Judge Wisely

The Valkyrie's Choice

Scripture: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 14), A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

On the back of my office door there hangs a sheet of papyrus painted with a scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It depicts two gods standing to either side of an enormous scale balance. One of them is the jackal-headed Anubis, god of death and mummification. The other, sporting the head of an ibis, is Thoth, the scribe of the gods. And together they are weighing hearts.

It is a scene of judgment. Upon mummification, a dead person’s heart would be placed into a sacred jar; and the gods would weigh this jar, they believed, on one end of the great scale balance against a single feather of Ma’at on the other side. Ma’at was the goddess of all that was right and orderly: goodness, truth, law, morality. If a dead man’s heart weighed more than a single feather of truth, it would immediately be devoured by the awaiting Eater of the Dead—and the poor sinner’s soul would be lost forever. I keep this papyrus in my office as a sobering reminder that every culture anticipates divine judgment. Every culture believes that in the end we must answer for our deeds and reap our proper, if terrible, reward.

For the Teutonic tribes of Germany and Scandinavia, the concern was not so much that we live lives of proper order, but of boldness, of bravery. Judgment came based not upon how one lived so much as how one died. Those slain in battle would be winged to Valhalla by Odin’s divine shield maidens, there to feast and fight until the end of the world. Those who died in timid ways—by age or by illness—were condemned to Helheim, the house of Hel, wherein the queen of the damned prepared her great warship, made of fingernails torn from the dead, for the final cataclysm of Ragnarok. Frankly, I think even their heaven sounds like a hell, but to each his own, I suppose.

In Hinduism, reincarnation offers some margin of error, since the wicked will be reborn lower and the righteous higher along the karmic ladder. But judgment is still judgment, and there are plenty of Hindu and Buddhist hells for those who cannot get their acts together even across multiple lifetimes. Islam describes divine judgment as a long razor bridge spanning a vast fiery chasm. The just Muslim must tread upon the razor’s edge, lest he fall headlong into the pit of eternal torment. With imagery such as this it might seem no wonder that fervent believers often fall into fanaticism and fear. Yet each of these instances is but an illustration of the universal human conviction that in the end our lives and our deeds will be judged by a higher, impartial authority—the authority not of history but of Truth—and we shall all reap our just rewards.

Most Christians, I’m afraid, still view judgment in this pagan manner. We imagine that someday we will stand trembling before the Throne of God (or of Zeus, which is how I fear we often picture God) and He will preside over us like a Roman emperor over the gladiatorial arena, extending His Almighty hand with either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. And this instills within us, again, fear and fanaticism.

An old friend of mine—a classmate from seminary, in fact—has recently left the ELCA in favor of a Unitarian Universalist church. Unitarians preach, in essence, that all religious practice is equivalent because all people end up in Heaven. When I asked her why the shift, she offered to me the words of one of our own professors, who said: “A God Who is filled with such love that He would sacrifice His own Son seems like exactly the sort of God Who would open His arms to the entire world, regardless of which church or temple they pray in. God’s love is bigger than our flawed doctrine.”  And of course, she’s right.

Judgment is very real but we as Christians often get it wrong. We embrace the pagan notion of God weighing our hearts on scales, of God sending Valkyries to collect the elect, of God forcing us to dance across the razor-edge of some bridge over hell. We think that God tests us to see whether or not we are worthy, then grades us in what must be the world’s most terrifying Final Exam. But the life that God gives to us, brothers and sisters, is not a test. The life that God gives to us is a choice.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus laments: “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you and you did not dance. We wailed and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon!’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” What Jesus is lamenting here is that God has tried so many ways to entice, to seduce, to bring His people back home. He offered the strict and dour path of John; He comes rejoicing and forgiving in Jesus. Yet no matter what the Lord tries, be it the carrot or the stick, He finds Himself rejected at every turn by the very humanity whom He has come to save.

And what is His reaction to our obstinance and sin? Is it anger and indignation? Is it spite and despair? After all, who are we ungrateful wretches that we would spit in the face of God? We should all be judged with fire! But no. That is not the response of Jesus Christ. Instead, our Lord, our God in the flesh, says unto us: “Come to Me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for Your souls.” Come to Me, He says! Come to Me and I will grant you rest, and gentleness, and forgiveness. I will grant you healing and mercy and new life. I will grant you everything you could ever need, and I will die just to have you, if only you would have Me!

Is this the face of some implacable judge? Is this Anubis weighing hearts or Zeus plunging down his thumb? By God, no! This is the God Who weeps for us, bleeds for us, perishes on the Cross for us! He is the Judge and His judgment is clear: “I choose you! All of you! I love you and ache for you and would have you as My own beloved sons and daughters! I have plunged down from Heaven for you, I have died on the Cross for you, and I have loved you all the way to hell and back!” God is our Judge, and though we be cruel sinners, nevertheless His judgment is not guilty by the love of Jesus Christ.

I am reminded of the Tibetan Buddhists, who teach that after death we must all face the great and terrible Yama, god of judgment, who will place a white pebble on one end of a scale for each of our good deeds, and a black on the other end for each of our sins. Yet the Tibetans insist that we must look beyond Yama. He isn’t real; he’s an illusion! We must realize that Yama is actually the image of us judging ourselves. God is not the barrier to Heaven; we are.

So then, are the Unitarian Universalists right? Does everybody go to Heaven because God loves and welcomes everybody home? Alas, I must humbly submit, that they, too, have it wrong. The Unitarians are making the same mistake as the pagans. They both think that judgment is about God judging us. Christ makes it clear that this is not the case. Rather, brothers and sisters, it is we who judge our God. From the very beginning, we have been blessed and burdened with the unspeakable gift of free will. We have been able to choose whether or not to trust and love and serve the One True God, or to turn from Him to worship ourselves. Such was the Fall of Adam and Eve in the garden. It was about so much more than fruit.

The reason for this freedom is that God’s very nature, the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, is love. Love is generous and kind and self-sacrificing. But love, by dint of being love, cannot force, cannot tyrannize, cannot enslave. Love must be accepted. Love must be mutually shared. Otherwise there is no freedom, no dignity, no love at all. The entire story of the Bible is God judging us good—from day one, good!—and we judging God unworthy of our love. The whole litany of mankind’s historical horrors has stemmed from this fact: that we love ourselves more than God, and more than our neighbors made in God’s image. And God has begged and pleaded and forgiven and incarnated and lived alongside us and died along with us, all in the desperate, passionate, and unceasing love of a Father for His wayward children, the love of a Bridegroom for His fallen bride. God desires us; do we truly desire God?

Life is not a test. Life is a choice. We remain under no judgment but the clear, simple, undeniable judgment of Truth—of who we most deeply and ultimately desire to be. Will we choose forever to live as people of self-love, or of selfless love? That is the question. Judge wisely.

In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.