9th November 2oo8 Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 7: 1-6

How different from the usual condemnatory attitude to the young -- condemned, it has to be said by the older generation.  We are much more likely to hear or to read of young people as problems, drinking too much, taking drugs, mugging, being involved in knife crime and gangs, then we are to hear of the positive and creative things they are involved in.

The verses of Matthew, we read today, Matthews 7: 1-6, speak very much to that tendency in all of us to judge and condemn not only the young but all sorts of groups and individuals in society.  ' If you want to be my disciples, ' says Jesus, ' it just won't do.  '

We often read this passage wrongly, as saying don't judge others and certainly don't voice that judgement.  But that is not the main point is Jesus is making.  This is much more about the way we avoid examining our own faults whilst pouring over the faults of others.

I don't know about you, but more and more I'm realising that my negative reactions to others is about me and not about them.  In fact, treated rightly, I should almost be grateful to these others for giving me the opportunity to wake up to areas of sin that need to be forgiven (over and over again) and damage that needs to be healed.

Let us look at the example of how we judge young people.  ' Don't judge others, ' says Jesus in v. 1 and 2 ' because in the same way you judge others, you will be judged.  ' We accuse young people of drinking too much.  Where did they learn to drink?  Well, my generation, the parents of the present generation of young people, we drink a lot.  My parents would have a glass of sherry on occasions, but certainly not every day.  Each generation has a tendency to take further the behaviour of the generation before.  And what about the violence we see in some of the young today?  There is a real link between violence and the steadily increasing stress under which we all live, the communications explosion through which disturbance comes pouring into our lives and is even more disturbing because we can't do anything about it, and finally the speed of change, which leaves us feeling exposed in a menacing world.  Young people feel this just as much as we do, but because they are young they don't have the mechanisms and experience to deal with it that older people might have.

But to get back to, Don't judge because in the way you judge, you will be judged.  The famous Christian writer, Bishop John V. Taylor, who was a school friend of my father, and so, if he were still alive, would be 95, blamed some of the cause of modern violence on his generation, those who became parents after the Second World War.  He said, and I quote,

'We were a generation that was particularly afraid of dying… we were so afraid of dying that we were afraid of even being a middle aged.  Consequently, that generation of parents refusde to bear the anxieties of middle age and projected it’s anxieties onto its children.  So instead of setting the boundaries, taking a normal parents’ responsibility for the ' house rules’ of home, and suffering the occasional hostility that is the price of any responsibility, my generation lost their nerve.  They did not want to bear the anxiety of making the decisions and so left their children to make their own and bear the anxiety of it themselves.  '

As someone who was a teenager in the 60s, that statement rings are very true to me.  The ' anything goes ' attitude of the 60s grew the generation gap, which led to the anger and rejection of parental values by the punk 70s, which led to the individualism and greed of the 80s and so on.  Who then do we condemn? Every one and no one, '  for all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God.  '

We all know that condemnation doesn't work.  It just makes people feel angry and undermines the very little sense of self worth we have.  It breaks down community and in the end is the most offensive to God himself.  As we heard in the first reading in Romans 14, v 10, ‘ Why do you pass judgement on your brother or sister?  Or why, do you despise your brother or sister?  For we will all stand before the judgement seat of God.  ' If all of us have sinned, as I hope my example of the generational gap has shown, then we all stand in need of God's forgiveness and grace -- we only exist as a community when we understand that to be true of each one of us in this community.  If this is the case, then keeping up a running commentary on what we dislike or disapprove of in each other is outrageous.  Critical barbs and gossipy asides (and believe me as I write this I have to say mea culpa:  I am guilty of this), critical barbs and gossipy asides are corrosive and corrupting.  Every judgemental word out of our mouths, violates a human soul for whom Jesus died, for, ' All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made, which was made.  ' So every time we condemn others we are violating God.  That's quite something, isn't it?

What is this plank in our own eye?  It is condemnation itself.  Condemnation of another blinds us.  It blinds us to seeing another person as they really are, struggling like us to get things right, full of contradictions, sinful and gifted and dearly loved by God.  It blinds us to God and his generous love and delight in all he has made.  It blinds us to our own need for self examination, so we remain stuck in ways, telling ourselves that if the world would only be the way we think it should be, everything would work and be fine.

Jesus did not condemn.  He chose very ordinary people and said, a bit like Obama, ' We can do it.  ' not, You can do it -- We can do it.  Jesus chose ordinary people and began to teach them on a hillside in about the road to life in all its fullness, the road of discipleship.  He gave us, he gives us, real tools for life, which, if only we would use them could change the world.  He gave us a moral compass for life with his way of living as magnetic North -- the way we should align ourselves: that direction by which we judge all directions in our life.  Let us from today really trying not to condemn others.  When we feel the urge coming upon us, let us wake up and ask ourselves quickly, ‘What is this telling me about myself?  What do I have to look at in myself and own up to?’