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"Don’t Judge…Too Much"
Matthew 7:1-5
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Douglas M.
Donley
On Wednesday night, we were here at church holding a cookout when the
rains came. People hurried into the portico
and then the building. When the sirens
went off, the choir, the cooks, the students and everyone here dutifully filed
downstairs as we awaited the storm’s passage.
When we got home, there was no electricity and lots of debris on the
road. Kim met me at the front door and
told me that the wind had blown down our beautiful linden tree in the
backyard. I’ve spent the better part of
the weekend cutting it up and hauling the debris to the curb. We were luckier than many of our
neighbors.
There are hundreds of 50-foot trees down in our neighborhood. Some fell on houses and cars, but most of
them (like ours) missed any structures.
As we walked through the streets we have met neighbors and commiserated
together. We share this burden of
tree-loss with those surrounding us. We
share a bond.
It’s odd to look out our back window and see nothingness where a huge
tree once stood. The kids were real sad
when they heard the tree had fallen.
They enjoyed swinging from the chair we hung in its branches. It gave us great shade and beautiful colors
in the fall. They had named the tree
“tree-a”.
Rebecca sat in my lap on Thursday morning, having been up most of the
night with nightmares. As we both looked
at the empty place where the tree once stood, she said, “Daddy, why is God so
mad at us that God took tree-a? What did
we do wrong?”
I tried to tell her that God was not punishing us. It just happened. She then reminded me about Noah and the ark
and how God got mad and made it rain for forty days and forty nights because
the people were so bad. “Is God going to
do that to us?” I told her no, God
doesn’t work like that. God doesn’t want
bad things to happen and is sad with the rest of us. And wasn’t it great to have tree-a for all of these years?
What she got in her head was that God was judging her, or us. And worse, God was punishing all of us with
this wind storm.
Pat Robertson has gotten a lot of play with the judgement card. First on 9/11 he and Jerry Falwell said that God withdrew his hand of protection
because of the permissiveness of society, the ACLU, feminists, and the presence
of GLBT people. Then with hurricanes
Katrina and Rita, he said it was because Ellen Degeneres
hosted the Emmy’s and we all know that
The Left Behind series depicts God
as a vindictive judge who punished the wicked with a vengeance. The Bible even points to God as a cruel judge
particularly throughout the books of Joshua and Judges. We have to deal with this idea of God as
judge and punisher. The theology of the
atonement is that it is in God’s nature to be a vindictive judge needing blood
to settle the divine wrath. And in this
scenario Jesus is given as the sacrifice to a vindictive, angry God so that
God’s anger will not be taken out on us deserving ruthless savages. Theologian John Dominic Crossan
calls this image of God as a monster is beyond anything he can bear. He says, “I may fear this God, but why would
I worship this God?”
Judgement and punishment are tied so closely together in many of our
minds. But what if God came not to
punish and judge but to set free and give us the gift of life? What if God became human in Jesus not to
simply die an atoning death for our sins, but to walk with us on this journey
of faith and to show us the ways God wold have us live? What if God got fed up with
all of the punishing that we do of each other in God’s name. What if Jesus came so that we might stop all
of this violence?
I think that’s exactly why God came to us in Jesus. It was to show us a different way to
live. A different way to love, a healthy
way to interact with one another, and to get religion out of the clouds and away
from the warriors and the muckety mucks and into the
hands of the people who need it most.
Jesus spoke the Sermon on the Mount to unpack religion gone wrong and
to give us all a chance at real life-giving community. When we live in this kind of community then
we see the God that really matters because we can see it in each other.
Jesus said in today’s scripture, “Judge not, let
you be judged”. We know that we judge
each other. We have standards that we
are to live by. We want to know who is
right and who is wrong. We want to make
sense of our world.
But remember, along with judgement comes punishment. Along with judging comes retribution. Along with judging comes the feeling of
superiority we feel when we are more righteous than another.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said love your enemies and pray for
those who persecute you. Jesus said
don’t get angry with your brother or sister, but seek to reconcile with them. Jesus said don’t be a hypocrite. Jesus said don’t spend all of your time
worrying. Jesus said, enter through the
narrow gate—another way of saying choose the road less traveled.
Again, Jesus bucks the system and says don’t do what we always do, sit
in judgement of each other. Judge not,
lest you be judged. Instead, do something
better. Be something better. Practice a subversive spirituality that
eschews judgment and punishment for its own sake.
Now does Jesus mean that we are not to notice anything around us that
is going wrong? Of
course not. We are to pay
attention to all of that. But we are to
be careful about how we do that judging.
We judge all the time. But we are
cautioned not to judge too much. Don’t
let judgment be our religion. Rather,
practice religion that seeks reconciliation more than retribution,
love more than blood-lust.
Jesus tells us that we are to look at the log in our own eyes before we
look at the specks in someone else’s.
This means that before we dare judge someone else, we had darn well
better look in the mirror. Too often
what bugs us the most about someone else is actually a part of us. When we see that
the log in our own eyes has blinded us to see the object of our judgement as a
brother or a sister, then we have lost a great deal. We are no better than anyone else. We are not a new creation. Judge not, lest you be judged by someone
else. Judgement, like violence is a
vicious cycle which increases and makes us all crazy.
Nonviolence is based largely upon the teachings of Jesus, particularly
the Sermon on the Mount. One of the
central tenets of nonviolence is to not judge someone. Our judgement is our log. We need to make a distinction between the
person and the person’s actions. A
person’s action may be good or bad, but the person underneath is a child of
God. And a child of God is a gift, each
and every one of us. If we write someone
off or judge them as a person, then we have committed an act of violence to
them. My daughter Amanda reminds me
often that there is no such thing as a bad person, only people who do bad things. We need to remember that our enemy is not a person, our enemy is instead the untrue thought or action
that people do. Our work is to change
the thought and action and restore community with our sister or brother. We can only do this if we choose not to judge
another.
Building upon the teachings of Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi said that we need
to struggle against violence with a force more powerful than evil. He called this force Satyagraha or “Soul
Force”. I have learned a great deal
about nonviolence from my involvement with a group called Soulforce. Here is some of what Soulforce
teaches us about our adversaries:
·
Once we
see ourselves as children of a loving God and our adversaries as sisters and
brothers in need of truth and love, we can begin the soul force process that
leads to reconciliation.
·
My
adversary s also a child of the Creator; we are both members of the same human
family; we are sisters and brothers in need of reconciliation.
·
My
adversary is not my enemy, but a victim of misinformation, as I have been.
·
My only
task is to bring my adversary truth in love (nonviolence) relentlessly.
·
My adversaries motives are as pure as mine and of no relevance
to our discussion.
·
My worst
adversary has an amazing potential for positive change.
·
My
adversary may have an insight into truth that I do not have.
·
My
adversary and I will understand each other and come to a new position that will
satisfy us both if we conduct our search for truth guided by the principles of
love.
And we can only truly do this if we continually look at ourselves and
judge our actions based upon God’s priorities.
When we do that, then we can start to see a new way to live in the
world. We can see a new way to be. We can see a new way to get ourselves unstuck
from the cycle of judgement, which is a part of the cycle of violence.
May we create a world where judgement is the means by which we become
better servants of the living God and that we see ourselves as parts of a torn
fabric of humanity searching for healing.
May we live in peace.
May we subvert the popular tendency to demonize our opponents.
May our spiritual life aim toward
reconciliation and harmony with our sisters and brothers who seem bent on
judging and punishing us.
May we not succumb to the spirit of hatred, but use our indignation to
restore the torn fabric of our community typified by the subversive spirit of
love.
May we not judge…too much.