Matthew 7:1-5
November 4, 2012
Do not judge, so that you may not be
judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you
give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's
eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your
neighbor, "Let me take the speck out of your eye,” while the log is in
your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then
you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.
There are a series of statistics I can’t get out of my
head. I think about them a lot because they have to do with what people think
of me,… and of you. These statistics pop up into my head whenever I read our
passage for this morning. But they also pop up into my head whenever I talk
with someone who tells me that they are spiritual but don’t see the need for
church.
I heard one such statement this past week when I visited
a woman in drug and alcohol rehab. She said that one of the things they had
told her was that “religion is for those
avoiding hell, while spirituality for those who’ve been through hell. It’s
a nice phrase, especially for those who have an aversion to religion. The only
problem is that the statement has very little truth to it, especially for
Presbyterians. Our theology is not one that teaches that going to church, being
part of a church, or doing religious stuff gets us out of hell or even into
heaven. We believe we’ve already been gotten out of hell by Christ’s forgiving
death on the cross. We are not a people who avoid hell. We are a people who
respond to God’s love by sharing God’s love, and religion is something we
practice to open us up to God’s love. Religion doesn’t keep us out of hell. It
trains us to share heaven.
Still, I completely understand why people, and especially
non-Christians, might quote that phrase. Religion does not have a good name
with younger generations, and a lot of it has to do with how we act towards
non-Christians. We are not well regarded in our culture among the
non-religious. David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, two evangelical Christian
researchers studied the perspectives of non-Christians between the ages of 18
and 30, and what they found was surprising. They wrote about their findings in
a book, UnChristian: What a New
Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters. I know
that I’ve shared these statistics before.
Here’s what they found:
- 91% believe that Christians are antihomosexual.
- 87% believe that we are.
- 85% believe that we are hypocritical.
- 70% believe that we are insensitive to others.
These statistics are what people think about you and me,
and the fact that 87% believe we are judgmental, especially in the face of our
passage for today, is really sad. And the problem is that they aren’t wrong in
thinking this. Many Christians ARE judgmental. I’m not necessarily implicating
members of our church because I’ve found that the members of Calvin Church tend
to be very supportive of differences. Still, we are Christian, and what people
think of Christians in general is also applied to us.
The fact is that many Christians are quick to judge those
of different religions, different races, different ethnicities, and different nationalities.
For instance, how do Christians typically talk about Muslims, Buddhists, and
people of other religions? How do white Christians tend to regard
African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and others? In fact, many Christians are
incredibly judgment toward Christians who don’t seem to be the “right” kind of
Christian.
Why are people, especially Christians, judgmental like
this? It has to do with human nature. At our cores all of us feel fragile,
insecure, and at the mercy of forces larger than us. We don’t admit our fears.
We don’t act like we’re afraid. But we all have secret anxieties, and one of
the ways to deal with them is to find subtle and not-so-subtle ways of making
ourselves feel safer and more secure. Judgment of another is one of those ways.
We feel stronger whenever we can place someone else in the category of being
weaker, dumber, less moral, in the wrong group, or of the wrong. The fact is
that we always feel better about ourselves whenever we can relegate someone
else or a group to a status worse than our own. The basic gist is that even if
I don’t like much about myself, if I can find someone in a worse position, then
I will end up feeling better about myself.
All of this has to do with the way our minds work. Our
minds play tricks on us by convincing us to judge another so we can feel
superior. Let me give you an example: A number of years ago an American man
attended a very prestigious international conference. Delegates from all over the world gathered
together to try to solve the world’s problems.
At dinner, he was seated next to a Chinese man. Not knowing any Chinese, the American sat
there not knowing what to say to his dinner partner. When the drinks came around, he leaned over
to the Chinese man and asked, “Likee drinkee?”
The Chinese man sipped it, nodded his head, and grinned. As the first course came, he leaned over to
the Chinese man and said, “Likee soupee?”
The Chinese man grinned and nodded his head. When the main course came, the man leaned
over and asked, “Likee fishee?” Again,
the Chinese man grinned and nodded.
After dinner the guest of honor was introduced with all
sorts of accolades over his accomplishments and deep understanding of the
issues. With that, the Chinese man got
up, went to the podium, and delivered an incredible speech in perfectly fluent
English. He was articulate, witty, and
tremendously insightful. After he
finished his speech, he sat back down at the table, leaned over to the
American, and said, “Likee speechie?”
Unfortunately, so many of us judge others, like the
American man of the story, without even realizing it. We Americans, even though many of us say we
are a Christian nation, have created a culture of judgment. We judge so often that
we don’t even realize it. For example, I’ve seen the wealthy judge workers as
beneath them, and workers judge the wealthy as snobs. I’ve seen Christians
judge Muslims, Muslims judge Jews, and Jews judge Christians. I’ve seen Evangelicals judge Protestants,
Protestants judge Catholics, and Pentecostals judge evangelicals. Whites judge
blacks, blacks judge whites, both judge Hispanics, Hispanics judge Asians, and
Asians judge whites. Men judge women, women judge men, and both sexes wonder
why God would do something as cruel as making us have to live together. Heterosexuals
judge homosexuals, leaving no one for homosexuals to judge. The old judge the
young, the young judge the old, generation lines up against generation until we
find it hard to worship together. Christians judge atheists, and atheists judge
Christians. And it all goes round and round in a cycle that never ends as we
pile on judgment on top of judgment on top of judgment until no one is safe
from our judgments. And one thing is
certain: even though our passage says that we will be judged by God using the
same standards that we judge others, God is merciful because if it was left up
to us no one would be saved.
So, how do we overcome our judgmental nature? One thing
that helps is something the 6th century mystic and monk, Dorothoeos
of Gaza, said: “The root cause of all
these disturbances, if we are to investigate it accurately, is that we do not
accuse ourselves… We remain all the time
against one another, grinding one another down.
Because each considers himself right and excuses himself, as I was
saying, all the while keeping none of the Commandments yet expecting his
neighbor to keep the lot! This is why we
do not acquire the habits of virtue, because if we light on any little thing we
tax our neighbor with it and blame him saying he ought not to do such a thing
and why did he do it—whereas ought we not rather to examine ourselves about the
Commandments and blame ourselves for not keeping them?”
Basically he says that to overcome our judgmental
nature we have to learn to diminish ourselves and raise up others. We can start
by questioning ourselves every time we catch ourselves judging others. Ask,
“Why am I judging this person? Is it for something I’d judge myself on? How can
I see what’s good instead of what’s wrong in her or him?”
C.S. Lewis talks about this. In his book, The Great Divorce, he deals with the
question of judgment—about who’s right and who’s wrong. The book is about
heaven and hell. In it, residents of hell get to take day trips to heaven to see
what it is like. The main character gets a tour of the outskirts of heaven by a
guide. They discuss who was right and who was wrong when it came to all of our
theological and religious battles, and the guide says, “That’s what we all find when we reach [heaven]. We’ve all been wrong! That’s
the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.” In essence
his point is that whenever you judge, you’re wrong. Whenever I judge, I’m
wrong. It’s not till we let go of our judgments that we begin to live.
There’s a larger point: Whenever we judge another for
anything, we harm our souls. We tear our souls apart, just a little bit. And
the antidote is to catch ourselves whenever we judge, and to find a way let the
judgment god so that we can let God’s love in us flow
Amen.
