Love. Do not condemn.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
EIGHTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (May 28^th) 1989

 

READINGS

Side chapel at the former Holy Trinity church,
Ringwood East

Sirach 27:4-7 / Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15
1 Corinthians 15:51-58
Luke 6:39-49

 

[I don’t think I would start a sermon in 2026 with a harangue like the one with which I began this one in 1989 - but that is the way it was!]

 

One of the problems faced by the liturgical churches in the modern world is that in an attempt to make scripture manageable we carve it up into small but meaningless portions. Worse, we then slavishly attempt to link together an Old Testament passage, a Psalm, a non-Gospels New Testament passage, and a reading from the Gospel, contorting them together and imposing on them a meaningless theme. 

You will or may have already noted that I am doing away with the “theme for the day” idea given to us in the prayer book.

To illustrate this, what better readings could one have than today’s? A collection of disjointed wisdom sayings that managed all but accidentally to find their way into the Old Testament, and which contrast futility with wisdom. A Psalm which rejoices in the psalmist’s relationship to God while cheerfully condemning God’s enemies (and the psalmist’s) to utter destruction, a Pauline slice that in three verses attempts to summarise what Paul says far more effectively in three chapters of Romans, celebrating the undoing of death. A Gospel reading taken wholly out of its context in Jesus’ teachings. 

We are given a theme, “whence comes goodness?”  Not it seems from An Australian Prayer Book.

The answer to the question “whence comes goodness?” is as trite as the question itself. From God. Okay. Sermon over.

But there is it seems a more profound question we must ask – and answer – and that is, “what is goodness?”

To answer that question in the light of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection we must turn to his own teachings. We have a bare snippet of those teachings as our gospel reading today, and must place it in context.

We have to begin that by remembering whose account of the gospel we are reading. Any two writers telling of the same events will do so with different slants. For Luke the emphasis is on Jesus as the one anointed by God to bring good news to the poor. In speaking of radically good news to the poor the Kingdom of God is announced and its fulfilment begun. 

Good News to the poor, though, is more radical than mere gaining of riches. It is the receipt of the blessing of God.

How blessed are you who are poor: the Kingdom of God is yours.

It is this proclamation that, a few verses before our current reading, begins Jesus’  solemn Sermon on the Plain, and this pronouncement was in turn foreshadowed in the Temple when Jesus proclaimed,

This task is being fulfilled even while you are listening.

He was speaking to the Temple on the text,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

Having made that solemn pronouncement, Jesus goes on to set out the responsibility of his Christian disciples, you and me, within the scheme of pronouncing God’s blessing to the poor. He tells the disciples of the commandment to love.

I say this to you who are listening: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.

 Jesus demands of Christians a radical practice of love that does not look after its own, but by which we are asked to set our needs and the needs of our in-group far behind the needs of others. We are not a club, as so often we have tended to become, and as Luke’s Christian community would appear to have become. We are not even a club in the commendable way that service clubs are clubs. We are called to love those who seek to destroy us.

And Christ calls us not to judge.

Judge not, that you may not be judged. Condemn not, that you may not be condemned.

Do not, Jesus says, let the so-called security of our Christian morality lead us to point the finger at those who are unclean, lest God touch us where we are unclean. Do not point the finger at the practice of homosexuals, lest God touch the raw nerve of our sexuality. Do not condemn the sexual ethics of our young people, lest God touched the raw nerve of the same energy within us. Do not condemn the atrocities of South African apartheid, lest God touch the ugly wound of our own racism and the racism of our nation.

Love. Do not condemn. Sure, do not condone. But do not condemn. For we too struggle with beasts of sexuality or sexism or racism or countless other isms, including the isms of shonky business ethics, that rage within us.

Only in the context of those warnings does our Lord produce the warnings or illustrations that we heard read in our gospel reading this morning.

Do we have logs in our eyes as we condemn others?

Undoubtedly so.

Do we have our stems sunk deep into the good fruit bearing tree, that produces the fruit of self-denying love? Or are we thorns? Brambles?

For the words of the mouth flow out of what fills the heart.

Goodness is a life lived anchored in the radical love of Christ, the love that proclaims from the utter agony and loneliness of the cross,

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.

As we adopt and grow into that radical ethic of love, we too will become a part of the upside down and illogical message that proclaims a blessing to the poor, to the hungry, to those who weep.

The nature of that blessing will be revealed only in the coming Kingdom.