05-09-04 Pentecost 16A Psalm 119

Much to my delight, Monday morning’s dawn light showed that the streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter were wet from rain but not immersed. There had been some wind damage to buildings as Katrina moved across the Quarter, but no one died and the damage was fairly light. The commentators on TV seemed to agree that New Orleans, a city that sits below sea level, situated between the sea, the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, had “dodged the bullet.”

It was Monday afternoon that water from Lake Pontchartrain began flowing over the top of a seawall that sat atop a levee along a canal at 17th Street. The water eroded the earthen levee as it fell on the city side and so removed the base of the seawall. The wall collapsed and within a short time, the rushing water opened a gap hundreds of feet wide. By Tuesday morning another breach had developed and four-fifths of the city was flooded many feet deep.

We are told there were 100,000 people still in the city. They had no electrical power, no transportation and little food or drinkable water. On Tuesday people started to break in to grocery stores to get food and water. But not only grocery stores. Looters broke into liquor stores, gun stores, department stores, electronics stores and every other kind of store. Cars were stolen or stripped. Gunfire was heard across the city.

Reuters news service reported,

Violence broke out in pockets of New Orleans among the wandering crowds grown hungry, thirsty and desperate to escape the flooded city and 90-degree temperatures.

Boat rescues were delayed because of the danger and police rescuers shifted their focus to fighting looting and other crime that gripped the city.

[T]he evacuation was suspended after reports that someone fired at a military helicopter sent to ferry out survivors.

Another wire report said,

Managers at a nursing home were prepared to cope with the power outages and had enough food for days, but then the looting began. The home’s bus driver was forced to surrender the vehicle to carjackers.

Bands of people drove by the nursing home, shouting to residents, “Get out!” Eighty residents, most of them in wheelchairs, were being evacuated to other nursing homes in the state.

“We had enough food for 10 days,” said Peggy Hoffman, the home’s executive director. “Now we’ll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot.”

The earthen levees weren’t the only ones that gave way in this catastrophe. Many persons’ moral levees collapsed as well. Not everyone’s did; there were amazing acts of heroism and selfless service by ordinary people faced with extraordinary circumstances. One man reported Sunday,

I just had a very frank conversation with the administrator of Jefferson Healthcare, (where my mother-in-law is trapped). … As it stands, my wife’s mother will be riding out Katrina in a one-story bulding, with a broken pelvis, requiring a serious regimen of prescription medication.

I really wanted to get angry about this conversation. However, once I realized that, should my wife lose her mother, Mr. Ray would also be dead, I found it impossible to be upset. I thanked him for his service and his commitment and said that he’d be in our prayers. There are people in that facility that make less in a year than a lot of people make in a week … but they’re staying with the patients to which they’ve made a commitment.

Then there was Cynthia Shephard, who “left the safety of her room at the W Hotel in order to rescue flood refugees stranded along the Interstate.” She rescued 10 people in her Ford pickup.

“Between draws on her cigarette, Shephard explained her motives: “They needed it. It’s crowded out there. Law enforcement is too busy. I can’t get a straight answer. So I took it on myself. And I’m in a truck, so I should utilize it.”

Hospital nurses and doctors stayed through the storm to care for patients. Hundreds of police officers whose own homes had been destroyed worked around the clock, hoping their own families were getting by. Hotel staffs stayed on the job because the city’s many tourists had no way to leave. Perhaps the media will see fit to report those stories in more detail some year. But among the millions of Americans personally untouched by the disaster there was a sense of unbelief at the scenes repetitively shown on TV. Historian Lee Harris wrote of one such man he encountered in a sandwich shop.

He was perhaps twenty or twenty-one at the most, but you could tell by looking at him that the footage of the looters had genuinely outraged and perplexed him. When he saw people carting out an endless stream of stereos and TV’s and assorted groceries from the businesses that they had broken into, he kept saying, with obvious disdain: “Will you look at that? It’s unbelievable!” Then he would glance around at his co-worker and at me, as if asking us to vocalize our support for his moral indignation.

But there was nothing unnatural about the violence in New Orleans. If a wide-scale catastrophe struck Nashville we would see the same scenes here. No one who knows what the Bible teaches about human nature should be the slightest bit surprised at the evil people do when the moral levees of their own consciences and of society have broken, allowing the flood waters of violence, selfishness and disregard for others to drown their souls.

The question is not why many people walked into the heart of darkness, but why so many remained children of the light. It is perhaps a mistake to over-generalize from hundreds of miles away, but perhaps some verses from Psalm 119 offer illumination:

1 Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD. 2 Happy are those who keep his decrees, who seek him with their whole heart, 3 who also do no wrong, but walk in his ways. 4 You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. 5 O that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! 6 Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.

33 Teach me, O LORD, the way of your statutes, and I will observe it to the end. 34 Give me understanding, that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart. 35 Lead me in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it. 36 Turn my heart to your decrees, and not to selfish gain. 37 Turn my eyes from looking at vanities; give me life in your ways. 38 Confirm to your servant your promise, which is for those who fear you. 39 Turn away the disgrace that I dread, for your ordinances are good. 40 See, I have longed for your precepts; in your righteousness give me life.

As disciples of Jesus Christ we are called - no, commanded - to be ruled by law leavened with love, not wrath. We are commanded to be transformed in our inward being so that we willingly heed and obey the moral commandments of God.

It was no crime for the hungry, thirsty or naked to take food and water and clothing from stores; Louisiana law even allows for it when the governor has declared a state of emergency, according to news reports. There is, however, a thin levee between taking things for support of life and outright looting, as experience this week sadly shows.

One of the things that churches should do is train the moral sense of it members. The God who created us also demands a high level of morality in us. The Ten Commandments do not say that a little murder is okay, a little adultery is permissible, a little thievery is allowable. Instead they instruct: No murder. No adultery. No stealing. There’s no wriggle room.

Our continuing challenge as Christians is to follow the moral commandments of God’s law without becoming legalists imprisoned by moralism rather than freed by morality. Rules are brittle; alone they make poor levees. When stressed from exceptional circumstances, rule-bound people are often the first to find their base eroded and their moral will overflowed. Rules alone oppress rather than liberate, stunt the spirit rather than grow it. Rules are imposed from the outside. Under stress, their restraints too easily break.

Love, though, comes from within. The silken covenants of love are not as easily broken as the iron chains of law. But love without rules leads to licentiousness. We can justify anything by claiming “our hearts are in the right place.” Rules bring the reign of reason into the impulses of the heart. Rules can serve as a lens to focus the impulses of love and bring needed discipline to love’s fleeting nature. Love provides desire, but rules provide a will.

Only one moral levee can withstand the category five challenges we may encounter and hold back the churning seas of chaos from flowing over us. We need a solid bed of the rules of God topped by a strong wall of love.

You know the commandments, wrote Paul:

“You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

There is law, and there is love; they are two sides of our moral levee.

Update: Timothy Garton Ash makes essentially the same case in The Guardian, but without a religious context.

Comment

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It always lies below

A hurricane produces anarchy. Decivilisation is not as far away as we like to think

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday September 8, 2005
The Guardian

Before our attention wanders on to the next headline story, let’s learn Katrina’s big lesson. This is not about the incompetence of the Bush administration, the scandalous neglect of poor black people in America, or our unpreparedness for major natural disasters - though all of those apply. Katrina’s big lesson is that the crust of civilisation on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor, and you’ve fallen through, scratching and gouging for your life like a wild dog.

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You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours in New Orleans would never happen in nice, civilised Europe? Think again. It happened here, all over our continent only 60 years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and gulag survivors, Norman Lewis’s account of Naples in 1944, or the recently republished anonymous diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened again in Bosnia just 10 years ago. And that wasn’t even the force majeure of a natural disaster. Europe’s were man-made hurricanes.

The basic point is the same: remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life - food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security - and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.

Read the whole thing.