Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; March 15, 2026
Readings: Luke 19:1-10 (children’s talk); Doctrine of Life §80; John 10:1-10
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Our series on the ten commandments has us in the midst of a set of commandments that are just obvious. Everyone knows that murder and adultery are wrong, and that stealing is wrong. Stealing is illegal everywhere. It seems unlikely that any of you need to be convinced that it’s bad.
Isn’t it nice that some of the commandments are easy to understand? After all, the Lord says a lot of things that challenge our understanding. But it would be much too easy to say, “Well I’m not in the habit of robbing banks, so this one isn’t for me—it’s for other people.” We’re meant to look deeper. If a commandment is easy to understand, that means we can spend our energy not on understanding it but on asking, “Am I really keeping it?” Because all of the commandments run deep, and they all get hard to keep at some point. After all, how many of us can truly say that we have never stolen anything?
So to begin with, we’re going to turn to the Heavenly Doctrine and hear a passage that summarizes the three major levels of the commandment against stealing: the natural, spiritual and celestial levels. This passage is from The Doctrine of Life, and it’s printed on the back of your handout [read §80].
Right off the bat, we should note that pretty much wherever the Heavenly Doctrine talks about stealing, it calls attention to the fact that stealing, in its natural sense, includes both obvious thefts and those that are not obvious (e.g. AE §967.3). Obvious thefts, like robbing banks and mugging people, are obviously wrong, and there really isn’t much to say about those things besides, “don’t do them.” But there are a lot of ways of taking what isn’t ours that are a lot less conspicuous—and we need to understand that those things are forbidden by the seventh commandment, just as much as daylight robbery. The reading says that swindling or taking another person’s goods by subterfuge is stealing (Life §80). And in True Christian Religion we read:
[Stealing] extends to all imposture and unlawful gain, usury and extortion, as well as fraud in payment of dues and taxes and in repaying debts. Workers who do not work in good faith and without deceit offend against this commandment; so do merchants who cheat over their wares, weights, measures and calculations…. (§317)
It’s pretty clear that the seventh commandment isn’t just about robbery: it’s about every method, every pretense, for taking or laying claim to what is not ours.
Now, people know that sneaky stealing is still stealing. White collar crime is still a crime. In general white collar crime is seen as less serious than something like armed robbery, and that holds up to the light of doctrine: if you rob someone at gunpoint you aren’t just stealing, you’re also threatening violence—so you’re breaking the fifth commandment as well as the seventh. And breaking two commandments seems worse than breaking one. But it’s worth nothing that when it talks about stealing, the Heavenly Doctrine highlights the destructiveness of “guile and deceit” (Life §81). Guile, or cunning, and deceit are like poisons that worm themselves deep into our minds. The point is that we need to be careful not to tell ourselves that our crimes “aren’t serious” because they’re subtle. That could be the opposite of the truth: if we embrace the art of deceit so deeply that we learn how to take what isn’t ours in a way that no one on earth will ever punish us for, we may be on the road to becoming someone who lives and breathes deceit. Even if we manage to convince ourselves that what we’re doing “doesn’t count” as stealing.
An interesting thought experiment is to consider the things a person could do that would not be illegal, but would still count as stealing in the Lord’s eyes. And we’re not talking about spiritual stealing yet—we’re still considering literal stealing. For example, if a company technically meets the requirements of the law as far as disclosing what their product is and what they’re going to charge for it, but their advertising and the way they do sales and their entire approach to business is about getting customers to pay more than they think they’re going to have to pay, is that stealing? It probably is. But the only people who can truly know whether or not an individual member of that company is stealing are the Lord and the individual himself. It could simply be that customers are making bad decisions because they’re too lazy to read the fine print. The question that the individual businessman needs to ask himself, in this example, is, “What’s my motive? Do I want my customers to get something that is worth their money, or am I looking for devices that will enable me to take more than I’ve earned?” If the intent is dishonest, then we’re stealing, even if the methods are technically legal.
The world generally views the theft of a valuable item as more serious than the theft of a cheap one. The sentence for stealing a car is greater than the sentence for shoplifting. That isn’t necessarily how the Lord sees it. The value of worldly goods doesn’t mean much in His kingdom. In the long run, it won’t matter much that we “only took a little bit at a time” if the fact is that we’ve given our heart to the art of taking.
As with all of the other commandments, the essence or spirit of stealing is easier to recognize if we also understand the good affection that stealing is opposed to. According to the Heavenly Doctrine, that good thing is honesty. Our reading said, “Insofar as someone refrains from every form of stealing as being a sin, so far he loves honesty” (Life §80). The word “honesty” makes sense here: it’s fairly common to refer to people who don’t lead lives of crime as “honest people.” In this context, “honest” people are people who value the law and live uprightly, people who are what they seem and do what they say. But there’s even more going on if we look at the original language. The Latin word here translated as “honesty” is sinceritas, which is the root of the English word “sincerity.” In English, to be sincere is to really mean what you say. But the Latin sinceritas has a broader meaning. It means cleanness, purity, soundness, wholeness. It describes something that is no more and no less than what it’s meant to be. It overlaps with the English word “integrity,” a word that also has to do with wholeness. If we’re whole, or sincere, or in integrity, or however you want to put it, that means that what we say and what we do are in alignment; but it also means that we know where we end and another person begins. To love honesty (or wholeness, or integrity) is to honor and value the truth that other people are distinct from ourselves. They are their own, and what is theirs is not ours.
For those who like to overthink things, there are a lot of rabbit holes related to stealing that we could descend into. What does it mean to “own” something? Is private property a real thing, or is it an empty social construct? If someone has billions of dollars and will hardly notice the loss of a few thousand, is it really so wrong to take a few thousand from that person? What if that billionaire is a thief—is it really wrong to steal from thieves? Most of the time we can be saved from the rabbit-holes by the simple question: is this mine? If it isn’t mine, I cannot take it. And it isn’t up to me to decide what should theoretically belong to whom. If it isn’t mine, I must not take it.
Beneath this idea is the much bigger idea that everything actually belongs to the Lord. “The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness” (Ps. 24:1). He created all of it; He sustains all of it; no created thing could exist for a moment apart from Him. So who are we to lay claim to any of it? Even our life is a gift from God. Now He wants to share what is His, so He gives us life and lets us feel as though it is our own; and He gives us other blessings, things that we get to call ours—like our children, our homes, our morning coffee. But they’re all gifts, which is why gratitude is such an important mentality; to be grateful is to see reality for what it is. And who are we to decide that what God has given to someone else should be ours instead?
So at last we’re ready to talk about the spiritual and celestial levels of this commandment—especially the celestial level, which has to do with claiming what belongs to God. Earlier we read:
In the spiritual sense stealing means to deprive another of the truths of his faith and the goods of his charity. And in the highest sense stealing means to take from the Lord something that is His and attribute it to oneself…. (Life §80)
Before we discuss these ideas any further, we’re going to turn to our final reading for today, which is from John chapter 10. This is a familiar text; but note how, throughout it, the Lord is directly contrasting Himself with thieves and robbers [read vv. 1-10].
In the spiritual sense, stealing means taking spiritual things away from people. True Christian Religion says that the thieves and robbers in this passage from John—the ones who are trying to get the sheep to hear them and follow them—symbolize people who deprive others of truths by means of falsities and heretical beliefs (§318). So to steal, in this sense, is to take a true idea away from someone by hoodwinking them or forcing them or persuading them to accept a false idea in its place. And why would anyone do something like that? “For the sake of power” is the obvious answer. If we can control what people think, then to a certain extent we can control what they do. But we might also do something like this simply because we feel a need for other people to think the way we do. We might feel threatened by the fact that other people think differently than we do. This is especially likely to be the case if we’re doing something wrong, and we know it, and other people also know it—we might attempt to take that truth from them, by persuading them that what we’re doing isn’t wrong, so that we don’t feel threatened. This is very different from trying to share the truths we see. Again, intention makes all the difference. Are we trying to give, or to take? If our object is control—if we’re trying to take a certain perspective or power of thought from someone—we’re stealing. And note how, in the spiritual sense as well, stealing involves a failure to respect the boundary between ourselves and another person—the difference between what is ours and what is not.
In the celestial sense, to steal is to claim what is the Lord’s. In John He says, “I am the door” (10:7, 9), which means that He is the way to life and salvation. These things are His to give. Trying to get these things without Him—without His help, without acknowledging Him—is stealing. In Secrets of Heaven we read:
“The sheep” are those who have charity and consequently faith, and they enter the fold through the Lord when they acknowledge that He is the source of everything composing faith and charity; for then these flow in from Him. But to attribute them to others, especially to self, is to take them away, which is “to kill and destroy” them. (§8906)
Isn’t it interesting that when we take what is the Lord’s and claim it for ourselves we don’t just steal it—we kill and destroy it? It’s like stealing a work of art and smashing it so that the owner can’t take it back from us. It’s a classic case of “the tighter you squeeze, the less you have.” When we feel the need to take instead of accepting good things as gifts, we don’t even enjoy what we have. Whereas the opposite will be the case if we choose gratitude. The more we humble ourselves, the more clearly will we see every gift that God’s given us; and there’s no limit to what He will give. He says, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).
Amen.