First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
29 August 2004

J Mary Luti

Finding Fault

Luke 6:6-11

I

You gotta love those Pharisees! They were serious about religion! I know pastors who'd kill to have parishioners like them! They were the committed laity, true believers whose faith permeated every corner of their lives. They treated the Torah like Civil War reenactors treat the Battle of Bull Run—­attentive to detail, right down to the angle of the bayonet and the tilt of the cap on the head. More observant than the rabbis, more Mosaic than Moses, more papist than the pope, the Pharisees (writes my former colleague, Greg Mobley)¹ "saw themselves as the last best hope in a world full of slackers and accommodationists," a righteous few in a sea of mediocrity.

Jesus, therefore, infuriates the Pharisees. He is a walking contradiction. It's plain to see that he does the kind of saving deeds that only someone in tune with the gracious God could do, but when he does them, he is not also always careful to observe the Law . How could someone he be sent from God and disobey God at the same time? How could someone who looks like a great prophet, whom people say might even be the messiah, not honor the Sabbath? How is it that he works on the holy Day?

Now, to us hard-working Americans what Jesus does in this story doesn't sound much like work. He is not out mowing his lawn or answering email. When he heals the man with the shriveled hand, he doesn't even work up a sweat. Maybe if he'd made mud from saliva and dirt and slathered it on the man's eyelids, or put his fingers in the man's ears and cried, "Open!", as he did to other people at other times, we might be able to call that 'work.' But all he does is ask the Pharisees a question and say a few other words to the man. The man is the one who 'works,' holding out his hand at Jesus' insistence.

Pharisees, however, are strict constructionists. For them, work is anything that isn't necessary to save a life. Jesus could wait until the Sabbath sundown to heal. In a matter of a few measly hours, he could bestow God's shalom, God's well-being on all the poor broken wretches he wants, and the Sabbath would also have been honored as the Law demands. But because he doesn't, instead of a gracious healing the Pharisees see only a broken rule. Because he doesn't, instead of a merciful man, they see only a rule-breaker—­and a man, therefore, who cannot possibly be the messiah, cannot possibly be a great prophet, and is probably not even a very good Jew.

There's an old joke that you've probably heard in one of its fifty-nine thousand versions. The one I know goes like this (with apologies to all of you who, like me, are put off by hunting)—­

A man invites a friend to go hunting with him and his dog. They settle in at the local pond, and before long they spot ducks flying overhead. The man aims, shoots, and down falls a duck. The dog bolts across the surface of the pond. He finds the bird, secures it in his jaws, runs back on top of the water and drops the duck at the man's feet. All morning long the same scene is repeated. The friend is too amazed to say anything, but a week later, he bumps into the man and asks him, "So, um..., how's your dog?" "Got rid of him," he replies. "But why?" the friend asks. The man answers, "Fool dog can't swim!"

II

Do you know what that's like? Some of you do. You could have walked on water, and your parents or teachers would still have found something wrong with you, criticized you for your friends, your looks, your tone of voice, your manners. You tried to please, but you never did. They were always displeased with something. And their displeasure was capricious. You never knew from one day to the next which of your countless perceived deficits would draw the dismissive comment, the painful barb. They saw all your faults. They never saw you.

In some relationships, partners have raised perpetual fault-finding to an art. I once did counseling with a couple whose marriage fell apart over the right way to dispose of coffee grounds. And at work, some bosses think constant nit-picking is an effective management tool. And in the church? Well, thank God no one does any carping around here!

It may seem like a slim lesson to draw from this gospel story, so full of great themes and thick lessons, but let me draw it anyway. This business of lying in wait for somebody? Of being on the alert for his weakness? Of zeroing in on her mistakes? Of being ever-ready to exploit people's failures and magnify their shortcomings? It's an awful business.

I'm not talking about the well-placed, thoughtful criticism, the occasional satirical rant, the constructive corrective offered in the course of mastering an art or learning a trade. Not even about an outburst of angry judgment stemming from a particular deep disappointment or strong disagreement. I'm not talking about naively suspending our critical faculties, or narrowing our sense of humor so as never to offend. You know what I mean. You know the difference between all that and a pervasive spirit of fault-finding, a reflex of critique, a posture of finger-pointing. I'm talking about a bad habit, the loss of perspective and scale, the elevation of small things to major crimes, the inability or unwillingness to distinguish between stuff that should make the front page of The New York Times and stuff that should simply be ignored, the impulse never to let a single thing we don't like go unremarked, never to let any good deed go unpunished.

I'm talking about the compulsion to diminish our own faults by enlarging the faults of others ( the best offense being a good defense, after all), and about the ego that feels entitled to criticize because it is believes it has no faults of its own. I'm also talking about what happens to us when we are constantly summed up and reduced to our mistakes without context or compassion. I'm talking about that irredeemable sense of failure, the wound of inadequacy that can forever damage a soul.

Those of us who are fault-finders are at risk of permanent soul-damage too, even if we don't think so. And most of us don't. In our minds, we are the only ones in our world who are not at risk; we are the last best hope in a sea of mediocrity. It's a hard job, we say, but someone has to do it—­remain vigilant, sweat the small stuff, lose sleep over the slippage in standards that is everywhere around us. And if we occasionally sound bitter, if we're always on the verge of apoplexy, if our hearts are a little corroded, our vocabulary a little blue, and the people around us always cringing, it's just the burden we bear for having such good taste, good grammar, good morals, good politics and really good brains.

As I said, it's bad for everyone, this fault-finding.

The solution?

Well, we could be kind to each other.

III

I never thought I'd ever hear myself say that! I've always squirmed in my pew when preachers have simplistically reduced this complex, demanding, death-defying, justice-making faith to a smiley face and an exchange of pleasantries with the people who change your motor oil. But the more I consider how devoid of kindness our lives are, on the grand scale as well as on the intimate, the more I think that simply being kind is not such a bad place to start, and that it might even be enough to save us.

But if kindness is the proposed solution, it will only work if we practice the sort of kindness recommended in Scripture. Normally we think of kindness, as preacher Thomas Long² has observed, as a matter of "letting affection for other people bubble out toward them." If this were all there is to kindness, we couldn't be kind for very long. There are, he says, "simply too many people out there to be kind to ... and at some point our patience would grow thin, and our kindness would turn to resentment." The Bible's brand of kindness doesn't depend on what we can do with our affections, but trains our attention instead on what God is doing with God's powerful mercy, and leads us on from there.

And what is God doing? To find out, we Christians look at Jesus. In our gospel text today, we learn from Jesus that "God is...taking a broken and bruised humanity—­you and me—­and healing us, making us new creatures," filling us with shalom, the wholeness and well-being of the Kingdom. And God intends this healing for everyone. By God's grace, our faith teaches us, everyone whom God now loves as each one is is also in the process of transformation, of becoming new and whole.

To be kind to each other in a biblical way, then, is to grow to regard each other not only as we are in the present, but also and especially as the new creatures we are already becoming and will be fully in the future. Biblical kindness is "an act of civil disobedience," Long says—­it is a refusal to deal with people only according to the status quo of the present situation, and an insistence on treating them in light of who they can and will be in God's tomorrow.

But if this last bit sounds a bit fuzzy to you, perhaps it will be clearer if I tell you the story preacher Long tells to make this point about seeing with eyes of faith into the future. We'll finish with it, then—­

A friend of Long's arrived at the airport only to find that his flight was delayed, so he sat down in the waiting area. It was directly across from the little airport restaurant. The restaurant was empty except for an obviously homeless man who had put his head down on the table top to rest. A minute later, the manager came out and headed for the table. Long's friend thought, "Uh-oh, he's going to throw him out." But instead, as the manager walked past the table, he put down a hot dog. On the way back, he put down a cup of coffee. A hot dog and a cup of coffee.

May we reverently do the same with each other.

¹Gregory Mobley, "Forgiveness," at Andover Newton Theological School, October 15, 2003.

²Thomas Long, "Kindness, Simple and Not-So-Simple," 30 Good Minutes, Program #4018, January 19, 1997.

© 2004, J Mary Luti