1 Peter 1:17-23
If you invoke as Father the one who judges impartially according to each person’s work, live in fear during the time of your exile. You know that you were ransomed from the futile conduct inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your trust and hope are in God.
Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual affection, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.
Sermon Text
Judgment. What kind of image does that conjure in your brain? Do you see court rooms or hellfire? Maybe you see the snickering of gossipy onlookers or a cruel glance from across a room? Whatever the word makes us imagine, it is a word we cannot escape. We are all of us subject to judgment in a multitude of ways, the only question about the way judgment manifests in our life is which judgments are valid, therefore worth listening to, and which are not, and then worth ignoring.
This cuts in both directions too. We are not just evaluating the judgments we receive to know if they are valid, we have to know if the judgments we make are worthy as well. We are all constantly evaluating the world around us. Arguments, bits of information, people, as well as situations are put up against a rigorous and sometimes automatic set of criteria that then determine what we should do about them. Sometimes the decision is affirmative, sometimes its negative, but it happens without us trying to make it come into being. Without a single ounce of intent, we can pass judgment upon someone or something.
With this in mind, we are faced with a singular contradiction within our life of faith. We are called to be discerning people, we talked a bit about that last week. Yet, in the midst of our discernment, in the midst of our evaluations we are also warned “Do not judge, lest ye be judged.”[1] While part of this could be hand waved away with an argument regarding specificity of language and differences in Greek words for judgment and discernment… I think any such argument will fall flat in light of the practical considerations we face. To live in this world, we must make judgments, but to make a judgment is to ask for an equal measure of judgment to be applied back toward us.
Our scripture opens with a brief meditation on judgment. “If you invoke as Father the one who judges impartially according to each person’s work, live in fear during the time of your exile.” We need to break that apart to really make sense of it. Firstly, “If you invoke as Father,” is referring to our paternal relationship we have with God. The argument Peter makes in this verse is that, by making the claim that God is our Father, we are subject to subsequent truths and expectations. “… the one who judges impartially according to each persons’ work,” tells us the character of the God who we call Father, namely that God is perfect in the judgment God makes, because God is capable of making judgments impartially, only looking upon what a person does or does not do. This implies that God’s judgment being impartial is different than ours. Finally, because we worship an impartial God who is “Father,” to us, then we are to live a quiet and “fearful,” life because of that truth.
With that basic outline examined, we can talk but the two pieces of instruction Peter gives. Firstly, that God is impartial, and therefore our judgments are not. If we can make that acknowledgment, then a lot of life becomes easier. I often criticize the aphorism that somebody “Just tells it like it is,” because such thinking is deceptive. When we “tell it like it is,” what we are doing is telling our version of the truth as though it were absolute. We deceive ourselves into thinking that we are the one sane observer in the world, and ignore that we too are fallible and capable of making bad choices and decisions.
I will speak of my own failing here. When I worked somewhere outside of the Church I had this wonderful thing called, “coworkers.” Coworkers are something I miss in churchwork, but that had their own sets of problems. Once, I made two mistakes of judgment in talking to one of these coworkers. Firstly, that they were trustworthy. Secondly, that they would understand the Spirit of my evaluating a friend of mine. So when she said, “Your friend is real weird around my friend, I think he thinks she is into him.”
To which I said, “He thinks every woman’s in love with him.” I did not mean this as a serious critique of my friend, and I do not think I was wrong either. However, when she inevitably told her friend, and my friend inevitably confronted her about his fear she had feelings for him, her friend told my friend, “You really do think everyone’s in love with you, don’t you.”
This is a silly, dramatic example, but if you think on the way we live our life we make more serious judgments all the time. We assume someone is dangerous because they look mean, but maybe they’re just tired. We assume someone isn’t really in trouble and just after something, so we ignore them when they approach us on the street. We assume that someone who decides or even entertains a decision other than one we would make is either uninformed or wrong… We assume and assume and assume, such that we are unable to make an actual determination about the individual situations in front of us.
We are not, however, in a world where we can go without some level of judgment. Sometimes people are trying to take advantage of us. Sometimes someone is truly making a bad choice and we might be able to help them avoid it. Sometimes we are in a circumstance where we have to do something and sitting around waffling is not going to get that thing done. Judgment is not something we are forbidden from doing, it is something we are asked to weigh heavily before we act upon. In the context of Matthew 7’s prohibition against judging, Jesus immediately says that we ought to “remove the plank,” from our own eye, before “removing the sawdust,” from our neighbors. That seems to imply that familiarity with getting through a problem does give some grounds for us to help others.
That’s where the next part of the admonition comes in. “live in fear,” does not mean to clutch at our pearls or shake at every little opportunity to worry. It is instead a call for us to take seriously every aspect of our life. If God, the impartial judge, judges us by our actions, and Matthew tells us that we are reciprocally judged based upon how we judge others, then suddenly everything is placed under an umbrella of responsibility. If I choose to make a judgment, and to make that judgment known, I should be confident that it is really made impartially and toward the good of those it will affect. If I am to voice my opinion, to follow through on a course of action, to raise concern… Again, and again, and again we are asked to do these things with a great deal of seriousness.
I think that is why our reading ends with Peter calling on the people to practice “mutual affection,” literally, “love like a family.”[2] The ideal familial love asks for us to look out for each other’s good. It means sticking through hard times and difficult conversations. It suggests investing in one another enough to choose our words carefully when we speak and not being too upset when someone fails to do the same. It also means owning up to wrongdoing. To admitting when the judgments and actions we took were not good, appropriate, or for the good of others. We have to be serious about our words, our thoughts, and especially when the two collide in our judgments.
So, here’s the homework for you to take with you this week. Keep track of your judgments, large and small, write them down if you have to. Then, look back at them. Evaluate, “Now why did I think that? Was it right to think that way? Did I really need to say it after I thought it?” Ask these kinds of questions, interrogate your own decision making, and see if in the space you make through your serious consideration, God gives you a much better sense of mercy, grace, and impartiality. – Amen.
[1] Matthew 7:1-3
[2]Philios – “The love of brothers/family.”
Teach us to Number our Days 