A life of condemnation or invitation?

​I was sitting at the desk in my hotel room yesterday morning. I was listening to Steven Furtick start his weekly message to his church. He was talking about their upcoming Easter service.

He told his large congregration that most people have started going back to restaurants and to movies and to grocery stores and to most places people had stopped going to because of the pandemic. But, he said, there are still a lot of people who haven't started coming back to church.

"You don't have to condemn them," he told his followers. "You can simply invite them to our Easter service."

Sometimes, a really powerful part of a message comes before the actual message ever gets started. I wrote Furtick's pre-message words down and stuck them in my pocket and thought about them on my drive home yesterday.

I thought about the woman in chapter 8 of John in the bible. The woman who had committed adultery and who had been brought by the pharisees to face Jesus. Pharisees who were trying to convince Jesus the woman should be stoned for her actions.

In response, the bible says, Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

The bible goes on to say:

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

The bible doesn't tell us what Jesus wrote in the dirt, but twice it referenced Jesus bending down and writing in the dirt in the middle of this exchange with the woman's accusers. So I think we are at least supposed to wonder what he was writing.

I wonder if Jesus was writing "how could you" or "I've got you."

I wonder if Jesus was writing "please go away" or "please come with me."

I wonder if Jesus was writing a condemnation or an invitation.

I think we all have some values in our lives that are important to us. Values that make us believe other people should fall in line with our values - or at least - make us believe other people's values aren't serving themselves or the world well.

I figure there are two ways to spend our energy in this case. We can spend it by displaying our values in a way that is inviting, or by letting someone else know just how uninviting their values are in a most uninviting way.

I love this story in John. Because not only did Jesus NOT condemn the woman, he also did NOT condemn the pharisees. Instead, he invited them to take a look into their lives through the lens of their own condemnation.

They accepted his invitation. And in turn, they adopted a value that Jesus valued.

Every minute, I think, we are living lives of either invitation or condemnation.

Condemnation is certainly a way to let someone know where you stand on a subject - and let you stone someone else for their stance - but rarely will it invite someone to reconsider their stance.

I also get that not everyone accepts an invitation. But invitation comes with possibility. Possibility comes with hope. And so even if we don't get to experience the change we'd like to see, we do get to experience - and share - hope.

Maybe that's what Jesus was writing in the dirt.

Hope.