Mtr Kelli Joyce

Hear, you peoples, all of you;
listen, O earth, and all that is in it;
and let the Lord God be a witness against you,
the Lord from his holy temple.
For lo, the Lord is coming out of his place,
and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.
Then the mountains will melt under him
and the valleys will burst open,
like wax near the fire,
like waters poured down a steep place.

Dear Friends in Christ,

For far too long, many Christians have used the threat of divine judgment as a weapon to enforce their own human desires on others. Instead of proclaiming Good News, for far too long the Church has scolded and threatened, often more concerned with punishing violations of the social status quo than with addressing the kinds of neighbor-harming behavior that Jesus and the Prophets condemned.

Because the language of God's judgment has been so badly misused, many people who grew up in such churches have an understandable negative response to this kind of language. I've been there myself - for years, in fact!

But as I've watched the events of the last decade unfold, I've found a place for divine judgment in my understanding of God. It's true that God is love, and that God's love covers the sinful and the righteous alike. But to me, the depth of that love is the reason that I can no longer believe in a God who doesn't take sides, who is never angry, who cannot or will not call wickedness for what it is. No, God loves the victims of human cruelty too much for that. Frankly, God loves the perpetrators of human cruelty too much for that.

In Rite I Morning Prayer, we say these words: O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of him. For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth, and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with his truth."

Humans judge wrongly. We judge unjustly. We judge selfishly, or with an eye toward vengeance, or we simply judge without actually knowing all the facts. Christ calls us not to judge, not least because we're really bad at it. (Remember the metaphor about the guy with a branch in his eye trying to get a speck of sawdust out of his friend's eye?) God, on the other hand, always judges in accordance with truth and mercy and righteousness and love. God's judgment is for the healing of creation, even if the removal of our idols and our failures looks like destruction from our limited point of view.

This is why I love the verses I put at the top of today's email. The world that God created and called good is now full of suffering and death, in ways we are both unwilling and unable to stop. But not forever. God has promised to come down, to bring to light the truths that have been hidden, to burn away dross and to put an end to the machinations of the powerful. Let's prepare ourselves for that great and terrible day, when Jesus of Nazareth, God made human, will return - as our judge and as our hope.

In peace,
Mtr Kelli