On that Sunday, after I touched you and smiled at you or on you and I smiled back at you, you said, “My name is Michael,” and I said my name and you said, “Thank you for your kindness.”
And there have been many times when people have said something like that and I’ve thought… who are you talking to? If you knew me you would never say that? I am not kind. And then there have been times when I’ve thought, this goodness of mine as an anomaly. It can’t happen all the time. It doesn’t happen all time. But that’s not true. If I step back I realize that I have an amazing capacity for seeing the right thing to do and doing it. But I also have an enormous capacity for cruelty, an appetite for nastiness and an addiction to all things petty.
Tonight, I think on these things. I have been all too quick to forgive myself. But what I call sarcasm is often scathing judgment, and what I call pet peeves are just dressed up pettiness. All through Lent prophets speak to the city of Jerusalem of repentance, they speak in grave terms as if repentance is the only alternative to destruction and when I look at history I realize this was true. Everytime the prophets rose up there was an army coming to ruin Judah and burn Jerusalem to the ground.
And if I look at my life it is much the same. The prophets are not talking hyberbole. Those things I look at carefully and repent of for the first time, those deeds that I have not forgiven so much as overlooked in myself, the smoldering judgment I have called—falsely—discernment, will destroy me and burn me down as sure as the Babylonians razed Jerusalem.
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