37 “Don’t judge, and you won’t be judged. Don’t condemn, and you won’t be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good portion—packed down, firmly shaken, and overflowing—will fall into your lap. The portion you give will determine the portion you receive in return.”
39 Jesus also told them a riddle. “A blind person can’t lead another blind person, right? Won’t they both fall into a ditch? 40 Disciples aren’t greater than their teacher, but whoever is fully prepared will be like their teacher. 41 Why do you see the splinter in your brother’s or sister’s eye but don’t notice the log in your own eye? 42 How can you say to your brother or sister, ‘Brother, Sister, let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ when you don’t see the log in your own eye? You deceive yourselves! First take the log out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s or sister’s eye. (Common English Bible)
“The
Sermon on the Mount’s Little Sibling: Luke’s Sermon on the Plain,” Week Four
The mother’s words soared out of the page as I
read them—convicting me in a way I hadn’t experienced in some time, and
certainly not after being inundated with so many pleas for help—many of which I
was simply completely unequipped to meet—that I had simply become worn down,
inadequate and impatient with the aid our church has to offer. Helping actual, real people and families
became a line to check off on my to-do list, like preparing for a Bible study
or writing a blog post or downloading my sermon for that week off the internet…
(yuk yuk yuk) And that is never a
sustainable mentality to do ministry in.
I confess this weariness to you to underscore
the impact that a mother’s words had on me.
This is, in part, what she had to say:
When our
son Ryan was living on the streets of Seattle, using drugs and doing all kinds
of awful things to afford them, I prayed that the people he encountered would
remember that he had a story. I prayed
that the police officers, the nurses, the pedestrians he bumped into and the
people he stole from might have the insight to know that he never chose to
become an addict. He never wanted to be
miserable. When he was a little boy, he
never dreamed of growing up to become imprisoned by addiction. I begged to God to bring people in his life
who would trust that Ryan had a story, who would see the image of God in Ryan
and who would reflect that image right back to him.
Now I
pray each day that God will allow me to see His image in every person I meet,
be that person the homeless guy on the corner, the man in the truck who flipped
me off for forgetting to signal before my lane change, or the angry, entitled
woman screaming at the checkout guy in the Costco line. I want to remember that I don’t know their
stories and to extend to them the same mercy and grace I wanted people to give
to my son.
This is another new sermon series for the fall,
and this series will take us all the way into November. And there really is a simple reason behind
how this sermon series got cooked up in the first place (beyond, you know, the
inspiration and movement of the Holy Spirit, me throwing darts at the wall, the
consulting of sheep entrails, that sort of thing). Luke 6 contains some of the most blunt,
point-blank ethical teachings of Jesus in any Gospel, but those teachings,
nicknamed the Sermon on the Plain (can you guess why?), tend to be overshadowed
by the magnum opus of Matthew’s Gospel, the Sermon on the Mount, which both
parallels and dwarfs the Sermon on the Plain.
So, we’re spending these six weeks giving some much-needed attention to
a sermon that often gets short shrift, even though it contains some of the most
famous one-off ethical pronouncements Jesus offers, including “love your
enemies,” “if someone steals your coat, give them your shirt as well,” and
“judge not, and you will not be judged.”
My aim is to present all of these teachings to you in their context of
an entire series of teachings, and so we set the scene, the backdrop for where
this teaching happens: an otherwise thoroughly nondescript plain (hence the
sermon’s title) where Jesus performed healing miracles on an untold number of
people before He even began teaching.
Since then, though, the teaching began in earnest, with what we might
call in the parlance a doozy: the whole “Woe are the rich,” “Woe are the
filled,” and “Woe are the hungry” bit right after the beatitudes, and the
lessons didn’t get any easier to swallow with last week’s instructions on
giving even to those who steal from us and turning the other cheek to those who
harm us. So, naturally, the degree of
difficulty once more gets doubled down, as Jesus admonishes us in no uncertain
terms against one of our favorite pastimes: judging other people.
And don’t lie to me and say it isn’t a favorite
pastime—we all do it. You, me, Judge
Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Judge
Whateverthehellelseisoncrappydaytimetelevision.
It’s part of our programming, because if we judge someone else to be
wrong, it means that we are right for having pointed out their flaw or their
sin. It means that we have, if even only
a little bit, managed to assert our moral superiority over the other person.
Christians these days, let me tell you, we are all
about asserting that moral superiority.
We love playing that card, we love it oh so much. From scolding unwed couples in a variety of
subtle and not-so-subtle ways to shaming addicts for a choice that has turned
into an illness, we still retain the role we had way back during the Spanish
Inquisition of policing everybody else’s own morality, only this time, we don’t
use physical torture devices (unless you count awkward singles’ ministry
groups).
And why wouldn’t we? Part of our faith is believing, knowing, that
we’ve come across some sort of truth, and truth is inherently right. Which means that if we have this truth, we
are right also. And we are right in
thinking this, at least at first: we have come to believe that God loves us and
expressed that love through the message, life, crucifixion, and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. But being right in this
singular area of our lives can cause us to be wrong in so, so many other areas.
Because, see, this solid rock of Christ’s love
that we stand upon is only a rock and only as solid in our lives as we apply it
to be. There are things in faith’s
wheelhouse, things that it is exceptionally good at dealing with. A loved one is sick? Your faith can comfort you in the form of
prayer, the community of a church, and the love expressed in the Bible. Upset at how someone is being treated? Your faith can make you strong enough to
speak out for them and to uplift them before those who are hurting them,
because, after all, blessed are the meek.
But—and here, I am going to say something that
might rub you a bit the wrong way—that faith is not inherently good. Faith may be true, but truthiness (because
Stephen Colbert made that a word) and goodness are not always 100% the same
thing. No, rather, faith is only as good
as the person who has it. It is like
anything else we possess that can be used for good or for bad depending on the
person who is holding onto it.
We know, we’ve seen, all sorts of people whose
faith has turned them into truly terrible, despicable people, and I don’t have
to name them off for you—fundamentalists-turned-hate-groups, religious
terrorists of all stripes, the proponents of the caste system in India—and
there is a common denominator at work here: namely, that these are all people who
have let allegiance to such a narrow strip of their faith turn their lives into
something utterly false.
It’s a paradox.
A painful, violent paradox that a bit of truth leads someone to living a
false life. But that is what we see
happening: people who rush to apply laws and doctrines that have no place in a
21st century world simply because they have come to believe that the
truth they once knew to be saving for them demands as such. They become prejudiced because everything
must be filtered through such a narrow, primitive lens. After all, if you are judging the world by
only one or two very specific, narrow criteria, it streamlines the whole
process of judgment. You don’t have to
think, you don’t have to wrestle, you don’t have to struggle. Thumbs up or thumbs down. Good or bad, all on the basis of that
prejudice.
I know that this is a loaded word, prejudice,
so let’s break it down before we continue on: literally, the word is a
compounding of the prefix ‘pre’ (meaning before or prior to something) and
judice, from the Latin word juris, from which we get words like judicial,
judicious, judgment…and judgmental. We
might say someone is ‘prejudiced’ in terms of being, say, racist or sexist, but
literally what the word ‘prejudiced’ means is an adjective describing someone
who has judged ‘pre,’ prior or before they should do so. It describes someone who has, quite
literally, rushed to judge.
And so far, I have been talking about pretty
extreme examples of this: fundamentalism, terrorism, bigotry, and the
like. But lend an ear once more to the
mother’s story about her son that I read to you at the very beginning. Confronted with a shelterless drug addict on
the street, how are you liable to react?
Not just externally, but internally.
Pity? Anger? Compassion?
Judgment?
Because realistically, that’s what this passage
has to say to us. The chances of any of
us coming face-to-face with, say, a member of ISIS in order to rebuke them for
their crimes and prejudices is probably nil.
But the chances of us coming face-to-face with someone in active drug
addiction, or a teenaged mother, or any of the other groups of people we are
liable to pass more subtle forms of judgment on today? I’d mark those chances at a near certainty.
So are we willing to admit now that we might
indeed harbor prejudice, and not in the terms of racial or sexist lines? That we might harbor prejudice towards
someone based on a particular characteristic of them? That we might think this characteristic, be
it a religious affiliation, or a sexual orientation, or a partisan identity,
completely defines them when in fact they are far more multifaceted and
multidimensional than we could ever possibly know in that moment?
Or are we still happier to point out that speck
in their eyes while ignoring the logs in our own?
We talk an awful lot about surrender here in
church—surrendering ourselves to Christ, surrendering our lives to God, but
what I’m not sure we know what any of that means anymore. Our lives represent a series of choices,
points in the road where we can go one direction or another. I can choose to do this, to say that, or to
not to. Which means that every day that
I wake up, and that you wake up, and get out of bed, you can choose whether to
be a Christian, a good person or not.
What if making that choice really meant
surrendering all other choices? What if
choosing the will of Christ really meant surrendering our will to judge? Do you think that we could do that? Or is that a part of our selfishness that we
still feel the need to clutch onto, that we simply cannot live without?
A lot of you here have also been the subject of
another person’s prejudices. I know
because you have told me. And those
stories…those stories of how it felt to be seen only as an addict, only as an
unwed parent, only as a person with their hand out needing help…those stories
are living proof of the Gospel’s truth here.
Proof painfully gained, wrenchingly remembered, that what Jesus says
here is indeed part of that greater truth that we have come to know: judgment
that does not come from God or from Christ will rarely cause us to reconcile
with God and with Christ. Our judgment
of one another—your judgment of another person—is not what will ultimately
restore right relationship between God and a wayward sinner who is casting
about for the way back home.
So judge not.
Condemn not. And I tell ye, ye
shall be forgiven. Thanks be to
God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
October 19, 2014
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