Today, as we send out our youth to be missionaries of God's Word in upstate New York, we are reminded of the day that Jesus sent His followers out, two-by-two, into the world to tell the good news. He sent them like "lambs into the midst of wolves," telling them to take nothing with them and thus to be at the mercy of the hospitality of the villages to which they were sent. And they came back happy, expecting Jesus to be happy with them.

Ever have a moment like that? I did. When I was a kid, we moved from Staten Island to a little beach bungalo on St. Petersburg Beach, Florida. This was paradise for a nine-year-old. So much was new! The water, lots of boys my age, cut-off jeans and bare feet. School was new too. I had a good teacher who, during science time, was trying to teaching us about evaporation and other stuff. She was also teaching us about the life cycle of frogs.

Anyway, it had rained, one of the first days I was there and after dinner I walked around the neighborhood with one of my new friends, a boy my age. And there were frogs everywhere. Big ones, small ones, brown ones, green ones, toads with speckles – you get the idea.

I made my friend wait while I ran to the back of the house for a bucket. When I returned, I got me a bucket of frogs to bring home to show my mother.

My mother was a Boston girl. But I think that she'd have been OK with the frogs. But she never gave me a chance to show them.

"Mom, look what I've got!" I shouted triumphantly as I walked in the house.

"Not now, Blair. And don't interrupt. I'm talking with your father about this 'palace' he has us living in."

"But mom, you have to see this."

"Blair, just put it away and I'll look at it in the morning."

So that's what I did. I put the bucket of frogs under my bed, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. In the morning, I eagerly pulled the bucket out from under the bed to look at my treasure. There was nothing there. "Wow," I thought. "Frogs evaporate."

I never got caught. And six months later, we moved into our new house, a place located well-inland from the beach. Much later I discovered that one of the 'tipping points' that helped my father agree to move was an invasion of frogs that happened one morning.

There can be too much of a good thing.

Jesus' followers returned, "with joy," having been successful, even with driving out demons. Jesus then cautioned his followers not to get "stuck up" or "cocky" about their success. After all, He cautioned them, this was the mistake that Satan made.

You can have too much of a good thing. Jesus recognized that the disciples' success could lead to their downfall. He'd made them conduits of God's power over demons. They'd begun to think that they, not God, were the source of that power. The disciples had returned overconfident. Jesus knew that the people He was leaving behind were "lambs in the midst of wolves." Overconfidence could lead to incaution and arrogance.

You can have too much of a good thing, even success. How about morality? Can you be too moral? Some would laugh at the question being posed at a Christian pulpit. But I don't laugh at that question. I contend that the answer is, 'yes,' when "too moral" refers to a kind of morality that is so narrowly focused that it is to the exclusion of other kinds of morality.

You can have too much of a good thing. Let me explain. This Bible story was in my mind this week as I continued my reading of new research about morality that is being conducted at Princeton and Harvard. Professors M. Hauser and Jonathan Haidt have recently published their research in books and articles. Drs. Hauser and Haidt, in separate research, indicate that all intact people are born with innate tendencies to act in moral ways. When given "moral questions," most people, regardless of their cultural backgrounds, tend to answer in similar ways. Moral tendencies, the scientists tell us, are something that most of us are born with. They fall into five categories: loyalty, respect for authority, purity, fairness, and the desire to protect others and/or to avoid harming them.

Loyalty, respect for authority, purity, fairness, and the desire to protect others and/or to avoid harming them. But, if we all have these tendencies, why don't we all agree with each other about what's right and wrong in this world?

I used to be a college-level ethics professor. So let me put that hat on for a moment. The combination of our upbringing and our environments cause each of us to develop our senses of morality differently. We live in social clusters, communities and nations; among people whose sense of moral right and wrong is often quite different from our own. This is true, especially, here in New Jersey, the most diverse state in the nation.

The five moral tendencies tend to pull us in different directions at the same time. For example, we want to avoid doing harm to others. So we are pulled in that moral direction. But we want to protect our families. This can pull us in the opposite direction. Do we harm burglars? The resolution of this problem lies with finding a moral compromise between the two. So, it is better to install a burglar alarm than to leave your doors wide-open and wait inside each night with a shotgun?

Waiting in the dark with a shotgun to shoot burglars is a form of narrow morality that is to the exclusion of other, balancing, moral options. Protecting your family is a good thing, but waiting in the dark in ambush with a shotgun is too much. And most who heard this story would think that there was something kind of "imbalanced" about a person who would do this.

We are born with numerous moral tendencies and a well-functioning person constantly makes moral compromises. A poorly-functioning person will take just one of the moral tendencies to an extreme. I'm not describing psychopaths. They have no sense of morality or of consequences to their behaviors. I'm talking about the vast majority of us, and how we, who think of ourselves as moral beings, are capable of doing great harm in the name of good.

Let's look at a few more examples of what happens when we take just one moral tendency to the extreme.

We are born, apparently, with the moral tendency to be loyal to our families built into our DNA, our genes. I think that family loyalty is admirable and most people would agree with me. The ancients knew this, too, which is why most societies, from the Hebrews to the Chinese, have some form of, "Honor thy father and thy mother" in their versions of the Ten Commandments. The tendency to be loyal to family and family groups can be taken to an extreme if not balanced with fairness, and the desire to not harm others. Family loyalty can, in some cases, lead to a sense of smug, ethnic superiority and [pause] racism.

Let's try another tendency, respect for authority.

Paul, in Romans 13, tells us to respect authority, for it is instituted by God. Every society that I have studied has instituted this tendency in its laws or cultural morays. Respect for authority is necessary for societies to function. It's lack of respect for authority that has turned our highways here in New Jersey into racetracks, that some describe as a return to the Wild West.

But the tendency to have respect for authority can go too far. Blind respect for authority can lead to a loss of our precious liberties. This is what happened in Germany, among the blind followers of Adolph Hitler. Our founding fathers made clear on that first 4th of July, that there are times when we must question authority, or loose our liberties.

As for the third moral tendency: the desire to be fair, many of Jesus' parables dealt with it. A father has two sons. He divides the inheritance in two and the prodigal son goes off and spends it all; then returns for more. The other son who stayed at home goes to his father and asks him if it is fair that the Prodigal Son should enjoy the fatted calf. And the father responds that repentance is not about being fair, it's about forgiveness and setting your life on the right path.

Remember the story of the baby who was brought to King Solomon? Two mothers claimed the same baby. Solomon called for a judgement based on fairness – cut the baby in half. The false mother approved of the judgement because it was fair. The true mother followed her instinct to prevent harm by allowing the false mother to have her child. She threw herself on the baby to protect it. Solomon recognized her as the baby's true mother and awarded her the child. And people have marveled at the wisdom of Solomon ever since.

I, too, marvel at the wisdom of Solomon. But, as an ethicist, I note the difference between the false mother, an example of fairness taken to the extreme; and the true mother whose ability to make moral compromises saved the life of her child. There is nothing wrong with moral compromise. Moral compromise is what psychologically healthy people almost every moment of the day. We have a moral "tug-of-war" going on inside us and this is the way our minds are supposed to operate. Scientists contend that this is built into our DNA. I add that this is the way God made us. So if we feel confused about moral issues, that's the way we are supposed to feel. It's an increasingly complicated world out there and it is normal for us to be pulled in many directions at once. Moral compromise needs to be re-discovered in this era of terrorism and moral extremism. Terrorists often focus only on the moral tendency to be religiously pure. But you can have too much of a good thing, even religious purity.

Terrorists are proud of their unwillingness to compromise on their narrow view of religious sanctity. But they are often blind to their natural moral tendencies to, for example, not want others to come to harm. This is why it seems so strange to the rest of us that terrorists would celebrate as their bombs kill innocent bystanders, some of whom were their neighbors and their neighbors' children. The rest of the world, the 99.9% of us who live lives of moral compromise, look on in horror. Our best defense against terrorism is not to become morally radicalized ourselves – but rather to live normal, psychologically balanced lives. And so we pray for the safety of our men and women who have gone off to war. And we pray for them to hold on to their sanity while over there. And we commit ourselves to helping them when they return. And we pray for world peace and a time when radical thinking will be replaced by reason.

And we send our kids off to places like an impoverished part of upstate New York to build, not destroy, so that the future will be a better one for their children.

Go back to the 2007 Sermons page.
Go back to the UMC Red Bank home page.