Sermon from September 16, 2007
A stranger introduced me in the early 1970s to my own ignorance about people and their sins and suffering. Carole called up to the stairs one Saturday afternoon to say a man was on the phone to talk to me. He had not given his name. When I took his call, I stepped into a world I knew nothing about.
When I asked his name, he said that if I didn’t mind, he’d rather not tell me just yet. I agreed but my guard was up. As it turned out, he was not selling anything. He didn’t want to come to our home. He didn’t want anything but to talk. After 45 minutes, it was not at all clear what he wanted to talk about. He asked about our church (it was not his church), about my beliefs, but never about anything personal. He told me he was an evangelical Christian and went to an evangelical church in our city. He didn’t tell me which one. He was married (35 years) with children, and he lived a few miles away from us. Before the conversation ended, he asked if we could talk again some time. I said yes.
He called again and again, every time on a Saturday. I don’t know how many times we talked before he told me the deepest secret of his life. He was homosexual, and he was terrified that his wife, children and friends of a lifetime would find out. He hated and loved his homosexual behavior. He loved and (I think) hated his wife.
I had never before known a homosexual man. I gave him a safe place to talk and spiritual advice, and all the time I was looking for the nearest lifeboat to escape his immensely painful situation and my own inadequacy. I never found a lifeboat, but I could not abandon him to go back into the silence of his private hell. He never became part of our congregation. After a year of so, for reasons of his own, he disappeared from my life.
More than 35 years later, homosexual behavior is out of the closet, although millions of people still wrestle with that man’s loneliness and fear. Many other human behaviors have come out of the closet, which also give evidence of the human family’s alienation from God.
What will the next decade bring? I don’t know. We can’t predict that. Besides, we should be asking a different question. How shall we the Church respond to people, who act out these behaviors, which offend God and disorder human life?
Last Sunday, I posed to you a big challenge for BVBC. We need to make the good ship Brandywine more seaworthy for her voyage into unknown waters. I identified three initial tasks that we have to accomplish, if we are to meet the challenge. First and foremost, we need to build bridges to other people. Will we be willing to build them to people who are uncomfortably different from us?
Christ calls us to build those bridges. I am willing to lead the charge, and I am asking you to come with me. Here’s how I’d like to approach our bridge-building task. Next Sunday, we’ll talk about building bridges to people whose religion is different from Christianity. The Sunday after that, we’ll talk about building bridges to people who are Christians but whose understanding of Christianity is different from ours. Today, we talk about building bridges to people whose personal values and behaviors are different from ours. So, let’s drop anchor today in the deep waters of John 8:2-11.
Jesus and the Adulteress
Let’s read through the story, and I’ll stop along the way and make comments. The unfortunate thing is that you can’t make comments as we read along. The social realities of a large group make that inadvisable. That’s why you would benefit from being in a small group, where every voice can be heard.
At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts. Don’t you think some people stiffened, when they saw Him come into the temple? A lot more were glad to see Him. Verse 3-5: All the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The drama unfolded as the teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”
The woman was probably not in danger of being stoned. What they would do with her came second in the minds of her accusers. Another motive drove their public humiliation of the woman.
Verse 6: They were using this question as a trap in order to have a basis for accusing him. Contempt for the woman and hatred for Jesus ate away at the hearts of those who had come in the name of God to uphold the word of God.
Jesus' response was enigmatic. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. Many have guessed at what He wrote in the dirt. You may guess to your heart’s content. He who says little is counted wise.
The woman’s accusers had some reason to think that Jesus, squatted down and doodling in the dirt, might be ignoring them. They insisted that He answer their question. Verses 7-8: When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Again, infuriatingly, he stooped down and wrote on the ground. Christ’s harshest and bluntest words were often kept for the Pharisees. Not so here. His reply is one of the tenderest He ever made. He was opening possibilities that only seconds ago seemed impossibly shut, possibilities for the Pharisees and for the woman.
“If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” How simple, gracious, devastating, liberating! And He did not stare His accusers down. He stooped again to His business with the dust. He left them alone with His challenge on their conscience. Things must have gotten very quiet. Not a sound until there came the unmistakable shuffling of men leaving the scene. They left, every one of them. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.
We may hope the best for them, just because they went away. Their wordless going made eloquent confession to their guilt, which otherwise lay hidden. The eldest went first, the ones who had the best reason to know the frailty of human virtue.
Their dispersion postponed only momentarily the interview with the silent woman. As the feet shuffled away, not a word passed until the woman and Jesus stood facing each other. Then, verse ten: Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” Scribe and Pharisee came into the scene righteous; they went away guilty. The woman caught in adultery came into the scene guilty; she went away righteous.
Lessons
Let me tell you what I see, as I read and reread John’s story. First, I see a life-giving way of looking at people. Jesus did not condemn her – “neither do I condemn you” – neither did He condone her behavior – “Go now and leave your life of sin.” He did not ignore her adultery, but He did not define her by her adultery. He saw more to her than her adultery. What did He see?
Can we learn not to define people by their moral failures? There’s that Monica Lewinsky; we know what kind of girl she is. Do we really? Can we see nothing but the woman presented in sensational television stories? What if BVBC was a church where she could come, and no one would shun her or make her a role model or a victim, and where it would be weeks before those close to her said, “What were you thinking?”
Or there’s that Ken Lay! I’m glad he’s dead. The greedy blankety-blank deprived thousands of people at Enron of their jobs and pensions. Is that all we know about Ken Lay? What if BVBC was a church he could come to, and no one would shun him or make him a hero, and where it would be weeks before anyone said, “What were you thinking?”
I’m not asking anyone to pretend that Monica Lewinsky or Ken Lay did not sin. But can we the Church see more to them than their sins? To do that we would have to see them as Christ saw the adulterous woman. What did He see? He saw the image of God in her. He saw what she could become by the grace of God.
Second, I see in John’s story a life-giving way of looking at ourselves. “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Let’s never hear about another person’s sins without realizing how easily we could do the same or worse. Left to itself, mine is a heart of darkness, and so is yours.
Nothing softens us so much as to be aware of how near the edge of moral disaster we walk, or to have a close family member, who has gone over that edge into moral disaster. When evil comes close like that, it doesn’t change our convictions about right and wrong, but it can shape the way we treat the people who do wrong.
Churches are full of moral failures, as they should be. But many of them may be hiding and fearful, as they should not be. Don’t many of you have someone in your family like that? Is there some safe person here to whom they can tell their secret? Do they want to go to this or any church? What if BVBC was a church that people could come to, and no one would shun them or excuse them, and it would be weeks before anyone said, “What were you thinking?” What if we saw the image of God in that person and what that person could become by the grace of God?
Third, I see in John’s story a life-giving way of remembering the forgotten victims of human sin. That woman, taken in adultery, was somebody’s daughter and wife. Suppose her father and mother had reared her to be a God-fearing daughter of Israel. “How could this happen? What did we do wrong? How can we ever face people again?”
What if BVBC was a church where those parents could come and hold their heads up and receive assurance that the arms of the church would always be open to them and to their loved one, who had disappointed them?
In each of these what ifs it takes just a handful of people to help the rest of us to see the image of God in people who are different from us in their values and behavior and to believe that God’s grace can do for them what Jesus did for the adulteress.
Implications
Now, I’d like to explore with you another dimension of Jesus’ encounter with scribe, Pharisee and adulteress. He had to address their accusation in the most difficult circumstance. Dealing with sensitive moral issues in a public setting is like making your way across a minefield.
When someone asks us to comment on sensitive moral issues, we need to learn to stoop down and doodle in the dirt. One possible way of doing that might go something like this.
“Pastor Matthews, your cousin’s child had a sex change operation in Los Angeles. Joe is now Josephine. What do you think about that?”
“Well, I have several important thoughts about it, but I don’t know that you are ready to hear them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we are talking about another human being’s welfare, and I can’t reduce how I care for that person to a sound bite. Let me ask you a question. Do you think you know enough about my cousin’s child to say for sure if what my cousin’s child did was best for him? If you don’t know that, you are trivializing the personal agony he has lived through and the agony of his family before and after the operation. If you really want to know the truth, turn off your camera, and we’ll talk.”
The point I am making is this: let’s be slow to make moral pronouncements in public; they may not be necessary, and in current public discourse strong moral statements can easily be perceived as hate speech. Our main task is not to make such statements; our task is to build bridges to people, to care about them in their particular circumstances.
That is much more a matter of private and patient listening and understanding. Most people do not behave the way they do just to show the world how bad they are. They act for reasons that make sense to them. We need to know what made sense to them, not to excuse them but to relate to them as real human beings like ourselves. They are not sermon targets or statistics of evil or “the enemy.” They are people with hopes and dreams and often a sense of terrible failure, like the man whom I served as confidant so many years ago.
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Can we become a church like that? We need to, if the good ship Brandywine is going to be more seaworthy for her voyage into unknown waters. People around you need you to care enough about them to listen to them and try to understand them without condemning them or fixing them or giving up your own convictions about right and wrong.
People do not expect churches to be like this. They expect churches to be censorious and unforgiving, even though many Church people are hiding the sins they condemn in others. I’d like BVBC to surprise them, not only by our talk but by the way we treat people.
It is risky to be that kind of church. We’ll encounter dilemmas that render theologians mute. We’ll be accused of being soft on sin. We’ll fail as well as succeed. But before us, like a shining light illuminating the path forward and encouraging us to take this path, however difficult it may be, is the glorious image of Jesus Christ, stooping to doodle in the dirt and rising to restore hope and to give new life to that shattered woman. He makes the risk worth taking.
© Copyright
, Brandywine Valley Baptist Church. All rights reserved.
