A couple of months ago there was an episode on the TV show, The Simpsons , that particularly caught my attention. For those of you who don't about this show, I think it is one of the best satirical shows on TV. The Simpsons are a family of five. The father, Homer, frequently has a warped sense of right and wrong and what is important in life. He also has an odd view of family responsibilities--though he does love his family. He has an important job at a nuclear power plant but he is incompetent and has been the cause for many "incidents" at the plant. Marge is his wife whose most distinguishable characteristic is her tall pile of blue hair. For the most part Marge is content to look after her family in the traditional way. She certainly suffers the fools in her family gladly. On occasion she does break out of the mold to lead a protest against violence on TV and in one episode she became a police officer. Their oldest child is Bart who is a terror. He hates school, doesn't do his homework and is always scheming to do large scale pranks. The youngest child,Maggie, is a baby-and this being television, she's been a baby for many years--Maggie never takes the pacifier out of her mouth. The middle child is Lisa,a child any family would love to have. She is energetic, a good student, she plays the saxophone, she's speaks out on the environment and women's rights. She is just about everything Bart is not.

Now in this one episode, Bart is feeling particularly resentful about being in school. He plots to cause friction between the school principal and one of the teachers who happens to be the leader of the teacher's union and sure enough the teachers go on strike closing the school. Bart is triumphant.

Lisa, on the other hand, is despondent. As the strike goes on for several days Lisa walks around the house aimlessly, without purpose. Then she finally cracks. In a burst of activity she cleans up her room, she plays the sax wonderfully, she takes care of Maggie, makes dinner-- most things she has done before but not with such frantic intensity. Through all this activity she keeps on asking her mother how she is doing and Marge, matter of factly, tells Lisa that she is doing fine- but this isn't enough for Lisa. She needs something more, something substantive. She pleads with her mother, "Grade me mom, give me a grade. " Marge thinks this is silly. "Please, Mom grade me, grade me," Lisa insists--again in a frenzy. Marge relents, get a piece of paper and writes a large "A" on it and Lisa breathes out a big sigh of relief. She's been graded. Her life--in suspension due to the strike--has meaning once again.

I also recall that when he was mayor of New York City, Ed Koch would constantly go around the asking people how he was doing. In fact that was what he titled his autobiography."How 'm I doin'?"

These two illustrations show that within us humans there is some innate need to be judged, appraised, acknowledged, appreciated, or to use a contemporary term, affirmed. All of us want to know how we are doing--all of us want, like Lisa, to be graded.

And yet at the same time we are often told as the Bible admonishes us, "Judge not lest ye be judged," particularly as it applies to moral judgements because it may reveal our hypocrisy. These days we often hear ourselves and others say that we don't want to be judgmental--but in fact we are.
This morning I'm not going to talk about being judged in some grand theological or moral sense. Still, there is a bit of that which I will touch on in a moment because there are many who believe their lives to be subject to divine judgement after it is over. But the judgements I'm talking about this morning are those we seek out from time to time that are like status reports which tell us what we need to know in order to make any necessary changes in our lives--while we are in the midst of them.

But there is also an existential reason why we ask to be graded. Rabbi Harold Kushner offers the example that just about everyone of us can relate to. Remember when you were in high school and you stayed up all night working putting the finishing touches on a weeklong project? The paper was nicely typed, illustrations were neatly pasted in, and a brightly colored folder was wrapped around it--all because you wanted it to be perfect and get a good grade. And then a week later its handed back to you with only a check on it indicating that the teacher hardly looked at it but gave you credit for handing it in. How did you feel? Probably along the lines "What's the point of working so hard to do a good job if nobody cares? Next time, I'll do the least I can get away with, and spend the rest of my time watching TV." And I suspect this example isn't limited to high school memories but has happened to you later in life, perhaps, even this week.

The reason we react the way we do in those situations is that we want to know that we are taken seriously. We want to know that the decisions we make in our lives--indeed our lives themselves- matter.

Sometimes we submit ourselves to judgement to gauge how we are doing in our lives, and if we need to rethink what we have been doing. Of course there is always the danger that we really abdicate the responsibility for our own lives when we rely solely on the judgements of others. When we ask someone, "how'm I doing?", the reason for such a question should come from deep within us.

We also want to know how we are doing when it comes to the moral dimension in our life.Rabbi Kushner, in his book "Who Needs God?" talks about how important it is for us to be judged on our moral character. And it, too, is something we seek out--even if it is often unconscious. He says that

we want to know that we are taken seriously. We want to feel that our decisions--to lie or not to lie, to steal or respect other's property--are important at the highest level. We want to have moral demands made of us, not because we are sure we will live up to them, but because the demands made of us make us feel that we are special because we are human.

Peter Fleck, who escaped from the Nazis in Holland and became a successful banker only to become, in the latter stages of his life, a Unitarian Universalist minister once recalled a television show in which a man dies and finds himself standing on line. An usher obviously bored with the tedium of his job tells the man that he must choose to enter either door that lie in front of him. The one on the right leads to heaven, the one on the left leads to hell.

The man was astounded.

"You mean that I am to choose whether I want to go to heaven or hell?", the man asks. "Is there no judgement? "Does it not count how I have lived, the good things I have done and the bad things?"

"That's right. You choose." the usher says. "Now move along, people are dying and lining up behind you. Choose one and keep the line moving."

"But I want to confess, I want to come clean, I want to be judged."

"I'm not interested in your accomplishments or your sins and no one else around here is either. We don't have time for that. Just choose a door and move along."

The man looked horrified. He hid his face in his hands to think; then he stepped forward past the usher and disappeared through the door marked "hell."

Peter Fleck's observation is that "in the end, we want to be held accountable...we want to be judged and ultimately to be forgiven." Not only do we want to judged on the things we shouldn't have done but also on all the things we could have done, but didn't. And we want affirmation of the positive things we've done in our life.

Several years ago a movie came out called "Defending Your Life." In it the main character is killed in a car crash and in a daze finds himself at some heavenly way station called Judgement City where one comes before a panel of two judges and watches as an advocate and a "prosecutor" shall we say, offer evidence--moments of the person's life--to determine whether that person shall be sent back to earth for another lifetime or move on to another level of consciousness and with greater brainpower.Our hero, Daniel, isn't sure what's going on and doesn't understand the need to defend his life.

During the hearing moments of his life are shown on videotape and submitted as evidence by both the hero's advocate and his prosecutor.The incidents Daniel has to comment on are very ordinary ones--why he didn't stand up to a grade school bully--why he risked suspension from school in order to help a friend--why at a successful job interview he didn't ask for a salary that was equal to his worth to the company.

The most common of life's moments--moments that very few of us would consider critical to our lives and yet they are the indication--the very essence of what our lives are about. They are moments that reveal our morality, our loyalty--and they reveal our moral values. And these were the things that Daniel was being judged on and asked to defend.This being a movie, at the end, Daniel realizes that the process of defending his life,under judgement, has given him the opportunity to understand the real value that his life had.

One of the puzzles of human nature is that we want to be judged and then resent it when we are. Or it's OK for us to ask someone how we're doing but we object when someone tells us without our asking first.But in asking others how we are doing--we are seeking to be affirmed; we are asking that the world know that we are hear, that we matter.

From the earliest years of childhood we have been told what to do--and what is right or wrong--we have been praised or criticized for what he have done or haven't done. But as we grow older--as we begin to show our maturity it is we who ask others how we are doing. We really don't want to wait for their unsolicited judgement--and often we resent it because we prefer to initiate the dialogue ourselves. Why is that? Is it because we want to have some control on what is being said about us? Is it because if we ask the response will be kinder?

What if we were to go to someone and ask them how we were doing and they didn't know what we were talking about--they didn't know what "judgement" was. Imagine a world in which there was no judgement of any kind--personal, communal, national, global. In such an imaginary world it is quite possible that there would be no wars, no hatred, no crime because no one would place a higher value than another person on a political system, land, race, or a car. There is much to say for such a world without judgement. But what about our own world--the world you and I live in every day? If there was no judgment in our personal world would we have any idea of self-worth; any idea of the difference our lives make in the lives of others--if our personal world was without judgement would our life have any meaning? But this world we live in is full of judgement. And this is why we feel the way we do when someone praises us.

The actress,Sally Field, has been made fun of over the years for her acceptance speech when she won an Oscar--her words have become something like an in-joke. When she was handed the Oscar her face was beaming and she said to those in the audience, many who had voted for her: "You like me. You really, really like me." Maybe in a cynical town like Los Angeles--and maybe it is true in the cynical society we have become--that those words can be turned into a joke. But the irony is that she was saying something that every person in that auditorium--that every person around the world would like to believe: that there are people out there who like us, who really, really like us; who appreciate what we do and who we are.

Placing ourselves under judgment can be a tricky thing. If we constantly seek out the opinions of others then we run the risk of living not by our own inner voice but living according to someone else's. By placing ourselves under our own judgement we run the risk of being overly critical of ourselves to the point of paralysis. Placing ourselves under judgement by others or ourselves is also risky business because we can lay bear our vulnerabilities and if there is one thing we don't like to be, it is vulnerable.

But placing ourselves in this position is ultimately a matter of trust; trust in ourselves and others. Frederick Beuchner, in the reading this morning, reminds us that we are judged everyday. "We are judged," he says, "by that face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror.We are judged by the faces of the people we love." Let me say one more time this morning that when we place our lives under judgement we seek a connection with others; we seek acknowledgement and we give it in return. In living under judgement we recognize that we are not alone but in relation with other people, with our conscience, with the Eternal Spirit,with God. And that is what gives meaning and purpose to our lives.

AMEN