Human? Nature

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.

-The Apocalypse of John 22: 1

Sometimes a whole bunch of things just come together in my brain.  Having lived in Pittsburgh for a bit, I have adopted a geographical word for this: confluence.  That's what they call the place where two, or in the case of the burgh, three rivers come together.  So here's my Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio for this week: Refugees, people experiencing homelessness, and the church, specifically the church I serve as pastor, but I think you will see a broader application.
First, without belaboring points I have made earlier, let me just say that I have been profoundly disappointed with some of the responses to the refugee crisis, even before the Paris attacks ratcheted the rhetoric up to eleven.  The fear and intolerance that I have seen displayed by many, including the governor of my own state has quite frankly dented my faith in humanity, and reminded me, rather vividly of the depth of human sin.
Second, this was our week to host the local Safe Nights program, which provides temporary shelter for people in Charles County who are experiencing homelessness.  Our church's lower level is packed with cots and the meager personal effects of between 30 and 40 men, women and children who are experiencing homelessness.  We feed them, we give them a place to sleep and our local community action group, Lifestyles of Southern Maryland (shameless plug, they're freaking awesome), does as much as possible to help them get their lives together during the day.  I would like to tell you that all of the people we serve are paragons of virtue who have just fallen on hard times, but that is not the truth.  The group as a whole is a full mixture of people of all different sorts, they can be surly and petulant with each other, they can be ungrateful and rude, but it is our duty to serve them and give them shelter nonetheless.  We have to stop this pervasive and perverse notion that those in need of help must somehow live up to certain standards in order to be treated decently.  That is not grace.  Whether you're talking about refugees or the homeless, or the person in traffic or at the grocery store, being grace filled is not something you should ever try to turn on and off according to the situation.
And so I walk up to a powder keg holding an open flame, and I attempt to investigate something that has and does trouble me about the church: do we allow ourselves to experience grace?  In our meetings and our plans, in our gatherings and in our attitudes towards one another?  In our relationship to individuals, congregations and other institutional groups, do we understand that we are what we are thanks to the grace of God and not because of how good we are?
Those who truly experience the grace of God in their lives are then called, and even compelled to let that grace flow out of them.  I believe that God is love, and that love is expressed towards humanity in the form of grace incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  I used Reinhold Niebuhr's famous Serenity prayer in our Session meeting last night, you know the one: "God, give me the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."  People who are familiar with some form of that prayer may not remember that it goes on from there, to say the following line: "Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it."
That hit me between the eyes.  I thought about how Jesus interfaced with the world, and it occurs to me that Niebuhr hit the nail on the head, Jesus took the world as it was, and people as they were.  He certainly recognized the failings and the sin, and sometimes it made him angry or even caused him to weep, but in the midst of all that there was a radical kind of acceptance, which we commonly call grace.
A lot of younglings these days use the phrase, "don't judge me," frequently.  I noticed this coming from my daughter and from some of our youth here at church, and I asked them about it. I asked them why they said it so often, even if there was no real sign that anyone was judging them.  One girl said, "I feel judged a lot."
"Why?" I asked, "I didn't say anything or do anything to indicate that I was judging you."
"I just feel it," she said, "because I do weird things, because I am weird."
Don't get me wrong, I understand there is plenty of judgment to go around that comes from external sources, but what I was encountering here was almost entirely internal judgment.
I said, in a moment of Pastoral inspiration, "you know, it occurs to me that the only way someone should be able to judge you, is if they really love you, otherwise they'll do it wrong."  Honestly, I don't really know where that came from, but the more I think about it the more it sort of runs away with me.  Jesus can be the judge of creation because he loves it.  He was able to set things right in the world and call sinners to repent, because he loved them, because he accepted their weirdness and did not judge without understanding that perhaps their sins were afflictions, and not flaws.  He did not come to "condemn the world, but came that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:17)
We need to learn to accept that grace and that justification.  If we can't accept it for ourselves, we will never, ever be able to give it to others.
If we fail to receive and give grace to others we will fail, not just as Christians, but as humans.