“Three Biblical Tools for a Decision!”

Rev. Jackson H. Day, Clergy, Baltimore-Washington Conference

United Methodist Church 

Introduction 

             This coming Election Day, Tuesday November 4, Marylanders will be asked to vote on a constitutional amendment permitting slot machine gambling.  Slot machines are now being called video lottery terminals.  Will you vote yes or no?  Will you talk about it with your friends or neighbors?  Will you bring your faith into your decision, and if you do, do you have the tools that can help you craft a decision that reflects your faith? 

            You could, of course, just go with your leaders. “If the United Methodist General Conference says it, that’s good enough for me.”  Our United Methodist Social Principles state, “Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life, destructive of good government and good stewardship.”[1]

            Or you could go with your emotions.  I personally have really negative emotions about gambling.  It takes work to earn money and I want to see the fruits of my labor spent in the best way possible.  And, when I think of gamblers one picture that comes to my mind is the Roman soldiers who came to the foot of the cross, not to confess their sins, not to worship a Savior, but to cast lots for dead Jesus’ clothing.

            But if “follow the leader” or “follow the emotions” don’t work for you, then I want to give you some biblical tools today.  You can use them to think through a good decision on this issue and many other issues.  They’re intended to strengthen the connections between faith and practice, between Sunday and Monday, between what we say in church and what we do in the voting booth.  Whatever you end up deciding about Maryland’s vote on slot machines, I want you to be able to take away these three tools today.  They can help you apply your faith to every dimension of your  life.  These are tools we already use and value:  our trust in God, our role as managers of God’s resources, and the example on the Cross of how God expects us to treat others.

            I call the first tool the Theological Principle because the tool is our relationship with God.  We are part of something bigger than ourselves.  In 1 Corinthians 12, St. Paul gave us a picture of what that relationship is like when he compared it to a body.  “If one part of our body hurts, we hurt all over.  If one part of our body is honored, the whole body will be happy.  Together you are the body of Christ.  Each one of  you is part of his body.”[2] 

            The most dramatic experience of being part of something bigger than we are that most of us get to have is a romance.  We want to have a romance because every day brings exciting new discoveries;  we’re willing to have one because of trust.  Our relationship with God and God’s people also works best when it combines the reliability of trust and the excitement of discovery. 

            Gambling takes that excitement of discovery out of the context of being part of something important, and turns it into amusement and greed without connection.  Ultimately it’s a counterfeit that can never satisfy. 

            One of the saddest statement’s I’ve heard came from one of a city’s poor who was buying a lottery ticket.  Hearing that some people wanted to abolish the lottery, he responded, “Please.  It’s the only hope I have.  Please don’t take it away.”  Figures bear him out. American researchers have discovered that if you can make someone feel poor, they’ll “spend more on a chance to become rich.”[3]

            I know of some in previous generations who didn’t approve of card playing.  I know of others who said, well, card playing is OK as long as it’s not playing cards – you know, those cards with Kings and Queens and Jacks.  They were right in knowing that there was an issue, but they mistook the outward signs – playing cards that you can shuffle and deal randomly – for the inner issue – looking to chance rather than relationship for the novelty that makes each day worth getting up for.

            There’s a line between harmless play and disastrous loss.  This first tool, our relationship to God and others whom we love and to whom we are accountable, can help us know that line.  This tool can help us distinguish between the computer solitaire game that gives me a relaxation break – and coming home to tell my wife,  “I’m sorry, but I lost our house in a poker game!” 

            But the gaming industry is committed to getting us to cross that line.  Slot machines are designed to hook our greed and weaken our resistance.  I understand that the word “extinction” is sometimes used in the industry – it refers to getting the player to stay at the table until he or she has nothing left.

            We need this first tool  – our trusting relationship with God – to keep us from crossing the line.  When we pray, as we do in the prayer Jesus taught us – “thy will be done…on earth as it is in heaven” – our lives work and our society works. 

            We get the second tool from a famous story in St. Matthew’s Gospel.  The tool is the conviction that we are God’s managers, and it moves us to the voting booth. You’ll recall the story.  The Pharisees want to trick Jesus and ask if it is right to pay taxes.  Jesus asks for a coin and asks whose picture is on it.  When people answer, “Caesar’s, Jesus responds – “well, then, give Caesar what is Caesar’s and give God what is God’s[4].” 

            This story gives us a typical expression of Jesus’ brilliant mind.  The Romans who heard this would have thought – well, nothing controversial about that – we all know everything belongs to Caesar – what is left to this God of the Hebrews?  But Jesus’ Jewish listeners would have gotten Jesus’ joke – because Jesus, knew the Jewish Torah backwards and forwards.  Jesus knew the Psalms including the lines from Psalm 24, verses 1:  The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.”  Jesus knew that God owns everything, and Caesar owns nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

            If God owns everything, our role is to be managers of all God owns.  The old word for manager is steward, and stewardship really means how we manage God’s assets.  We are God’s managers for the resources God has entrusted to us personally, for the resources God has entrusted to our church congregation, and for the resources God has given to a whole state, like Maryland.  When we vote about slots or taxes or government spending, we are acting as managers of what God owns.  And what is a primary tool that managers use?  Numbers. 

            Several months ago I saw an analysis of the proposed Maryland legislation.[5]  The projected gross revenue from slots in Maryland is $1.3 Billion Dollars, of which $650 Million would go into an education trust fund.  Pretty nifty, eh?

            Currently,  Marylanders spend about $1.6 Billion on the lottery, so the slots proposal seeks to just about double Maryland’s revenue from gambling.  You may hear people say, “people are going to gamble anyway, so we might as well let them do it here.”  But the slot machine budget is based on turning a huge number of people into gambling losers who weren’t going to gamble anyway, people who weren’t losers before.

            How will you get that $1.3 Billion dollars?  Well, the average gambler loses about $1000 in a year.  Currently we claim that $400 million is going to Delaware and West  Virginia – so Maryland already has 400,000 losers and we want them back, because we think losers are good for us.  But to get that $1.3 Billion, we’ll have to create 900,000 new losers to get the 1.3 million losers  we’ll need.  And since Maryland’s population is 5.6 million, the proposed legislation seeks to turn almost one Marylander out of 4 into losers.[6]

            These new losers will be taking an average $1000 that they’re already spending somewhere else in the economy, and losing it in the slots instead.  Instead of buying shoes or food or cell phones or making house payments or taking their children on family vacations, they’ll put $1000 in a slot machine and have nothing to show for it.  2% of these losers, it’s estimated, become pathological losers.  So the 400,000 losers we already have already include 8000 pathological gambling losers in the State.  Out of our 900,000 new losers, we’ll have an additional 18,000 pathological gambling losers.  That’s 18,000 more people who used to be able to keep a job, maintain a family, pay taxes and stay out of jail – and now they can’t, whose lives and whose families’ lives spin out of control.  More than three times as many pathological gamblers as we started with.

            Many of us can gamble without becoming addicted.  I’ll admit that I had a short career as a gambler.  Years ago several of us visited Charlestown.  I placed a $2  bet on a horse.  I collected $4 in winnings.  A voice told me to quit while I was ahead, and I did! 

            But your 2% pathological losers can’t do that.  Some people would say, too bad, it’s their problem, why should that spoil the fun for the rest of us?  But, unless we’re willing to let people die in the streets, it is going to spoil things for the rest of us, because ultimately we, society, taxpayers, pay the bill when their lives and their families’ lives go out of control.  We pay for

• Shelters for those who have become homeless
• Assistance for families that have lost their breadwinner
• Counseling for children from broken homes
• The cost of crime from family members whose lives have become disrupted
• The loss of tax revenues from people who could have been solid pillars of the community – but now aren’t.

            And remember, Maryland’s proposed legislation looks at 900,000 new losers, 18,000 of them out of control pathological gamblers.  Slots have been called the crack cocaine of gambling.  Video lottery terminals are actually more dangerous than a traditional "clock-work" slot machine because they’re programmed with addiction in mind.  Video lottery terminals take the maximum legal advantage of human emotions and frailty. A lot of science and research has gone into making sure that gamblers lose as much (and gamble for as long) as possible.

            But we have the second tool – the knowledge that God owns it all.  The Lord’s prayer is a manager’s prayer that helps us use that tool  We pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.  A good manager of God’s resources – including God’s human resources – will manage them so that there are no losers. 

            The third tool is the Bible’s messages on how we are to treat others.  The first tool helps us with personal decisions, the second helps us decide how to vote, but the third tool really demands that we go out and become activists on behalf of God.  I call the third tool the Evangelical Principle.  It goes beyond the Golden rule, where Jesus tells us in Luke[7] that we should do unto others as we have them do to us.  Evangelical ethics says, “treat other people like people Christ gave his life for on the cross.”  Value them that highly!  That is a big deal.

            When Jesus told us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves,[8] he was reaching back to the Holiness Code in the book of Leviticus[9] where in the very early days of the Bible God’s people struggled with specifics of how we are to treat people who aren’t as well off as we are.  There we find verse 19:14:  “You shall not revile the deaf, or put a stumbling block before the blind.”  Why?  Because the blind are loved by God, and because they have fewer resources than I do, they are in greater need of protection.  What is true for the deaf and blind extends to gambling losers.  We are not to put a stumbling block in their path.  That’s how you put “you are to love your neighbor as yourself,” into practice. 

            So it is wrong for me to cause anyone to stumble, but it is even more wrong to cause a blind man to stumble, because the blind man is weak and has a claim on my protection.

            But the evangelical principle is that how we treat others should go even farther – as Christ did.  When Christians talk about a social issue, we should turn to John 3:16.  Christ died on the cross for me, he died for you – and he died especially for the losers of the world.

            The evangelical principle is our obligation as Christians to bring good news to others. We are obligated to bring the message of Christ to every person with whom we have contact.,  We are to regard every person we see as someone for whom Christ suffered and died on the cross.  We are to regard every person as being of supreme value in the sight of God.

            Now – can we abuse such a person? Can we allow others to abuse such a person?  Can we allow anyone to turn them into losers?

            At 4 PM on a recent Saturday, Delaware State Police arrested a young couple while they were gambling at Delaware Park.  The couple, from Reading, Pennsylvania, had left their 10 year old and 6 year old children in their car while they went in to play the slots.[10] 

            We can look at them and heap negatives on them.  How could they do such a thing?  What were they thinking?  By all means, take their children from them.  What losers they are.  But  Leviticus asks – did anyone put a stumbling block in the path of this weak couple?  John asks – are these people for whom Christ died?  And if Christ gave his life for them, can we treat them as if they don’t matter?

            Our faith tells us that we cannot be indifferent to their plight, and if we authorize legislation that puts temptation in a gambler’s way, we ourselves have participated in his sin.