Sermon Tone Analysis

Shredding the Past

/Ephesians 1:3-14/ | 1~/5~/2003

*State-of-the-art shredders can destroy massive quantities of sensitive documents in minutes, but some attempts at destruction go awry.

One thing that can never be shredded is our sins ... but they can be forgiven.

*

Shortly after the Enron story broke last year, Jay Leno quipped, “Enron is now officially out of the energy business.

They are now in a new business: confetti.”

The paper shredders at Enron weren’t the only ones cranking out confetti in 2002.

The Arthur Andersen accounting firm as well as WorldCom were at it 24~/7 until the courts told them to stop.

To get a job like this done, however, you’d want to have the Taskmaster TM1620DS.

This turbo-charged baby can destroy massive quantities of sensitive documents in minutes.

Feed a two-inch thick ream of documents, spiral notebooks, cards, checks, computer printouts or document boxes into the Taskmaster and the unit will shred the stuff and discharge it as small, secure chips.

There is no denying that human beings have laid waste to a great many things in the course of time: cities, species and a vast amount of cultural, religious and linguistic heritage.

Much has been lost through wanton and intentional eradication.

What seems more remarkable, though, writes Cullen Murphy in The Atlantic Monthly, is how often our attempts at destruction go awry.

Check it out: On the eve of the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran, in 1979, American officials desperately fed secret documents into the embassy’s paper shredders, then departed.

Over the next several years, while waiting for satellite dishes and Baywatch to arrive, the Iranians painstakingly stitched the documents back together.

They ultimately published the reconstituted intelligence files in some 60 volumes, under the overarching title Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den.

Try as our foreign service officials did, their efforts at destruction and deletion amounted to failure.

There are times in our personal lives when what we want most is to hide something we did or said or wrote.

This isn’t easily done.

The Bible tells us: Nothing remains hidden in darkness, all is revealed (Mark 4:22).

Murphy cites another case in point: During the controversy over the Iran-contra affair, in 1986, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North attempted to erase all the relevant e-mail messages on his computer; he repeatedly pressed the DELETE button, thinking that he was thereby expunging the messages.

“Wow, were we wrong!” he later observed.

North didn’t know that pressing DELETE doesn’t result in complete deletion.

He also didn’t know about the existence of a backup data-storage system.

Oops.

Try as he did to hide what happened, much, if not all, was eventually revealed at the congressional hearings.

Now we learn that some of the shredded documents from Enron may also be recovered - a task made easier by the fact that pages were sometimes put through the shredding machines sideways, leaving individual lines of type intact.

Enron employees had a zealous corporate directive, but they lacked morals, time, patience, and apparently, and most importantly, simple shredding know-how.

If only they had tried burning the files after shredding, then they may have succeeded.

As it is, their greed, and the greed of those like them, has become their undoing.

Historically, fire has been an effective and successful means of destruction.

When that sinful or sensitive information in your hard drive or in your file cabinet needs complete deletion, try the old-fashioned method.

Acquire a local burning permit.

Build a big hardwood bonfire in your backyard, toss on your paper files, then top it off with your PC hard drive.

That ought to do it.

Maybe.

History shows a good hot fire doesn’t always work well for data demolition, however.

The Assyrian empire was brought down in the seventh century B.C. by an invading force of Babylonians, Scythians and Medes.

The conquerors put the great library of Ashurbanipal to the torch, but they hadn’t thought it through thoroughly.

The library’s contents were written on clay tablets, and the consequence was to fire the archives, as if they were so much pottery.

Some 20,000 cuneiform tablets survived in the form of accidental ceramics records, much to the delight of modern researchers.

To completely, absolutely and with an irrevocable finality delete, destroy and demolish is difficult.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking crime scene evidence, files, records, books, art, people, cities, cultures, languages or sins.

It doesn’t matter if it’s hard data, digitalized information or personal folly.

It remains dauntingly difficult to erase mistakes, or crimes, or sins, leaving behind no trace.

One way to avoid the problems of our peccadilloes - be it greed or something less or more sinister - is to live perfectly pure and peaceful lives in the first place.

Do no wrong.

Always and in every way behave flawlessly.

Say nothing wrong.

Never lie.

Never hurt with words the ones we love.

Never speak before thinking.

Perhaps never speak at all.

Think nothing wrong.

Keep our thoughts wholesome, our minds upright and our imaginations unused.

Perhaps not thinking at all is best.

Commit no offense or transgression.

Keep the slate clean.

Keep the hard drive empty.

Be perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48).

Like that’s going to happen.

Even if we haven’t lied about the existence of billions of dollars or tried to cover up details of decades of espionage, we all sin - big ones or little ones - and do so nearly every day.

It’s a given.

It’s the way it is; it’s the way we are.

It’s as if our souls themselves are assembled with a divinely digitized storage device endlessly and effortlessly recording all of our thoughts and all of our actions over a lifetime, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly for permanent playback to God.

There just isn’t anywhere to hide.

There isn’t any deletion program on earth capable of that kind of obliteration.

Human beings, all of us, are born with an advanced and natural capacity to mess up, to hurt each other and to fall victim to our own desires.

We tend to buy into whatever supports our false self-image.

We adore our various desires, addictions and jealousies.

In short, we readily and easily fall into temptations and simply love those seven deadly sins in all their glorious forms: gluttony, lust, envy, pride, wrath, greed and sloth.

On our own we can’t undo the sinful events of our lives.

Alone we can’t reinitialize our souls to a random order of zeros and ones, effectively making our souls empty and blank and sparkling new.

We can’t erase, delete or destroy our life’s record.

The data is never lost.

The facts are never destroyed.

The statistics of our lives are embedded in the essence of our souls.

There’s no fifth Amendment to plead.

God sees all hears all and knows all.

No sin, public or private, is missed.

Nothing - the bad, the good, the ugly or the beautiful - is ever hidden from God. What’s done is done.

The record is made.

The information is in there.

Sin and its consequences can’t be covered up or ignored.

Even Paul, the best of the brightest of his time, had his own struggles.

In his letters he tells us that his spirit is willing but his flesh, like ours, is weak.

He had his troubles that led him to sin.

He had that thorn in his side which he took time to mention.

Paul knew how he should behave, and Paul knew how to live the good and holy life, but he found himself doing the opposite.

Just like us.

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak (Matthew 26:41).

So what can we do if we can’t delete or destroy?

It sounds bleak but it’s not really.

God gives us each a get-out-of-jail-free card.

It’s called grace through Christ.

It’s simple to accept forgiveness through Christ as God’s greatest gift to us.

Here’s the good news: Jesus Christ, “in whom we have redemption - the forgiveness of sins” (Ephesians 1:7 KJV).

What we can’t do alone, Christ can do for us.

Christ will delete and destroy all evidence of every sin, if only we ask.