Here I am, reposting my sermon from 28th November, and its all about judgement! Why on Earth would I want to preach a sermon about judgement you may ask? Well, I thought it was about time we had a rethink about it, as we either get hopelessly negative and scared or we pooh pooh the fact that it might exist at all. Hopefully this redresses the balance and starts us thinking more positively!
Here is the address for the bible readings...
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We have now come into the season of Advent, when we look forward to the coming of Christ in three ways. Christ who came at Bethlehem 2000 years ago, Christ who comes to us and meets us at the altar each week and Christ who will come in glory to judge the earth.
As our reading from Isaiah chapter 2 put it “He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; “
We often see Judgement as bad. Talking about judgement makes us nervous because we are scared of being found fault with or rejected. It does not help that many of the times we hear the word in everyday life, it is used negatively. "Don't be so judgemental. The judge gave him ten years hard labour" . The rise of shows like X factor and Strictly Come Dancing and judges like Simon Cowell have made things even worse. Or as Bruno said of Ann Widdecombe's salsa " It was unique and compelling, somewhere between horror and comedy. " Jesus, is not like any of these judges and we need to learn to flip those ideas on their heads.
If we look up judgement in a thesaurus, and then remove the suggestions with those more negative connotations we are left with this little list of suggestions of words with similar meanings.
astuteness, discernment, ingenuity, intuition, penetration, perception, savvy, sharpness and wisdom. Perhaps we should see the judge not as the one who wishes to jail us, but more like the penetrating perception of a body scanner in the hands of a skilled doctor, delving deep inside and trying to see what is going wrong in order to fix it.
One of the desert Fathers in the early church was asked by a certain soldier if God received a penitent man. And after heartening him with many words, the monk said to him at the last, "Tell me, beloved, if your cloak were torn, would you throw it away?" he said, "No, but I would patch it and wear it." The old man said to him, "If you would spare your garment, shall not God have mercy on His own image?"
We are made in the image of God, and God loves us, and does not want to reject us or throw us away. God wants to fix us. Or as Coldplay put it
" Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you"
See the video of the whole song here .
We are broken people living in a broken world, and the judgement of God is not one that throws away. It is one that fixes whenever it can.
"They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks"
The swords we heard about in that Isaiah reading did not end up in landfill. They were not burned or buried. They were moulded into something better. They were turned into ploughshares, a tool for growing crops and feeding the hungry. A weapon of death was turned into a means of saving life. A sharp edge is useful somewhere else!
Yet of course the problem in this day and age is that many people do simply throw away torn clothes and old swords, and many things end up in landfill that do not need to be there.We write off people too. Society finds it hard to accept that people can change, and is not often willing to give them second chances. But God not only gives people second chances, he gives them 70 times 7 chances, that is the extent of his love.
Henri Nouwen wrote these challenging words about how we deal with other people who have made mistakes "Some of us tend to do away with things that are slightly damaged. Instead of repairing them we say: "Well, I don't have time to fix it, I might as well throw it in the garbage can and buy a new one." Often we also treat people this way. We say: "Well, he has a problem with drinking; well, she is quite depressed; well, they have mismanaged their business...we'd better not take the risk of working with them." When we dismiss people out of hand because of their apparent woundedness, we stunt their lives by ignoring their gifts, which are often buried in their wounds."
One of the most challenging things about that Henri Nouwen quote is his insight that people’s gifts are often buried in their wounds. And it is true that when we allow God to work within us, He transforms our very woundedness into something that can help and heal other people, but in order to allow that to happen we have to open ourselves up to God working within us and learn to accept ,and love, and forgive ourselves.
One of the absolutions in the New Zealand prayerbook goes. “God forgives you, forgive others, forgive youself, through Christ God has put away your sin. Approach your God in peace.” I love that prayer and was sad that it didn’t make it into our current prayer book as an authorised text, because it underlines the fact that often the hardest task we have when we have done something we are ashamed of, is to forgive ourselves.
So if we look at judgement more as a body scanner than a high court judge we can see God's judgement as more of a weeding-out of what makes us, our lives and our world unhappy. Or as psalm 72 puts it. “May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.”
Those on the top of the pile may be afraid of anything changing. But for those on the bottom of the pile, the outcasts on the margins, and those who have suffered grave injustice the thought that someone is going to root out what makes life unfair for them becomes a good thing that they long for. For justice involves "fairness", and if all your life you have suffered from un-fairness and in-justice then the thought that someone will come and make things right and give you a fair chance is something amazing.
Some people would prefer not to think of God as judging at all. But, as someone pointed out to me recently, what would we call a judge who simply let a murderer walk away free?
The answer is "Corrupt".
Yet God is not corrupt. He longs to make things right.
...and we can help God in that task. Not by standing in the middle of town and shouting about God’s judgement like some Christians have done in the past, but rather by opening ourselves up to God’s body-scanning judgement here and now. By asking God to reveal what is wrong in our lives, and inviting in his healing love to fix it. Many people find it helpful to have a confessor or soul friend to do this with them. Others simply do it in a quiet place on their own - and if we mess up and find ourselves feeling guilty, saying sorry to God sooner rather than later can help - not letting our wounds fester. Then when the end comes and Christ returns in glory, we will have nothing to fear at all but much to look forward to, when justice finally comes to our world.
