The following is the full text of Toby's message delivered Tuesday, June 30 at the Bear River POW gathering....
So last week, when we were here, we
talked about a few “What If’s…” We asked 3 What IF’s of the church – what if a
church or spiritual community didn’t have to be a place or a building, bounded
by a uniform set of beliefs? Tonight I want to continue with our What If theme
for the summer. Tonight I want to ask What If a church or spiritual community
completely refrained from judging others? What if a spiritual community or
church made an absolute, unwavering covenant never to judge, condemn, or
belittle others, no matter what their identifiable differences…? What if…?
Part of the reason I ask this
particular question is that several years ago a research team from the Barna
group polled people across this country to determine what the first thing or
things people thought of when they heard the word “Christian.” Care to guess
what the top three answers were – from millions of interviewees nation-wide…?
The top three answers were judgmental, anti-homosexual, and anti-abortion.
Those are the top 3 answers of what
people associate with followers of Jesus. I’m sure Jesus is really proud to
have his supposed followers known for those 3 things above all others. In fact,
I bet for him it’s almost as good as…well… being crucified all over again!
So can you see why I want us to explore
the question of what if we were to let go - once and for all - of our
incredibly pervasive tendency to judge, categorize, and condemn others?
I’d like you to meet our musical guest
tonight and get to know him a little better, because his story and journey have
a lot to do with moving beyond judgment of others. (Interview with Musical Guest - Rokko Jans)
(Rokko and Melissa play "Geodes" by Carrie Newcomb)
I’ve
never been much of a gardener but occasionally I’ll have the chance to spend
some time in some of my friends’ gardens. Some of them have an amazing way with
flowers, vegetables, and all things green. I don’t have free reign when it
comes to other people’s gardens. I’m relegated to watering when they’re out of
town or unable to get to it. I’m occasionally granted permission to weed,
though my gardening friends are pretty leery – just as my own mother was - about
turning me loose on the weeds. You see, I’ve pulled out more than a few good
plants and flowers when I thought all I was doing was weeding.
I’ve pulled out little fledgling something or others - chives, parsley, and
even some tomato stalks. Nowadays, about the only way anyone lets me into their
garden to weed is if they can actually point out exactly what to pull out and
what to leave – AND stay there watching so I don’t screw it up!
You know there’s a great story Jesus
told about weeding a garden. Does anybody remember it? Check it out…(read Mt.
13) God’s kingdom, Jesus says, is like an unweeded garden, a huge mixture of
good and bad, of productive and unproductive. And did you happen to hear that it
is NOT for the Lord’s servants to do the weeding? The servants of the king come
to their Lord dutifully and ask, “Do you want us go and pull the weeds up?” And
without hesitation the king replies, “No, for while you are pulling up the
weeds, you may root up some of the wheat as well. Let both grow together until
the harvest.” Let them BOTH grow TOGETHER until the harvest.
What a lesson! What a challenge! What a
metaphor for life! If we are going to call ourselves followers of Jesus, then
we are supposed to live and love in an UNweeded
garden. We’re to make no distinctions about who is good
and who isn’t, about who is in and who is out, about who gets water and who
doesn’t.
It really shouldn’t surprise us that
Jesus prefers the garden of his creation to be unweeded. Remember in his famous
Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus put it this way: “You have heard it said, ‘Love
your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you; Love your enemy and pray
for those who persecute you, that you may be true sons of your father in
heaven. For God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain
on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:43-45) That’s our model;
that’s our calling – to live and love in an unweeded garden and to make no
distinction in how we treat people. When it comes to people, we are called and
commanded to stay out of the weeding business, to let our light shine and our
love fall upon the evil as well as the good, on the righteous as well as the
unrighteous.
As a teacher of World Religions at
NCMC, one of fascinating things I’ve observed is the growing interest my
students seem to have in Buddhism and Hinduism, while their interest in
Christianity continues to wane and fade away. We saw this from Megan who was
with us last week for the interview, right? Do you know what draws them to
those religions, rather than to say Christianity or Islam…? The fact that
Buddhists and Hindus don’t dismiss, criticize, or condemn people of other
religions.
When asked by a reporter during his
march to the sea if he wanted to convert the whole world to Hinduism, do you
remember Gandhi’s reply? ”No! I simply want Hindus to be better Hindus, Jews to
be better Jews, Christians to be better Christians, and Muslims to be better
Muslims.” This was his way of acknowledging that no religion is superior to any
other and no truly religious people would ever judge or condemn those of
another religion. Gandhi also once said that “the essence of Hinduism is to
learn to see God in every living being and act accordingly.” Isn’t that pretty
much the essence of Christianity, too? Isn’t that exactly what Jesus did? If
only his followers could do the same, right?
Judging others is such a slippery
slope, isn’t it? We are always making judgments and acting on such limited
information. We have some teachers here tonight, don’t we? Teachers know a
little something about working in an unweeded garden, don’t we? Each and every
classroom is the ultimate unweeded garden. For 14 years, when I was teaching,
every fall when I’d get a new class list, I’d do the same, stupid, judgmental thing.
I’d run my index finger down the list, hoping that I’d have certain “good kids”
in my class, and hoping even more fervently that I’d NOT have to endure certain
“weeds” in my classroom. But despite my hoping and praying, I always got some
unique mix of the kids I wanted and those I didn’t want to have. And do you
know what else I remember about all my classes over 14 years of teaching? Some
of the kids I thought I really wanted to have weren’t always so great, AND one
or two of the kids I thought would absolutely ruin my class, turned out a lot
better than I thought. In the end, I guess I wasn’t that good at telling which
were the weeds and which were the flowers. In the end, the true challenge of
teaching was to give all the kids in
my classroom my absolute best, whether I thought they were weeds or beautiful
flowers. The challenge was to learn to see God in every student and treat them accordingly.
You know, we live in a time and in a
country where more Christians than ever want to weed the garden, which is why
that Barna survey revealed what it did about what people associate with
Christians and Christianity. And it’s not just that Christians want to weed the
garden: they want to weed it NOW. For many Christians, it’s the Muslims who are
the weeds, and if we could just separate and get rid of “them” with all their
terrorists and suicide bombers, we’d be set. For others in our so-called
Christian family, it’s the pro-choicers, the homosexuals, and the liberals that
need to be weeded out so that God’s true kingdom can come. You can fill in the
blanks on who and what your weeds are, but we’ve all got
them, don’t we?
But our Master Gardener – Jesus the
Christ - has made it clear; we’re not very good weeders. Despite our
good intentions, when we weed, we pull out and get rid of too much stuff that
God wants and that God is still working with. In our impatience to “get-r-done,”
we lose sight of the fact that, as Isaiah said some 2,800 years ago, “God’s
ways are not like our ways.” (Isaiah 55:8)
(Insert
song – What’s Going On?)
‘Come on, Toby. Aren’t there are a
number of passages in our scriptures that seem to give us Christians license to
weed, or at least criteria that we think we can use to weed on God’s behalf?’
Yes, as a matter of fact there are. I won’t chronicle all of them now, but I do
want to examine one of the biggest and most influential of these apparent license-to-weed
passages Christians often call upon, just to show you how dangerous AND misused
such texts can be. In John chapter 10, beginning in verse 7, Jesus says,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me
are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not heed them. I am the door; if any
one enters by me he will be saved.” License to weed, right? Could this
be any clearer? Jesus puts himself at the door of the kingdom of God. He’s
the gatekeeper. That means, that as followers of Jesus, we’re set! We’re on the
“right” side of this whole religious argument, right! The God we
worship is the true God, and so all the Muslims and Jews and Hindus and
Buddhists must be the weeds. Let the weeding begin!
Not so fast. Not so fast. If we keep
reading in this very same chapter of John’s gospel, we come to verse 16. Jesus
continues: “And I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them
in also, and they will heed my voice. So, ultimately, there shall be one flock
and one shepherd.” What did Jesus say? Other sheep? Not of this fold? Sheep
that WILL hear his voice – note the future tense. Can you see how John 10 –
when you read it entirely and in its context – is NOT license to weed at all,
but, in fact, quite the opposite?
My friends, the God we worship is
alive. The God that these scriptures give testament to is still working! He’s
not finished with any of us yet, and He’s certainly not finished with the
world. We can’t start weeding. It’s too soon, and it’s not our job.
So what if…what if we agreed to let go
of weeding forever? What if we agreed to let go of judging forever? What if our
only job were to love, to serve, to feed, and to lift up others
indiscriminately? What if a spiritual community committed to letting the rain
of our love fall on the just as well as on the unjust, for that is the model
we’ve been given in Christ?
What if…? Can you imagine it? Can you
imagine…
(the message concluded with Toby, Melissa, and Rokko singing John Lennon's "Imagine.")
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