Judging/Loving
Sermon preached by the Reverend Patricia Farris
June 19 - 24, 2005
Bless
us this morning, O God, to be your chosen ones, holy and beloved,
thankful, clothed in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience
and love, everything bound together in perfect harmony. And let the
peace of Christ rule in our hearts. Amen.
The theme of this service
is Judging. As I was working away on these sermons after I’d
received your invitation to come, I first had to get my head into
the themes that had been chosen for each of these worship services,
each one a different aspect of what it means to live a blessed life.
It was all making great sense to me—Longing, Truth-telling,
Accepting, Listening, Remembering... But judging? Can you imagine
singing: “Lord, I want to be more judging in my heart”?
I whipped off an email
to Anne Hook, my new friend, basically saying “are you nuts?”
Of course, I am too polite to say that, so I asked nicely: “You’ve
chosen a word that is the opposite of what the blessed life should
be about--don’t you want to call this one “Loving”?
She replied that that was just the point. By Day Three, your Worship
Team had figured, we might be getting a bit too complacent, maybe
even a bit self-congratulatory, and would need to be jarred awake
by this word “judging.” We would need to really think
about why we are too often judging rather than loving others.
They were right about that,
seems to me. Isn’t judging something of an occupational hazard
for those of us who fancy ourselves among God’s beloved? Aren’t
we prone to begin to think more of ourselves than we ought? Don’t
we sometimes take pride in our piety, our service, the hours we dedicate
to doing the Lord’s work? And if we begin—however unconsciously—to
set ourselves above others, do we not risk the temptation to judge?
Building on yesterday’s
theme of truth-telling, today’s focus on Judging calls us again
to look deep within and examine our hearts. Judging is not the way
of our Savior and Lord. Blessed are the meek, Jesus said, the gentle,
the humble. The old Aramaic roots of that word carry connotations
of one who has softened that which is unnaturally hard within, one
who has surrendered to God, letting go of moral heaviness within.
Blessed are the meek, those in whom God’s love has softened
the hardness of the heart.
There’s a story told
about John Wesley that may or may not be true. It’s certainly
something that we could well imagine him saying. It seems that he
learned that a certain British general, James Oglethorpe, had caught
one of his servants stealing a bottle of his wine and had beaten him
severely for it. The legend goes that Wesley confronted Oglethorpe
and asked that the general find it in his heart to forgive his servant.
“Sir,” said the officer, “I never forgive.”
To which Wesley replied: “Then, sir, I hope you never offend.”
As Wesley clearly knew,
an exaggerated sense of one’s own worth is a terrible and dangerous
thing, for it’s built on the premise of one’s superiority
over another. Individuals do it. Nations do it. In fact, we are so
prone to thinking better of ourselves than we ought that we don’t
even realize that we’re doing it until we feel so entitled to
harbor these inflated notions about ourselves that our arrogance and
pride is hidden from us and seems quite natural. Eventually the need
that we have to find fault with another, to point out another’s
brokenness and sin, overshadows our need to confess our own.
But today’s
theme reminds us that to embrace our identity as God’s beloved
does not mean that we set ourselves over others, but should move us
from judging to loving. As Henri Nouwen has written, “[being
the Beloved] does not mean excluding others, but includes them. Instead
of rejecting others as less valuable, it accepts others in their own
uniqueness. ….Once we deeply trust that we ourselves are precious
in God’s eyes, we are able to recognize the preciousness of
others and their unique place in God’s heart.” In God’s
house are many dwelling places. There is room and welcome for all.
One of my most favorite contemporary articulators of faith is the writer,
Anne Lamott. She’s brutally honest about her own struggles with
alcoholism and disarmingly clear about how God, through a little urban,
multi-racial Presbyterian congregation in Northern California, saved
her life and taught her about how to love herself and others.
In
one chapter of her newest book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, she
describes how as a child she loved to work to get the tangles out of
necklace chains. If you’ve ever done it, you’ll know what
she means. Great patience is required, working it and working it with
a needle, working the knot until it lets go.
Anne
goes on to describe one particular sermon her pastor gave about loving
one’s enemies. She wrote: “that day my pastor was speaking
directly to me. She said that Christians [too often] speak in reverent
terms of grace, justice, equality, mercy, and then we despise people
who are also created in God’s image, who are [God’s] children,
too…”
But
then Lamott turns the same teaching back on herself and thinks about
the people she most despises in this world, whose politics she can’t
stand, the people who make her crazy and she realizes this means that
God loves them, too, and she needs to as well. Not agree with them,
but love them.
She
wrote: “I felt a shift inside, the conviction that love was having
its way with me, softening me, changing my cold stone heart…Driving
home I tried to hold on to what I’d heard that day: that loving
your enemies was nonnegotiable. It meant trying to respect them, it
meant identifying with their humanity and weakness….it had felt
almost like …a baby sense of hope, a chance of release from the
constant knots in my stomach. I had poked a needle into another knot
that day, tugged, let go, and finally felt some give…So tug tug,
poke poke. I have to believe that if I do this, it will cause change—there
will be more give, and give means there is more light between the links.
You never now exactly where the knot is going to release, but usually,
if you keep working with it, it will.”
The
spiritual work we all must do is this work of untangling the knots within
us. Henri Nouwen put it this way, “in the heart of God, we can
see that the other human beings who live on this earth with us are also
God’s sons and daughters…and [in the heart of God we can
also see] our own belovedness…God says, ‘give all your love
to me, and I will give you both your neighbor and yourself.”
How
do we turn from being those who judge to those who love? How do we become
truly welcoming, in our practice and in our heart of hearts? How do
we untangle the knots of fear and prejudice and arrogance inside to
let the love of God soften the hardness of our hearts?
Here’s one way we’re doing it in my congregation back home.
About two years ago, we re-vamped our early service a bit. We started
singing from The Faith We Sing and involving the children in that service.
We open each week with congregational singing and as we move into a
time of Welcome and Fellowship, we sing Marty Haugen’s “All
Are Welcome.” Every week. A number of people rolled their eyes
a lot at first. That song again?? Now so you’ll know, we’re
a fairly affluent place, pretty homogenous in most ways, a place where
resistance to coming forward for communion instead of passing the trays
in the pews came from people who quietly confessed that they were worried
about how people might judge how they were dressed, how they looked.
Well,
after about a year of singing “All Are Welcome”, one of
our leaders came to me and said “Pastor, you know that song we
sing every week, “All Are Welcome”? “Yeah.”
“I couldn’t get it out of my head all week.” “Great”,
I thought, but I said: “That’s interesting.” “You
know, I think we sing that because that’s how we really want our
congregation to be….We’re not there yet, are we?”
No,
we’re not there yet. But as I looked at the families of the
kids we confirmed a few weeks ago, I saw it beginning to happen. There
they were, kids and families right in front of us all, representing
all kinds of diversity and difference, with much more of the variety
of all God’s children than we had embraced before. One kid whose
parents have sort of gone AWOL, being raised by her grandparents.
2 kids from multi-racial homes. 2 others from the community who’d
been drawn in from our summer program and are now working to bring
their parents to church with them. One kid whose cousin is gay and
a full part of their family with his partner.
One
kid whose dad has been in and out of jail and detox programs. One
kid and her mom who’d been homeless for awhile and are now back
on their feet. All right there alongside kids born with the proverbial
silver spoon in their mouth. There they were, our confirmands and
their families, all taking very seriously their pledge to follow Jesus
Christ and become faithful members of the United Methodist Church.
The
song we sing invites us into the kind of all-inclusive love and hospitality
that is at the heart of Beatitude faith. We’ve been growing
into it, sometimes in spite of ourselves. We just keep singing the
song. And we sing it because it’s not really true yet, but more
and more we want it to be true, and little by little, it’s happening.
Why
do we judge when instead, God calls us to love and to bless? The Beatitudes
always take us from the “what is” of this world into the
“what will be” of the world God intends. We hear the blessing
and instantly we are invited to enter into its promise even now. The
Beatitudes draw us away from judging and excluding, from setting ourselves
above others, from seeing ourselves as better than others, more faithful
than others, more blessed than others, into the all-inclusive love
of the Kingdom of God. We grow from judging to loving.
Let
me close today, again with the words of Henri Nouwen, with his words
from this morning’s bulletin cover: “Claiming your own
blessedness always leads to a deep desire to bless others. The characteristic
of the blessed ones is that, wherever they go, they always speak words
of blessing…It flows naturally from our hearts. When we hear
within ourselves the voice calling us by name and blessing us, the
darkness no longer distracts us. The voice that calls us the Beloved
will give us words to bless others and reveal to them that they are
no less blessed than we.”
And
so, God’s people keep on singing: “Lord, I want to be
more loving in my heart…” We sing because we want it to
be so. We sing until it describes who we are in Christ Jesus. ‘Til
then, we’ll just keep on singing.
Notes:
John
Wesley story from Kolbell, Erik. What Jesus Meant: The Beatitudes
and a Meaningful Life. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
Lamott,
Anne. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead Books,
2005.
Nouwen,
Henri. Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World. New
York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992.
© Patricia E. Farris, 2005. Permission is given for brief quotation
with attribution. All other rights reserved.
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