Some wisecracker years ago said that “the church is the only army that shoots its own wounded.” As more atrocities from our armed services come to light from both Afghanistan and Iraq, that may not really be true, but you get the point. Christians are not successfully warring against the forces of darkness on behalf of Jesus if we are constantly beating up other Christians. It is no wonder that millions of people today want nothing to do anymore with any church, because they can’t distinguish between good church and bad church.

How can we let them know that we trust in God’s grace, and don’t believe that God is trying to trick us all into stumbling headlong into damnation?

Today I sat at our parish’s booth in the local street fair, Sunset Junction, which has been going on every August for 30 years to build bridges between ethnic groups and across the chasm between straight identities and gay people. The astonishing diversity and I guess even perversity is palpable when watching it point blank from the middle lane of Sunset Boulevard, closed to traffic for 36 hours.

This is the first year that our congregation has put up the effort to get a booth, think up a theme, and take banners, tables, chairs, literature, free giveaways (we ordered New Testaments from the American Bible Society) and ask volunteers to staff 2-hour shifts. The street fair is decidedly a party atmosphere—the music is deafening and a lot of beer is consumed to wash down either Mexican, Salvadoreno or Thai food—and yet it is surprising how many people actually did look at our banner and posters and take home flyers and a New Testament. We even had a real mail box for people to leave written prayer requests, which we will lift up in our parish life this week.

The reason I mention all this is because this afternoon a woman stepped up, and her first question was, “You’re not Missouri Synod, are you?” She had been raised in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, and went through a K–8 parochial school in the Chicago suburbs. Now she won’t go near an LC-MS church. “Too many rules,” she said flatly.

Ten minutes hadn’t past since another woman had stopped to stare at our banner, and weigh whether it was worth stopping to talk, before one of us noticed and called out a “Hello” to her. The banner, in addition to our congregation’s name, etc., bears this slogan:

“Where Religion Doesn’t Hurt.”

She told me a heart-breaking story of having been expelled—she used the word excommunicated —from her church eight years ago. She had been publicly humiliated in church for her sin, which I deduced must have been over a marital break-up. Years later, she is still deeply wounded but also still longing for a spiritual community where she will not be tested or questioned about her sins or failings, or pushed out the door.

Clearly, our church is a place where wounds are healed, but people don’t always recognize the different between a church that continues to wound and one that wants to be a place of healing.

It convinces me all the more that Christian ethics are first and foremost a matter of personal discipline and discernment. As a community, our first duty is to stand with someone who is struggling with difficult ethical decisions or choices, and stand with them even in a failure or a mistake, before the community even begins to talk about condoning or not condoning a behavior.

Martin Luther rebelled against Roman Catholic Canon Law. To this day, the Lutheran Church has no such “code” by which a member can be tried or excluded. We hope and expect that each person, guided by the light of the Holy Spirit, will measure him or herself against the Law until it is clear that each person is in need of God’s forgiveness and grace. Once I am thoughtful and clear about my own need for grace, it also becomes clear that I am in no position to judge another. When you have a whole collection of individual Christians who are clear that none of us can play the divine judge (”Let the one who has not sinned cast the first stone,” John 8:7), it ought to temper the temptation of a congregation or a churchbody to condemn anyone, to pass judgment, or to exclude even a single sinner from the community of grace.

What interested me, too, was that both of these women were heterosexual, and weren’t wounded over being lesbian or gay. Yet both of them had felt judged, even condemned, by harsh religiosity that has forgotten the place we all must have before the throne of grace.

Dear sisters, this is not right. This should never happen to you. Please give us a second chance to proclaim the good news, not wallow in the self-righteousness of those who imagine they are “holier than thou.”

—Pastor Dan Hooper