"Working the System"
#92-10Presented on The Lutheran Hour on November 3, 2024
By Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler, Lutheran Hour Speaker
Copyright 2024 Lutheran Hour Ministries
No bonus material MP3
Text: Genesis 33:8
Miss Gossin was my fourth-grade teacher. She was a single lady in her 30s. She had short, brown, curly hair and when you stepped into her classroom, she would greet you at the door with a smile that said "I'm glad you are here." And if you were one of her students, you had to learn her system. Miss Gossin had a system, a point-keeping system. "Bonus points," she called them. It was her classroom management system. It was designed to encourage good behavior and dissuade bad behavior. You were awarded points generally for following the rules and sometimes extra points for going above and beyond. And you lost points for breaking the rules or misbehaving. As a student, I mostly related to Miss Gossin through this system. She was the keeper of the system, but also I suppose a participant in it because she was our model for what counted as good behavior.
As a kid, I guess I didn't think about Miss Gossin as a person outside of this system. For me, primarily she was the giver and the taker of points. I tracked my points by making little tick marks on the laminated desktop with my pencil, arranging them in tiny columns and rows and groups of five, which tells you a little something about my personality. Everyone was supposed to track their points in some way, in a notebook or something. It wasn't a real strict accounting system for the points, but if you were having trouble with the math, there'd always be a classmate standing by, ready to give you a free audit. The point system was how Miss Gossin chose to manage her classroom for that season. She probably changed it and modified it from year to year to better serve the students she had. And I'm sure if you talked to her as an adult, she'd tell you that it wasn't about the points, it wasn't about the system.
The system was a tool. It was a temporary tool designed to help us sometimes unruly kids get along. And she used this system because she loved us. She really did, most days. No, she loved us. She was glad we existed, that we were her students, even when she was frustrated by us, because she saw us with the love of God. That was the worldview that Miss Gossin brought to teaching. She was a Christian, a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, who's called the Christ, the Messiah. Because of Jesus, she truly believed that God actually loves the world and that He loves us as individuals in it, and that included her students who were gifts, gifts from the God who created them with gifts so that they could cultivate them and share them and thereby shine the love of God onto others. That's why she used the system.
The fourth-grade system had a sharp end, though, if you misbehaved, and I will never forget the day that I lost all my points. Early on that school year, some of the boys in our class had gotten mixed up in the old chair-pulling prank. Nothing good comes from the chair-pulling prank, and these days it might lead to a lawsuit. So Miss Gossin was wise to nip it in the bud. Just earlier that week, I had a chair pulled right out from underneath me. Now, if you've ever had this done to you, you know the feeling. It is a fundamental violation of the system, the rules of civility. There are some things in life that you ought to be able to count on, such as that the chair you had sat on a moment ago will still be there as you're sitting down now. But the chair-pulling prank violates all of that.
What was there a moment ago is gone. One second, you're in free fall and the next half, the class is laughing at you while you're lying on the floor. There's a German phrase that you may have heard before, "Schadenfreude." Schaden means "harm" or "injury," Freude means "gladness." Put them together and you get a happy feeling when someone else is suffering. I didn't know the meaning of Schadenfreude when I was in fourth grade, but I'm pretty sure that if you look it up in the dictionary, there's a picture of a guy pulling a chair out from under someone. And there's a sick logic in there somewhere. Maybe gloating over someone else's pain temporarily takes the edge off of yours. For me, it was mostly my pride that was wounded, and that was enough to make me want to pass it on to someone else. And so I did, and in the moment I confess that I felt some Schadenfreude in one of the darker corners of my soul, seeing my classmate hit the floor after I had absconded with his seat. But it was temporary because Miss Gossin saw me. "Michael!" she said it in that tone, "That is not okay." And she took all my points away.
See, Miss Gossin's point system was designed not only to help us become the kind of people who shined the love of God on others, but also to protect us from such behavior—to hold us back from a state of free-for-all lawlessness. When we think of systems in this wider way, we can also see how there are systems in our grown-up world, systems designed to encourage civility and to keep us from lawlessness. Take, for example, a sign you might see in an emergency room at the hospital. Something like "Our mission is to provide the best medical care to you and to your loved ones. Abusive behavior of any kind is not acceptable. It's not okay." And behind the sign there needs to be a system to uphold it, and the system almost always involves some kind of score-keeping or point-tracking. And if someone doesn't play by the rules, if they pull the chair out from under us, we expect them to lose points. And if they keep losing points, eventually they'll be escorted out.
In the case of a hospital, that system is designed to protect from lawlessness, so that care providers can do their job, that they can give the care to the people who need it. But there are other kinds of systems. There's a point-keeping system that happens when a business gets a rating. Whether it's a Better Business Bureau seal or a five-star review on Yelp, how many points or stars they've accumulated says something about their reliability or how much of a hassle it might be to deal with them. We all live in these systems and we deal with people through these systems, in families and neighborhoods, sports leagues, schools, churches. And each has a slightly different set of rules. And the rules tell us how to get along with people in that system, how to pull a chair up for someone and not yank it from them, because behavior like that will cost you points.
Sometimes we have a love-hate relationship with this system. Maybe you've noticed that, as customers or consumers, we are starting to get our own individual ratings online. For example, if you buy something from someone on a marketplace app, they can give you a rating. And if you don't keep your word, if you're rude or belligerent, if you pull the chair out from under them, you lose points; you get a lower rating. The same kind of thing happens informally when people chat you up in your neighborhood or at school or at your job. They give many testimonials about their latest interaction with you, and your score in others' eyes either goes up or down. I was talking with a friend about this and he said, "I like my point system for others, but I don't like their point system for me."
Now, if you're like my fourth-grade teacher Miss Gossin, and you accept the Christian worldview as the truth—truth that I also have been led to accept and you can also trust—that the God who created us and loves us is temporarily using all these systems, even the mismanaged and malfunctioning ones, to help us. And God is helping us in several ways. Ultimately, God's goal is not that we would be stuck in this system, but that we would fully be His children, His adopted children, who model our behavior after God's love for us. And this goal has become possible for us because God is not only the keeper of the system, not only the giver and the taker of points, but also a participant in it. God the Father sent His Son to become part of the system, to become human. God's Son took the name Jesus, was raised up among God's chosen beloved people—the people of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Jesus was born among them, was crucified and raised to new life among them, so that God's love could shine on all people.
Jesus became like us so that we could become like Him, so that God's love could shine on others through us. And God uses the system to help move us along toward this goal. In one place the Bible calls this system the "elementary principles of the world" (see Galatians 4), or sometimes just "the Law." It's like that sign in the ER that says abusive behavior will not be tolerated, the sign that represents the behavior management system for the hospital. That system isn't the goal for the hospital, but it serves the goal. The goal for the hospital is to heal people. So also God's goal is not to make sick and injured people a little more well-behaved, but rather to make them well again. And we are sick and injured deep down; we've all got dark corners in our souls. Any fourth-grade teacher can see it in her students, even the well-behaved ones. And we've all felt it in ourselves, that sinister Schadenfreude that delights in the suffering of others. The Bible says it's like a sickness that both infects us and injures us.
It warps our behavior, leads us to harm ourselves and each other. It's a fatal illness that will ultimately kill us and separate us from God forever. But God in His love wants to heal us and He's made the world into His emergency room, His hospital. God heals us by sending us His Spirit, the Holy Spirit, God's breath of life. The Spirit comes to us by an infusion of God's Word. By hearing God speak to us in the Bible, in Baptism, in the Lord's Supper, in Christian preaching and conversation, the Spirit and the Word work together to kill that sickness in us, to heal, to bring us to life, to make us well again. But it's really hard to heal people if your waiting room is chaos. It's hard to teach people when your classroom is a free-for-all. So God has a system, He's got a sign. Abusive behavior will not be tolerated. God uses the system to help keep down the chaos, to help us get along while He heals us and makes us His children.
God's work is illustrated well in the life of Jacob recorded in the Bible, which we've been listening to on this program. If there ever was a guy guilty of pulling the chair out from under someone, it was Jacob. Jacob's name means "prankster." Jacob had an older brother named Esau who twice was the butt of Jacob's tricks. You can read all about it in Genesis 27. But let's just say for now that there was a major break in the established system, and in a subtle way God Himself is behind this break. Because Jacob, the second born, got the bigger blessing while Esau, who normally would get that blessing, the older one and the favorite of their father, he felt like he got the shaft. And Jacob lost serious points in Esau's eyes, and Esau wanted to kill him.
But as the Genesis narrative progresses, we learned that there's a bigger plan here. God's blessing of Jacob wasn't so that Jacob could gloat over his brother. The blessing wasn't for Jacob's private enjoyment. No, the blessing was for the healing of the world. Jacob was blessed so that in the fullness of time God could send forth His Son into Jacob's family, born of the Virgin Mary, born under the Law, born in the system, so that by faith we could all be adopted, so that God's love for us could shine through us to others. That's why God blesses Jacob, because he's been chosen to carry the seed of the Messiah in his body. Points or no points, God's got a bigger plan for Jacob. And on the way God uses a system to help him get along with his brother. Notice how it works in Genesis 33.
Jacob has just come from wrestling with God. God came in human form, a foreshadowing of what He would ultimately do in Jesus, and He came and wrestled Jacob to bless him, to remind Jacob once again that even when it feels like God is against him, like He's tallying up all his misdeeds, punishing his sins, docking his points, God in fact is truly for him. That's what the wrestling match was all about. So Jacob leaves there, limping, but knowing that God loves him. And then right away he's going to be faced with his brother, and he knows that he's lost a lot of points with his brother because of all the tricks. But because he knows he's loved by God, Jacob also knows that he's called to let God's love shine on his brother. But Esau, his brother, lives in a system, an ancient system where older brothers are esteemed, and livestock is money, and honor is everything.
So Jacob, God's beloved child, is called to love his brother in that system. So what does he do? He bows to the ground seven times as he approaches Esau; he refers to himself as Esau's "servant," and he gives him a gift of livestock, 550 animals to be specific. And maybe it's just the old prankster Jacob working out of his self-interest. Maybe the gift is just insurance for later so that when Esau's in one of his darker moods and his murderous thoughts drift back to all the ways that his brothers shafted him, at least he'll have a tangible reminder of 550 camels, goats, sheep, and donkeys to help him not be so angry. Maybe it is just Jacob groveling, or maybe not. Maybe Jacob is a forgiven, beloved child of God, and he knows that God loves him unconditionally. And because God has all the points, Jacob can now return to that system, to work within it to love his brother. And God, (it) turns out, does Jacob one better, because as soon as Esau sees Jacob, he runs to him, embraces him, throws his arms around him, and kisses him. And Jacob tells his brother that seeing his face is like seeing the face of God.
If you are part of the Christian church, then your mission with all of us is to form a community in Jesus where the face of God can shine through us to all people. In the Christian school I attended, Miss Gossin taught us how, first, to know that God loves us, and second, to know that we are called to love people who live in systems. And to love them well you have to learn the system. It takes much wisdom and experience and skill to do this because every system is a little bit different, and every system is a little bit broken, and some are really broken. But all are at least somewhat grounded in those basic principles of the world, the Law that God has written into the creation and on every human heart, and all are judged by God's Law. And this will be true no matter who is elected president.
So it is our calling as Christians to help raise up people who know that God loves them unconditionally, who aren't slaves to the system, but know how to love people in those systems. That means you have to know how the system works. You have to learn the culture. You have to know the subtle difference between laughing with someone and laughing at them. You have to know what counts as currency, how to show honor and how not to lose all your points. These systems we live in are temporary. It's like the foyer in an emergency room. It's like a fourth-grade classroom; we're not supposed to stay in them forever. Because one day Jesus will return to raise the dead, and He will bring God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, and these systems will be laid to rest. Then God's love, the goal of the Law, will dwell in our hearts and shine on our faces.
And even today, when we take God at His Word, when we believe that behind the system there is One who loves us, His love shines through us to others. I once had the opportunity to meet Miss Gossin again, about ten years later when I was in my twenties. She had gotten married, switched from teaching, and went back to school to become a lawyer. When I saw her, I said, "Miss Gossin—!" She said, "Call me Jill." Her hair was still curly, and the smile on her face still said, "I am glad you are here." In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
Reflections for November 3, 2024
Title: Working the System
No reflection segment this week.
Music Selections for this program:
"A Mighty Fortress" arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
"The Law of God Is Good and Wise" by Matthias Loy, arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
"Sing With All the Saints in Glory" by William J. Irons & William B. Roberts (Music © 1995 Augsburg Fortress-SESAC) Used by permission.
"Crucifer" by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
"Behold a Host, Arrayed in White" From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.
