Recently my husband was working on a sermon and wanted to use an illustration that he had heard years before. He wanted to make sure that he had all the facts right before using it, so we did some research. We started by watching videos of other pastors using the illustration. With each one that we watched we began to find it humorous how the story got exaggerated with each telling.
The basic story was that there was a painting of a chess game called “Checkmate.” It depicted a demonic figure playing against a man. Someone saw the painting and realized that the demonic figure that claimed “checkmate” was wrong, and that the man he was playing could still win. Different speakers who have relayed this story came up with a wide variety of details. Most of the speakers said that the painting was painted by Faust and was hanging in the Louvre in Paris when the man saw it. Some said that the man was a “chess expert”, that he pondered the painting for several hours, that he jumped up and yelled “there’s one more move.” These are a few of the many renditions we heard.
Thankfully, we discovered the original article in the Columbia Chess Chronicle in 1888, that told the story. There were several letters to the editor written in response to the article and the story was clarified even further in those letters. The painting was hanging in a home in America not in the Louvre in France, it wasn’t painted by Faust, but rather by Moritz Retzsch. The man who saw it was actually a chess expert, but did not ponder the painting for hours nor did he jump up and yell “there’s one more move”. The chess expert, Paul Morphy, simply suggested that they put the pieces on the board like they were arranged in the painting to see if the man could still win. As they worked through the possible moves, it became apparent that the man in the painting could still win.
At some point the speakers who relayed the story and got it quite wrong either heard it wrong from someone else and retold it how they heard it, or they purposely added false details to make the story more interesting. However, in this particular case, the message in the end was still the same; don’t give in when the devil appears to have won, remember the promises of God, He always wins in the end.
In another case that I read about this week the message in the end is quite different. This week in the news and in social media there were several outcries of racism in reference to a Peanut’s cartoon. The reactions seem justified when you just look at the specific parts of the cartoon that they were concerned about. However after further review, there is much more to the story.
Franklin, the first black character to be portrayed in the Peanut’s cartoons, was introduced in 1968 as a way to honor black people and the changing times. Americans were being awakened to the atrocity of treating people of another color differently. After the murder of Martin Luther King, a woman wrote to Charles Schultz (the creator of Peanuts) with an idea. She felt that by introducing a black child he could have influence to help people treat each other equally, and put an end to the “fear, hate and violence”. In fact, the woman who wrote the letter to Mr. Schultz took time to consult with black Americans to ask them what would be the best way to introduce a black character, so that it would be helpful and not harmful.
To say that Peanut’s cartoons were racist, without any research, would be an easy conclusion to make, seeing how Franklin was portrayed initially. However, after research, it’s clear to see that this was a step forward and not a step back as was implied by those who have accused Charles Shultz of racism. In our world of social media where a thought can be exclaimed immediately all over the world, those immediate thoughts put out there so quickly and frivolously have impact that in some cases have changed the course of our history.
Proverbs 18:13 says “Whoever answers before listening is both foolish and shameful.” Listening means to consider something intelligently and to carefully understand it. When we have a thought about something and immediately tell someone or put it on social media without doing any research to know if it is really true or to know the story behind it, we do great harm to our society. We often wonder why there is so much polarization and many harmfully expressed opposing views. Could it be that if each one of us would slow down and intelligently consider our thoughts before we speak them out, we would begin to see a softening in the foolish rhetoric?
Jill Johnson 
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