This fall, we found Austria to be immaculate - no trash. Until we came to Vienna, walked up to a large group of youth, eating something from McDonalds. One girl, the picture of "color outside the lines" looked both ways, giggled, and tossed down the wrapper on an otherwise totally clean walking street. The girls around her giggled, and off they went. I didn't understand the language, but understood what I saw. And watched another in her group, who said nothing, but quietly reached down and picked up the trash as the group moved along.
If you say, "Don't do............." something inside says, "Well, I'm gonna.......................", as old as Cain and Abel. Sure, there are lots worse things than dropping a wrapper, lots of other ways to cross the line and play with the forbidden. But if her whole culture says "no", she'll find a way to say "yes." Human nature always lives on that edge.
In the Old Testament, the ultimate sin is to insult God and disrespect Him. So, layer by layer, the law built a sort of safety-net philosophy into fence after fence, each one farther out from the core sin. I might sew up a tear in a cloth, and that breaks the sabbath law, but that is just one of the outer fences. My conscience reminds me LONG before I get close to actually offending God.
In our time, the more fences we dismantle (and we've done a lot of that), the more dangerous our adventurousness becomes. (Remember how bad language actually used to be, at least, subdued in public.) Truthfulness has taken some hits lately as well. But the fences are there to protect the essential core, perhaps even the sacredness of life entrusted to us.
So, are we to be fence-BUILDERS? Probably not, at least individually, but surely we are to be fence-OBSERVERS, adding our part to the whole, encouraging others for the sake of Jesus' high hopes for all His children. Disciples recognize that there are values to be honored, just in the simple process of living out the Golden Rule.
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