SEATTLE MENNONITE CHURCH

November 13, 2005

Sermon: Weldon D. Nisly

TITLE: Do not judge

THEME: Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount

TEXTS: Isaiah 42:1-7 The Servant as Light to the Nations

Matthew 7:1-12 On judging, profaning, searching, & the Golden Rule

Judge not

Jesus went on to say, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged” (Matthew 7:1).

We near the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount with the first half of chapter 7 of Matthew’s gospel that we hear in worship today. We hear a series of sayings from Jesus’ lips that come to us as call and command, as wisdom and warning.

Do not judge lest you be judged.

Do not give what is holy to dogs.

Do not cast pearls before pigs.

Do ask, search and knock on the door to find God.

Do to others what you want others to do to you.

Do enter through the narrow gate….for the road is hard and few find it (7:1-14).

This is a hard road. Jesus tells us three times, “do not” do this and three times “do” that There is a lot packed into these six sayings – these six “dos” and “don’ts.”

Let me ask you a question. Do you find Jesus’ words here inspiring or depressing? Encouraging or discouraging? Jesus does not make it easy for us.

Perhaps one of the greatest errors we make in the contemporary church is that we make it sound too easy. Why aren’t we telling people, “I don’t know if you are ready for this?”

Monasticism has always known that would-be monks will be tested and talked out of joining the monastery. Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century put in the Rule of Saint Benedict why and how monks are to be discouraged from entering monastic life. Faith is not for the faint of heart.

Rule 58 of The Rule of Saint Benedict begins:

Do not grant newcomers to the monastic life an easy entry, but, as the Apostle says, Test the spirits to see if they are from God (1 John 4:1). If Someone comes and keeps knocking at the door, and……..has shown [patience]…….and persisted in [this] request, then [the person] should be allowed to enter and stay (RB 1980).

That is the monastic way of hearing Jesus say, “Ask, and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (7:7).

SMC sermon – WDNisly – 11/13/05 – p. 2

Our Anabaptist ancestors knew the way and words of Jesus took great courage and perseverance. It demanded one’s life for one’s faith. They did not make following Jesus in the community of faith an easy choice or path. You were baptized as an adult as an act of dying or drowning to your own life and “rising in Christ.” How could that be easy?

A Revelation “on Judging”

While each saying of Jesus confronts us with our life and faith, one is particularly hard. It is the first of this series of sayings, “Do not judge….”

Rather than probing the command “Do not judge” directly, I want to approach it through a story. Usually Jesus told stories rather than arguing doctrine or theology. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is primarily doing straightforward teaching. So let’s hear Jesus teaching on judging through story.

This story has been with me again for the past few weeks since Gerald Schlabach shared it with me from a sermon he preached at Faith Mennonite Church in Minneapolis on October 9. Gerald let the story reveal a “Nagging Mercy” in the twenty-third Psalm. We will let it reveal a “nagging judgment” in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It is Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation.”

Jesus’ dos and don’ts in the Sermon on the Mount appear all over Flannery O’Connor stories. Front and center in “Revelation” are Jesus’ words, “Do not judge.”

I share it today because it connects one of my greatest sins – judging others – with one of my favorite writers – Flannery O’Connor.

Flannery O’Connor died of lupus at 39, a life too short for one of this country’s most amazing writers. She was also one of the church’s earliest and best narrative theologians, although she wouldn’t have used that term. She was a Catholic writer in the deep South with an eye for the grotesque and a language for the bizarre. She painted graphic word pictures confronting us with our human struggle to follow Jesus.

“Revelation” takes place in the South as do most of her stories. The setting for this story is the crowded tacky waiting room of a doctor’s office.

------------------ borrowing from O’Connor’s story & Gerald’s sermon ---------------------

The main character, Mrs. Turpin is waiting for the doctor with her husband Claud. Mrs. Turpin’s antagonist is a sullen faced acne-scarred teenage student home from Wellesley College. Her name, Mary Grace, is itself a revelation. Mary Grace is as unlikely, reluctant and dour a prophet as Jeremiah.

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In the waiting room, Mrs. Turpin is trying a little too cheerily to make conversation with some, and trying a little too obviously to avoid conversation with others.

A conversation runs constantly inside her head, as she chatters out loud about the runny-nosed child who ought to give her a seat and about the “whitetrashy” mother wearing a print dress made out of the same material as the Turpins' chicken feed sacks. Then she commented on the stylish woman across the room and on the sullen Mary Grace scowling into a thick blue book with the title Human Development. She looked up only to throw hateful glares Mrs. Turpin’s way.

Mrs. Turpin is a good Christian obsessed with the classification system she uses to rate different types of people. She is so obsessed that she sometimes laid awake at night wondering what she would say if Jesus gave her the choice of being born white trash or [black]. [I can’t bring myself to say out loud the word Flannery O’Connor uses.]

Mrs. Turpin is making clear to the stylish woman that she and Claud are property owners -- growing cotton and raising livestock on a small but respectable farm with a little of everything -- when a white trashy woman butts in.

"One thang I don't want. Hogs. Nasty stinking things, a-grunting and a rooting all over the place."

Mrs. Turpin must defend her hogs. She describes the "pig parlor" where her Claud hoses them down every day. But the woman insists: "One thang I know ... I ain't going to ... love no [black people] or scoot down no hog with no hose."

Mrs. Turpin and the pleasant lady exchanged looks that indicated they both understood that you had to have certain things before you could know certain things. But every time Mrs. Turpin exchanged a look with the lady, she was aware that the sullen girl's glaring

eyes were like lasers directed at her and she had trouble bringing her attention back to the conversation.

The stylish woman's "mouth grew thin and tight. 'I think the worst thing in the world,' she

said, 'is an ungrateful person. To have everything and not appreciate it. I know a girl,' she said, 'who has parents who would give her everything, ... who is getting a good education, who wears the best clothes, but who can never say a kind word to anyone, who never smiles, who just criticizes and complains all day long.'

"If it's one thing I am," Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, "it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is! It could have been different!' …..She was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. 'Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!' she cried aloud.”

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"The book struck her directly over her left eye." Mary Grace had thrown it, howling and crashing across the magazine table. In another instant, Mrs. Turpin was on the ground, with Mary Grace's hand around her throat.

The next instant a nurse had pulled the girl off and pinned her to the ground next to Mrs. Turpin. "'What you got to say to me?' [Mrs. Turpin] asked hoarsely, ...waiting, as for a revelation.

"The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin's. 'Go back to hell where you

came from, you old wart hog,' she whispered. Her eyes burned for a moment as she saw with pleasure that her message had stuck a target."

That evening, Mrs. Turpin followed her Claud to the pig parlor, and as he hosed down the

hogs, she "glowered at them." "The shoats were running about shaking themselves like idiot children." "A-grunting and a-rooting…" After a bit she grabbed the hose herself and told Claud to drive home their negro farm help.

Once Claud was out of earshot, she began to talk, to talk to Jesus. She spoke in a "low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury.”

"'What do you send me a message like that for?' ... 'How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?' ... 'Why me? ... It's no trash around here, black or white, that I haven't given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church..... Go on, call me a hog! ... Who do you think you are?"

Remember, she is talking to Jesus. This time it is for real.

The sun was going down. The color of everything, "field and crimson sky," was

burning with "transparent intensity." At last she was silent, waiting. "Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting wildly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.”

And still she waited, as darkness fell, until finally she raised her hands from the pen in a

gesture upward. "A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the [last] streak [of light] as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash,….and of blacks in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.

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She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable, as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly at what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

"At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah."

Revelation and Judgment

You do well to hear all of Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” to get the fullness of the story. You do well to hear all of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to get the fullness of faith. In this story as in Jesus’ sermon is a three-word revelation: “Do not judge.”

Too often judging is a means of belittling another and judgment a means of control rather than a search for truth or act of faith. Judging so easily becomes a way of bolstering one’s self while belittling another (Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount, 162.)

Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, writes a daily reflection called “The Monastic Way” to help us live a whole and holy life. On Friday, this was Joan Chittister’s word of wisdom:

To judge another without either the experience or evidence that confirms it,

is to draw boundaries around our lives. Better to be fooled by someone

than to be cut off by the cancer of unsubstantiated suspicion from the

possibilities the relationships might well bring. (Friday, November 11, 2005)

Jesus promises in the Sermon, “The way we judge is the way we will be judged.”

How we treat other people is the very heart of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. How we treat each other is a specific and essential principle in the great commandment to love God, self, neighbor and enemy (Brendan Byrne, Lifting the Burden: Reading Matthew’s Gospel in the Church Today, 69.)

Jesus said, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged………...

In everything do to others as you would have them do to you;

For this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:1 & 12).