degrees

When you look at someone, what do you see? If you are like me, you immediately filter through what they are wearing, how they come off (nice/not so nice), and what they are doing. Those three things, not necessarily in that order, are the first things I tend to soak in about someone. If we are being honest, I am not doing this necessarily to know them better but to measure it up against my own clothes, temperament, and what I’m doing. I then ask myself: who is doing better? That makes me sound like a terrible person, but I think we all do this whether we are aware of it or not. When we do this the most, though, is whenever we know we aren’t doing so well. For example, I happened to be convicted of doing this at a party. I watched as two girls next to me danced in a way that, in my head, was far far worse than my own. I judged them. I judged what they were doing against what I was, and I instantly took my “holier than thou” pedestal with gusto. I sat there the rest of the party until I got home and was alone. In the quiet of my room, without anyone else around me, I was forced to examine my own actions against nothing but me and what scripture says.

“As it is, you are full of your grandiose selves. All such vaunting self-importance is evil. In fact, if you know the right thing to do and don’t do it, that, for you, is evil.”

- James 4:16-17 MSG

As you can imagine, I jumped off that pedestal really quick. I was so so guilty of doing the thing I harped on those two girls for- hypocrisy. Sin. But my sin was way less of a sin than dirty dancing, right? That is what we do. We rank sins based on their degree. High degree sins: murder, rape, thievery, sex, etc. Low degree sins: drinking, smoking weed, all but sex, etc. The problem with this is that it leaves grey areas. What about a low cut shirt? Idolizing social media? Dirty dancing? We rank those based on what we think which changes from circumstance to circumstance. If I am not ______ , that is a high degree sin. If I am ______, it is a low degree sin. I was guilty of this at that party. I ranked my sin because I knew all of it was wrong, but it is easier to swallow that way. As I sat in bed thinking, I thought about how many times I do this in a day and how it makes no difference to God. Sin is sin, big or small. The idea of creating big and small pillars means nothing from the bird’s eye view God maintains. If we can think that way, we will never feel worthy enough to sit on God’s pedestal of judgment and tell others what degree their sin is all the while omitting our own. We all sin in the dark, so we never have a right to assign degrees to sin. God’s benevolence and perfection are and forever will be unattainable for us, but we ignore that and, in doing so, ignore those qualities of God. To place ourselves in the position to look at another’s sin as worse than our own takes away from the glory and grace of the death of Jesus, the blood that leveled every sin, and the gift that allows union with God in spite of them.