Friday, February 15, 2008

Today's text

John 3:17

For God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.

Prayer

We are so unlike you, Loving Mystery.

How much time do we spend a day, a week, a year … judging? What is breakdown in my words--70 percent blessing and 30 percent judging? The other way around? Do I bless more souls on an average day than I wound?

And every judgment flows from the seeping wounds of ego. Our anxious, unfulfilled selves, knowing we are barely lovable, seek acceptability in every judgment we pass as we try to reassure ourselves that we are okay, or at least better than the targets of our verdicts.

A young man walks into a classroom in a quiet college town and randomly kills, seven dead now. And I wonder: is this his judgment on the world, on himself? Is it the radical acting out of sick, wounded ego succumbing to final despair?

I don’t know. I just know, my Lord, that our judgments do no good. They don’t help … anyone. When we judge we don’t convince our hearts that we are okay, while others are not. It is but a knowing lie we tell ourselves. A lie that continues the wounding of your world, leaving lacerated souls in our wake, who, in their own place and way, act out their wounds. And the whole ugly cycle goes on.

Except for you, you break the cycle. You enter our world not to judge (we already have plenty of that) but to save those who cannot end the wounding cycle.

You come to us with the blessing of free forgiveness and warm inclusion into the embrace of your love. That love embraces the dead and the killers, the wounded and the wounding, the grieving, the confused and the outraged.

And in that love we find the freedom to give up our judging ways. For you heal the wounds that drive us to wound.

So grant us grace, Loving Mystery, to rest in that love for which we have no concepts, and end, as best we can, the whole ugly cycle.

Pr. David L. Miller