[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.