It is a sensory feast.  Brightly colored, exotic flowers.  The fragrance of flora, coffee, and traditional culinary offerings.  Row upon row, stall upon stall of every conceivable offering.  Purveyors of every conceivable craft engage their commercial dance with customers to entice and negotiate.  Local woodcraft, spices, flowers, foods, toys, coffee, and festive traditional clothing pile on sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures to overpower yet delight.  The city market in San Jose, Costa Rica is an experience not to be missed.  With all the natural treasures of this incredibly biodiverse country, San Jose’s market is easily overlooked.   

My daughter and I tried to take it all in.  We passed a stall of traditional Costa Rican dresses. Long flowing skirts and ruffled blouses, intricately embroidered and brightly colored, caught our eye.  This would be a perfect keepsake of our adventure.  The young lady attending the booth assisted us to find the size and style Emma needed.  The prices seemed reasonable and the exchange rate favorable.  So, I prepared to pay the price listed on the tag.  The proprietor frowned.  She brought out her calculator and declared in broken English all the merits of her product.  A little slow on the uptake, it finally dawned on me that the “price was not the price.”  It was just the starting point for the dance.  

My willingness to pay an arbitrarily assigned price, though better for the seller, was not the way it was done.  I was to offer half.  She would counter with 90%, to which I would counter-offer 75%.  Then, and only then, could the sale happen.   Costa Rican culture expects to establish the price of everything through negotiation and mutual agreement.   It would not do to pay the sticker price!  Commodities simply do not have a fair market value.   Their value is intrinsically connected to the relationship between buyer and seller.  And so, every price is unique. 

This is an important insight.  The value of things is not an intrinsic quality.  Nor entirely dependent on laws of supply and demand.  The value of a thing, in significant ways, reflects the value of the one to whom it belongs and the relationships of those who share it.  The prophet Nathan makes this shockingly clear to David when the prophet confronts the King about his sin with Bathsheba, telling him a story about the rich man’s wanton theft of a poor man’s only lamb. 

Do you understand this?  That the value of another’s things reflects the degree to which you value them?   How careful are you when someone loans you something to treat it with care and return it promptly?  How concerned are you about guarding what is under your care, your habits and possessions, to ensure they harm no one?   Do you take responsibility for the impact your things have on others?   The law speaks of liability.  But these concerns are more about our love for one another.  Our possessions are, in many ways, an extension of our relationships.  And the means through which we love our neighbor as ourselves. Or not!

It is easy to gloss over property laws in the Old Testament.  Most of us don’t have a donkey or an ox?  Yet, anything more than a cursory reading quickly reveals timeless principles to instruct us in the our care for our own property and that of other’s.   Do we accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions, our negligence, or our unfaithfulness in the use of our neighbor’s possessions?  Does our love for our neighbor as ourselves extend to our fences, our dogs, our shared spaces, our care for things borrowed?  Does our neighborliness make it clear that we are the covenant people of God?  Or confirm the world’s suspicion that our faith is a hypocritical cover story?

Join us as we examine Exodus 21:28-22:17 and examine what the Bible says about our responsibility to love our neighbors by the way we use our things, what happens when we fail to exercise this love, and why it matters.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube.