Listening for God: From Judgment to Integrity

Sermon, 3/7/10 (Lent 3). There’s a difference between passing judgment and promoting discernment. Discernment speaks from a place of integrity – a wholeness of perspective based on how we see others, versus how they might see us. Integrity is the careful, prayerful, penitent Lenten listening for God from the inside-out, not the outside-in. It not only neutralizes the judgment seat at our table of Communion, it removes it altogether.

Scripture                      Luke 13:1-9

Listening for God: From Judgment to Integrity

It is not a pleasant thing.

And we all do it.

And we all fear it being done to us.

Passing judgment. Only let’s agree not to call it that. Let’s touch it up with a little perfume or splash on some cologne, and call it “discernment.”

Scented shrouding regardless: Differences – substantive ones – separate judgment from discernment.

Judgment jousts with one other across the table.

Discernment speaks to the matter on the table.

Judgment is a spirit bearing no gifts.

Discernment is a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Judgment calls for retribution.

Discernment begins with repentance.

What to do, to move us beyond our place of judgment – not to mention our fear of it?

How to repent – not because we are afraid of what people or God will do to us, but because of what we would do without a sense of God?

What to do … to move us from the judgmental to a place of integrity?

Integrity. Discernment – and not judgment – flows from a place of integrity. The dictionary I use defines integrity as “possession of firm principles; completeness; wholeness.” Complete … Whole: bedfellows of the Hebrew and Greek words for salvation.

Integrity seems to be receiving greater press these days – and I for one am glad. Not too long ago, Stephen L. Carter, a Yale Law School professor, wrote a book on the subject that was truly a rara avis: a work both popular and profound.¹

Whence can we acquire this integrity – this sense of completeness, or wholeness? A friend of mine in Alcoholics Anonymous comes to our aid here. Integrity, he says, is based not on how we think others perceive us. Integrity is based on how we perceive others.

That begs a second hearing: Integrity is based not on how we think others perceive us. It is based on how we perceive others. This understanding, I believe, encompasses the entire trajectory of Jesus’ teachings and ministry to us. It’s an inside-out witness to an outside-in world.

It’s the careful listening for God

within us

and then among us

made manifest to us

by the season of Lent.

Today’s gospel passage is a difficult one. On our best days, at least, we can all agree that persons who suffer horrifically in this world, be they imperial sacrifices or victims of a creation groaning in travail, are no worse sinners and no less human than those who meet a kinder fate. Pat Robertson notwithstanding, most of us – I hope – reject such coldheartedness.

And yet, this compassionate separation of suffering from sin was quite the revelation in Jesus’ day. A revelation courtesy of a rabbi who understood what so many enforcers of a purity code could not yet grasp, and still may not grasp: that the rankest of sins seems to be the ranking of sins.

For Jesus came and he comes not to slake our thirst for ranking and retribution. He came and he comes to whet our appetite for our own repentance. Moving us inside-out, rather than outside-in. Focusing us on how we see the world, rather than how the world may see us.

Repentance. For each of us. The foundation stone of our integrity. Regardless of whom we are – that is, whom we think we are.

Mary Hinkle Shore writes, "Jesus rejects retribution and yet calls for repentance. The fact that some of us … find our brains taxed when we try to hold these two thoughts together may indicate just how tied into retribution we still are."²

How tied into retribution we are – indeed! We seem not to be able to find it within ourselves as a nation to extricate ourselves from the vicious cycles of retributive justice.

And so we have been perishing from within, versus repenting from within, for many years now. Jesus is clear today that the two are linked: “But unless you repent, you will perish!” Not by the hand of God – but by our own doing. Because we have looked to deconstruct the perceived sins of other nations first – for our material as well as for our moral benefit – rather than seal the bricks of our considerable power with the necessary mortar of humility.

And now what to do when the bricks of our house are crumbling? And now what to do when someone else holds the deed?

We have had our chances to repent. George Packer wrote the following in The New Yorker six winters ago; it could have been written yesterday:

In the days that followed the September 11^th attacks, we saw the early stages of something like a national self-mobilization. The long lines of would-be blood donors, the volunteers converging on lower Manhattan from all over the country, the fumbling public efforts at understanding Islam: the response took on very personal tones. People spoke as if they wanted to change their lives … A generation legendary for its self-centeredness seemed to grasp that here was a historic chance to aim for something greater.

It has been much remarked that (nothing was done) to tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger effort. (Instead,) Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for suspicious activity.³

But of course, we did mobilize: to fight a perceived external enemy. For when being of service to each other required too much sustained imagination and effort, we found it served us well to return to the one great national addiction and obsession we all share: war. War is a force that gives us meaning, to quote the title of a veteran war journalist’s book⁴ – whether we may agree with a particular conflict or not! The myth that violence can redeem violence is the ethos of our time – the spirituality of the modern world, Walter Wink writes, rooted in the Babylonian creation myth of one god killing another, rather than the Judeo-Christian creation myth that God created everything and it was good.⁵ Nothing compares to the judgmental high – the retributive rush – of our national addiction of engaging in and engaging over a good, juicy war between nations or a crossfire among partisans at home.

Yet today, Jesus’ Lenten cry to our nation – and to each of us – is clear: to move from judgment to integrity. It’s an inside job. No external, false god – no idol – out there, that we can imbibe or inject, intoxicating as it may be, can mask our sense of incompleteness, can cover up our lack of wholeness … can feed us with the bread of salvation. No pointing to the destruction of several Galileans in the scripture here, or a personal or national enemy over there, can justify and satisfy us.

Repentance. A Lenten turning, from how each and all of us think the world sees us, to how each and all of us can better envision God’s world.

And then, taking the actions – always, repentance involves actions – to set the chairs around the Communion table of integrity, when we would plop ourselves down in the judgment seat.

Or, then again – as many of us church folk are especially wont to do – we stand helplessly and perhaps even hopelessly by while the religiously righteous cheerfully and gratefully claim that judgment seat we have neglected to remove from within our house, to begin with. Those who bang their knives and forks at the head of the table of “Christian” fellowship and grunt, “You: you belong. You: you can serve this table, but you cannot belong. You: you can belong, but you cannot serve with the others!”

When I avoid confronting these judgmental individuals – perhaps for fear of being seen as judgmental myself – I am not free. When I turn the other way and say to the next one still at the table, “Pass the cup of Christ, please”, I am not free to respond creatively, and I am not free to respond lovingly, to those who would sit in the judgment seat.

And when enough of us are too enslaved within to remove the judgment seat altogether, none of us are truly free to be of service to the kingdom.

For when the kingdom table is not kept round, and somebody is banging on it and tilting it from its head, there will always be those who – for no fault of their own – slide off at its end.

And we are all less whole – less complete – with less integrity – because of it. Not because those who’ve slip slided away have not repented. But because we have not.

From judgment to integrity. It’s our Lenten journey. Not because there’s a promise of punishment hanging over us if we do not traverse this road. But because of the reality of our repentance would bring us life everlasting.

Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.

*        *        *

¹Integrity (Harper Perennial, 1997). According to Carter, to possess true integrity requires three steps. "First, you must know what it is that you believe. Second, you must be willing to act on the basis of what you believe. And third, perhaps hardest of all, you must be willing to say openly that you are acting on the basis of what you believe." Stanford University News Service, “Yale law professor Stephen Carter speaks at commencement”, June 14, 1994, http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/94/940614Arc4207.html.

²http://maryhinkle.typepad.com/pilgrim_preaching/2004/03/repent_or_peris.html.

³February 16-23, 2004 edition, p. 108.

⁴Anchor, 2003. The author is war journalist Chris Hedges.

⁵Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 13-17.

Benediction …

From judgment to integrity.

The medieval Sufi mystic Rumi put it well:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

Go, and spread the Good News of your integrity in Christ Jesus. Judging not. And tolerating judgment not.