Good Judgement

Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Paul Carling

Luke 3:7-18

 

“So with many other exhortations, (John) proclaimed the good news to the people…” Well, if the good news is that we’d all better behave ourselves or be burned alive, don’t you wonder what the bad news is?

Advent’s strange this year – because the 4 th Sunday of Advent is also Christmas Eve, Advent is effectively just 3 weeks long. It’s hardly begun and we’ve already had the Family Carol Sing with Santa Claus, and the Parish School Bell Ringing extravaganza. Last week the Darien clergy all got together for lunch and… sang Christmas carols. It’s like we’ve all agreed to just bag Advent this year and get on to the real deal – Christmas.

But there’s just one teeny problem. Every Advent, no matter how short, we can only get to the baby Jesus by going past John the Baptist. We’re happily cruising toward that star in Bethlehem, minding our own business, when just around the bend, we come face to face with – you guessed it – John the Baptist, hopping mad, preaching in front of a bonfire with a pitchfork in one hand and an ax in the other, winnowing, burning, judging. Bummer, dude – this is the last person in the world most of us want to see. In fact, a lot of us left our childhood churches to avoid him; we hurry to change the radio station when he hear a gospel hour rant; and we turn the other way at a highway sign that blares, “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand.” Over the years, John’s hellfire and damnation brand of divine judgment has been used to threaten us, scold us, punish us, and just plain frighten us, until most of us don’t want anything to do with it anymore.

But the truth is most of us have a love - hate relationship with the idea of judgment. We hate the heavenly version of the police line up, backed against the wall with bright lights in our eyes and numbers around our necks, facing a two way mirror, behind which God is making fiercely accurate calculations about whether we’re on his team or not. There’s a terror-filled black-and-white, who’s-in-and-who’s-out quality to that kind of judgment – and we recoil from it. Kind of like the e-mail from a friend the other day that read: “Warning: aliens are coming to abduct all the young, good looking, sexy people in the world.” To which he added, “Don’t worry – you’ll be safe… and I’m just writing to say goodbye.”

Judgment is all about being known, being seen into, seen through, stripped of all of our defenses and pretensions, our armor and masks and possessions and excuses; being known for who we really are. We fear judgment so much, yet we want it so much, because the experience of being truly known – and still loved – is the most healing experience in the universe. I share that experience with Cherise, with my son Oliver, with my closest friends. And these are just pale shadows of how you and I can experience it with God. So it’s good news that our judgment and our salvation don’t depend on our own evaluation, or even on our own goodness, but on the goodness of the Saviour of the world, a judge whose chambers are the chambers of his compassionate heart.

Last year, a group of us went to Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. One afternoon, handing out food in a huge tent to an endless line of waiting people, Father Joe, director of Camp Coast Care, noticed that some of us, when a person asked for six cans of vegetables, would glance at the line, frown, and hand them two.

That evening, he had a “come to Jesus” talk with us well-meaning volunteers. “Thepeople here,” Father Joe said, “have lost everything, and the worst loss is their hope. We may not have enough food to go around, but what we do have is the power to offer them something no one else is giving around here – the experience of God’s abundance. We’re working in a war zone – a war against despair – and in this war, I have time to either judge a person or love them, but not both. I choose to love them.”

William Sloan Coffin, the great Yale chaplain, once said, “God loves us as we are, but much too much to leave us there.” In other words, as David reminded us in his sermon two weeks ago, to accept God’s love is to agree to be changed. Now you and I can accept the reality that God loves us just like that, or we can reject it. We can refuse to believe God; we can fear God; we can run away from God. Or we can say “Yes.” … “Here I am, transform me, baptize me with the fire of the Holy Spirit, and damn the torpedoes. I give up trying to figure out how good or bad I am, I give up trying to be God. You be the judge, you be God.” And when we say yes like this, John reminds us, it’s an invitation to get burned.

But thankfully, God’s fire is not our fire. It’s the fire the potter uses to make beautiful vessels out of damp clay, the fire of the jeweler refining gold from rough ore – not the fire of destruction, but the fire of transformation; the fire that burns away our false and fruitless selves so that we can behave as who we really are – beloved children of God, alive with the passion of Jesus baptizing us, armed with the joy of knowing God’s love – and ready to transform the world. The good news is that divine judgment has less to do with who we are, than with who God is. And if you’re worried you’re not good enough to take in God’s love, remember: God doesn’t need a lot of raw materials, just a handful of dust willing to be caught on fire.

“What then should we do?” the people asked John. And God replies, “Figure out what needs pruning in your own hearts, in your own lives; what deadwood and chaff need burning so that your hearts can grow wheat, plentiful enough to feed the world.”

This invitation to transformation isn’t for the squeamish. The reason we keep the lid on looking deep within is that there’s no guarantee where we might end up. Take 25-year-old Sergeant Logan Laituri from Orange County, California, for example. An ordinary grunt, back from a 14-month tour in Iraq and scheduled to return in a few months; and welcomed home by his devoutly Christian girlfriend with so much love, that he found her faith infectious. He signed up for a New Testament class at a local college, and found himself immersed in Scripture and filled with the spirit. Soon, he started letting the Bible shape his opinions. “I realized I had to figure out what it meant to be a soldier,” he says. “How do I still follow Jesus’ great commandment to love my neighbor as myself… when I’m being asked to lay waste to large areas of a country?” So Logan went to his Army chaplain, who told him everything he never knew about Just War theory, but in the end, he decided that, at least for him, this was just a bunch of rationalization, an accommodation to a secular culture that sees war as a legitimate means of resolving disputes, that plans for war, that even profits from war. “When the Bible says love your enemies,” Logan concluded, that means I can’t kill someone in love.” It turned out that, for Logan, holding onto his childhood belief in war had become deadwood.

You can imagine how unpopular this was with his neighbors. The people who’d supported his newfound faith were furious that this is where it led him. But Logan stayed focused on Christ… and on his buddies in Iraq.

With a fierce loyalty to them, he asked the army to send him back to Iraq… without a rifle. This was his calling, he told them as he applied for conscientious objector status. But he had only a few months left on his tour, so the Army quietly discharged him. Hew as free – unlike the 8000 young Americans who have deserted since the Iraq War began. But Logan had found religion. Since the army wouldn’t send him go back, he joined the Christian Peacemaker Teams – remember the group whose members were abducted in Baghdad a year ago? Back he’s gone to the front lines of Iraq again, disarmed and disarming, with the courage of a warrior, and transformed by the love of God.

When we get serious about cleaning out deadwood, miracles happen. Some of us, like Logan, have our lives completely turned around. For others, change is smaller, closer to home. But whatever transformation we end up with, we keep going inside, over and over, because we care about John’s invitation to live out our faith, in our daily lives.

And since we care, we’re willing to take on the heavy lifting that’s involved – leveling the mountains, filling up the valleys, making the crooked path straight – because we know the truth of what John the Baptist tells us: it’s only through clearing out the deadwood and the chaff, and growing wheat for the rest of God’s children, that we will all get a chance to see the salvation of the world.