Instead of the usual we're subbing in this reader question:
Pastor Dave,I'll answer the last part first. There aren't really any (or at least not many) places in the Bible that tell you to resent people or be judgmental towards them. Those that appear to exist are outweighed ten to one by other references and infinity to one by Jesus' actions on the cross. But people have a knack for seeing what they want to see. Even the devil can quote scripture, as the famous saying goes. If you're looking for something that can be interpreted as judgmental--something that makes you look right in a certain stance--you can probably find it in scripture.
I enjoyed your talk about judgment and sin. The issue has frustrated me. A couple friends of mine have really gotten on my nerves in the last year for this very reason. They're so judgmental about certain things. They call it godly but I can't follow that. It just seems narrow-minded and hateful to me. I've tried to talk to them without any success and it has hurt our friendship. We were once very close! How do good people go bad like this? What makes people so judgmental? Is it really something they're reading in the Bible? If so, where?
There's often a difference between what the Bible says and what people say the Bible says. Plenty of really bad preachers make a living on that difference...let alone common folks. In our society all you have to say is, "This is what *I* believe and religion is a private matter between me and God" and you have finished the argument. Everybody seems to respect that. I do too, actually, as long as the discussion remains one-on-one and on somebody's couch. The problem is that these beliefs inevitably go public and make hordes of people think that being judgmental is the true and strong Christian stance. Meanwhile the rest of us "nice" folks stand on the sideline and shake our heads while the judgmental folks leave this impression with everyone. That's sad. In any case, I'm not sure it matters what the Bible says or where judgmental folks are getting the material. If you argue them out of one passage they'll just jump to another that they believe supports their claims. It's hard to see clearly when your premise is faulty to begin with and you only want to read things that confirm it.
As far as how good people go bad...in my experience that's not true. Good people don't go bad. Good people go good. That's the problem.
Click through to see what I mean!
Let's envision the life of faith like an archer shooting at a bullseye target. When considering any faith issue you draw, you aim, you fire, and you hope to hit the center. As long as you're somewhere in the vicinity the backstop will stop your arrow...good enough.
Now I want you to envision someone stepping up to the line...a good archer, known and respected. This archer draws, aims, and fires just like usual. But instead of hitting the target the shot just misses, and I mean barely. As long as the archer notices the near miss they can pick up the arrow and try again. No harm done.
But let's say the archer doesn't acknowledge the miss. Instead they want to call it a hit. After all, they're a good archer. Their shots hit, right? Missing is beneath them. It would call into question their skill, their commitment, their talent. They've put years and years of practice into this! Everybody thinks they're the best at it! So instead of going and picking up their errant arrow off the ground they claim it hit.
Let's also pretend that for some weird reason the archer's opinion/belief controlled the flight of the arrow. As soon as they acknowledge a miss it falls and they can do the whole "pick it up and retry" thing. But until they admit the miss the arrow keeps flying straight and level, right on the course it was launched.
Relative to the target this was a narrow miss, maybe an inch or so wide. But it's still traveling at that skewed angle as it flies onward. As it goes farther and farther along its slightly wide trajectory, what's happening to it? It keeps getting wider and wider, angling away from the correct line. Point your left index finger straight in front of you. Point your right index finger at a slight angle to your left. Move both forward in the direction they're pointing. See what happens to your right finger? It's going farther afield. That's what our arrow is doing. If that arrow keeps flying for any appreciable distance pretty soon our "good" archer's shot is so wide that even the most novice buffoon could claim a straighter aim.
This is exactly what happens when good people go good! If they'd just admit the occasional miss--or even bother to discuss, question, or introduce some level of doubt into their faith equation--their missed arrows would fall and their mistakes would be temporary and not have a great impact. But instead they opt to be "good" archers. No human being can hit the bullseye every time. But they do. Or at least they claim that they don't stray far from it compared to everyone else.
Even if they are right 99% of the time that one shot they miss (and won't admit) ends up destroying them. The arrow keeps flying wider and wider and they won't let it drop. They just follow it on and on, refusing to be anything less than impeccably correct.
When their tactics are questioned our "good" archers grasp at an obvious solution: if it appears to people that my arrow's trajectory didn't intersect the target, just move the target! So the Word of God, Way of God, Salvation of God, and Son of God get shifted fifteen feet to the right so they can fire that same shot again and again in the same way they originally did, appearing to hit each time. Problem solved!
It's hard enough to get people to correct one mistaken arrow shot, you know. When that correction would also mean moving someone's whole concept of God and Scripture back to its original place--a place now quite different from where it's residing in their lives--getting them to change is all but impossible. And really, why should they? Their whole purpose in the first place was to be considered "good". Now they look plenty good shooting at their favored target and hitting every time. Moving would put them at a severe disadvantage.
In fact even having someone else put their own target in a different place makes our good archers look bad, so they can't have it. No true believer must ever conceive of anything different than they, themselves believe! Every target for every archer in the world must lie in exactly this spot and neither God nor man will convince them differently.
One of my high school algebra teachers used to say she got madder at students who scored 97% on tests than those who scored 70%. If you scored 70% you didn't know the material, which is fair enough. If you scored 97% you knew that material inside and out but were just too inattentive to get 100%. The first she could work with. The second she couldn't cure because the 97% students felt they already had it down and wouldn't put in the effort to correct their mistakes.
I feel the same way sometimes. The "best" Christians--the 97% folks--are often the most blind and therefore the most damaging. I don't get mad at people who don't know the difference between Jesus and a hole in the ground. I don't get mad at people who are of other faiths or who are casual about their Christian faith. All of those people have a potential journey in front of them. Even if they're not making it now, if and when the time comes they will be able to see that distance clearly and start crossing it. I get mad at people who are "strong" in the faith but feel they already have it down and don't work anymore to first admit, and then correct, their mistakes: people who, as we said before, don't ask questions or doubt themselves, who parade around their faith as if church were some big awards contest. They are tons more dangerous than the people who are obviously mistaken about God because unlike those "poor sinners" they deride, these people will never see their mistakes, let alone confess and let them be redeemed. Instead they will just keep calling them right until they've followed their missed arrow all the way into self-deluded ignorance.
Again, if it were just a matter of one person maybe I could live with even that...sadly. The trouble is that these people drag a lot of other well-meaning people along with them in this journey and they hurt and/or mislead innocent bystanders in the process by demonstrating--and sometimes beating people across the back with--the worst tendencies of our faith.
Have I adequately described your friend, their effect on you, and their poisoning of the sweet flavor of faith in your community yet? And all of this comes in the name of being right about their opinion. That's a bad deal. I assume you're more convinced than ever that you don't want on board?
There are a couple correctives to this:
1. Understand that you're not going to be perfect and that faith is neither about being perfect nor about you looking good. Admit your missed shots. Have some doubt about every shot, in fact, even if it appears to hit the bullseye for you. Be able to ask questions about it, discuss it fairly, to hear new viewpoints even if you've been taught to shoot this way since your youth and have never fired any other direction. I'm not saying you have to change your shooting style or the location of your target. I'm saying that none of us benefit from being sure that we're perfect.
Be especially aware when you HAVE to... HAVE IT...YOUR WAY...or else everybody else is IGNORANT and UN-SCRIPTURAL and RUINING YOUR CHURCH! That is inevitably code-speak for "I have followed this arrow so far afield now that I can't even see the way back so no, no, no, no, NO, DON'T TELL ME THERE'S EVEN A CHANCE THAT I MISSED! LA LA LA LA LA!!!!"
2. If God asks you to move your target back to where it should be, for God's sake (literally) be willing to pay the price to move it...whatever that price may be. It doesn't matter if your whole life has been invested in something else. What's a life worth if not build on a foundation of God and eternity? Refusing to adjust means you've weighed the cost of moving all the stuff in your life against God and decided that all the stuff in your life is worth more. That's not faith no matter how strongly you cling to your artificial target and claim it as holy.
Realize also that God has funny ways of asking people to move. Usually he sends somebody you don't suspect. It could be a relative, could be a kid, could be a friend, could be a co-worker or spouse or someone you respect. All of a sudden that person says something that sounds different than what you've believed and your mind starts going crazy like it was a computer Captain Kirk was trying to blow up. "They're saying the wrong thing...but I respect them...but they're different than me...but I love them... Does not compute! Does not compute!" The only way to avoid this is to make sure nobody who doesn't agree with you 100% enters your life. Some folks actually manage that feat, ruling the castle of their existence with an iron fist. If that's you, I'm not sure I can help you. But for everybody else, those sparks flying out of your now-addled brain are God's sign that something isn't consistent with the truth here. At that point you have a choice: snuff out the spark and kick that person out of your life (beginning the iron-fist process we just talked about) or stop and listen for a minute, changing your target ever so slightly by doing so. I don't think there's any question which of those two is right. There's also no question which of those two takes more strength, courage, love, and real faith.
Which leads us to...
3. For God's sake (again, literally) let us stop calling stubborn, intractable, noisily braying, attention-seeking, "perfect" Christians "good". Also when somebody is offered a choice between his or her beliefs and reaching out a compassionate, welcoming hand to a neighbor or stranger and that person chooses their beliefs, we need to start defining those beliefs as something else besides Christian no matter whose name they're supposedly doing it in. You can call a cow pie an apple pie but that doesn't make it so.
We wouldn't have nearly the trouble we do if people would stop looking up to bad behavior, assuming that since it's grumpier and more exclusive it must me more faithful. This provides the support "good" Christians need to continue their charade. Being perfect isn't good. Being right about everything isn't good. Insisting on your own way isn't good. Excluding others to keep yourself or your church or your community pure isn't good. All of those are just different ways of denying your need for Christ and his redemptive power. You know what's really good? Knowing that you make mistakes, knowing you don't have it all down, knowing there's a long way to go in your relationship with God and church and faith, and being able to accept and support these same qualities in others as you make this journey together in love. We should all be confessing, or at least laughing at, our own mistakes. We should all be embracing and reassuring other folks when they show theirs. The "good" Christians are precisely the ones we should be chiding, or at least ignoring and working around. They certainly aren't the ones we should let speak for the church or God!
The root of this problem is not that somebody is mistaken. That's assumed in the walk of faith and the corrections for it--love, forgiveness, discussion and discovery--are already built into the system. But your friend didn't just spring up one day mistaken. What you see now is a flower whose root lies in our failure to properly understand and speak of true goodness: mis-placing our bullseye, calling weakness strength, and then following it. The time to solve this problem was probably decades ago when somebody walked into the church and said, overtly or by implication: "I am good and I know Scripture so follow me and I will tell you how this is all supposed to be... [how to do church and what is Lutheran and what's wrong with society and the economy and politics and how to find true theology and what God thinks about everything]." At that point somebody should have quietly put an arm around their shoulder and replied, "None of us here dare to make those claims. That's not how we do things here. If you'd like to join us in discovering together, worshiping together, forgiving our mistakes together, and embracing all those people you just tried to shut out--depending on Jesus Christ as our guide and salvation in all things--you're more than welcome."
The problem isn't just that they were (and are) weak in these situations. The problem is that we were (and are) weak in these situations and do not proclaim what needs to be proclaimed: our trust in God alone and our sticking very close to the bullseye of Christ dying for our sins so we could be free and serve him by loving our neighbor in every situation.
We cannot fix the "them" in this equation. We probably couldn't have then and we almost certainly can't now. But we can create a new and better tomorrow where people don't have to go through the same thing you're going through right now by fixing the "us" part, both as individuals and as a congregation. Right now that fixing starts with a simple admission: better a hundred missed shots dropping to the ground in God's name than one followed into oblivion in the name of ourselves or our own goodness.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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