I set the ball between the two teenagers. One of them held a bat. The other an orange cone.
I yelled, “Go!”
They just stood there. Awkwardly. Embarrassment and frustration showed on their faced. And nothing happened.
You see, I hadn’t told them any rules. They knew they were supposed to be playing a game of some sort, but they didn’t know what the game was.
All games are determined by their rules. No rules; no game.
I did the same experiment with two other teens on another occasion. Same props. Same lack of rules. But when I yelled, “Go!” they began to play a version of keep-away. Without saying anything, they immediately gravitated to the rules of a game they already knew. The bat and cone were ignored as they tried to get the ball away from each other.
But what if the bat and cone were actually essential to a real game? Their assumptions would have ruined that game.
Whenever we buy a new game and are itching to just get on with playing it, we have to stop and read the rules. Well thought out rules make for great games. But if we try to play too quickly, before we understand the rules adequately, we’re headed into confusion and potential trouble.
The most frustrating games have ambiguous rules. My extended family had a lengthy argument that went nowhere for a long time because there were two very different possible interpretations of the written rules of a game we were playing together. Eventually, the majority prevailed and we agreed that despite the ambiguity, we would play it one way from that time forward. We made a ruling on the rules to avoid future conflict.
I tend to be a stickler for rules like “a card laid is a card played” and once you’ve removed your hand from a piece you’ve been considering moving, it has now been moved. These little rules make a big difference in determining when one player’s turn is over and another player’s turn has begun. Without them, the next player may signal a move the previous player hadn’t considered and the previous player can simply say, “I didn’t mean to do that,” and counter the next player’s move.
Rules establish relationships.
Marriage vows. Job descriptions. The Ten Commandments. The Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution.
Whether spoken or written, we enter into covenants and contracts by establishing the nature of our relationships through the rules and boundaries we establish.
Back in my single days, we used to refer to the DTR, the Define The Relationship talk a guy and girl would have that would either establish their new dating relationship or doom it to the Friend Zone. The first of many important conversations, it answered the “What are we?” question establishing an exclusivity and intimacy to the relationship which hadn’t existed before. When Charlene and I sat down to our DTR, she let me know she’d only date me if marriage was a possibility. “I’m not messing around,” she said. In a year and a half, it will have been 30 years since we took the vows that have established and shaped our marriage.
Rules protect relationships.
Don’t murder. No adultery. No stealing. No lying. No coveting. These final five of the Ten Commandments protect relationships. When they’re ignored and contravened, relationships collide things fall apart.
A friend of mine was recently talking about the importance of “people over policy.” I know what he was getting at — often policies end up as more important than people and come to exist for their own sake — but I think the comment misses the point of policies. Policies exist for the sake of people. At least, they’re supposed to. The problem is when they’re badly written and exist without reference to the relationships they were written to protect.
When Jesus upset the religiously minded Jews of his day by healing on the Sabbath, he highlighted the disconnect his detractors had fallen into: for they were pitting the policy of keeping sabbath over caring for people. So Jesus says, “Hang on, guys. The Sabbath is about freedom and I just freed this lady from the bondage to Satan she’d been under.” The purpose of Sabbath is to protect people from the slavery by keeping us from endless work. But out of zeal for the keeping of the day, these expert rule followers had turned it into a burden. This elicits Jesus’s comment elsewhere that humans aren’t made for the Sabbath. Rather, Sabbath is made for humans. Again, its goal is to protect us.
There are two main categories of things we’re protected from by rules, the two classic definitions of evil.
Evil does harm.
This is active evil.Murder. Adultery. Abuse. Assault. These and others tend to be more obvious.
There are numerous rules that arise from the goal of protecting people from harm. From speed limits to seat belt and helmet laws, the rules of the road exist to keep us from harming others or ourselves. Consumer safety laws protect buyers from being defrauded by sellers. And so on. What’s so sad is how many of these protection from harm laws we’ve had to create. Their number reflects the willingness of humans to harm one another and our need to contravene that willingness.
Evil deprives others of good.
This tends to be more passive and subversive.
This is where racism does its primary work, keeping the outsiders from the good the insiders experience. Because of this, for instance, there are rules which require minorities to be interviewed for every NFL coaching job. Such a rule was obviously necessary when every head coach in the league was a white man while most of the players were black men.
Where evil that harms is easier to see, evil that deprives of good is not only harder to see, but harder to make rules about. This is because it’s far easier to deny that you’re depriving someone of good than it is that you’ve harmed someone.
I don’t love rules. What I love is relationships. And I’m so grateful for the rules which establish relationships and for the ones that protect them.
This love of what rules establish and protect is at the heart of Psalm 119. “I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free” (Ps. 119:32). There is freedom to run for those who accept the Torah given by God to his people. Its path constrains by rejecting certain behaviors, but it frees by establishing a level playing field. No runner in the Olympics complains of the lines on the track. Those lines exist to let each runner run with the freedom necessary to run their fastest.
Where there are rules or laws or policies that don’t establish or protect relationships, they need to be either modified or replaced by ones that do. The U.S. Constitution was built precisely for this to take place, with ten amendments instituted immediately with the Bill of Rights.
There are times, however, when we don’t see how a particular rule was put into place to establish or protect relationships, and we need to do a little extra thinking and talking about it.
For instance, at a camp I’ve worked at, kids will occasionally sneak out at night, believing they’re doing harm to no one. But a little thinking points out how it does. It can be dangerous, putting the camp in jeopardy is someone gets hurt. It creates a divide between those who are invited to sneak out and those who aren’t, creating an inner circle and harming the community. It puts those who are invited to join in the sneak out into moral danger, requiring them to choose between friends and the rules of the community.
When we don’t understand rules, it’s easy to ignore them or ditch them as irrelevant, to say “I’m a rule breaker” or “people over policy.” It seems obvious this was the approach of the Corinthians which elicited Paul’s strong rebuke in 1 Cor. 5. They had ditched the rule found in Lev. 18:8 about not having sex with your father’s wife. (We see other instances of this behavior in Gen. 35:22 and 2 Sam. 12:11; 16:21-22.) Where the Corinthians had taken their freedom too far, Paul reined them in, protecting their true sexual freedom within the confines of marriage by rejecting the false freedom of anything goes.
So let’s make sure all our rules and policies are people-oriented, establishing and protecting relationships, so we avoid confusion about them or a cavalier attitude toward them.