It must be a sign of the times.  Yet another shop I frequently patronise has put up signs near its service counters warning customers that abusive behaviour will not be tolerated.

I first spotted those signs at our local hospital some seven or eight years ago while calling on a parishioner.  A warning against abusive behaviour in a hospital emergency department made good sense to me.  I say that from experience.   Some twenty years ago I spent a night in a hospital emergency bed after collapsing while visiting a patient.  Somewhere around midnight an ambulance brought in an intoxicated road accident victim who had refused a police breathalyser and was now resisting an enforced blood sample being taken.  Despite the man’s abuse of the police and hospital staff several burly hospital orderlies held him down while the mandatory blood sample was taken.  Warnings against abuse in that context are appropriate – although I’m not convinced that those to whom these messages are directed are in any condition to take much notice of them.

Three years ago I went to our local Centrelink office to apply for a pension.  I noticed similar warnings against abuse of Centrelink staff were prominently displayed.  And – once again – I have witnessed the need for such warnings in that context.  More recently while at Centrelink a customer began to abuse staff and had to be escorted from the building by security.  When she continued her abuse outside the building the doors were closed and customers were shown out through a rear exit.

Sadly, in the present case the warning signs have gone up in our small local chemist shop – hardly the place where I would have expected staff to be confronted by abusive customers.  I’m also beginning to see similar warnings in other shops.  It raises the question whether ours is a less respectful society than that of a couple of decades ago.  Are folk more aggressive today than they were in a past generation?

As I’m putting this Blog together I’ve just come across a catalogue of social, moral and relational problems.   The list includes self-absorbed people, folk who are money-hungry, self-promoting, stuck-up, profane, contemptuous of their parents, crude, coarse, unbending, slanderers, impulsively wild, savage, cynical, treacherous, ruthless, bloated windbags, addicted to lust.  Wow!  Did someone just go through all the newspapers of the past week and catalogue all the evils that appeared in our communities during the last seven days?  There are certainly people in that list who would need to be cautioned against abusive behaviour.

Well, actually that list of social, moral and relational problems comes from the Bible.  It happened to be part of our daily Bible reading.  It’s taken from Eugene Petersen’s paraphrase, The Message, and came from the apostle Paul who wrote those words to his young apprentice, Timothy.  Paul was warning Timothy that as the end of the age approaches people will become increasingly immoral and careless of good social behaviour.

What’s telling about that list is that it ends up by referring to people who are “allergic to God”.   More than a thousand years earlier the Psalmist made a similar point.  In Psalm 14 he said, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” He then went on to point out that there are moral and social consequences to denying the existence of God – as he too catalogued the evils that then take place in society.  If there is no God then there is no Law-giver and if there is no Law-giver then there are no moral absolutes.  In my books there’s a relationship between the appearance of warnings against abusive behaviour in my chemist shop and the increase in the number of people in the last Aussie census who said they had no religion or were atheists.

Some years ago a friend of mine asked an interesting question.  He painted a scenario where I was walking down a dark alleyway in the city somewhere around midnight.  He said, “Between you and your car there are two burly guys standing under a streetlight.  Would it make a difference to your confidence in heading for your car if you knew whether these two men had just come out of a brothel or had just left a Bible study meeting?”

For me that was a no-brainer.  Christians are not perfect but they have a moral compass.  And that moral compass is to imitate to the best of their ability the wonderful life of Jesus, their Lord and Saviour.

John Westendorp