“When We Get Behind Closed Doors”

• Scriptural Reference: Deuteronomy 24:10-11; Luke 9:57-58
• May 4, 2008

Some years ago a country singer by the name of Charlie Rich had a hit song called “When We Get behind Closed Doors.” He had white hair and accompanied himself on the piano. They called him “The Silver Fox.” I thought he was sleazy. In fact, I thought the song was sleazy. It became a country music staple, though, and for better or worse – in my opinion, mostly worse – a whole lot of people used to like this song, though I don’t recommend finding it and listening to it. Suffice it to say that the song is about how one’s home is one’s castle and what goes on at home is intensely private. It’s no one else’s business. Home is where you can walk around in your underwear, something my dad did on a regular basis and his BVD bedecked figure walking around in my memory still makes me laugh out loud. Home is where you can lounge in your pajamas. You can play your music, even if it’s Charlie Rich. You can cook your food – or not. You can leave your dirty socks lying around, if you’re not married, or leave your stockings hanging from the shower curtain rod, even when you ARE married. You can put your bed in the living room and turn your garage into a study. Whatever. It’s your house and it’s your business and when you go in and close the doors, the rest of the world better knock and ask for permission to come in.

Now, all of that is true. Our homes are intensely private. As a matter of fact, did you know that the Deuteronomic Code in our Bible recognizes the privacy of the individual home? Deuteronomy 24:10ff instructs any creditor who goes to a debtor’s house to collect collateral for a loan NOT to go into the house but to wait outside for the debtor to bring the collateral out. “Do not go into his house,” the instructions say. The home is the sovereign territory of its residents.

This sentiment runs through the center of our Constitution as repeatedly interpreted by the Supreme Court through the years. Though the right to privacy isn’t mentioned explicitly, starting with the prohibition of police search without a due warrant and extending to judgments rendered in cases like Loving vs. Virginia where the Court ruled that the state cannot prevent so-called “mixed race” marriages, law makers are in almost complete unanimity that when citizens get behind closed doors, their business is theirs and no one else’s.

Likewise, the preacher better keep his hands off, right?

Even here, though, what we do in private CAN have a profound effect on the community around us.

First of all, Christians never walk away and close the door on Philippians 2:1-4 when we look not only to our own interests but to the interests of others. Again, this doesn’t mean poking around in someone else’s business, especially when we haven’t been invited. As we’ve already concluded, Paul didn’t mean giving unsolicited advice to others. He meant that we are always to remember that our actions, no matter how private they appear to be, always send ripples through the human community of which we are a part. This might not be so readily apparent when it comes to our private spaces as home, but let’s look at a few things.

First of all, most of our private homes are on a public grid of some kind. We get electricity from a large utility that sells power to thousands of others and many of us get our water from public utilities and flush our wastes through public sewers. Some of us may have wells and septic tanks, but most of us still have to rely on some form of large utility company for the power we use. We also probably carry our garbage off to some kind of waste disposal facility – a landfill and/or recycling center. Simply put, we cannot retreat into our private activities without having an impact on the public support that allows that private activity.

Take computer use for example. Did you know that a computer running a screen saver uses almost ten times as much energy as one in "sleep" mode? Also, did you know that, contrary to office legend, turning off your computer when you go home at night does no harm?  On the other hand, the good it does is substantial – one workstation (computer and monitor) left on all night for a year is responsible for one ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Switching it off at night and setting it to sleep when idle during the day can reduce energy use by 80 percent. It would have a tremendous impact if the millions of private computer users in homes across our nation would practice this kind of habit. We’d reduce the draw on the electric grid tremendously and subsequently reduce the amount of junk pumped into the atmosphere.

Or how about water usage? I don’t know about your house, but there was a time when at least one of the residents of our house would take 25 minute showers every day; this without any discernable difference in appearance from the night before. Are those habitual long showers merely a private practice? Consider that that i t takes a considerable amount of energy to deliver and treat the water you use everyday. American public water supply and treatment facilities consume about 56 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year—enough electricity to power more than 5 million homes for an entire year. For example, letting your faucet run for five minutes uses about as much energy as letting a 60-watt light bulb run for 14 hours.

Or, consider this: if one out of every 100 American homes retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, we could save about 100 million kWh of electricity per year—avoiding 80,000 tons of toxic emissions. That is equivalent to removing nearly 15,000 automobiles from the road for one year! By the same token, if 1 percent of American homes replaced their older, inefficient toilets with Water-Sense labeled models, the country would save more than 38 million kWh of electricity, which the EPA estimates is enough to supply more than 43,000 house-holds electricity for one month.

According to the EPA, if each U.S. household installed one low-flow sink faucet or aerator, it would save more than 60 billion gallons of water annually. You can find this information and more statistics at the website, epa.gov/watersense.

I love a good hot shower. It’s one of my luxuries, and every once in a while, I’ll take a long one. This sermon isn’t about becoming a Desert Father – or Mother. On the other hand, with some small changes in our water habits, we can have a huge impact collectively.

Consider some other factoids, as well.

• The average U.S. house creates double the greenhouse-gas emissions of the average car.
• High-definition TVs use up to 64 percent more electricity than similar-size conventional sets.
• Cleaning the lint filter on your dryer can decrease the energy used per load by up to 30 percent.
• Each year, 100 million trees are used to produce junk mail. Find out how to get off marketers' lists at newdream.org/junkmail.

Now, there are some things you can do. Consider them to be part of a practical spiritual practice. Here are some examples:

1) Use energy-efficient lights. Changing just one 75-watt bulb to a compact fluorescent light cuts roughly 1,300 pounds of global warming pollution. They also last up to 15 times as long and save you money. (Learn how to pick the best bulbs.)

2) Turn off lights. A good chunk of lighting expenses is from rooms that stay unnecessarily lit.

3) Use natural light. Open shades and use sunlight to help light rooms.

4) Install motion-sensors so that lights automatically turn on when someone is in the room and turn off when empty.

I can suggest some other things, too.

Responsible living in the privacy of our homes isn’t limited to how we use our appliances or what light bulbs we choose. Even without an environmental crisis, we need to remember that our attitudes toward each other in our homes among our immediate family will spill over into the world we enter when we go out from our homes each day. Read any substantive literature on the subject and you will discover that the primary religious educators for our children are still their parents. The home environment still ranks higher than any other single element in determining whether kids will grow into the kind of adults who live lives of faith. What moms and dads model in their daily lives forms the backbone of what kids learn and accept as true. While there are exceptions to every rule, it amazes researchers how consistently children’s religious behavior resembles that of their parents as the kids grow older.

If our nation has experienced a decline in religious participation over the last few decades, we need to recognize that its reversal will not come from government act or eloquent preaching or cutting-edge youth and children’s programming in school systems or even in churches. All these can aid the process. Real change, though, will never happen if our children do not see faith practiced consistently first and foremost in the privacy of our homes.

One of the Americans I met while working in Austria was a fellow from Louisiana named Tom Preston. Tom was in Austria for only a short time while I was there but we formed a good friendship as often happens with expatriates. When he left Austria, he went back home, attended seminary and soon became a pastor in Oklahoma. While I was working at the VBMB, Tom came through Virginia and reconnected with the Austria contingent here. We had a lunch together and during that time he shared with me the following story.

Tom loves to work with wood. He builds real find furniture pieces and finds that the hands-on activity provides him with a great counterpoint to the intangible work of pasturing. Tom was working on a finely crafted table he’d designed himself and had decided to accent the top with his own fashion of inlay. He used a precision saw to cut perfect pieces of inlay two inches long and one quarter of an inch square. He bought the best (and very expensive) teak and mahogany boards he could find from which to cut the pieces. It took him three days to cut what he needed and soon had a pile of them ready for the inlay. As he left his woodworking shop on that third day and saw the stack of wood, he felt proud and remembered his dad and the way his dad also worked with wood.

His dad had always told him not to think that he need to latest toy or the most expensive new gadget in order to be happy. He’d be happier if he made his own fun and worked making things himself. In fact, Tom had tried his best to model that behavior for his son. He’d even strongly suggested to his son that when the sun was shining, never to waste it inside with the video games. Instead, go outside and be active. And even when it rained, it would be better to build something in Tom’s workshop that to sit passive in front of a tube.

That’s why Tom was so pleased when he arrived home from the church office one evening and in the failing light of dusk, saw his son Charlie bending over something he’d built in the back of the yard. Charlie heard the car door slam shut and when he saw Tom, his eye lit up as he called out, “Dad! Come and see what I’ve built! I’ve built a whole town back here!”

“Really! That’s great! Let me see what you’ve done.”

As Tom crossed the yard, he saw that indeed, Charlie had used a hoe to scrape a network of streets in the dirt at the back of their lot. He’d even constructed some buildings. Charlie confirmed it. “Here’s town hall. And over there’s the court house. And this is my house.”

The court house was made from some bricks that had been stacked behind Tom’s workshop and a couple of wood blocks served as a portico. The town hall had an upturned plastic cup for a cupola and a nail for a weather vein. A porch stood out from the front of the house with perfectly straight columns holding up the roof. In fact, the streets looked incredibly straight in Charlie’s town. Tom said, “You sure got those streets straight. How’d you do that?”

“I tied some string like you do when you plant the garden so you can get the vegetables straight. And I used some scrap wood from your shop for gutters and that made the sides of the streets real straight, too!” Charlie was obviously very proud.

But that remark about the scrap wood made Tom look a little closer at the gutters. The twilight was fading so he had to bend close to see clearly, but as he got in close he saw them: soaking up the moisture from that black Oklahoma dirt, in alternating hues, serving as model gutters, were his teak and mahogany inlay strips. He felt horror rising in his gut.

And he looked at the steps of the court house again, and there they were: teak and mahogany inlay strips. And he looked at the columns holding up the porch of the house, and there they were: teak and mahogany inlay strips. Tom gritted his teeth to keep quiet. He looked at Charlie and even in the dim light, Charlie saw Toms jaw muscles working. Charlie started to get scared.

But in that moment, Tom had a memory. He was about Charlie’s age and his dad was out of town for a few days. Tom was a little bored and went to his dad’s workshop in Shreveport, Louisiana to see if he could find something to do. He took the key to the shop off of the nail by the door where it hung for the entire world to see and opened the door. The first thing he saw was a shabby cardboard box sitting right beside the trash barrel where his dad threw wood scraps. Inside the box were about thirty identical plastic tubes. Tom wondered why his dad would want to throw away tubes like that. He stuck his finger into one of the tubes and an idea suddenly hit him.

He pulled the tube out of the box with his finger still stuck in it. It was about a half inch in diameter, the same size as the model rocket tubes he’d buy at the hobby store. He hadn’t been able to buy any recently and he had about twenty rocket engines in his room. These were the rocket engines that had a powder charge in them and you’d put a little a-shaped wire in the bottom with the ends sticking out, attach alligator clips to them, then attach wires to the alligator clips and touch them to a 9-volt battery. The current would heat the wire which would ignite the engine, thrust would blast out the bottom and the model rocket would shoot about 200-300 feet in the air before an explosive charge in the end of the engine would go off, knocking off the nose cone and expelling a parachute. Only, if you put the nose cone on too tight, the ejector charge would blow up the whole rocket instead. That had happened once by accident, but the disaster was so cool, Tom had subsequently blown up all his other rockets intentionally.

Sure enough, upon inspection he found that his twenty engines fit perfectly into the tubes he’d found. So he made some nose cones, cut some fins from cardboard, used plastic model glue to fasten them to the tubes and soon he had twenty model ballistic missiles. With the help of his friend across the street, they lugged the twenty missiles, a car battery, wires and a metal launching rod to the pasture behind their house. They constructed an enemy army camp out of shoe boxes, stationed some plastic army men on towers and in some model tanks, and went off about 300 feet where they set up their missile launcher.

Over the next few minutes, they shot missiles at the enemy. The first few over shot the target, but they exploded with loud bangs and pieces flew all over. Then they made some direct hits. If the shot them at the right angle, they’d embed themselves in the dirt before the exploded in a satisfying cloud of dirt and plastic shrapnel. Soon they’d demolished the enemy camp.

That evening, Tom and Mrs. Preston were sitting at the table when Mr. Preston came in from Baton Rouge. “I got the contract,” exclaimed Mr. Preston almost before the back door shut. “Mr. Meyer from Hamburg is going to buy my prototype. Those tubes are going to be perfect!”

Tom had a fork full of meatloaf on the way to his mouth and it stopped in mid flight. “Tubes?”

Mr. Preston looked at Tom. “Yes. I’ve got some tubes out in the shop that are the perfect size for a prototype of a solar powered water filtration system I’m going to develop for a German firm. I’m going to put it together over the next couple of days and take it back to this man Thursday.”

Then Mr. Preston saw the look in Tom’s face. “Why do you ask?”

Tom put the meatloaf down and told Mr. Preston about the missiles. Mr. Preston exploded like the tubes. “You used those tubes as missiles?” He grew a vivid color of red, sputtered and blubbered for a couple of minutes, then stalked out the door and slammed it behind him.

Mrs. Preston immediately followed and went out on the porch. Tom saw his dad facing toward the back yard, his mom’s arm across his shoulder, leaning forward and looking up into his face. Tom eased over to the door and slowly parted it so he could hear what they were saying. She said, “You remember that story you always tell so proudly – you’ve told it to Tom – about how you built your own soap box racer out of lumber from your dad’s shop and how he got mad at you but how proud he was that you always won.”

Mr. Preston sighed. “I guess he come by it honest, huh?”

“Just go in and call Mr. Meyer and tell him what happened. He probably has kids. He’ll understand.”

Tom hurried back to his place at the table as his parents came back into the kitchen. Mr. Preston leaned on a chair and said, “Listen son. Next time you find something interesting in my shop, please don’t use it without asking me first, okay?” He then went to the phone, pulled out a card from his shirt pocket and dialed a number. Tom wondered how he was going to get punished.

Mr. Preston said, “Hello, Herr Meyer? Listen, I need a little more time to get that prototype to you. I got home and discovered that my son blew up the tubes.” Tom winced at this but distinctly heard laughter coming through the phone.

“Yes sir, he made missiles out of them and shot them at a target out in the pasture – yes, sir, he is a very bright boy.” And Mr. Preston looked at Tom and smiled.

Tom remembered that out there in his own backyard with his own son looking on and remembered it in a flash, in far less time than it takes to tell it on paper, and remembered that he’d never been punished. He looked at the expensive mahogany and teak inlay strips soaking up Oklahoma moisture and dirt and thought, well, maybe this is my punishment. Or, then again, maybe it’s my reward.

He looked at Charlie and said, “Charlie, the next time you see something interesting in my workshop, how about asking me first before you use it?”

Charlie looked at his dad wide-eyed, nodded his head and said, “Yes sir!”

Tom said, “Look, these pieces in the dirt are ruined. I can’t use them, but I can still use the steps and the columns, so I’ll tell you what. I have a board of solid pine in the shop and I’ll cut replacements for you. Okay?”

Isn’t it amazing how those lessons, those curses AND those blessings cascade down through the generations? When it comes to passing on what we value as parents to our children, school is always in session. And it’s not always what we say that matters. Whatever takes place behind closed doors eventually walks out through them.