Sermon: Judgment Without Being Judgmental

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Judgment Without Being Judgmental

By Charles Rush

March 5, 2000

ording to the church calendar, we are about to enter the season of Lent, which officially begins this Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. So I trust you will have your pancakes on Tuesday, usually called Shrove Tuesday. During the Middle Ages the church forbade eating animal fat during lent, so the custom arose of using up all the fat in pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday. Afterwards everyone joined in games that cost a penny or two to play. The money raised was given to the poor. Shrove Tuesday is also known as Mardi Gras (which is French for "Fat Tuesday")... and I know some of you are thinking right now what a good idea it would be to embark on a Holy pilgrimage to New Orleans for it's celebration... Elsewhere in Europe the celebration featured carnivals and was called Carnivale (as in Rio, the Mecca of Holy decadence). Carnival, as you may know, literally means "farewell to meat", as it was the last time for 7 weeks.

Lent has traditionally been a time for penitence and self-denial. It is a time of taking stock of our lives. Frankly, this is not a bad concept, properly conceived. It seems to me that most of us under a certain age spend frightfully little time taking stock of what we are doing and where we are going. It is enough just to return the calls on our desk. We are just grinding away in our life rut, with the unspoken hope that somehow everything worth worrying about is going to just work its way out if we can just get to the next level in our life. Maybe it will, particularly if you are fairly shallow person. But it may take more than this.

I read an article about Muhammad Ali a few years ago. Three times the heavyweight champion of the world- a feat never duplicated. He has had his picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated more times than any other athlete. At one time, he may well have been the most popular man on the planet. The sports writer, Gary Smith, interviewed him a few years ago, to get an update on how he was doing.

They were visiting together in the barn next to Ali's farmhouse. In the barn, on the floor leaning against the walls, were pictures and framed newspaper articles from his prime. There were photos of the champ punching and dancing. There was one picture where his fist was punching the air. There was also a picture of Ali holding his championship belt high in triumph. "The thrilla in Manilla" a framed poster read.

As the sportswriter looked at the pictures he couldn't help but notice that they were covered with white streaks- bird droppings. Just then the ex-champ looked into the rafters at the pigeons who made his gym their home. Then perhaps as a statement of despair, Ali walked over to the row of pictures and one by one turned them face down. Then he walked out the door and stared out at the countryside. He mumbled something so low the sportswriter asked him what he said. "I had the world," Muhammad Ali repeated, "and it wasn't nothing. Look now." A sobering thought.

It may well be the case that you get to that level where you think it should all work out and it won't all work out. There are good reasons to take stock occasionally.

This season, I thought we might use the season of Lent to take a peek at where we want to go. If you could be a spiritually rounded person, what would you look like? What qualities, what virtues would a rounded person have?

This week, Jesus refers us, in two independent stories to the quality of making judgments without being judgmental.

Legalism, as a spiritual disposition, I've come to conclude, is so pervasive in our world because it matches the psychological disposition for so many people who prefer order and control above profundity and insight.

There may be nothing more enervating to the soul of the university professor than these six words, "will this be on the test?" Usually they are uttered about that way, most of the time after a moment of intoxicating intellectual speculation. Professors get this blank pensive stare. I can tell you what they are thinking. They are wondering about heaven. "What if there is only country music there? What if the big excitement every night is 'Who wants to be a Millionaire?' What if the really good people get to bowl once a month?"

Some people are just like that... all they want to know is what is on the exam. Some people just don't feel comfortable outside of the box, don't know what to do outside of the box, don't wonder what's outside of the box. In the long march of human history, this accounts for billons of people.

I heard about a group that was on a corporate retreat for goal development. The retreat leader was trying to get the managers to branch out into another realm of being than the ordinary roles of the work place. He handed out large sheets of manila construction paper and asked people to draw an emotion. He wanted them to use the full sheet of paper, to fill in every space with some color. 15 minutes go by, he's walking around... One guy is just sitting there with a few lines on his sheet, frozen, immobile... The guy says to him "I can't do this... you don't understand, I really can't do this."

Catholics complain to me pretty regularly about the rules in the Catholic Church. It is true that there are a lot of rules. I believe that the sum total of Canon Law runs 30 some odd volumes. That is a lot of rules. Small print. Ex-Catholics often point out to me that it is somewhat ironic the founder of Christianity wanted to reduce all the rules of Judaism to just two - love God and love your neighbor - and the Church turned right around and made rules to cover every conceivable situation. But if you want to know why that developed, it is because the people demanded it. They want salvation reduced to a formula that they can follow. From the get go, they came to the Bishop and asked how to attain salvation?

You want to go to heaven, get baptized, go to Mass weekly, and say your prayers."

But Father, suppose you can't go to Mass weekly, suppose you have to skip because your work takes you deep into the wilderness where there is no church."

Then my Son, offer the Church $50 in the offering plate and someone will say a Mass for you that week."

But Father, suppose the money I use to pay for the Mass was earned by means not honorable and full of moral compromise... because Father, my work demands it?

Then say 5 Hail Mary's and ask for God's forgiveness and mercy as you drop the money in the plate for the Mass...

And on and on it went... So that after 2000 years of people asking us all the time, "will this be on the test", we have a pretty substantial body of Canon Law.

Some people just plain need a lot of rules, they like a lot of structure. I suppose you either found it amusing or mystifying this week that the president of Bob Jones University in South Carolina, finally came out with the groundbreaking resolution that... watch out... interracial dating was Okay.

And that was a big deal at the fundamentalist, Bob Jones University because the whole logic of their spirituality runs like this. If you compromise morally on this issue, then you open the door for compromise on other issues. You keep compromising, keep compromising and the next thing you know all the Co-eds at Bob Jones University will be streaking, drinking, and a bunch of atheists... just like Brown University. They have to be intolerant, in their mind, in order to be, morally pure. I don't know if you happened to see the editorial in the New York Times by a recent graduate of Bob Jones University but he describes life on campus there. It was so quaint it was almost cute. You can only date under the supervision of a chaperon, in the parlor of the dorms, and then there was the six-inch rule. You have to keep six inches of distance between you and your date at all times... Makes you want to say, "Gee Willikers...let's go get a malted?"

This moral casuistry is all about control. Very often, it combines well with anger. That was the one thing that went unsaid this week in the exchanges between Senator John McCain and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Senator McCain was widely criticized for his remarks about the religious right in the Republican Party, perhaps rightfully so. But he was right about one thing. Too many leaders of the Religious Right are angry men and their anger drives their religion. They need a liberal enemy or a secular enemy to generate enthusiasm. They have to have something to overcome, something to reform and rescue from the clutches of Evil. Theirs is not a positive spirituality, nor is it a spirituality of bridge building because it is driven by anger. It is always divisive. That is why there is a joke about Baptists in the South. Every time they have a church fight, the losing group leaves, starts a new church and they call it missions. Sadly, there is a lot of truth to that. Too many people need structure and

But, he also lived a life that stood for something. He lived for the Kingdom of God. He lived for those values. He had convictions. Ultimately he died for them. The other challenge is to also make judgments.

That is harder for most of us, particularly in areas of religion. We have been educated in the great liberal tradition. We know that the Church has flaws. We know that that the Bible has some problems. We know that there are many religions in the world, many philosophies that have been generated. Each of them has some truth to it, some insight. Some seem to work better for some types of people. But, frankly, it is almost impossible to adjudicate between two competing truth claims. All of these sorts of things seem to be relative to culture and history, making it hard to talk about things from an ultimate perspective. So what do we do? We have a very cultivated way of engaging all these different things. If nothing else, we do believe in surveying all the options, all the evidence. And we have a very sophisticated, cultivated way of keeping our options open.

We are not very big on commitment; we are big on being open. We don't like religions that make a lot of demands on us; we want something that is user-friendly. When it comes to religion, we are like a guy I knew named Leo - witty, charming, engaging, well traveled, spoke 3 languages and could make clever puns in all three. He was great at a cocktail party - always had funny repartee, pulled from a deep memory the perfect quote from Hemingway to fit the moment, gregarious, engaging. After knowing him for years, and being delighted by him for years, my wife asked me what he would think about a moral crisis that we were all involved in. I thought about it for a moment and said, "I haven't the foggiest idea what he would think about it." The reason I didn't know is because he didn't know. But he had his options open.

No the other part of this, the harder part for us, is forming some judgments, developing some convictions, articulating our values. We'd rather not actually verbalize some of them because then we might have to question some of them, might have to make some changes. In the physical world, the only things that consistently flow downstream, the only things that go with the flow, the current... are dead. More of us, on the spiritual level, need to begin the discipline of at least saying to ourselves, "in my considered opinion" when we read the paper every day. We need to be making some moral judgments, reflecting on our spiritual values, and practice actually verbalizing what we believe at least to ourselves. Maybe with some other people in your church that are trying to develop some spiritual values for themselves.

Tolerance is an important virtue. But it doesn't take the place of commitment. The trick is to have convictions and compassion, to be broad-minded and believing, to be understanding and judicious. You want to become a person of substance because for all its titillation and glory, Mohammed Ali is right about how quickly it all fades... "I had the world... and it wasn't nothing". We you're old, you don't want someone to ask you kids what you stood for and have them get silent and thoughtful for a moment and say "I don't know."

Amen.