By Brent Beasley
This week a good friend of mine from a former church, Carmen Anderson, asked me for a story I once told in a sermon about farm animals that all got killed by the farmer. She thought she could use it to say something about church-state relations in a Sunday school lesson on July 4. I found the story and sent it to her, but told her I didn’t see the connection to religious liberty.
Here’s the story:
A mouse looked through a crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife opening a package; what food might it contain? He was aghast to discover that it was a mousetrap! Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning: “There is a mouse trap in the house! There is a mouse trap in the house!”
The chicken clucked and scratched and raised her head and said, “Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me; I can’t be bothered.”
The mouse turned to the pig and told him. “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse,” sympathized the pig, “but there is nothing I can think of to do about it. Surely someone else will step in to help.”
The mouse turned to the cow, who replied, “Wow, Mr. Mouse, a mouse trap; am I in grave danger? I don’t think so.”
So the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mousetrap alone.
That very night a sound was heard throughout the house; the mousetrap had snapped shut and, presumably, caught the mouse. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see that it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital.
She returned home with a fever. Now, everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient.
His wife’s sickness continued so that friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.
The farmer’s wife did not get well, in fact, she died, and so many people came for her funeral the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide meat for all of them to eat.
When the least of us is threatened, we are all in danger.
When I asked how this applies to religious liberty, my friend Carmen said, “What I was thinking about was the issue that the mouse needed support from others but they were only concerned for their own issues; then they all lost out. If our biggest and most powerful religious groups and denominations align with the government, years later, who knows? Another religion may be bigger by then and the state will push that one on everyone. When the least religion or denomination is in danger, we all are.”
Now I get it!
G.K. Chesterton said, “All [people] matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.”
If we don’t get that, we are all in grave danger.