Who Am I to Judge?

Today I was reading A Year in the Life of American Saints, and the saint for the day was Bayard Rustin. I recently watched the movie Rustin, so his story was still fresh in my mind.

What a remarkable man.

Rustin endured rejection, prejudice, imprisonment, and condemnation, yet he devoted much of his life to nonviolence, justice, reconciliation, and the dignity of people who had been pushed aside.

Would everyone in the church call Bayard Rustin a saint?

Probably not.

But I would.

That got me thinking about some other people I admire—Dolly Parton, Fred Rogers, Jimmy Carter, and even George W. Bush. They are very different people. I don’t agree with everything every one of them has done, said, or believed. Neither would they agree with one another about everything.

But I see something in their lives that keeps taking me back to Jesus.

When Religion Gets in the Way

I have traveled through several expressions of Christianity during my pilgrimage. I was raised Free Will Baptist. I became Nazarene, then Methodist, and now I worship in the Episcopal tradition.

I have found wonderful people in all of them.

I have also discovered the same danger in all of them.

We can become so convinced that we are right and they are wrong that we begin measuring other people by whether they fit our religious profile.

And that troubles me because that is exactly what I see happening in the Gospels.

Some of the religious leaders couldn’t accept Jesus because he didn’t fit their profile of what the Messiah was supposed to be.

Jesus healed on the wrong day.

He ate with the wrong people.

He touched people others considered unclean.

He welcomed people respectable society rejected.

Again and again, Jesus challenged those who allowed religious rules and traditions to become more important than God’s grace and mercy.

Woe to us when we do the same thing.

We can become so Baptist, so Methodist, so Anglican, so Catholic—or even so agnostic—that defending our particular understanding becomes more important than seeking truth, extending mercy, and loving the person standing in front of us.

There is a fine line between being religious and following Jesus.

What Is the Test?

Morality matters. Our choices matter. How we live matters.

But I have increasingly come to believe that the ultimate test is relationship.

How do I relate to God?

How do I relate to others?

How do I relate to myself?

How do I relate to God’s creation—the universe of which I am a part?

Jesus summed up the commandments by telling us to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Then in Matthew 25, Jesus gives us a startling picture of judgment.

Were the hungry fed?

Was the stranger welcomed?

Were the naked clothed?

Were the sick cared for?

Were the prisoners visited?

And then Jesus says:

“As you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.”

That passage keeps bothering me—in a good way.

Because Jesus doesn’t allow me merely to ask what another person believes.

He makes me ask how I treated them.

I Remember Someone

There was someone very close to me whose life did not fit comfortably within the expectations of many Christians.

I knew some of his struggles and some of his mistakes.

But I saw something else.

I watched him care about young people who had been rejected, abused, or pushed away from their families. I saw him spend his own money to help young people get home. I saw him try to bring hurting young people and their families back together.

He taught me something I have never forgotten:

A human life cannot be reduced to the part of it someone else condemns.

There is always more to the person.

And there is always more to the story.

Remember the Thief

Then I think about the thief dying beside Jesus.

Whatever he had done had brought him to a Roman cross.

There wasn’t time to straighten everything out.

There wasn’t time to establish a respectable religious record.

There wasn’t time to prove himself worthy.

He simply turned toward Jesus and said:

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

And Jesus answered:

“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Grace.

Amazing, mysterious grace.

If Jesus could look at a condemned man dying beside him and speak those words of grace, I find myself asking: