My Rocks...Your Glass House

Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, ² but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. ³ As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.  ⁴ “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. ⁵ The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”  ⁶ They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. ⁷ They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” ⁸ Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.  ⁹ When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. ¹⁰ Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”  ¹¹ “No, Lord,” she said.  And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.”   John 8:1-11 NLT

You're reading this and probably wondering if I'm going to launch a tirade.  Not a full blown melt down, but maybe just an expression of my frustration and disbelief when it comes to dealing with the people around us.  In case you missed the bulletin...we live in a fallen world.  Humankind is flawed.  We can strive for Christ's standard of holiness, but we are still going to miss the mark.  That doesn't mean we get to go through life wallowing in our imperfections...running amok and taking advantage of God's grace.  As Believers, we have a responsibility to live our lives in such a way that they draw the searching soul to a saving knowledge of Christ.  And that's not always easy because sometimes that requires us to stretch our faith...we find ourselves in situations where we have to love our brother, despite the circumstances.

A young friend of mine recently delivered her first child...a baby girl.  When I say that she's a young friend of mine, I'm not exaggerating.  She's a high school Senior.  She's one of the students in our church's youth ministry.  A few days before she delivered, we celebrated the impending arrival of her baby and it was the PERFECT time to have some honest discussion with the other girls in our small group. Mommy-to-be was very candid and very honest.  Took a lot of courage for her to feel like she could speak freely and I hope I wasn't the only one in the room who understood that.  Broke my heart to hear her tell about those who've shunned her...some being blood kin.  Seriously?  It's 2013....not 1953.  Folks near and dear to her heart have passed judgement against her and decided that she is no longer worthy of their love.   

So, go back to the story of the adulterous woman.  When I was a kid, I always wondered what Jesus was writing in the dirt.  I've heard several sermons with this as the topic and am inclined to agree with a couple of different theories.  Perhaps Jesus was making a list of those gathered accusers and their sins or maybe....and I have to say that this one is my favorite...Jesus took a look into the hearts of the accusers and proceeded to make a list of the ones who had contributed to this woman's adulterous reputation.  You don't get that kind of reputation without having help...know what I'm saying, Homeslice? Which means if she's adulterous, so are they!   What else would Jesus be writing that would make each of them leave?  It wasn't a recipe for lamb stew, that's for sure!

The choice that my young friend made that led to this baby's conception was a sin.  But so is my laziness and tendency to gossip.  Cheating on an exam, harboring bitterness and resentment, having an ungrateful attitude, disrespecting your parents, stealing a pack of gum....guess what, they are all sin.  My friend's situation just happens to come with immediate physical and eventually visible consequences.  God doesn't see one as any different from the other.  Man is the one who has graded sin.  If it causes a break in the fellowship between me and God...between you and God...it's sin and no matter how insignificant or small it might seem to us, it still nailed a precious, blameless man to the cross.  Chew on that for a minute....the mental tirade that you launched against the bag boy for YET AGAIN putting twelve cans of soup on top of your potato chips, is sin-a-plenty...and just enough to send Christ to the cross.  You didn't utter a word, but it's nearly a guarantee your attitude spoke VOLUMES...as does your attempt to avoid certain bagging clerks like the plague! 

Some questioned the wisdom of the very casual party that we gave for my young friend.  Some thought it meant that we were condoning her choice.  I guess it might look that way from behind the glass in some houses but that's now how it was.  If we are supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, that means that we do life with each other...no matter how messy or uncomfortable it may be.  We want this new baby girl to see Jesus...we don't want her to just hear Jesus.  We want her mama to tell her of the love of God because she felt and saw that love in what seemed like a darkest hour.  We want her mama to be able to teach her how to love like that and she won't know unless her mama knows.  We love because He FIRST loved.  Hello....if He could love me, despite my laziness, my spiteful attitude, my passive aggressive manipulations (We keep it real around here, yes?)...who am I to deny His love to an innocent child?

We all live in glass houses.  We all have rocks.  Some of them seem bigger than others.  Before you go throwing your rocks at your neighbor's house, you might take a gander at the glass walls around yourself ...that rock is going to make a mess before it even hits that other house.