On Justice, Truth, and Peace

This is the text of the reflections I offered on Sunday, May 5, 2019 in the congregation I serve here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Rabban Simeon ben Gamliel whose words are at the heart of the piece the choir just sang, was a Jewish sage and leader who lived a little less than 2,100 years ago. Rav Muna, the other rabbi quoted in the choral piece, was one of the two rabbi who edited an early version of the Talmud, known as “The Talmud of the Land of Israel.”  Commenting on the teaching of ben Gamliel that “on justice, truth, and peace the whole world stands,” Rav Muna said something that Amy Bernon didn’t include in her song.  He said that in truth, those three things are not three separate things, wholly distinct from one another.  Rather, he taught, those three things are really only one thing.  That’s why, as she quoted, “where justice is done, truth is done, and peace is made.” 

This put me in mind of another saying that has this same interlocking progressive structure.  It’s actually from our Unitarian kin in Transylvania.  I imagine that our friend the Rev. István Török leads the members of our partner congregation in Olteviz in saying this with some regularity:

Hol hit—ott szeretet
Hol szeretet—ott béke
Hol béke—ott áldás
Hol áldás—ott Isten
Hol Isten—ott szükseg nincen

Elizabeth North, the Director of Music at our congregation in Concord, Massachusetts and a Unitarian Universalist composer extraordinaire, set this text to music.  It’s #1043 in the teal hymnal. (I’ll note that Beth took a little liberty with the last line):

Where there is faith there is love
Where there is love there is peace
Where there is peace there is blessing
Where there is blessing there is God
Where there is God there, there is no need.

Let’s sing that together …

Do you see the pattern?  Where justice is done, truth is done – they’re one and the same.  And where justice and truth are, peace is made.  If faith exists, then hope exists, and love exists, and peace exists, and blessings abound, and God – however you conceive of that Sacred Something, that Unlimited Love that undergirds all that is – where that is, we have all we need (which is the original last line).

For the longest time I’ve had a magnet on my refrigerator with words taken from the writings of Lau-Tzu.  It also has this same understanding of the simultaneity, the essential, fundamental equivalency of what might seem to be different things. I’ll bet that a number of you know it:

“If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.” 

I did a lot of research for these Reflections – facts and figures, Jewish history, world history, current events …  I’ve thrown all that out.  (Although I will post that version on my blog next week for those of you who are into that sort of thing.)  I threw all of that because as I wrote I kept hearing a little voice in my head.  It was our Associate Minister, Rev. Alex.  Her voice was encouraging me not to tell you things you already know – about how if we look around us there seems to be so little evidence of justice, truth, and peace in our world today.  “They know that,” she said in my head.  “They’re already living with that, living in that.  What they need is to have some thoughts about what to do with that.”  And she’s right.

What do we do when we live in a society, and increasingly a world, where injustice can seem to be the norm, where truth appears to be under attack, and where peace is hard to find?  If on these three things the whole word stands, what do we do when those supports are looking increasingly unstable? 

Well … if justice, truth, and peace are not three separate things but only one thing; and if faith, love, peace, blessing, and that Holy Whole in which “we live and move and have our being” co-exist; then for there to be any of them in the world, they must first be alive in our hearts.

So … how do we bring these needful things to life and nurture them in ourselves?  We cultivate them.  We work at it.  Sorry, but there’s no other way.  No shortcut.  We have to work at it.  We make choices day-in and day-out, responding to the situations we find ourselves in rather than reacting to them out of our cultural conditioning.  We ask ourselves again and again, “What is the truth here?  What does justice look like in this encounter?  What would Peace do?”  (WWPD)

This morning I’m going to suggest three things, three ways that we can do the work of developing peace in our hearts.  Although justice, and truth, and faith, and love, and all of those things are needed in our world, I think peace provides a good model of how to respond to our own heart’s need of them. 

So … three things we can do to cultivate, to develop, to strengthen peace in our hearts:

First, we can put ourselves into direct contact with beauty.   We’re surround by beauty here right now – after the service wander around the sanctuary and take in Marissa Minnerly’s paintings.  On the drive, or the walk home, grey though the sky is today, look at the flowers you pass.  Really notice them, how their colors pop.  Let their beauty into you.  Go out into the woods, get onto a river or lake, drink deep the natural world.  Look into the eyes of a loved one, listen to their voice, reminisce about the good times you’ve had and about all the good times to come (as Willie Nelson says in one of his songs).  For that matter, listen to music.  Music is a great way to put yourself in the presence of beauty.

I have to pause here a moment to express my deepest appreciation to the choir, to Scott, to James.  I often hear clergy colleagues bemoaning the fact that they so rarely get to worship themselves, because they’re so often facilitating worship experiences for others.  I tell them that I get to worship every single Sunday.  St. Francis of Assisi is remembered as saying to his companions, “Preach always.  When necessary, use words.”  Each and every Sunday I get to – we get to – hear powerful preaching and profound sounds of prayer.  I’ll let you in on a secret:  when Scott plays a Prelude, or James plays the Musical Meditation, or whenever the service switches from words to music, I forget all about all y’all.  I don’t give you another thought.  I just open myself and let the beauty of the music wash over me, flow through me, and I revel in the mastery we’re experiencing.  That is worship here for me, and even though I think that from time to time the preacher has something worth hearing I know that many of you feel as I do. 

I do also want to put in a good word for words, though.  I was brought up by parents who shared with their kids a love of words, and to this day a well-crafted sentence brings me joy.  A few years back my friend and mentor, the Rev. Gary Smith, served on the panel that interviewed candidates for the position of Professor of Homiletics at the Starr King School for the Ministry, our seminary out in Berkley, California.  He told me that there were two questions he asked each prospective professor:  who is your favorite poet, and what was the last novel you read?  He asked these not only because if you’re going to make your living with words – which we preachers do – then you should regularly engage with the work of others who share the craft.  He also thought it important because both poetry and fiction are acts of imagination, of taking the world as it is and opening it up, exploring it in new ways, creating something revelatory.  Poetry and (good) fiction are beautiful in a very deep sense of that word.  And they are avenues for that direct contact with beauty that can help us cultivate peace in our hearts.

My second suggestion is to regularly do things that fill us up.  Modern life can be so … draining.  It can take so much out of us, the day-in day-outness of our lives.  We can go for long periods of time – for some of us extremely long periods of time – without having the opportunity to replenish our souls, our spirits.  The things we’re doing may be really important, even enjoyable, yet the often pressured pace depletes the peace we, and the world, so desperately need.  For there to be peace in the world there must be peace in the heart. 

The concept of “extroverts” and “introverts” is often misunderstood, seeing “extroverts” as people who like people and “introverts” as people who … prefer their cats.  It’s not that at all.  There are a great many people who are introverts who really like being around people, and extroverts who enjoy being alone.  The real differences is that an introvert’s spiritual/emotional battery is refilled by solitude, while the inverse is true of extroverts – they get charged by being with others.

So for those of us who are introverts, we need to find time, make time, to be alone, and to be alone with nothing to do.  No laundry, no shopping for groceries, no making of lists.  Of course, we can do those things if doing them feeds us.  The point here is, as one of my spiritual teachers put it, “don’t do anything that you have to do, that you feel obligated to do.”  So make time for this solitary not-doing regularly.  Not every once-in-a-while when the opportunity presents itself.  Regularly.  Frequently.  We should schedule it in our day timer.

For those of us who are extroverts, we need to schedule time to hang out with people we enjoy.  And I don’t mean those social events we kind of have to go to, parties (or meetings) we feel obliged to attend, those gatherings that have some kind of purpose to them.  I mean just hanging out for the sake of hanging out.

Making the time and space for those things that fill our spirits, along with putting ourselves, regularly, into direct contact with beauty – these things can help us to develop the peace in our hearts that is essential if we’re to survive these times we’re in.

One last thing.  (And given my background as a magician, juggler, fire-eater, escape artist, and clown you should probably be expecting this one.)  Play.  “Life’s too mysterious,” a greeting card said, “don’t take it serious.”  Find a young child and get down on the floor and play with them.  Heck, get down on the floor and play even if there’s no child anywhere around.  From the floor there’s an entirely different perspective on things.  Go to kids movies – superhero films come immediately to my mind, of course, but Toy Story 4 and The Secret Life of Pets 2 are coming out soon.  Do something silly because it’s silly.  A therapist I know (who I consider a rabbi, a wise sage) told me once that he’d like to write a book about how our lives could be so much healthier if we’d try to laugh, really laugh, full-throated, no-holds-barred laugh at least once a day.  He said that he worked in a group setting he made it a practice for the staff, and that it made all the difference.  (When I told him about how much our staff laughs when we’re together he was impressed, even envious, and said that we must be doing something right.)

So .. to cultivate peace in our hearts, in our lives, we can ourselves into direct contact with whatever we find to as expressions of Beauty – wherever we find them.  We can take time, make time, to do what (re)fills our spirit, taking care to avoid doing anything that we feel like we have to do, are supposed to do, feel obligated to do.  And we can play, be silly, laugh – early and often.  These three things can help us to create peace in our hearts without which there cannot be peace in the home, among neighbors, in the cities, in the nations, or in the world; without which the world doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Amen.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

A Reason to Hope

This is the text of the reflections I offered on September 30, 2018 at the Unitarian Universalist congregation I serve in Charlottesville, VA

TV writer Aaron Fullerton photoshopped an image from inside the room in the U.S. Capitol,
next to a dystopian government meeting in the show on Twitter

As I listened on Thursday to the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, I knew that what I’d planned to reflect on this morning had to be set aside.  This happens to preachers from time to time.  I’ve had it happen as late as while I was stepping into the pulpit.  I know someone who says that there’ve been a time or two when they finished composing their sermon when they sat down after delivering it.  I at least had a few days, which was time enough to pass a draft by other eyes and hearts.  I’m glad I did, because they saved me from my worst inclinations – to fill this time with statistics, and analysis, politics.  To avoid, in other words, literally the heart of the matter.  The statistics are staggering, yet it’s the stories and the women who tell them that really matters.

Before I go any further, though, I do want to say that while I won’t be talking in any kind of explicit detail, I understand that any discussion of the way(s) our patriarchal, misogynist society degrades and dehumanizes women might be a rough sermon for some people.  If you find these reflections bringing up painful things for you, please listen to your body and your heart; reach out to others for support.  Rev. Alex is available to listen, as am I, Leia, Chris, and members of our lay Pastoral Visitors.  Your Covenant Group might be a safe space.  Perhaps a close friend or a member of your family.  What I’m getting at is that if your feelings are too large to hold, and if it is all possible, please don’t try to hold them alone.

I also want to say, here at the outset, that I recognize the last thing some of you may want is another straight, white, gender-conforming man pontificating about something that he – that I – really can’t know much about.  That’s not quite right.  I can know, but I can’t really fully understand, can’t fully comprehend, because I’m a straight, white, gender-conforming man who grew up in this country during the last half century.  I know that the anger I’ve felt these past few weeks, the disgust, is nothing compared to the anger, the pain, sometimes the shame, the grief, the fear, the exhaustion so many women have had to carry for their whole lives … which many of you have had to carry.

Over the past year, since the #MeToo movement began, a number of women I’ve known have used Facebook and other social media platforms to tell the story of their experience of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault.  All too often it was their stories, in the plural, because so many had more than one.  These women courageously, defiantly, wrote about their experience — some for the first time. They wrote of being harassed, attacked, abused, and assaulted by strangers, friends, and family.  One friend of mine from high school had a list that began with harassment in elementary school and continued throughout her life.

None of this should have been surprising.  I know the statistics — most of you probably do too —they are … alarming (to say the least).  Yet I was surprised, and shocked, deeply saddened, and really, really angry that women I’ve known have had to suffer in silence for so long.  Have had to suffer with this at all.  That’s how oblivious I’ve been able to be — I’ve been able to see, yet not see.  The dominant misogynist, white supremacist, classist, heterosexist culture in which we live does such a good job of putting a clean and polished veneer on everything, and is expert at deflecting attention:

Don’t look too hard at those young black men being shot in the streets.  Call it an anomaly, a few bad apples — don’t see the systems this violence stems from and supports.

Don’t look too hard at the staggering — and increasing — wealth gap between those with the most and those with the least — don’t see the structures that guarantee this disparity.

Don’t look too hard at the mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, aunts, grandmothers, co-workers, teachers — all those women who have been … and are being … assaulted at a rate that’s equivalent to one act of sexual violence against a woman every 98 seconds.  Oh no, don’t look too hard at any of that, and especially don’t look at all the many, many ways ways large and small that women are harassed and abused on a daily, hourly, moment-by-moment basis.  These things won’t make the evening news, yet they work together to create the cultural context from within which some men can believe they have the right to treat women as less-than-human, and other men are able (even if unconsciously) to see the truth that’s right in front of their eyes.

In this room there are women who have stories they could tell, many of whom have no doubt never told anyone except, perhaps, a therapist or a very close friend.  I imagine that some of these women have lit Candles over the years.  These stories are most certainly among those things that have “gone unsaid,” for which we light that last candle each week.  So let me say what shouldn’t need to be said but might:  these stories — your stories — have a place in the sanctuary of our hearts.  To the extent it is possible, we see you, we hear you, and we believe you, even if you never say a word.

“Women” is not a monolithic category, any more than any other group is of one mind at all times.  The past few weeks have been hard in a variety of ways, for a variety of reasons.  And the last few days?  The papers are saying that the nation was “captivated,” “riveted,” by the scene that played out in the Senate.  “Captivated?”  “Riveted”?  Those are words we use to describe action movies and thrillers.  “Sitting on the edge of your seat.”  Yet this wasn’t a performance.  This was just about as clear a distillation of our country’s dominant misogynist culture as anyone could want.  It was infuriating, nauseating, forehead slapping how-can-anyone-not-see-what’s-going-on – ing.  It was surprising and horrifying for those who’ve been able to avoid the truth of the way women are, and have been, treated in our society.  It was wearingly predictable for those who live that truth.

A week or two ago a member of the congregation stood during Joys & Sorrows to share that she had been remembering roughly 25 years ago, during the hearings concerning the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court when he was accused of sexual harassment by Dr. Anita Hill, she and her friends talked about how their generation was going to change things – they were going to raise their sons to reject the patriarchal/misogynist culture that was on such clear display in those hearings, and they would choose partners who already had.  That was in 1991, and here we are again.  It can feel – it does feel for many – that nothing has changed and that nothing is ever really going to change.  And that can lead some women (and some feminist men) to a kind of hopelessness, a demoralization born from decades upon decades of denigration and dehumanization.

There’s a school of thought which says that all sermons must end on a note of hope.  A preacher should send the congregation back into the world with inspiration.  I’m not sure that I believe that as strongly as some do, yet there is some truth in that.  And despite the way things seem right now, many of my female friends have told me that they take hop in the fact that “here” is not exactly the same as it was back then.  From the Women’s March, to the #MeToo Movement, to the predicted – hoped for –  “blue wave” (which shows every sign of being led by women , and especially women of color), there seems to be a wider and growing awareness today of what has for too long, by too many, been too ignored.  And there is a greater willingness to call things as they are or, perhaps, a refusal to let that truth continue to be ignored.

On Thursday the world witnessed a petulant poster-child for patriarchy bluster his was around the thing being unsaid:  that straight, white, gender-conforming men (and especially straight, white, gender-conforming men of means) are entitled to use and abuse women in any way that they like just as they are entitled to everything else in life.  Kavanaugh – and those male Senators who sat in judgement looking for all the world like the tribunal of Commanders in the Handmaid’s Tale – was a personification of the problem.

And there was Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who came forward to tell her story knowing the vilification that would be hurled at her like so much excrement.  She came forward – in front of the cameras, in front of the world – to speak clearly and courageously about the egregious harm that had been done to her, not only by this man, but also by the society which gave this man permission and which demanded of her acquiescence.

I asked one of my friends who’d shared her story online, sharing parts of it for the first time if she was okay, after sharing so publicly something that had until then been entirely private.  She said, simply, that she was ready to share.  And whether it’s in a Senate hearing on national television, on a person’s Facebook page, or with a hashtag at the end of a tweet, more and more women are finding themselves “ready to share.”  In numbers that would have been inconceivable not all that long ago, women are bravely telling the truth of this culture, the truth that so many just don’t want to acknowledge, and seems as though more people are willing, and able, to listen.  In that I pray we can all find some hope.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Of Judgement and Truth

This is the text of the sermon I preached at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Sunday, November 6, 2016 as part of a pulpit exchange with their Pastor, Lehman Bates.

It begins with a stoning and it ends with a stoning, and in between there are some important teachings about truth and judgement, and there’s one big challenge.  That's my 15-second synopsis of the 8th chapter of the Gospel of John, the passage my friend, and your pastor, suggested that each of us preach from this morning.
 

It all starts with what’s come to be known as “the story of the woman caught in adultery.”  We’re told that a woman had been caught in the act of adultery, and that the "teachers of the law and the Pharisees" brought her to Jesus to ask him what they should do with her.  It seems that they wanted to test him … to trip him up. 

Now, the Law of Moses was very clear -- she should be stoned to death.  But Jesus had a reputation for being merciful and compassionate, and of saying and doing things that weren't necessarily in accord with what the Law of Moses taught. 

They must have been feeling pretty proud of themselves, because it could seem that no matter what he said, they'd have him.  We’re told that he had just sat down in the temple courts to teactea and a crowd had gathered, waiting to hear his words about God's love.  So, if Jesus said that the woman should be stoned in accordance with the law, he'd look to the crowd as if he was flip-flopping on his whole "compassion thing."  But if he said that they shouldn't stone her -- said that here in the temple courts, no less -- he'd prove that he was not the good, observant Jew he claimed to be. 

Now, before we go any further I want us to be clear about what was at stake.  When someone is stoned -- as people still are in some parts of the world today -- a group of people take rocks of various sizes and throw them at someone until the cumulative effect of all that blunt force trauma leads to that person's death.  It could take minutes; it could take hours.  However long it takes, though, stoning is an extremely awful way to die. 

In all of the ways we humans have devised to kill one another, crucifixion, of course, is unimaginably brutal.  The lynching tree is hardly better.  Being shot while playing with a toy gun by a police officer who'd arrived on the scene less than two seconds before he fired and who then refused to offer any first aid to your twelve-year old self is right up there.  One thing these all have in common is that they not only accomplish their intention of killing the person, they also send a message.  They're not just a means of execution, they're also an example.  They're an expression, and a reinforcement, of the power dynamics at work in a society.  And they’re all legal.  That's another awful thing ... not only could somebody do these things, but according to one reading of the law, at least, they’re supposed to.  

So that was the trap.  Jesus either had to condone such a heinous act, respecting the law but betraying his values, or refuse to go along, staying true to his principles but breaking the law.  Well, Jesus was too smart to be so easily trapped by so simplistic a seeming dichotomy.  He didn't answer the question they asked.  Instead, he gave them the answer to the real question at hand:  who gets to judge.

Who are you, who am I, who are any of us to judge?  Who, here, hasn't made a mistake at some point in our lives?  Who here hasn't done something we wish we hadn't done, wish we could take back, wish we could go back in time to un-do?  In other words, who among us here, today, right here and right now, has not done something for which we, ourselves, could be judged?

That's the question Jesus answered that morning in the temple courts, with a crowd around him waiting to hear his teachings, and people who wanted to test him and prove him wanting, and that poor, frightened woman who could have been any one of us.  He didn't answer the question of whether or not it was right to follow the law.  He answered the question of who has the right to judge another.  No one.  Not one of us. He answered by saying that the person who had never sinned should be the one to cast the first stone, and we're told that one by one -- starting with the oldest, the scripture points out -- the people in that crowd, that mob, that had gathered to murder that young woman they had not only judged but condemned, dropped their stones and walked away.  Every single one.  And when they had all gone, Jesus asked the woman a question, "Does no one judge you?"  "There's no one here," she said.  "I don't judge you either."  Jesus replied.  "Go and sin no more."

That’s the first stoning of the two stonings, and the first teaching about truth and judgement.  The truth is that none of us is free to judge another, because each of us has our own things for which we could be judged.  No one can cast that first stone.  But we know this, don't we?  I mean, you and I, we've heard this before.  We've probably even said it to people.  Maybe we've even tried to live like that a little bit, from time to time.

But seriously now ...  how are we supposed to go through life not judging?  We're in the final days of the Presidential campaign, and it all comes down to a choice between two major party candidates, and a handful from third parties.  But how do we choose among them if we don't judge -- judge their words and their deeds, judge their temperament, their character?  How do we choose who gets our precious vote if we don't judge them?

And if you pay even the slightest attention to the news, you hear day in and day out of terrible things happening -- in our world, our country, even right here in Charlottesville -- things that seem to cry out for a response.  But knowing which ones to respond to, and how to respond, often requires us to judge.  To judge who is the victim and who is the perpetrator; to judge the impact as well as the intent.  How can we not judge?  And even in our families -- I'll bet some of you are thinking, "especially in our families" -- it would be impossible to avoid all judgement.  And it's not just that sometimes we can't help it; it's that so much of the time we seem to have to. 

In verse 15, Jesus says something interesting:  "You judge by human standards; I pass judgement on no one."

Huh.  "I pass judgement on no one.”  What are we supposed to make of that?   "You judge by human standards [but] I pass judgement on no one."

There are a lot of commentaries written about this passage, written by all kinds of scholars, with all kinds of points of view.  I know.  I looked at a bunch of them as I was writing.

But what I want to say to you this morning is not something I red in any of those commentaries, but something that I heard as I was meditating on the text itself.  It came to me that every time we judge something, someone, we're expressing an opinion.  You judge me to be a kind person, because everything you know or have heard about me leads you to think of me that way.  But you can't really know, can you?  How often have we heard the neighbors of a serial killer being interviewed, saying something like, "he always seemed like such a nice person."  So when you or I judge someone to be a kind person, or a not-kind person, we’re not stating a fact as much as we are offering an opinion.

But Jesus says that he "pass[es] judgement on no one."  I think what this means is that he doesn't have opinions about who a person is.  He knows, really knows -- he can see, really see -- who we are.  He doesn't have to judge.  The beautiful 139th Psalm says:

1 You have searched me, Lord,

    and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise;

    you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down;

    you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue

    you, Lord, know it completely.

5 You hem me in behind and before,

    and you lay your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

    too lofty for me to attain.

I think that Jesus is saying that he doesn't have to judge, doesn't have to rely on mere judgement, because the One he calls Abba, Father, knows us better than we know ourselves.  And he knows the Abba, he knows God, with such intimacy that what God knows, he knows.  "... I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me," Jesus says in verse 28.  "The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone ..."   That's verse 29.  Jesus doesn’t have to pass judgement because he knows God, and God knows us.

This is where we get to that big challenge.  Jesus not only says that he doesn’t need to judge because he knows, he also says, essentially, that those who are judging him are doing so because they don’t know. 

Your Pastor told me that he said something of the sort from this very pulpit not that long ago.  It is so much easier to know about God, than to know God.  It is so much easier to embrace the concept than to make the connection.  Far, far, far too often religion becomes focused on the rules, when it’s really about the relationship.

⁴² Jesus said to them [and this is still from John 8], “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. ⁴³ Why is my language not clear to you?  […]   ⁴⁷ Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.”

It’s a good thing that Jesus doesn’t pass judgement or he might have had even more to say!

But that’s the thing.  If I look at myself honestly in the mirror, I have to acknowledge that this isn’t a mere judgement.  It’s not just an opinion.  It’s the truth.  I don’t know God with the fullness God invites me to.  I don’t tend to, care for, cultivate a relationship with the Nameless One such that I, too, might call God “Abba.”

There’s an old joke that a great place to hide from God is in church; the best way to hide from God is to become a minister.  I have so much “sacred” work to attend to that I can run out of time for the holy communion with God that gives that work Life.  (Have you ever noticed that if you rearrange the letters in the word “sacred” you get the word “scared”?) 

You probably have your own version of this same problem.  There’s so much to do taking care of the kids, trying to make ends meet, caring for grandkids (or grandparents), making a plate of something for someone in need, dealing with the courts, struggling with an addiction, trying to make a difference in the world, trying just to get by.  There’s so much to do that we’re often more Martha than Mary.  And if you’re anything like me, you judge yourself – and maybe judge yourself harshly – for that.  The funny thing is, that judgement can become one more thing in the way of deepening our relationship – the guilt that we’re not as intimate with God as we know God wants becomes a stumbling block to really knowing God at all.

In the little time I have left I want to offer some good news.  That’s what preachers are supposed to do, right?  It’s in this chapter of the Gospel of John that Jesus says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  The fact that we don’t know God as deeply, as richly, as God would like is only part of the truth.  The other part is that God’s okay with that.  We judge by human standards, we live by human standards, because we are humans, and God knows that.  God doesn’t expect any more of us than that.  God is patient and kind.  God always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres.  That’s good news.

And that good news, that truth, can set us free from the guilt and shame that holds us in bondage because God tells us – God promises us – that there is no one here who can judge us, tells us that there are no stones ready to fly, because there is no one who can cast that first stone.  And through the eyes of Jesus God looks at us just as Jesus looked at the poor, frightened woman, and says, “I don’t judge you either.  Go and sin no more.”

One last thing.  I said that this chapter begins with a stoning and that it ends with one.  It seems that the folks Jesus was talking with that morning in the temple courts didn’t like the truth he showed them about themselves, didn’t like being told that they knew more about God than they knew God directly.  So they did what we humans so often do when we don’t like the message we hear, they judged, and condemned, the messenger.  John tells us that that crowd picked up stones with the intention of stoning Jesus.  But while they were gathering their weapons, Jesus disappeared.

And, apparently, this didn’t deter in him the least.  He went right back with his mission of spreading God’s love.  John’s 9^th chapter begins with Jesus healing a man who’d been blind since birth.  May we pray that our blindness might be healed, so that we might drop the stones in our hands and stop fearing the stones in the hands of others, so that we might focus our hearts on the God who sees us, and knows us, and loves us.

Amen.