There is a saying in my immediate family. A saying that is repeated solemnly anytime a story is told of serious damage incurred from an attempt to do a small, but ill-advised, good deed. It is a proverb of unintended and unpredictable consequences. It communicates a strong sense of imbalance between the bitter cost incurred and the small good we hoped to accomplish. The saying is simple if, initially, a little cryptic: “Just kill the dumb duck. “
The story begins like this. About 20 years ago my dad was driving his 1982 black and red Ford F-150 pick up truck to town one spring Sunday morning for doughnuts and a Sunday paper. The sky was clear and the morning crisp. A thin layer of dew coated everything causing the grass to glitter and giving the blacktop a dark sheen.
On the six miles of blacktop between my childhood home and town was a small subdivision of 15 homes, each on a one or two acre lot. The southern most home had a small pond, constructed by the erection of an earthen dam across a gully with a rather steep grade that continued down to the road. As dad approached the dip in the road where it intersected with the gully, he noticed a solitary duck begin to ascend from the right side ditch onto the blacktop immediately before him. According to my father's report he barely touched the brake pedal, just enough to break his own momentum and give the duck a chance of crossing the road unharmed.
When he touched the brake, however, the truck began to spin and after one or two revolutions it flipped onto the driver's side, on which the truck continued to spin until it came to rest in a freshly plowed field. The owner of the pond was drinking his morning coffee in his yard and witnessed the crash and, after asking his wife to call for an ambulance, ran out to the crash scene. After watching a rattled, beaten up man pull himself out of the passenger side window he asked, “Are you alright?” Dad looked around and watched a lone mallard finish its ascent of the earthen dam to the well manicured pond beyond. Dad looked at the man and said, “I should have killed the dumb duck.”
The ancient Hebrews had a different proverb, “Better is open rebuke than hidden love.”1 When we read the proverb in English there is a tendency to emphasize the tragedy of hidden love but I'm increasingly convinced that we should place the emphasis on the expression of love which is an honest rebuke. The thrust of the proverb, as I interpret it, is not that hidden love is even worse than open rebuke but that open rebuke reveals love. Better is open rebuke in the community of faith than a love so hidden that it allows a brother or sister to continue unabated on a course of sin.
The love of God is a complex and often unpredictable thing. If anyone claims to be able to control God, to manipulate his love in such a way as to guarantee a result, whether to guarantee healing or wealth or success, they are not representing the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. The God revealed to prophets and disciples is a God who will not be controlled like a machine or manipulated like a rag doll. God loves us but he is not our servant. God's love is beyond our imagination so it refuses to be constrained by it. “Better is open rebuke than hidden love.” Sometimes the love of God or the love of a friend is displayed in the act of an honest rebuke even when it does not feel like love at the exact moment. True love, whether it springs from the divine or a friend, seeks what is best for the beloved, even if it risks alienating the beloved and sometimes we need to be rebuked.
Rebuke, whether it comes from God or a friend, is a terrifying thing. It pays no respect to age, honor, accomplishment or wealth. It can come as a pang of conscience and it can come in the tumbling of empires. It can be dislocating, confusing, and can dismantle that which we worked hard to accomplish. But when it is spoken in truth and grants opportunity for correction, it is an act of love. If we are walking on a path of destruction, however we are knocked off of that path is an act of love. Even if we are embarrassed or humbled for a time, that is a small price to pay to be turned toward truth. Rebuke, when needed, is always better than the alternative.
I want to try to be clear; there is no doubt that we witness the love of God in every good thing that we experience in life from the provision of our daily bread to the joy of the natural world and of our children. But the truth is always one of those good things. Even when embracing it requires admitting that we were wrong in the past.
Jesus cared for the Samaritan woman but he did not flatter her. He did not attempt to charm her into accepting him as Messiah. He did not seek to avoid truth because it might offend. He merely spoke truthfully and the truth always comes with hope. He is offering her the opportunity to change from an unfulfilling path to the truly liberating call to the discipleship of grace. By the manner of his speaking and the knowledge that he displayed he won her to faith. She did not deny her life's trajectory or take offense at the master's audacity of talking about. She understood the experience as a sign that the promise of God had come and that what she was being offered was true freedom.
All too often I think we feel locked into poor choices by a trick of the brain that economists call the “Psychology of Previous Investment.” The idea is simply that as human beings we have a tendency to continue to support stocks or business plans even after there are many rational and compelling reasons to reject them. We do this because we have become invested them financially but more importantly, emotionally. The more emotionally invested we become the more difficult it is to see any other options but continuing on the path of destruction.
If someone continues to buy stock in a company, even as it spirals into bankruptcy we say, “They are throwing good money after bad.” If they continue repeating the same personal mistakes of the past we might say, “They are repeating the same behavior expecting another result.” Either way the psychology of previous investment is at work. Unfortunately, it is easier to see in others than in ourselves. When the love of God is at work in a rebuke, it draws our attention to the matter and grants us the opportunity to see what we were otherwise unable to see. Rebuke breaks the cycle of the psychology of previous investment and forces us to evaluate our actions more objectively.
It is not necessary to travel too far into adulthood before we realize that everyone makes mistakes and sometimes they are doozies. If we do not sometimes hear the rebuke of God then it is only because we are not listening. All too often we do hear but we do not respond. God's love is not only evident in our joys and celebrations. The love of God is evident anytime we are wrong and confronted with truth that illuminates our own mistake. It is, under the circumstances, the only way that God's love could be manifest. If there were no rebuke then we would have to assume that either God does not love us enough to draw us away from our error or that his love is so hidden that it will not come out from its hiding place in order to correct us.
Confession and repentance are not sad times or a time to be wasted beating ourselves up but times for rejoicing. It is a time for rejoicing, because it is during those times that the love of God, made manifest in the speaking of truth, is embraced. Accepting correction results in a strengthening of our discipleship and that is always a good thing. Let me emphasize: it matters little by what detour we came to that greater understanding and more faithful practice but it is in greater understanding and Christian practice that we experience the freedom that God grants through truth.
What should be mourned are those rebukes which go unheeded, when our guilt is revealed to us but we find a way to ignore it, brush it aside or discount it. A failure to heed a righteous rebuke may be an act of pride or a result of the power of previous investment or it can be rooted in fear. Fear that the grace of God will not be extended or that the love of friends is not deep enough to forgive. I know that the fear that God's grace is incapable of reaching us is false and can only say that the love of true friends extends much farther in our time of need than we give it credit for when we are afraid.
Now I like ducks, they are very cute. It is relaxing to watch them paddle around a pond or walk across a grassy plain. I also like to be liked and if people have a good opinion of me, so much the better. Maintaining that standing before others, however, is not worth ignoring truth and protecting it is not worth departing from the path of discipleship. It would be like my trashing my truck and sending myself to the hospital in order to save a duck.
After dad’s accident, I remember sitting in the emergency waiting room and hearing my mom yell, “Joe? Joe? This is not funny.” After which I heard a “SLAP” as she tried to revive him when he inexplicably fell unconscious. Dad recovered quickly. He was out of the hospital the next day and everyone had a good laugh at the welt across his cheek and the story of the sacrifice he made for the dumb duck of Rose Township. I like ducks, but not enough to risk a human life to save one, not enough to trade my dad for one. I like my reputation but not enough to risk departing from the path of discipleship for it.
The topic this third Sunday of Lent is the love of God, a love that is present not only in our successes and our triumphs over sin or injustice but also in our repentance; which is, truth be told, just another kind of victory over sin and injustice. Now if anyone here is faced with a pained conscience or a need for repentance and change, I am ignorant of it. I only know that none of us is perfect and all of us, everyone of you and I myself, will be confronted with the call to change at some point. I know that experience can be difficult and the time spent there can feel dark and lonely but it is out of these dark moments that the love of God shines most clearly and the warmth it brings to our soul shines most vibrantly. The love of God brings the rebuke that we may know the truth and thereby be set free.
After Lent comes Easter. After Good Friday comes resurrection. After confession comes the rejoicing of a million angels and a more fulfilling walk with our Savior and King. So when you are faced with an honest rebuke I have only one piece of advice, “Just kill the dumb duck” because, "Better is open rebuke, than hidden love."
Peace of Christ to you
1 Proverbs 27:5
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