Judge Not

Intro: Good morning, Church. A couple years ago I attended a conference in a denomination I had  been part of 20 years ago. What surprised me was how many people I could still recognize after 20 years of not seeing them. And while it was easy to recognize people, I have to say that they were a lot greyer and a little heavier than I remember. That sounds a little judgmental, doesn’t it? I mention the word ‘judgmental’ because the attendance at the conference was almost double what it usually was, because the topic up for discussion was ‘do you agree or disagree that a definition of marriage should only include the union of a man with a woman’. And I’ll bet you can imagine the verse that got lots of airplay in the debate. It was ‘Thou shalt not judge’. People used that verse as if it should stop any discussion on the topic, and as if it was given by Jesus to stop anyone from holding any opinion other that ‘everything goes.