Homily | 💧A Cup of Cold Water

5th Sunday After Pentecost

Photo by Alvin on Unsplash

Note: Since the video didn’t take, I’ll leave you with this transcript of the homily. Enjoy!

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Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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When I read these passages today, I started to realize I’ve spent my entire life as a judge.

Unpaid, unelected, yes.

And it’s a job I didn’t even know I had until looking back, like a lot of things.

When I was a kid, I knew exactly who the “bad Americans” were. The traitors. The ones who didn’t love this country the way my family did.

I could spot un-American from across a room. Sure, I was eight years old, and already SO confident in my verdict.

Then, later, I shifted to the other end of the partisan spectrum. (Now, you might think I’m about to tell you how ‘evolved’ I’ve become. That’s not where I’m going.)

What I want you to see is how seamlessly I kept the job. It’s just that the guilty party became the man in the flag T-shirt tucked into his jean shorts. The truck with the big bald eagle decal. Different defendant. Same judge. Same robe. Same nose, high in the air and tilted at the same angle, just pointed in the opposite direction.

It took me a long time to notice that the one constant in my life — through every political conversion, every so-called enlightenment — was me, judging. I thought I’d been on a journey toward better, each step a wiser me leaving a foolish me behind. But the “wiser” me was doing the exact same thing the old me did. The whole time, I’d been (to use Paul’s word) a slave who kept getting sold to new owners while calling it growth.

Romans 6 is hard to read, because Paul takes away the chair we really want to sit in. You know the chair. The one up on the bench, above it all, where you bang the gavel and nobody bangs one back at you. We think if we just get our opinions right enough, we get to be the judge instead of the judged.

But Paul says: there’s no such chair. Nobody’s up on the bench. You’re down on the floor with everyone else, and your name’s on the docket too.

You’re either owned by the thing that makes you sort and sneer and tally (Paul calls it Sin) or you’re owned by grace.

And all that sorting and sneering and tallying? Paul says it pays a wage, and the wage is death. We can’t see this kind of ‘death’ as a punishment God slaps on at the end, like a late fee. This kind of death is a description of what the judging already is.

St. Irenaeus (who we commemorate today) said (in the 100s): “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” When we judge, we keep ourselves dead.

Ask anyone who’s tried to enjoy a 4th of July cookout while silently scoring everyone’s politics, food preferences, and life choices over the potato salad if they feel truly alive doing so; tallying the bumper stickers in the driveway, sorting the guests into sheep and goats before the hot dogs come off the grill. That’s not freedom. Or even a half-decent party. That’s a prison with a flag on it and some sparklers to wave around.

This is exhausting, right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live this way anymore.

And here’s the cruel part: you can’t judge your way out of being a judge. The harder I try to stop sorting people, the more I’m sorting myself. Now I’m the judge AND the defendant, prosecuting myself for being judgmental. We see here how the machine eats its own tail.

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In about six days, this experiment we call a country turns 250. And the air is already thick with the language of wages: We earned this. We deserve this. We are exceptional, a city on a hill, set apart by our virtue.

Or... If you’re on the other side of the spectrum: We are guilty, irredeemable, a crime scene with fireworks.

But those are the same prayer.

“God, I thank you that we aren’t like other inferior nations.”

And...

“God, I thank you that I’m not like those deluded people who think we’re great.”

One waves the flag and one prosecutes it. But both stand outside the party that Jesus is throwing with their arms crossed, rendering verdicts, and unwilling to go in.

Both are wages-thinking, trying to earn or justify the verdict. And wages-thinking can never rest. It can never just stop and feast. It can never just receive a cup of cold water from somebody who lives, laughs, loves, or votes the other way.

But hear Paul’s but. The wages of sin is death — BUT the free gift of God is eternal life. Wages and gift. Two different worlds that we occupy (or, that occupy us?). And you can’t earn your way into the second one. You can only stop prosecuting long enough to notice the grace that’s already afoot.

The verdict has already been rendered. It came down at a cross, and the final word was acquittal. For everyone. For the flag-wavers and the deconstructors. For the eight-year-old who called half the country traitors and the thirty-something year old who rolled his eyes at the other half. In my 46 years, I’ve basically judged 100% of the population. How’m I doin’? (God, help me.)

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The cross is where the whole apparatus of judgment — including my judgment of myself as a lifelong judge — gets nailed up and killed.

The only one who ever had the right to sit on that bench, the only true Judge, climbed down and took the defendant’s chair himself before his execution.

The Judge took our ceaseless judgement and absorbed it, once and for all, in his body.

We don’t have to render the verdict anymore, because the job’s been abolished. There was a massive layoff. The final judgement already happened. The game is over. It is finished. You and I have been laid off as judges, and though it’s torture for our ego, it’s the best news we’ll get all year.

So. Freed from the bench, here’s what I’m gonna try. This Fourth of July, I’m gonna try to NOT hold this country as someone who’s finally learned to judge it correctly. I’ve been relieved of that post. I’m going to pray God helps me to hold this country as a gift. Which is what it is. Not “great” the way a champion is great.

As a Christian, I have to see that our greatness is in our forgiven-ness. We’re a beloved mess on the road home, still smelling of pigs. And the prodigal Father drops everything and runs toward us anyway. And all He has on His heart is love.

Now, I don’t know if God can love an abstract idea we call a ‘country.’ But God loves you. And you. And all of us who make up this country. And every country.

I’ve heard that if you want to hate America, read the headlines. But if you want to love it, take a road trip across it. Meet people at truck stops, yoga studios, backyards, and dive bars.

I don’t think the greatness was ever in the headlines. Never the bombs bursting in air, the exceptional destiny, the city-on-a-hill speeches. That’s the part we keep trying to earn or justify. The part we put on the résumé. The real thing is smaller, and it’s everywhere. I’ve seen it in Little Rock, AR and in San Francisco, CA.

I pray that we can keep our focus on the small cups of cold water given to each other; the welcome scandalously extended across tribal lines. That’s pretty great.

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.

But for this to really hit home, we have to realize how in need of cold water we are ourselves! The only people who truly enjoy a cold cup of water are those dying of thirst. Until we see how parched we are, this little Gospel passage flies right over our heads.

Cold water. Welcome. The Gospel is so simple.

It’s the neighbor who’d be your sworn enemy according to cable news showing up with jumper cables when your battery’s dead. It’s two people who live two vastly different lifestyles leaning on the same fence at a Little League game, taking joy in the same kid’s base hit. A cup of cold water handed across a divide the headlines swear is unbridgeable.

That is this country. Right now. It’s messy, but beautiful in a cruciform way if you look through the right eyes. The bummer is that this Divine party was happening on those porches and fences the whole time, and all those years, I was too busy judging to see it.

Because the party Jesus threw before the foundation of the world is already happening. It has a table. And the table is so wide, so vast, that it seats people you and I can’t stand.

So pull up a chair. Enjoy your cold water. And after you shoo the flies from it, pass me some of that warm, crusty potato salad.