“Hot Coffee and Lost Pants ”

• July 8, 2007

Well, I’ve got to say something coherent Sunday about what it means to be a “New Creation.” How can you be a new creation when you see the sun spots, gray hair, and notice that your arms aren’t long enough to read things? All that matters is a new creation, says Paul.

Our society is obsessed with being young and we’re constantly trying to re-create our youth. Even though the older we get the more we recognize how dumb we were when we were youth, we still want to look like we’re only old enough to be foolish. So there’s botox and rogain and Grecian formula – and the fastest growing segment of the medical industry world wide is the area of cosmetic surgery. We want to look like relatively new humans. Well, that’s not what Paul means by a new creation. (I bet you sort of knew that.)

Actually, the kind of new creation Paul is talking about is a whole lot harder to accomplish than getting a face lift, or a tummy tuck, or some kind of enhancement. In some ways, it’s even more painful. This New Creation, though, is a person whose happiness originates completely in God and nowhere else. And that can be painful, you may ask?

People remember the MacDonald’s hot coffee case. Stella Liebeck, of Albuquerque, went through a MacDonald’s drive through with her grandson and ordered some coffee. When she tried to get the top off to put in cream and sugar, the coffee spilled in her lap and the heavy sweat pants she was wearing held the 180 degree coffee next to the skin of her inner thighs long enough to cause third degree burns. She was in the hospital for a long period of time undergoing skin grafts and ultimately was awarded 2.9 million dollars in compensatory funds. The award was reduced to around 480,000.\

The case became famous because to sue an establishment claiming that their coffee is too hot seems ludicrous to most of us. Isn’t coffee supposed to be hot? When you order coffee, don’t you know that if you spill it, it won’t feel good? Should a restaurant be held liable for a customer’s carelessness? Well, when you read the particulars of the case you begin to see that it wasn’t quite as cut-and-dried absurd as it sounded without knowing the details. Nevertheless, the main reason why this coffee-cup case offends us is because the vast majority of us have a basic sense that the individual is responsible for his or her actions and it’s ridiculous to blame others for ones own mistakes. Most of us were glad when we heard that the guy who sued the dry cleaners for 54 million dollars because they lost a pair of his pants got thrown out of court. We felt even better when the judge ordered the plaintiff to pay the defendant’s court costs. People ought to accept responsibility for their actions, right?

Lord, we say this, but wait until my own tail gets in a crack.