Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Today’s text

John 3:15-18

For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. No one who believes in him will be judged; but whoever does not believe is judged already, because that person does not believe in the Name of God's only Son.

Reflection

No one who believes shall be judged. And yet we judge ourselves and each other all the time.

But you, O God, do not judge me. You do not hold me up to the light and look closely at the lines and creases of my life, the imperfections that we both know are there.

This is not your way. Those who believe into Jesus dwell in an unfailing environment of grace, a bubble of blessing in which you seek to envelop our every pore.

Our lives know the ordinary bumps and bruises of living amid the unruliness of chance, of human emotion and action, of sickness and health. Sometimes those bumps are not ordinary at all, but truly frightening and destructive, or they fall heavy on our hearts.

Yet even then, we dwell in the land of the Son. We may struggle and fail, we may hold little strength or power; heaviness of spirit may grind us down, and circumstances may whisper that we have no worth. But we can look into the eyes of all this and more. And shout: ‘no judgment!’

None.

You judge us worthy of love and care, worth dieing for, treasured to the end of our days and to the eternity of time.

Our life’s struggle is to surrender our judgments of ourselves to your judgment--and to dismiss others judgments of our value altogether.

For you do no judge us based on our human frailties and wrong doing. You see us dwelling in the air of Christ’s love, struggling, yes, to breathe in the fresh, lightness of non-judgment.

Teach us to breathe the freshness of this air that our judgments and condemnations, our self-loathing and hatreds may end. We would walk unencumbered into the lightness of being you intend.

Pr. David L. Miller