Since the Christian Church has retained a vocabulary adequate to handle this particular aspect of our human existence [sin], it has the capability to track more precisely the impact that sin can have on our communities. A popular caricature of the church is that of a community of people who see themselves as righteous while viewing everyone on the outside as sinners. However, a more accurate portrayal of the Christian Church is, first of all, a community of sinners. The church is not a hall of fame for the most holy people in our society, nor is it a museum celebrating greatness in our past, but it is a hospital where broken people gather to be healed by grace. People who encounter the church on this basis—as sinners in need of grace—tend to find what they are looking for. People unwilling to acknowledge their own sin invariably miss the very thing that the church has to offer.

In Life Together, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer has poignantly described the process by which people cheat themselves out of a true experience of community. He uses the term, serious Christian, ironically to describe persons who are more serious than truly Christian because they come to the church, trying to realize some kind of idealized vision of human community rather than trying first of all to find grace for themselves.

“The serious Christian,” Bonhoeffer declares “set down for the first time in a Christian community is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it.” However, in the actual experience of Christian community, that ideal is quickly shattered. The Christian community never lives up to the expectations that people bring to it.

This presents the person seeking Christian community with a crisis. Will she choose to love this actual human community into which she has found herself or will she choose to love her ideal vision? The difference depends upon whether she can see in this imperfect community sinners like herself in need of grace. If she does so, she will find, first of all the reality of grace as the foundation of this community, and this foundation will hold her up as she encounters her own sinfulness in the particularities of her day-to-day life.

On the other hand, if the Christian decides to love her ideal of Christian community more than the actual Christian community in which he or she has been placed, a predictable cycle of rejection ensues. First, the Christian becomes “the despising accuser of his brethren, then of God and finally of himself.” In my experience, this does happen in the lives of many people. Often they will reject not one but a number of Christian communities before they start accusing God and then self, but in time, the result is the same. In fact, when people come to join our church because of perceived shortcomings of their former church, I have come to expect that such people will be rejecting us in the near future as well.

Jesus knew that His teaching differed from the teaching of others in Israel and especially from the Pharisees, and His warnings at the end of the sermon show that He wanted to distinguish His teaching from others. He gives a quick succession of “cartoons” that describe the dangers of false teachers. He says that the Pharisees are like blind men who are trying to lead other blind men, and points out that when the blind lead the blind, all of them eventually topple over into the ditch. He warns that disciples become like their teachers; following Pharisees means becoming a Pharisee, and who wants that?

One sort of blindness that Jesus condemns is the kind that comes from focusing on the small errors of others while ignoring your own large and blatant errors and sins. He describes a man with a tree trunk in his eye offering to remove a small speck of dust from his brother’s eye. The picture is absurd, and the significance is deepened when we look at it in larger biblical perspective. Throughout Scripture, eyes are organs of judgment. From the first chapter of Genesis, God sees and evaluates the world He makes; He “sees” and pronounces it good. The man with the speck in his eye has his judgment impaired, but not nearly so much as the man with the tree trunk in his eye.

Jesus is not saying that passing judgment is wrong. In fact, we are redeemed, Paul tells us, so that our eyes may be opened and we can share in God’s evaluations and judgments. It is a great privilege to be able to discern and pass judgment. Our brothers and sisters may indeed have specks in their eyes, which cloud their judgments, and it is an act of Christian love to help remove the speck. But Jesus warns that we need to take heed to ourselves first. Before we have offer our services as ophthalmologists, we should check our own qualifications, because our eyesight may be faulty. Paul made this very same point when he encouraged the Galatians: “if a man is caught in a trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, looking to yourself, lest you too be tempted.”

We in Moscow especially need to take Jesus’ warning to heart. We are frequently critical of other Christians for their goofiness and their trashiness. We condemn Christian kitsch and Jesus junk and the me-tooism that characterizes evangelicalism. Making these kinds of judgments is not wrong. These are genuine errors and flaws, and serious ones, in the contemporary church, and they are obstacles to discernment.

But we are qualified for this only insofar as we are regularly removing the logs from our own eyes, and making sure that our judgment is not impaired by some massive sin. One of the great dangers is that an attitude of pride and self-congratulation can come into this, even if we state our criticisms with a degree of humility. We don’t profess to be perfect, but at least we don’t sing praise songs. We may not have arrived, but at least we don’t like Thomas Kincaid. We may not have it all together, but at least we don’t buy cheesy Bibles. At least we’re superior to our brothers in THOSE respects. At least we are not like that pathetic Evangelical in the corner.

That kind of smug self-satisfaction would be a log, a monstrous beam in our eye, and as long as it’s there we have no business trying to perform cataract surgery on our brothers. Remove the log, and THEN help your brother with his speck. For remember the words of Jesus: “by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you in return.”