First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
30 November 2003
Our Judge and Our Hope
Advent is a journey with two destinations. One is to the past, to the manger, Jesus' first coming. We place ourselves imaginatively alongside the ancient people of Israel. With them, we cry out in elegaic songs for the Messiah—"the desire of all the nations"—to come and heal us and to bring justice everywhere. That the Messiah did come in Jesus of Nazareth is the joy Christian faith celebrates on Christmas.
The other destination of our Advent journey is the future, the "second coming," when our traditions teach that Christ will return "in glory." History will end, and the new way of life we call "The Kingdom," for whose coming we've prayed all our lives, will be ours in full at last.
The earliest Christians did not pay much attention to that first coming. They focused on the second, and they believed it was imminent. For them, who had so painfully broken with culture, custom and family to follow Jesus, nothing was more desirable than to be swept into the Kingdom by the glorious Lord of their hearts.
We, I think, are considerably less eager. We regard Doomsday with a certain bemused ambivalence—we say, "Jesus is coming! Look busy!" and make other jokes about The End. On the one hand, our sense of justice demands that God finally take charge of this world in which, as Robin R. Myers writes, "good deeds and righteous living provide [no] exemption from mindless tragedy, and the meek inherit [nothing but] a crushing debt and a dead planet." 1 We want to believe that God has a plan to salvage this mess. On the other hand, we wonder if it makes any sense to think this way. The second coming, after all, has been awfully long in coming. After 2,000 years talk about Jesus' return starts to sound naïve. Waiting for Jesus feels a little like waiting for Elvis to re-enter the building. It's embarrassing.
We handle this embarrassment by saying, as St. Paul told the earliest believers, that imminence is in the eye of the beholder. God's time isn't like human time. For God, the psalmist declares, "a thousand years is like a day." (By God's watch, then, it's only been two days and a fraction of a second since Christ left the earth—hardly a long wait, even in this age of instant gratification!) Or we reduce the second coming to a purely subjective experience—Jesus is always coming into our hearts, we say. That his coming might also be an objective reality in the future is not something we easily grasp or grant.
This may be because most of us are more or less content with our lives. Myers remarks, "How quickly one wishes to 'check out' depends a lot on how happily one is 'checked in'." True enough. But even if our circumstances were not so great, faced with the prospect of a permanent interruption, most of us would opt for the life we know, not the one we don't.
And so we let ranting fundamentalists on late-night cable teach people who are afraid of the world to read the 'sign of the fig tree,' and to hammer plowshares into swords so that their fire-breathing Jesus can wreak vengeance on the ungodly. (Ironically, the scary folks they love to condemn are the same ones that, in the gospels, Jesus loved to save. Oh, well. Perhaps, as Fred Craddock suggests, they are obsessed with the second coming because, deep down, they are so very disappointed in the first one.)2
Fundamentalist nonsense aside, however, when you read the New Testament attentively, it's hard to avoid the idea of a second coming and a final judgment. And that, I suspect, is the main reason we avoid the whole subject. Judgment makes us exceedingly nervous. Some of you may remember that in one of the exercises of last year's visioning process, we were asked to rate our beliefs from "dearly-held" to "not-so-dearly held," using various traditional statements of faith as a basis for the discussion. When we shared the results, judgment came in among the bottom-feeders.
There are good reasons for our aversion to judgment. Too many of us grew up staggering under it. God or a parent or some other authority was always lying in wait for us to fail. They saw everything. They forgave little. Measuring up was the name of the game, and we never did. Our faith in a human-God didn't help much. We had to wonder whether the all-seeing God who became "flesh" and lived as a human being in Jesus would now expect us to live perfect lives, because it's been shown to be possible. God might be saying to us, "Well, I had the same experiences you have, and they didn't defeat me!"3 Who could bear to hear that on any day, let alone on the last day, when we've run out of chances? Let Jesus come and settle all the grand cosmic scores, we say, but please leave our souls and psyches out of it. We've had enough judgment for several lifetimes.
Or have we? Modern psychology has taught us to be nonjudgmental, persuading many of us over time that the worst sin we can commit is to be unsupportive.4 So it's going against a lot of grains to say that sometimes I wonder if we could actually do not with less judgment, but with more—but only if it is the right kind. Maybe the following story can help explain what I mean.
A minister I know did something bad a couple of years ago (no, not what you may be thinking). She felt very guilty and remorseful, so she went for help to her close friends. She'd barely gotten the story out of her mouth when they began telling her that it didn't sound that bad, that she'd had good intentions, that she was way too hard on herself, and that God had already forgiven her. They were immensely supportive, but this only made her feel worse. Either they thought she was incapable of doing the slightest thing wrong (which she knew to be untrue) or she didn't matter enough to them to be taken seriously. Either way, she was left in her pain. They offered her glib affirmations when what she needed was commitment, love, and the truth—a word of judgment.
She wanted to go to confession, but she wasn't Catholic. So she called me and said, "You'll know what to do." I reminded her that I wasn't Catholic either, at least not now. But I did know what to do. I grabbed a UCC Book of Worship and told her to meet me at her church. I sat her down in the chancel, opened the book to the "Rite of Reconciliation of a Penitent" and began....
First we recited a prayer of confidence in God. Then I exhorted her to confess what she had done, and in God's presence and mine she confessed. I affirmed that she had indeed done wrong, and asked her if she was sorry. Yes, she said, she truly was. I inquired whether she'd formed a plan to make amends. She had, and she was resolved to do it. We prayed together for mercy and healing. Then I stood up and declared her sins pardoned in the name of Jesus Christ. We said a final prayer recalling the joy there is in heaven when one who was lost is found, and we exchanged a sign of peace. Then she went home, and so did I.
Now, if you knew the bad thing she did, you might agree with her friends that it wasn't that bad, that she had had good intentions and that she was being way too hard on herself. You might even think that going through an entire reconciliation ritual for that was so much spiritual overkill. But you'd be wrong on both counts. It is a big deal whenever someone breaks through a sense of false innocence, faces a frailty that caused real damage even without intending it, and discovers a greater authenticity of life even in a relatively small moral matter. And by being judged and found wanting, she received a gift most of us crave—the certainty that neither God (nor I) loved her any less even knowing what we know about her; the joy that God (and I) took her conscience and her sense of need seriously and believed that she was worth being judged, worth being forgiven and restored.
Believe me, I tell you this story (much disguised to protect her confidences) to make only one point—namely, that often what threatens us is not judgment itself, but the experience of knowing something about ourselves, or of having someone else know it, and fearing that we will not be able to love ourselves or live with what we know, nor will they. Most of us actually want judgment, because most of us finally want to embrace our truth. But—and here is the key to the whole matter of judgment—it is also the case that most of us cannot bear to embrace the truth about our lives without the warmth and light of love. We know from bitter experience that truth and judgment without love crush us.
And here is where we return to Advent and its double destination. Advent asks us to believe that the enfleshed God of the manger is the same God who will reveal us to ourselves, who in Christ will judge us on the last day. But this is not the all-seeing Perfectionist I spoke of earlier, a God who sees us from afar, knows what we have done, and is disappointed. No, this is God-with-us and God-for-us—Jesus, our Christ. He is the one of whom John's Gospel says this most amazing thing: "He knew what was in us." He will judge us with a judgment of kinship, the judgment of One who has been inside us, inside our human motivations, understanding us on our terms. The Jesus who will be our judge on the last day is the same one who said, paradoxically, "I judge no one."
Theologian Rowan Williams writes that it is hard not to feel in that response of Jesus to sinners "an element of sheer visceral pity. 'Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you? Neither do I condemn you.''' Jesus' own terrible temptations and struggles "seem to have produced [in him] a sense of the precariousness of goodness so strong that no failure or error could provoke his condemnation." The only people Jesus condemns are the legalists who can't allow for this precariousness, who refuse to see, as Jesus did, that the sinner is often a victim more than a criminal, and who suppose we are freer to choose and sin than we really are. Jesus knows the real measure of our responsibility. He knows it better than we know it ourselves.5
This divine sense of the precariousness of goodness is our hope on judgment day and on every day when we face ourselves in God's presence. It can save us not only from some imagined divine condemnation, but also and especially from self-condemnation. He knows what is in us. And in the cross that deals him his death, Williams writes, "he shows us the very depths of our destructive refusal of health and life, our violence and fear." And through all this he still accepts and loves us. "When we are vulnerable and fragile, it is he who is wounded and broken... , carrying all our hurt in himself. So we may take to him our whole selves in the sure trust that nothing will be thrown back at us to wound or destroy. This is the gospel whose ministers we are."
Yes, this is the gospel whose ministers we are. We are the heralds of the good news of a judgment that is love, a Messiah whose only fierceness is a mercy that lays us bare for healing. May we embrace this gospel in trust and welcome the truth that frees. And may we use his judgment and no other with ourselves, each other and the world—I mean the very compassion of God. And may we pray earnestly and without anxiety this Advent for the One who is coming to come indeed, and soon. Amen. Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus!
1. Robin R. Myers, "In Praise of the First Coming," Living by the Word, The Christian Century, Nov. 15, 2000.
2. Cited in Myers, above.
3. Cf. A sentiment expressed by King Herod in W. H. Auden's oratorio, For the Time Being, cited in Williams, below.
4. Garret Keizer, "Simon the Supportive," Living by the Word, The Christian Century, Aug. 11-l8, l999.
5. Rowan Williams, "Knowing and Loving," A Ray of Darkness, Cowley Publications, 1995.
© 2003, J. Mary Luti