Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost
How to Judge Your Neighbor
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ!
Amen. St. Paul announces in today's Epistle from Romans chapter 3, "There is
no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and
[all] are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is
in Christ Jesus."
Dear Christian friends,
There are three and only three ways for you to judge your
neighbor. (Now I know very well that Jesus says we must not judge others,
but you very know that we all do anyway. If you and I must insist on judging
our neighbor, whether it is our dearest family member or the stranger on the
street, we should least take pains to pass our judgments in a pious and
Christian manner.) When we do this-when we judge our neighbor-there are only
three possible conclusions we can draw concerning that person:
1. The first conclusion we might draw when we judge our neighbor is that he
or she is more of a sinner than we are.
This is a very dangerous and destructive form of judgment, one that our God
clearly forbids us to carry out against our neighbor. This is the form of
judgment our Lord Jesus was speaking about when He said,
Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you
will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why
do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the
log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, "Let me
take the speck out of your eye," when there is the log 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 brother's eye (Matthew 7:1-5).
None of us wants to admit our tendency to think ourselves better than
others. But think of the expectations you place on other people. Think of
the disappointment or anger or indignation you feel when those people do not
live up to your expectations for them. If so-and-so is really a Christian,
doesn't that mean he or she shouldn't speak that way to you? Do the children
really need to be told so many times in a single day to pick up their
laundry or to quiet down or to stop wrestling in the living room? I remember
a woman from a sister congregation who voiced some complaints to me about a
decade ago, not long after I graduated from the seminary. This woman was
disturbed about something she had seen her pastor do-something that did not
seem bothersome at all to me, much less scandalous. When I asked this woman
why exactly her pastor's behavior was so troublesome to her, she said to me,
"It just doesn't seem that a pastor should do such a thing."
How about you? What is it about your neighbor that does not measure up to
your standards for that person? Or again, what do you personally hear your
neighbor say or see him do that you feel pretty sure you would never say or
do yourself-or at least get caught saying or doing?
When we fall into judging our neighbor as more sinful and ourselves less
sinful, we are not so much damning our neighbor as we are damning ourselves.
Such judgments against our neighbor really mean that we do not believe
ourselves to need Jesus and His mercy as much as that other guy does. That
is why St. Paul so readily threw himself on the floor: "Christ Jesus came
into the world to save sinners," the apostle declared. Then he immediately
added, "I am the foremost [of sinners]" (1 Timothy 1:15).
2. The second conclusion we might draw when we judge our neighbor is not
that he or she is MORE of a sinner, but that he or she is less of a sinner
and of a higher moral quality than we are.
This is also a dangerous and destructive form of judgment against
the neighbor. This second form of judgment does your neighbor the disservice
of assuming he does not need Jesus as dearly as you need Jesus. This second
form of judgment can also be disastrous to you personally because it is the
stuff that self-loathing, depression, or even suicide can be built upon.
This form of judgment looks at others and says, "These are really good
people! They deserve to be Christian much more than I do. I know that
forgiveness gets spoken to everyone on a Sunday morning, but none of these
others have done the horrible things I have done. They have not seen or
experienced the darkness I have experienced. They are much better than I,
and surely it must be easy for God to give His forgiveness to them. But how
can someone such as me ever qualify for such love from God? I have been too
damaged by others; I have fallen to far; I have been stained too deeply; I
have lost too much.
Tread carefully with such judgments, Christian! It is easy to see
yourself as more of a sinner than others because you get to see yourself on
the inside. By comparison, you only see these other people on the outside
and on the surface of things. Their beauty is only skin deep but their sin
goes straight to the bone. Maybe you do have a hard time accepting the fact
that these other people around you could possibly be as sinful or as tempted
or as tortured as you feel yourself to be. If nothing else, believe what
Jesus says about these others. Jesus speaks about your neighbor's sin as
clearly as He speaks about your sin when He says, "Out of the heart-that is,
out of your neighbor's heart and out of your pastor's heart as well as out
of your heart-come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality,
theft, false witness, slander" and every other sin (Matthew 15:19).
These are the first two of three possible ways for us to pass
judgment on our neighbor, that we would either look at our neighbor as more
of a sinner than we are, or as less of a sinner than we are. Neither of
these ways of judging our neighbor is good or beneficial for anybody.
3. The third conclusion we might draw when we judge our neighbor is the
good, pious, truly beneficial and Christian conclusion that love for
neighbor requires us to draw: we rightly judge our neighbor when we see that
he or she is exactly the same sort of sinner that we are.
This is what St. Paul declares in today's Epistle from Romans 3: "There is
no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
· Suppose two archers each shoot an arrow at the target and both
miss. One arrow falls short by a couple of feet and the other by 10 yards.
Both have missed the target. Both shots are bad.
· If two people are rushing to catch an airplane, does it really
matter if one arrives 5 minutes late, and the other 15 minutes? Both have
missed the plane.
· Or again, suppose one of you should run out of gas 10 miles away
from work, and your coworker runs out of gas only 1 mile away. Have either
of you made it to work that day?
When you look at your neighbor as being just as totally sinful and as
capable of every sin as you are, you do a great, godly service both to
yourself and to your neighbor. This is a high service to your neighbor
because it gives you great patience toward him and because it allows you to
see that your neighbor needs Jesus' grace and forgiveness just as much as
you do. (This might even move you to pity for your neighbor, so that you
become willing to speak the Gospel of forgiveness to him.) In addition to
this, when you see yourself as being equally miserable in sin and temptation
as every other Christian around you, you give high praise to God your
heavenly Father and His Son Jesus Christ. This is because you rob yourself
of any reason to boast before God.
Recognizing and confessing that you and your neighbor are equal in sin and
in death is not merely a matter of claiming that misery loves company.
Rather, when you believe that your neighbor is no more and no less sinful
than you are, you then become able to see and believe that your Lord Jesus
loves, forebears, forgives, repeatedly restores your neighbor even more
often than you do. To state it the opposite way, when you believe that your
neighbor is no more and no less sinful than you are, you then become able to
see and believe that your Lord Jesus loves, forebears, forgives, repeatedly
restores you even more often than your neighbor does. "There is no
distinction," Christians: "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God, and [all] are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption
that is in Christ Jesus."
God's Word speaks about the fact that Christ Jesus died for all people in
the world, and that ALL "are justified by His grace as a gift." That is good
news both for you and for your neighbor, because both of you are undeniably
included in the word ALL: "all are justified by His grace as a gift." All
the archers whose arrows fall short of the target get credited as having hit
a bulls' eye because Jesus hit the bulls' eye and gave His straight shooting
to you.
Theologians and Bible scholars like to refer to this as "the Universal
Atonement." They call it universal because it is for everybody-both for your
neighbor and for you-and they call it atonement because it has to do with
washing away the guilt of your sins in the blood of Jesus' death. Stated a
bit differently, "the Universal Atonement" means that all of us pigs now
feed off the same sow, which is Christ and none other. Not a single one of
us comes to this place in order to display some sort of superiority or
higher holiness over the others. In the same way, not a single one of us
should be spending the hour of our worship thinking that we are hopelessly
more sinful than all the others. We gather here as at the family table, each
one receiving the rich feast of Christ's forgiveness. This forgiveness
overflows with nourishment into all and for all; for your neighbor, for you.
The peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds
through Christ Jesus. Amen.
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