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LINKS TO THE SERMONS |
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| The Good, The Bad, And The Holy Rev. Stan Gollery Luke 6:37-50 June 17, 2007
The reading for today shows Jesus as a guest in the home of a Pharisee. The Pharisees were men who did their best to live conscientiously religious lives; they had a rigorous approach to their faith, trying to learn just what it was that God wanted them to do, and doing their best to do it. They knew the scriptures; they knew what was required and what was forbidden, and they lived accordingly. They were quite serious about following the laws of God.
Jesus was not always on friendly terms with the Pharisees. Some of them challenged him. They questioned his authority to teach and heal and forgive sins. Many of them thought he was an arrogant show-off, an impostor trying to fool the people into believing he was a prophet sent from God.
Jesus condemned them, not because they attacked him, but because he saw their rigid rule-keeping as a barrier to the true faith; he saw them as men who were getting in the way of the Kingdom of God. They called him a false prophet; he called them hypocrites.
But here’s Jesus, eating with a Pharisee in the Pharisees home, a dinner guest, willing to keep contact with the people who opposed him.
And then she walked in. The reading calls her a woman of the city, who was a sinner. She’d heard that Jesus was in that house, and she couldn’t stay away. “She stood behind him at his feet, weeping,” washing his feet with her tears, drying them with her hair, soothing them with ointment.
You might have trouble with the practical aspects of that picture. What was she doing there” How did she get in? How could she be standing up and washing his feet at the same time?
Apparently homes were more open to uninvited visitors then than they are now. The Pharisee didn’t seem surprised or concerned that she was there. Maybe it had something to do with the law of hospitality. Hospitality was a requirement of the Hebrew faith. Strangers were to be made welcome in your home, your city, your country. While they were with you, you were to protect them and take care of them. It wasn’t just good manners, it was a religious requirement. It was one of the things that God’s people did, because they were God’s people.
And the woman could reach Jesus‘ feet from a standing position because people in those days didn’t sit in chairs around a table when they ate; they lay on their sides on benches, or couches, with their legs extended along the length of the bench. So Jesus’ feet would be within reach of the woman as she stood behind him.
That doesn’t have anything to do with the point of the story. I just didn’t want you to have a mental picture of her crawling around under the table, squeezing in among the chairs and the knees and the feet, trying to do her work.
The Pharisee knew that she was not one of the good people; he knew that she was one of the bad ones. And he was surprised that Jesus was letting her touch him. The Pharisees tried to avoid contact with people who didn’t observe God’s laws as thoroughly as they did; and they were especially careful not to touch people who were sick - the illness might be God’s punishment for sin - or people who were obvious sinners. They thought touching, or being touched by, a spiritually unclean person would make them spiritually unclean, too.
But Jesus made no objection, no move to get away from the woman’s touch. And the Pharisee saw his lack of concern as proof that Jesus was not the prophet people thought he was. If Jesus was a real prophet, he thought to himself, his special powers would let him know what kind of woman wastouching him.
And Jesus told him a parable about two men who owed different amounts of money, whose debts were canceled by the lender, and made the point that the one who owed the most was the most grateful. This woman, he said, is acting appropriately; because her sins were greater than those of most people, her experience of forgiveness was greater than that of most people; and because of that her love for him was greater than most.
I’m thankful to God for a great many things. I’m thankful for my family, I’m thankful I’m relatively healthy; I’m thankful I live in a country where I can say what I think out loud. I’m thankful to be part of this congregation. I’m thankful for most of the people in the choir. I’m thankful for a whole lot of things. But I think the thing I’m most thankful about is the fact that God has not put me in charge of deciding who is good and who’s bad.
For one thing, it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference. For another, we’ve been told not to do it.
Jesus said “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged.”. He’s speaking of evaluating another person’s spiritual condition, which is something that only God is permitted to do. Now, it seems to me that trying to take over God’s job is not only presumptuous, but possibly dangerous. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not afraid of God in the sense that I think He’s following me around, ready to swat me if I get out of line. But doing something that God has reserved for Himself, like deciding who’s good and who isn’t, seems to me like issuing a direct challenge to God Almighty, saying “I’ve decided to take over this part of your job; I can do it as well as you can,” thus giving God a valid reason to slap me down. As I say, I don’t think God’s going to swat me, but why take chances? I mean, I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid. If God wants to make the decisions about who’s good and who’s bad in His sight, I’m perfectly willing to let Him do it. He doesn’t need my help.
I sometimes feel like I’m alone in that attitude. There seems to be a long line of people who are willing to announce to the world who’s good and who’s bad, especially who‘s bad.
But deciding who’s good and who’s bad is God’s business, not ours. We’d better remember who’s in charge. I think the simplest definition of the Christian faith may be this: There is only one God - and it isn’t you.
There’s a practical reason not to judge other people’s goodness or badness, besides the fact that we’ve been told it’s not our business. It’s just this: You may not know them well enough. You probably don’t know the whole story. There may be something going on behind someone’s obnoxious behavior that you don‘t know about.
For example: Years ago, there was a woman who came to church every Sunday; her husband hardly ever showed up. I thought he was just one of those men who hold their religion in their wife’s name. I asked somebody about him, and they said, “Well, you know, he drinks a lot”. And I thought, Oh, that poor woman - married to a drunk. And I thought I knew everything I needed to know about him.
But one day someone was talking to me about him, and they said, “Every night he has the same dream. In the dream, he sees pieces of eighteen and nineteen year old boys scattered across the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.”
At that point, World War II had been over for twenty years. Twenty years. Every night for twenty years he saw that horror all over again. Twenty years. Seven thousand nights - so far. Knowing this about him didn’t make his drinking any less of a problem for his friends and his family, but it certainly changed my attitude toward him. Maybe you don’t know the whole story.
And maybe you never will know what a “bad” person is facing, and what it‘s like to face that. There are times when you just can’t put yourself in someone else’s place, because you‘ve never been in that place; so you can’t realistically judge their goodness or their badness. Even if that was up to you, which it isn’t.
But there is a lot of judging going on, a lot of separating the population into good guys and bad guys. A lot of evaluation of people’s characters.
One fun way of doing this is called gossip. Talking about people who aren’t part of the conversation. By an odd coincidence, I got an e-mail about gossip yesterday:
Mildred, the church gossip, and self-appointed monitor of the church's morals, kept sticking her nose in to other people's business. Several members did not approve of her extra curricular activities, but feared her enough to maintain their silence.
She made a mistake, however, when she accused George, a new member, of being an alcoholic after she saw his old pickup parked in front of the town's only bar one afternoon. She emphatically told George (and several others) that everyone seeing it there would know what he was doing.
George, a man of few words, stared at her for a moment and just turned and walked away. He didn't explain, defend, or deny... he said nothing. Later that evening, George quietly parked his pickup in front of Mildred's house, walked home, and left it there all night.
There used to be a restaurant in our neighborhood called the Hot Gossip Café. I always wondered what went on in there. Unfortunately, it closed before I had a chance to find out. I guess the gossip wasn’t hot enough.
There is a kind of attractiveness to talking about people who are somewhere else - you can say whatever you want, true or not; it gives you a feeling that you have knowledge and wisdom that other people don’t have. And so a lot of people follow the lead of a woman named Alice Longworth, who said, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anyone - come sit by me”.
There’s a more serious way of dividing people up into the good guys and the bad guys. It comes from believing that you know all the truth that matters, and anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. This applies to religion and politics and probably a number of other things.
It applies to liberals and conservatives in both religion and politics. It doesn’t matter which party or what religion - Democratic, Republican, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, whatever. It’s the belief that people who don’t agree with you, who see the world differently than you do, who think about God differently than you do are wrong, and must be converted, or if that doesn’t work, they must be condemned.
In the extreme form, people who disagree with you are not only wrong in their ideas, they are dangerous; they are evil. And in the really, really extreme form of this belief, you are justified in killing them, as in the Crusades; as in the Protestants and Catholic killing each other in Ireland; as in the civil war in Iraq; as in a hundred other bloody examples. All this in the name of truth, in the name of being right; in the name of God.
It’s sad when people judge other people in the name of religion. I’m bothered by the fact that so many Christians have this attitude of “I’m right and good, and you’re wrong and bad”. From time to time church members who were moving to another town have asked me if I could recommend a church in that place. Usually, I didn’t know the churches there well enough to help them, but I always told them that if they visited a church, and got the slightest hint that the people think that their church is right and other churches are wrong, that they should walk out the door and keep going.
I’m not worried about the small-mindedness of people like that; and it doesn’t bother me that they would probably think I’m wrong. What bothers me is what that attitude says about God, which seems to be that God is so small that they can capture all there is of Him and put Him in their little cage, their little box. To have someone say, for instance, that if God didn’t come into your life the same way He came into mine, then He didn’t really enter your life, is to say that God is limited in His choices - He has only one way of doing things; the way that I have personally experienced. That’s telling God what he can and cannot do.
There are different ways to worship God; churches have different kinds of music; Christians interpret the Bible differently, have varying views on who Jesus was and is. For some, faith is an intellectual experience; for others, it’s deeply emotional. God shows Himself to people in whatever way they can understand. To say that the way I’ve come to know God is the only way He can be known is to downsize God.
So I rise to God’s defense. I don’t think God needs me to do that, but I rise to the defense of a God who is more than we can think, more than we can experience, and more than we can imagine. I think that God is so big and so multifaceted, so all-encompassing, that no one person, no one group, no one church can get their minds completely around Him.
People who say things like “She says she’s a Christian, but she’s not a real Christian” would be better off to say “She thinks of God differently than I do”’ Instead of saying “They don’t really believe the Bible” it would be more realistic to say “Their way of understanding the Bible is different than mine”. Wouldn’t that be better, more respectful of God’s greatness, than saying “I’m right, and they’re wrong.” That’s the attitude of the old-time Pharisees. I don’t think that I’m judging people who talk that way; I’m not saying they’re bad; I’m just concerned that they think God is so small, so limited, and I’m concerned about what that kind of thinking may be doing to them.
Many of us who have computers have created improved versions of them by upgrading them -installing new hardware or software or both. I’ve done something better than that - I’ve upgraded my brain. Somebody in the choir said “It’s about time”. That’s right; I am now an improved, more up-to-date version of myself. I have installed an automatic translator in my brain. This is a piece of software that instantly and automatically translates what I hear people saying to me into what they’re really saying. In a conversation about religion, if someone says to me, “You are wrong”, my brain translates that into “You don’t think the same way I do”. That’s what’s really going on. This saves me a lot of trouble. If what they’re really saying is “You’re not like me” I can agree with that and go on to something else, instead of having to defend my position, or trying to prove that they are wrong, which usually doesn’t work anyway.
For you computer users, this instant translator is freeware - you can download it without charge from:
www.pleasegodfixmybrain.ihs
The Pharisee kept his God
in a box; or, to be more accurate, he kept his God in a book; he
had found God there, and had kept God there, in a book of laws,
a book of rules. He knew which people were good, and who were bad.
The good people knew the book and kept the rules; the bad people
didn’t. Rules. Rules don’t forgive; but God does. That
was what Jesus said to people who were able to see above the definitions
of goodness and badness, people who could get beyond judging, and
instead could see each other as God does - as His children - children
growing up – growing up differently; but each of us worth
being loved completely, however we grow. As always if you would like a DVD of a service please contact the church office
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