The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Ephphatha Parish of the Deaf
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY
A man who had served in the Army in his youth told me this story:
His platoon was drawn up at perfect, rigid attention for a special ceremony. He himself was part of the color guard, carrying the flag in front of the platoon. It was a very warm spring day, sunny and bright; and the air was full of swarms of tiny bugs, gnats and no-see-ums, darting around the parade ground.
Well, he and the other members of the color guard were really being tormented by the bugs. They were sweating, too, in the hot sun, and as everyone knows, sweat seems to attract bugs. Suddenly a bug flew up his nose and his reflexes cut in. He dropped the flag and started rubbing his nose! You can imagine what the reaction was from the officers on the reviewing stand and from the platoon's sergeant. And so our friend wound up with a week's KP after the ceremony was over, and had to carry the flag everywhere for a week, "to teach him to honor the colors" as his sergeant said.
Today's first reading made me think of this story. Here were the Jewish people, just freed from slavery in Egypt, safely across the Red Sea, and on the way home to Canaan, which they would later re-name Israel. Freedom was such a big gift from God, a totally unexpected gift. You'd think that the idea of freedom would be filling their minds and hearts. But, no. They looked for whatever they could find to complain and gripe about. Like my friend in the Army, the big thing...the parade to honor somebody...was not as important to them as the little thing...a tiny bug getting into his nose. Freedom wasn't in their minds. They were not happy with the food and water they had, so who cared that they were free at last? Their sense of proportion was skewed, just as the soldier's sense of proportion and priorities was skewed.
The letter James wrote to the churches follows a similar pattern of thinking. You have been saved. Your salvation is sure. You should be thankful, and trying to become more and more like Christ, right? But, no. Instead, you start to look around among the folks you know, looking for things to criticize and complain and scold about. You have lost your sense of proportion and priorities; you really do know that your biggest priority is to work on and improve your own ways of following Christ, and leave the others to God to worry about. Instead, you go so far as to even break a commandment, and try to make yourself into God for others....remembering that the Bible tells us that it is God's business, not ours, to judge other people.
The Gospel continues on this theme. Jesus is very emphatic. It is our duty to see to our own conduct, not to judge other people. Anything that we might do that could interfere with another person's salvation is wrong. We are to pay attention to our own growth in the knowledge and obedience of God, not look around and criticize others who may be at a different stage of their spiritual journey than we are.
This seems to be a very important concept, because Jesus spoke about it again and again throughout the Gospels, and the same idea pops up frequently in other books of the Bible. If you stop and think a bit, you will remember many of the things the Bible says about judging others and working out our own spiritual journey....don't fuss about the splinter in another person's eye, when you have a big log in your own eye...justice belongs to the Lord...whatever you do to another person, you are doing to Jesus...and so on. It seems to me that the Church has given us a big gift by putting these readings together for us today, because I notice that in our society we are getting more and more critical of other people, from the President on down, and at the same time we overlook or make excuses for our own wrongdoing or faults or laziness. Maybe God reminded the Church, when they were putting together the Prayer Book Lesson tables, that we all need a reminder on this now and then, and so today is the day we got reminded. That leaves us with just one question: What are we going to do about it? Amen.
