Rector's Message
Rector's Message
Rectors Message for December 2007
After my second year in seminary, back in the 1980s, I spent a summer in England serving an internship. Toward the end of my time, after my duties were over, I planned to do some touring of the country. One evening, invited to dinner at the home of a member of the parish where I was serving, another guest brusquely asked me, Well, so are you going to London and Stratford-upon-Avon and then say, Ive done England Taken a little aback, I said, Well, no. And I described my planned tour, which included Lincoln, Salisbury, Liverpool, Ely, and a number of other places all around the country. He softened up a great deal after that. What I realized was that he had figured I was a typical American tourist and judged me accordingly.
Judgment. Much as we might like to ignore it, it is impossible to avoid judgment in this world. Sometimes it is a label slapped on us, whether we deserve it or not. Other times, it is for something we do. Whether it is for drawing with crayons all over our mothers living room wall at the age of two or whether it is sitting for the SAT to get into college or whether it is for our annual job review, judgment is a regular part of life from an early age. More often it is not the formal judgments, like final examinations or drivers license tests, that are painful but rather the informal daily judgments that are made about us by friends and family and strangers and acquaintancessometimes based on just who we are (superficial American tourists perhaps)
Perhaps that is why people react so viscerally to the whole idea of judgment, even though we all do make judgments about things or situations or people nearly every day. It is a very negative thing to describe someone as judgmental; it implies a pharisaical self-righteousness, a bigoted intolerance. In fact, judgmentalism may be the one thing modern world does not tolerateeven though, of course, this is a contradiction in itself.
One of the hard things about Jesus is that, despite the mutterings some may utter about him, he did judge peopleand not just the Pharisees. The picture of a soft Jesus who only loved and affirmed people is a myth invented by people who dont know their Bible stories. As we hear clearly in the Advent readings from Scripture, he talked about a final judgment and reckoning. This, of course, was nothing new; the prophets had warned of judgment for centuries. But, the whole Biblical approach to judgment reveals that our modern take on it is all wrong. Judgment Day was about setting things right that are wrong in the world, about vindicating those who were suffering unjustly. Judgment Day is a really good thing because it takes seriously the fact that much of the world is messed up, and needs to be put back together again. And finally, the cross reveals that Judgment is appropriate and fair and just but that it has been transformed, at least in its application to us, with mercy, love and forgiveness purchased at a very high price by Jesus. We wont get what we deserve, thank goodness, because Jesus has taken that rap for us. But the cost was his very life; thats because sin is so much more corrosive and destructive than we tend to estimate.
Judgment, true and righteous judgment, is about honesty; it is about the way things really are. And as good as that may sound, it leaves us with no hope because it means we all fall under judgment, even righteous judgment. Our hope instead is in Jesus, who exchanges his clean record for our dirty onebecause he is our savior.
