of income for lawyers not hired by big firms.  Naturally, the defense work gravitated to the established corporate law firms.

We need to say that while plaintiff’s lawyers make the decisions on one side, insurance companies call the shots on the other‑‑not the defense lawyers who work by the hour.  We also need to say that both insurance companies and plaintiff’s lawyers make a great deal of money in the process.  Their relationship is symbiotic.

Inevitably, attorneys who work primarily for plaintiff’s began to compare notes.  The Trial Lawyers Association emerged.  Plaintiff’s work became lucrative.  And although defense attorneys no doubt sympathize with their friends at the insurance company, they also make money when their client is sued.  The struggle, or perhaps we should call it the dance between perfectly matched partners, began.  No fault insurance temporarily hampered the plaintiffs’ side.  Fraud and bad faith then took on new meaning‑‑and refilled the plaintiffs’ cups.  The dance moved into the legislature with tort reform.  An organized, politically active plaintiffs’ bar found that it could have an impact on judicial selection.  And they also found that  courts can make law‑‑and are in charge of interpreting the constitution.  Insurance companies, with faithful support from the business community, found that like trial lawyers, they could become involved in judicial elections.  In fact, they had known it all along.

Our civil justice system concentrates on the interests of these two specialized groups and often departs from the needs of the people.  The beleaguered public must stop the dance.  The first step is to insist that courts get out of the politics of law making.  If judges simply decide cases and avoid ambitions to make law, judicial races will not attract the political money.  Judges and judicial candidates should avoid the rift between trial lawyers and insurance companies.

Courts should avoid the politics of law making.  Advocates of court made law are quick to point out that courts can’t avoid making law.  When a court decides a case, consistency requires that similar cases that arise later should be treated the same.  This gives rise to the legal doctrine of stare decisis‑‑precedent is given the force of law.  Most common law developed in precisely this way‑‑from court decisions.  Even the criminal law‑‑murder, robbery, burglary‑‑did not originate in statutes but in case law.

The common law started in England, before the birth of the United States.  Judges of the common law courts did not admit that they were “making” law.  They firmly believed in natural law.  They believed that they could discover in nature the laws that govern human conduct‑‑similar to the way that scientists discovered laws of science.  The role of the judge is to find the law, declare it, and apply it.  To say that courts make law is as foolish as saying that butchers make ham.

But the legal community no longer subscribes to the natural law theory.  About 200 years ago an Englishman named John Austin suggested that courts actually make law‑‑they don’t just find it.  The modern nation state had firmly established itself.  The thought had emerged that the nation state makes law.  Law is the command of the sovereign.  The social compact or social contract theory of government had arrived.  Law is merely a product of human reason.  No ham here‑‑just butchers.  Validity for law is purely a matter of genealogy: did the person or agency declaring the principle have authority?  This new theory of law, legal positivism, differed radically from the natural law viewpoint.  Courts properly make law as a legitimate part of the sovereign.  We should note that in English law, the King‑‑or Parliament‑‑could reverse the decisions of courts.  Courts do not have the last word in the English system.

Our constitution assigned lawmaking power to the legislative branch.  Courts were to resolve cases by applying principles adopted by the legislative branch.  Then came the inevitable problem‑‑who decides whether a statute violates the constitution?  The U. S. Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison decided courts can declare legislative enactments unconstitutional.  Unlike the Parliamentary system in the England, courts here have the last word.

Another factor subtly promotes the law-making role of courts.  In 1871, Dean Langdell established the “case method” of legal instruction at the Harvard Law School.  Students read appellate opinions to learn the law.  Law schools throughout the nation quickly adopted this effective teaching tool.  Law schools became the predominant method of law study, replacing the old system of “reading” the law.  The case method of study inevitably created a powerful impression in the minds of lawyers that courts make law.  Future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard professor, proclaimed “Law is what a court does.”

Lawmaking by the courts probably reached an all-time high with the Warren court.  No longer content to simply strike down legislative measures that the court deemed unconstitutional; the Warren Court began to actually declare positive law in the name of the Constitution.  In the famous Miranda case, for instance, our Supreme Court prescribed a litany a rights that law enforcement officials must describe to a suspect before questioning begins.  The Supreme Court now intentionally selects cases to declare principles with prospective operation.

Step by step the courts have moved into the political arena of lawmaking.  They have moved far beyond merely making law as precedent when they decide cases.  They decide whether legislation is unconstitutional, and even use the constitution as a basis for declaring new law.  Their own logic and ingenuity‑‑not natural law which incorporates the collective wisdom of the community‑‑is the basis for their decisions.  The case method of instruction in law school reinforces the impression among lawyers that all law comes from courts.

The problem is that the advocates of natural law had a point.  Law must draw its real force from the deep‑‑seated beliefs of the people‑‑the wisdom of the entire culture.  The court endangers it own authority and the very concept of law if it sets aside legislative enactments which the people want, or declare principles that are repugnant to the beliefs of the people.  Courts necessarily establish law by deciding cases.  This is okay, as long as they are really deciding cases‑‑and not intentionally making law.

The problem is that the law of the lawyers and courts can slip away from our social reality.  It becomes law for the lawyers, and lawyers even believe that only they are qualified to pass on the qualifications of judges.  The economics of law practice–the needs of the lawyers, has an ever-increasing impact on the substantive content of law.

The problem is not one sided.  As I pointed out earlier, there are two parts to the legal profession: the part that used to represent the establishment, and the recently arrived plaintiff’s bar.  They were both called into existence by powerful needs.  What possible justification for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, you may want to ask?  Let me suggest a few:

(1) There is immorality in the market place.  It is real.  Many businesses do not operate morally and ethically, and have little concern for the human element.  The problem of immorality in the market place is real.

(2) There is no one other than the plaintiff’s lawyers to tackle the problem.  Efforts at self-regulation has proven futile, and governmental bureaucracy is even worse.

(3) Governmental bureaucracy is totally ineffective.  It is more a part of the problem than of the solution.  The banking department, for instance, may regulate some things quite well, but I saw one computation of credit life insurance, approved by the department, arguing that although the premium was almost twenty percent of the principle of the loan, that it did not exceed one dollar per one hundred dollars per year, which was the legal limitation for such premiums.

But on the other hand the jobs—the goose that laid the golden egg—is in danger of being roasted, in the present environment of runaway verdicts that exists in this state.  The law of the legal community has truly departed the social reality with which it should be dealing.  The answers lie in reality crashing through the artificial, non-workable paradigms that the legal community has created.  The following things could bring that about:

1)  The resurgence of faith in transcendent values — that right and wrong have a basis in reality and are not merely mothers of individual opinion.  One belief is not really just as good as another.

2)  The values of the legal community must be brought in line with the values of the larger community.

(A)       The adversarial system is not always the best way to resolve disputes.

(B)       The constitution is important but not sacred and not infinitely flexible.

(C)       Absolute zeal for the cause of an immoral client is not a part of professionalism.

(D)       Legal and judicial ethics must embody the moral aspirations of the larger community–not just those of the legal profession.

(E)       The legal profession must merge its belief system and arrive at commonly-held values. Our leaders must first understand the problem.  Stop-gap measures won’t work.  And Judges must differentiate the judicial profession from the legal profession The work of judges differs greatly from that of lawyers, although they both deal with the law.

(F)       The business community must behave morally.  Morals must have given a larger role in the process of social regulation.

How do we do all of this?  Reform of the magnitudes of which I speak may only be possible in the realm of religion.  There must be major shifts in our belief system.  When our actions on Monday are consistent with what we say we believe on Sunday, there will be hope.  When we realize that science can’t create or even recognize morality, there will be hope.