“The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and my cup; you support my lot. The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; Indeed, my heritage is beautiful to me.” — Psalm 16:5-6
Back nearly 30 years ago, I went to see my youngest son’s baseball game. He would have been about 6 or so. It’s one of those things you do when you are a dad because your son is the whole team to you, not because you ever understood baseball’s intricacies.
At this particular game, one boy got to bat and nailed the pitch for what should have been a double. With the smack of the bat on the ball, the little boy took off for first base. It was once he got to first base that things went terribly wrong.
Glen Schmucker
Again, he could have easily reached second base except, when he got to first, instead of taking a 90-degree left turn, he simply kept running way on out into right field. I can still hear the crowd yelling encouragement to go to second, but he was preoccupied and couldn’t hear them.
He was solely focused on following the line that, in his imagination, kept running from first base onto out into right field. He went several yards and then started turning circles looking intently to the ground for something.
That’s when I heard him yell, “Where’s the line?” He’d lost the line and therefore lost his way.
He’d be in good company now. It seems we’ve all lost the line that guides us, structures our ways of thinking and even keeps us playing properly with each other. Sadly, the lines that once led us now seem to divide us.
In the text above, the psalmist is celebrating the gift of God in the “lines” of demarcation God has drawn. Staying aware of those lines helped a person know what was his or hers. Those lines also were the demarcation of the heritage that, in God’s grace, had been gifted to us.
Lines help define our responsibly to ourselves and others. They keep us in touch with God’s purpose for our being.
In time, God’s lines were further fleshed out in the words and teachings of Jesus. They weren’t used any longer to define geographic boundaries as much as the boundaries of the human heart. They were not designed to imprison us but point us to our heritage of grace.
“Geographic boundaries always lead to war. God’s lines lead to peace.”
Geographic boundaries always lead to war. God’s lines lead to peace.
We need help redefining those lines. It’s not easy.
Pick the issue: Politics. Ethics. Religion. Money. Sex. Name it. We can rarely find common ground in those issues. Where is, are, the lines?
The prophet Micah summed it up for us all. “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment might be, he answered by saying “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-38).
From the Ten Commandments to the prophets and to Jesus, we were taught that God’s lines are meant to show us the way to love and justice — the highest of all ethical descriptions.
Years ago, I was sitting at a table in a hardwood-floored century-old café with a group of men having coffee. One of the older men at the table, 70 or so, loved to brag that he was a deacon at the county seat downtown First Baptist Church and he had breakfast with the pastor once a week.
The conversation turned to politics. My practice was to shut my mouth. This time, though, the downtown-deacon, speaking of the then current president, referred to him by using the “N” word. I hate that word with a deep passion!
For some reason, I kept my mouth shut instead of calling out his use of that adolescent, seventh-grade playground, crude, profane and hateful pejorative. I should have shamed him for bragging about his overinflated view of his importance at his church with one breath and then calling anyone that word.
“How can a 70-year-old man sit in the pew and listen to the gospel all his life but never be transformed by it?”
I wish I had said that, by inferring that he was a follower of Jesus, he could be a representative of his church and his supposed Lord, or he could be a racist. He couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be both.
How can a 70-year-old man sit in the pew and listen to the gospel all his life but never be transformed by it?
Justice and love are not passive. They are proactive. They mean not only accepting those who are different than us (which everyone is) but taking positive steps toward others and exercising love and justice in any way we can.
We might not be able to meet on a common line on any given issue, but we can, we must, love others and seek justice for them, not propagate injustice.
If Jesus’ love had been passive, we’d have no Easter and we’d have no way of knowing where the blood-red line is that leads to the resurrection and away from it to God’s very purpose for our being.
Glen Schmucker is a writer, speaker and Baptist pastor who lives in Fort Worth, Texas. Follow his blog on Facebook.
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