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"Ten Years And What I've Come To Learn..."

1 Corinthians 4:1-5
May 25, 2008

Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.
Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. But with me it is a
very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even
judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted.
It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time,
before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will
disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God.

This weekend is roughly the 10th anniversary of my ordination to the Christian ministry,
in May of 1998 in Mobile, Alabama. It was a very important moment in my life, as you
can well imagine, but it was also an important family moment as well, because my father
had died only months earlier, and so my mother and sister, along with an aunt I with
whom I was very close, came to Mobile to see my ordination. It was a very emotional
time for me, not only because of that recent personal loss, but because getting to that
place, to that moment of ordination had been such a difficult journey. To be able to
come to that place, to kneel and then to have other ministers lay their hands on me,
and then to have the members of the church I did my internship also lay their hands on
me, to be able to come to that place knowing that I had come to this moment with my
conscience clear, that I had told the truth, that I had not lied, or been deceptive about
who I was, well, it was an incredibly emotional moment for me. It felt like the end of an
important part of my life journey, but, on the other hand, of course, it was just the
beginning of another part of my journey, one that has been unexpected, so unexpected
as to find myself pastoring this congregation, in a small town in Southwest Michigan.
Who would have guessed? Who would have known?

But throughout that journey of 10 years in ministry there have been a lot of ups and
downs, already, just a third into my hopefully 30 plus year career. I’ve had some
unbelievable highs, which include moments when people thought I had hung in the
moon because of my work in turning around my first congregation and then starting a
brand new one in Oklahoma City. Those times of have been great, but the deep
valleys, the lows of the last decade have been as memorable as the best times. And
usually during those difficult times there have always been the critics, the judges, those
who have found my leadership wanting, have found me to be less than stellar and who
often times would tell me face-to-face, which, despite the pain of it for both sides, is
something you always want from those who are unhappy with you. I would rather hear
it directly from someone rather that hear it from a third hand source—that is the
minimum we owe each other in the church, that we deal directly each other when we’ve
got a problem or a concern with someone else. Robert Alper, the Jewish comic and
rabbi, tells this story about a synagogue that uses voice mail. Alper phoned and heard
this message: "Welcome to Temple Beth Shalom. If you're calling from a touch-tone
phone and would like membership information, press one. For our service schedule,
press two. To complain to the rabbi, press three. To complain about the rabbi, press
four, five or six."

However, more often than not, I’ve not gotten the complaints directly from church
members—I’ve usually gotten the information about some dissatisfaction or concern
from a third hand party, which always causes me a little concern and I always ask
myself: is there something about me that shows a lack of openness to others that they
can’t feel they can come to me, either because they think I will react poorly and become
angry at them, or that I will somehow have my feelings hurt because someone points
out to me the real truth that I may not be the perfect person, and certainly not the
perfect pastor? But, of course, I think a lot of it is the real truth that it’s just hard to go
to someone, especially someone you care about and maybe even respect, and share
with them that you think they may have dropped the ball when it came to this or that
matter. Admittedly, I’ve had more than my fair share of not doing the right thing, and
yet, at other times, it’s has just been a disagreement between me and others about
which is the right path to go on in order to get to the common goal we both share.
Nonetheless, when people can’t feely communicate with each other, they inevitably
start looking for others that will agree with them, they triangulate, as we say in systems
thinking, looking for others to affirm their perceptions, real or imagined, and then
groups and factions begin to coalesce and form, causing a congregation to fracture
and be divided in itself. That is a painful thing to watch, and I’ve seen it in both small
and large congregations that I have served—there is nothing worse than a church fight,
and nothing that makes the church look more hypocritical than a no-hold barred, drag
out congregational brawl, with people treating each other poorly in a less than Christ-
like way.

I am very thankful that we’ve not had one of those kinds of moments in this church, and
I hope we never will. But when those moments do happen, when I gets criticized,
judged, or better, hopefully, critiqued, I try to remember how those who have gone
before me, especially people like the apostle Paul, who despite the reverence we often
pay the apostle nowadays, was a very controversial person in his own time, even in the
churches he helped to found. Paul’s letters reflect the deep criticism he often
endured—some of it certainly valid at times, I suspect, but his critics were always fierce,
always passionate, and the response he would give his critics returned that passion,
blow for blow, hopefully in a way that was better than the ways I’ve seen church fights
played out, though I think probably not—people are humans, both then and now. The
church at Corinth, which is where this passage you heard today is directed towards, is
a congregation filled with a lot of different factions divided by loyalties to the different
charismatic figures that had served them over the years. You often find that in
congregations: people who loved Pastor So-and So and his ministry, whereas you find
other people like Pastor So and So and her ministry better. It’s just natural, I suspect,
to have favorites, but in Corinth the situation had gotten out of control and so you had
powerful forces within the congregation who had taken on the names of their favorite
pastors—I belong to Apollos, and another would say, I belong to Paul, I am follower of
so and so, and on and on it went (I Corinthians 3). It was tearing this congregation
apart, and so Paul writes to them to answer their questions about matters of faith, and
to encourage to them to be one, despite their differences and their divided loyalties. It
is in First Corinthians that you have Paul’s famous love chapter—love is patient, love is
kind, and right before that he talks about the congregation being like a body with
different parts and functions, but none being less valuable than another—we all have
our part to play, Paul writes.

So, you can see how the issue of “togetherness despite the differences” haunted the
Corinthian church, and how the criticism of Paul’s leadership had caused him to
respond to them with words that sometime border on paternalistic. In our passage
today, he writes about what is expected of a leader, one who is a steward of God’s
mysteries—trustworthiness is what is expected, Paul says. And then he goes on to say
that it matters little to him what they, the Corinthians, think of him, how they will come to
judge him, and ultimately, really, he doesn’t even have the right to judge himself over
the rightness or wrongness of his actions or beliefs. We are often told that we have no
right to judge other people, to decide whether or not they are “in” with God or not, but
its unusual here for Paul to remind us that we are not even to judge ourselves, to even
decide for ourselves whether or not we are, in the end, “in” or “out” with God. All
judgment, all final decisions on who is right or wrong in this world, ultimately rest at the
feet of God, and yet most of us are tempted to wrest that heavy burden from God, we
want to take on the job ourselves, even when it comes to judging ourselves. And yet
the work of judgment, the parsing out of who is ultimately right or wrong, that is difficult
work, one that we’re really not built for, and ironically enough, gets us into a lot of
trouble, because we act like we know better than God. “The late Indian Jesuit priest
and psychologist Anthony de Mello liked to tell the story of the two taxidermists who
stopped before a window in which an owl was on display. They immediately began to
criticize the way it was mounted. Its eyes were not natural; its wings were not in
proportion with its head; its feathers were not neatly arranged; and its feet could
certainly be improved. When they finished critiquing the owl, the old owl slowly turned
its head ... and winked at them.” Sometimes we foolishly think we know better than the
Creator, right?

So, how do we avoid the temptation of judging each other, that is, deciding the
goodness or badness of other people? Well, let me tell you what I don’t think it means:
I don’t think it means that we can’t name a particular behavior as bad or good—fraud is
a bad thing, rape is a bad thing, cruelty and violence are bad things, and we ought to
name them as such, because if we don’t speak up against behavior and sin that does
such great harm in this world, then we will be held accountable for that as well, on that
last great day. The hard part comes when we disagree about what behaviors are bad,
what things are sinful, and what things are right and good. As I mentioned last week,
my grandmother authentically believed that people of different racial backgrounds
should not marry each other, based on what I think to be a bad misreading of the Bible,
but there it is—I disagree with her on this issue. Of course, the disagreements are not
the problem, really—it’s what happens when our disagreements become our
justifications for judging each other, for saying that we are in or out of favor with God
herself because someone does not agree with us. Now, believing that God might agree
with us on this or that issue—that’s fine, but when we leave humility behind, the truth
that ultimately God is the one who decides what is right or wrong, and not us, when we
begin deciding those that do not agree with us are not in the realm of God’s favor or
love, and that they will be punished for disagreeing with us, well, that is when we
become the judge of other people’s souls. It is not our job to judge others, to decide in
whose hands they ultimately reside. And if we are not even to judge ourselves, to
decide whether or not we are “in” our “out” with God, to decide whether or not our souls
are right with God or not, then certainly we are not to judge the souls of others, souls
that we cannot even know as well as our own. What we do in this world can be judged,
can be spoken for or against, but who we are, who we are before the living God, that is
God’s business, and we save ourselves much pain and much trouble if we walk from
the temptation to parse out who is and who is not on the outs with God.

If this sounds like the old, tired adage, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” well, know that is
not what I mean, nor do I think that is what Paul is thinking here. I’ve always hated that
saying, especially when it is directed at me and people like me, because it’s often used
as an excuse for behavior that is less than loving—going after people, trying to curtail
their human rights, and then oddly justifying their actions by naming it as loving, when it
certainly feels less than loving to those who fear the power of the majority. And it’s
central core idea is nonsense…isn’t everyone a sinner, and isn’t everyone to be loved,
and if you’ve got to say something like “hate the sin, love the sinner,” that means you’re
struggling to do what we are called to do, which is just to love each other, and to
behave in a way that actually lives out that kind of Christian love. That is where I do
find fault with Paul here…in this passage, he implies that his conscience is clear, that
he has done nothing wrong, especially in matters to do with the Corinthian church, and
thus he has proven to be trustworthy in all things. Well, to be frank, from one minister
to another, Paul, I think you’re probably wrong about yourself, because I’ve yet to meet
another steward of God’s mysteries that hasn’t made a mess of things in her or his
congregation at least once or twice—and maybe you did it even there in Corinth, as
one of their leaders. It comes with territory of being human, Paul, and even the great
ones have feet of clay every once and while.

But having said that, having taken Paul to task for his lack of self-awareness, I do credit
him for saying that just because he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, or that his
soul is clear of any guilt, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he hasn’t done anything
wrong or that his soul is without fault when it comes to his relationship with this church—
he knows that God will ultimately decide that issue. I think that the way to avoid judging
each other is to listen to what Paul says in the latter part of this passage, which seems
to remind us to let go of the “should have’s”, or “ought to be’s” that seem to control so
much of our thinking and destroy so many of our relationships with each other. We are
all sinners, we all make mistakes, sometimes with the best of intentions—I know that as
a human being, and I know as a minister who is hopefully more often trustworthy than
he is not, who is better minister than he was 10 years ago, but who often fails God and
the people I serve. If we know that truth, that we are all on the same imperfect boat,
really know it in our own soul, then it certainly becomes a lot more difficult to judge each
other, to foist someone out of God’s love and care, out of God’s kingdom. All that work,
all that effort to do something like that, and then we find out that it was never our job to
begin with, the work of judging other! Thank goodness, because the burden of it, well,
it’s too much to bear, and you and I’ve we’ve got enough on our plates without having
to play God with each other, or even, ironically, enough, with ourselves. Amen.