"Specks and Logs"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE GOSPELS Matthew 7:1-6 SERMON “Specks and Logs”

We have moved into the final act of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew’s gospel. This summer we have listened as Jesus describes for us life in the kingdom, or kinship of Heaven that has come near; what Jesus would have us turn toward and hear as good news. It’s good news that can get lost when we reduce faith and this project we call church to little more than one of sin management. What listening to Jesus’ words has shown us is that to lose sight of the essential good news of God’s power and presence that draws near to us and draws us nearer to one another is to lose sight of the kind of blessing that is about more than winning. It’s a blessing that is for the poor in spirit and the pure in heart alike. To lose sight of what Jesus would show us is to risk plunging into the darkness of literalistic legalism that may attend to the letter of the law at the expense of our own souls; abandoning us to the forces of anger, lust, and payback that slowly consume our hearts like so much burning garbage. When we lose sight of the priority of God’s realm at hand, we start to care far more about what other people think of our faith in God than God does. We turn God into a wish factory instead of recognizing our deep need to be fed daily by God’s presence on earth as it is in heaven, our deep need for forgiveness that frees us; both the forgiveness we receive and the forgiveness we extend to those around us. To lose sight of heaven come near is to lose our bearing in a sea of worries created by the distraction of accumulating and maintaining material wealth. Really, what Jesus seems to bring us back to time and again is this tendency we have of replacing our relationship with God, our reliance on the things God promises to provide- like blessing, fulfillment, treasure, and forgiveness- Jesus repeatedly challenges our tendency to replace those good gifts of God’s present power with lesser versions of what he try to make for ourselves. We are too easily satisfied to rule over our own personal fiefdoms where we get to call the shots, far more comfortable believing ourselves to be in charge; masters of our destiny and captains of our fate. As usual, Jesus’ words turn the worlds we’ve made for ourselves upside down, pointing us in a new direction toward a world where the earth is literally crammed with heaven and our role in it is completely redefined. Including the judgements we exercise. 

About four hundred years ago, the great bard, William Shakespeare, wrote what is one of his lesser known plays- Measure for Measure. The title is likely taken from our scripture this morning in which Jesus warns his followers about the hazards of entering into judgement. It may be one of the few bible verses many people know by heart even if they don’t know its origin.  “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” Well, Shakespeare’s Measure of Measure is all about judgement. It begins when the benign Duke who rules the city of Vienna departs on a supposed diplomatic mission, leaving the strict law-and-order minded judge, Angelo, in charge. Angelo quickly cracks down on what he sees as the Duke’s morally lax enforcement of the city’s laws. Caught in this aggressive sweep of the city’s depraved citizenry is Claudio, a nobleman engaged to a young woman. Claudio has been slow to close the deal and get married ever since his fiancé’s dowry was lost at sea. However, it hasn’t stopped her from becoming pregnant by him. And because they are unmarried, Claudio is charged with the crime of unlawful fornication. Let me tell you, Game of Thrones has nothing on Shakespeare. Now, normally under the rule of the Duke such offenders were simply made to marry- shotgun anyone? But in the vigor of his moral rectitude, Angelo the judge decides to carry out the full measure of the law and sentence Claudio to death for his crime. Word of this sentence soon reaches the walls of the nearby abbey, where Claudio’s sister, Isabella, is studying to become a nun. In her distress, the girl races to plead mercy from Angelo, begging him to spare her brother’s life. Angelo is moved by the young woman, not with pity to have mercy on her brother, but with a powerful lust that causes him to propose an exchange- her virtue for her brother’s life. Suddenly, as so many before and so many since, the would-be moral crusader who would have condemned a man to death for his weakness falls victim to his own weakness. The play may be fiction, but the pattern it describes has played out over and over again. It is the danger of believing that we know with absolute certainty and moral clarity that another is deserving of condemnation; that their actions put them ‘beyond the pale’. That phrase comes from the days when access to the communal fire often meant the difference between life and death. To be beyond the pale is to be cast out from the warmth and light of that fire, to be so far removed from it that one is out beyond the palest flicker it might have to offer. It is to be alone in the outer and utter darkness, completely vulnerable to the dangers of the night.  

Do not judge, says Jesus, so that you may not be judged. Unfortunately, those words have been twisted and taken to mean that we should never make a judgement, that everything is just a matter of opinion, conditioned by circumstances; that what is right and what is wrong are simply a matter of individual perspective- what’s right for me, my truth. The result has been a precipitous decline in any kind of standard, a belief that self-justification is more important than the demands of discipline. The great crime committed by Angelo in Shakespeare’s Vienna isn’t that he went trampling other people’s sense of self, it was his belief in his own moral superiority to them, the belief that his position of authority placed him above them and granted him an exception to the laws he had been charged to uphold. 

We are, of course, called to stand and name the places in this world where wrong is being done, to stand against actions that violate the fundamental principles of loving God and our neighbor as bearers of the divine image. But as Jesus cautions us, such judgement is never as simple as we might imagine. There’s a two-by-four wedged in our eye that prevents us from seeing all that we could, all that we should. And that two-by-four is our mistaken belief that we know best, that we are somehow uniquely qualified because of our age, or our income, our social position, or our education, or worst of all because our religious beliefs make us feel entitled to pass judgement on people no different than us as being beyond the pale, deserving exile to the outer darkness. It’s that very two-by-four blocking our sight that keeps us from doing precisely what we are called to do, which is to restore those lost in the darkness to the warmth and safety of the fire. We don’t do that by dropping our supposed pearls of wisdom, or holy pronouncements upon them, presuming we have or know what someone else needs. The profound mis-reading of Jesus’ words about pearls before swine and what is holy going to the dogs is to fall back once again into the belief that someone other than us falls into the category of pig, or dog, and that we are the dispensers of holy pearls of wisdom. Given Jesus’ caution that immediately precedes these words, that is probably not what he meant for us to take away from them. Of course, when you’re walking around with a two-by-four in your eye you tend to miss the fairly obvious. Pigs don’t need pearls, they’re of no earthly good to them. They don’t wear them and they certainly can’t eat them. Neither are dogs concerned with the holy. This is what we do when we judge other people to be beneath us, beneath our concern, beneath our compassion, beneath the dignity that any child of God deserves. Paul puts it this way in his first letter to the church in Corinth, “If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. 

The judgement we are called to exercise is the same one shown to us by Jesus, the judgment that determines that we, and by extension everyone else are worth loving. It is the judgement that marks the coming of God’s kinship with us and among us. Love, that gives not what we think others should want or have, but the kind of love that flows from the recognition of our own deep need and reaches out to the deep need of another. It’s the kind of love that knows enough to set aside the belief that we know better and is satisfied to simply offer ourselves in all humility. So that something of what may have been lost might be restored, redeemed; that we might all live together in the warmth of the light of the fire that burns from the heart of eternity; the fire of God’s realm that is even now at hand.