Specks, Logs, Motes, and Beams: Life Lessons from the Gospel of Luke

I don't know how many of you know this, or even if you care, but your Daily Officer has always had a soft spot in his heart for Luke, his favorite Gospel, and in fact he wears a St. Luke medal around his neck. (That's what's on that silver chain. I bet you always wondered.) Today we read a good passage in Luke and here are some deservedly famous highlights:

⁴¹Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? ⁴²Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye”, when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye.

What a true and direct sentiment. Randall Balmer, professor of American Religious History and self-proclaimed evangelical Christian, recently wrote an interesting book called Thy Kingdom Come. It's a good book despite overusing the "academic colon" in the title.

The academic colon, by the way, is not a gastrointestinal disorder acquired on a university campus, but is instead a punctuation mark that separates the catchy title from the explanatory title in all works that aspire to some sort of academic merit. You can use this yourself. Just apply the template Catchy Title: Explanatory Title to your next essay or thesis. (Or blog post; see above.) You should get familiar with this, because all academic works are required by fiat of the Library of Congress to use this formula. You've seen this in familiar formulations such as The Death of Pink: Barbie as Seen Through the Lens of Feminist Postmodernism. What a classic that would have been, except that I just now made that title up myself. But consider the topical example of Physician, Heal Thyself: Pathways to Personal Redemption in the Gospel of Luke. Just kidding; I made that up too. But see how easy and important it is to master the academic colon? If you grab the reader with a good enough use of your academic colon, you might not even need a good essay behind it!

Okay I'm digressing. My point was that Balmer uses and abuses the academic colon in his work. The full title of the book is Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament. See the problem? He uses not one but two academic colons. (In the medical world, we call that a redundant colon. On second thought, please don't follow that link, it's disgusting.)

Back on topic. Balmer makes a strong point in his first chapter that religious social conservatives completely ignore the spirit of this morning's passage from Luke. The religious right, he argues, typically picks a "pet sin" that that conveniently lies outside of the behavior that most social conservatives will admit to. In the 1950's and 1960's the pet sin was divorce. In the 1980's it changed to abortion. Since the turn of the century it's been gay marriage. Balmer argues that the pet sin is something that Evangelicals may actually do, but they collude together in pretending that they don't, giving them a club with which to beat the others (i.e. the unsaved, or non-Evangelicals). It becomes a litmus test for real membership in the religious right. You can have differing views on the environment or on taxation, but don't speak out against the pet sin!

The pet sin is usually defended vigorously by quotations from scripture, such as the tortured attempts to interpret scripture as referring specifically to abortion (which it does not) or the familiar and oft-cited denunciations of homosexuality. But Balmer makes the point that the social conservatives use selective literalism, which means that they happily quote the Bible literally when it speaks out against homosexuality, but now read as allegory the passages that argue against divorce or the ordination of women.

But the whole idea of picking a particular sin to use against a group of "others" smacks of just what Jesus was warning us against in Luke. Balmer writes:

[Attacking the pro-choice lobby] and the ritual castigation of homosexuals have paid off handsomely for the Religious Right by providing them a political platform. But at what price? The political calculus behind choosing the issues of abortion and homosexuality while ignoring other issues, such as care for the poor and opposition to war, to name only two, exposes the evangelical ruse of selective literalism, which leads both to distortion of the gospel and to a kind of mechanistic reading of the scriptures that takes no account of historical contingency. (pp. 33-34)

Redundant academic megacolon or not, Balmer's book is a good and vital read. It's especially good to read that an evangelical Christian can loudly proclaim that kind of humility. Your Daily Officer certainly falls short of the mark in many respects, but part of what I do is confess my sins to God three times per day. (More than that on days when I go to mass.) I find myself thinking frequently about my own sins. I try earnestly to live up to the spirit of what I hear St. Luke saying, about seeing the log in my own eye, and I try hard to see it. I find it easy to enumerate my own deficiencies.

But then I agree with Randall Balmer about how the religious right has got it all wrong. They misunderstand my beloved Luke. They judge too harshly. They get scripture wrong. They are wrong. And then that shadow descends again across my vision, clouds my view, shames me... and I realize that the way to Christ lies in transcending that sort of judgment. The Log in Your Own Eye: How Judging Others Harshly Often Separates You From Christ. Look for it to be published soon.