Advent Thoughts
Judging
Dutch TV company Endemol were out to break their own Guinness World Record of 3,992,397 falling dominoes. They had worked for weeks setting up more than 4 million dominoes when in flew a sparrow and knocked over 23,000 of them. The common house sparrow - of a species on the national endangered list - was chased into a corner and shot by an exterminator with an air rifle. "More than 100 people from 12 countries had worked for more than a month setting them up," explained Endemol spokesman Jeroen van Waardenberg. But Dorland, the animal protection group, plans to submit the case to national prosecutors.
The sparrow posed a threat to Endemol’s project. At the heart of our experience of life is a consciousness of how often human beings’ good intentions are threatened and undermined. Sometimes it’s other people whose selfishness or sheer wickedness interrupts otherwise previously peaceful lives. Sometimes it’s more personal – we are aware in our own lives of doing or saying things which seem to emerge unbidden from our subconscious but which cause hurt to others or are destructive of our best endeavours.
The putting to death of a man whose life and words had been designed to bring only benefit to the human race epitomized this self-destructive human characteristic. But his birth, which we are shortly to celebrate, suggests that God doesn’t deal with such human failings in the way Endemol dealt with the sparrow. Jesus reflected God’s judgement, not by dramatically rooting out all that was evil in human beings, but in coming to love us as we are.
If today someone’s failure or incompetence threatens something we’re engaged with, anger may be one reaction. But trying to love that person into being different and into behaving more creatively will probably have more long term effect.
Rick Pyburn was sick and tired of motorists speeding past his home. Already, he had lost five chickens to hit-and-run drivers passing by at speeds well above the limit. Calling the police did no good —with a strapped budget, the Benton County Sheriff's Office couldn't do much to help.
Then, one day, as he watched a sheriff's car cruise by his house, Pyburn got an idea. With the help of a local sign company, he built the front half of a two-dimensional plywood sheriff's car, and set up the decoy in some bushes complete with a cut-out of his own face in the "window," warning them to slow down. "Once I placed that on the highway, it was amazing," he said. "The traffic, even when it wasn’t breaking the limit, slowed immediately."
Authority figures do tend to slow us down. The sight of someone with power to issue a reprimand makes most people stop to check whether they’re doing anything amiss. Often an internal policeman makes us feel guilty even when we’re not actually doing anything wrong. There’s sometimes a fear which may go back into childhood that we are perpetually at fault.
Religion can have this effect but not at its best. The God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures has high moral standards but also a compassionate, forgiving attitude which is far from being like the authoritarian figures in our past and in our imagination. We need to try and live by our principles. If an imaginary plywood cut-out god would help make us better people, let’s adopt one – but the real God, while demanding the best from us, is infinitely understanding and forgiving about our failures. Perhaps that's the inner voice we should really listen to.
The National Trust has launched a campaign to find the country's ugliest vegetable.
Gardeners were encouraged to submit anything ‘from two legged carrots to corkscrew runner beans’. Entrants have nearly a year to produce something ugly. “We want to counter a trend among retailers for stocking perfect-looking fruit and vegetables, regardless of its taste,” said a spokesperson.
Were it not for the competition, many gardeners would find it beneath them to produce an ugly vegetable. It might not enhance their reputation. Indeed most of us feel that what we produce reflects who we are and we take personally judgements made about anything we’ve had a part in creating.
Jesus did teach that one way of judging people was by their ‘fruits’ but the main emphasis of his message was that it is the person God is interested in, not what they have, or have not, done. The elder son in the story
of the Prodigal laid claim to recognition because of his thorough and committed work on the farm. But it was the younger for whom a banquet was thrown, in spite of his ugly and destructive behaviour.
We shall want our work today to do us credit and it will be good if we can feel proud of it. But we shouldn’t judge ourselves failures in God’s eyes, or in our own, if it gets criticised by others or we feel it falls short of what we’d hoped. Thank goodness that God, and often those who love us, see past our outward shape and enjoy what's inside.
Australian John Fleming works for a company that makes road signs warning motorists of kangaroos. There are more than 57 million of them in the country and they account for more than 70 percent of animal related accidents. Sadly for Mr Fleming’s motorbike, and for the kangaroo, he ran into one of them recently. "I was riding my motorbike with my mate when the kangaroo jumped straight into it," he told Australia's Herald Sun newspaper. "The guys from work sent me a get well card that's a warning sign for a kangaroo."
It seems as though spending all day surrounded by warnings about kangaroos is no protection from them. Nor does knowing what we shouldn’t do, prevent us doing it. Perhaps more valuable than warning signs is personal experience and the news item about what happened to Mr Fleming may well have had far more effect than road signs which are so common people hardly notice them.
God’s choice to come in Jesus and experience human life enables God to know from the inside the struggles humans have. God’s commands are clearly spelt out in the Bible; the Old Testament is full of warnings from the prophets and others about the consequences of disobedience. But in the New Testament, God’s judgement on our failure is tempered by a sense that God understands, that the one who issued the warnings suffers in himself the consequences of ignoring them. Christ’s death reveals a love which shares with us in the suffering sin causes and his experience of what that sin can do has changed people more effectively down the centuries than many a prophetic warning.
Today we may fail to do what we should, or we may do what we shouldn’t. We may react by wagging a warning finger at ourselves. Better perhaps to remember that Jesus came to share with us in the struggle to get it right and that in his love for us, there’s a power that can change us, if we’ll let it.
In Cornwall, parking wardens recently clamped a van belonging to a dead man and then refused to waive the £350 release fee. In Kristiansand, on Norway's southern tip, a motorist unable to move because of rush hour traffic got a parking ticket. The officials involved would clearly have benefited from the new BTEC qualification for ‘immobilisation operatives’. Described as a course to assist clampers and parking wardens with communication skills and conflict resolution, let’s hope it also equips them to make less stupid decisions!
It’s not only parking wardens who do stupid things; and a thirty-hour training course would make little impact on the capacity of nearly all of us to make silly mistakes or behave foolishly. Careless speech or clumsy behaviour can leave us feeling very red in the face, even when only we know about it.
Occasionally embarrassment is the only appropriate response. But often, there is a reason why we have done or said something stupid. It may be a sign that we are over-tired, or that we are feeling threatened, or that something not yet identified is making us uncomfortable. It’s sensible in such circumstances not to berate ourselves but to make careful judgements about why we might have behaved like that. We can make something creative out of a faux pas if we pause to reflect on why this normally sensible person suddenly does something silly; and then take appropriate action.
