Church Voices

Recently, at my alma mater a professor left her infant in her minivan and the infant died (there will be no linking to story or names used due to the remarkably brutish nature of many of the comments that have accumulated on news stories).

Many of the comments I’ve seen on the various news articles are quick to condemn this woman, and one particular way of condemning this woman quickly emerged. The particular condemnation leveled is that this woman was obsessed with her career and the money it brought in, so much so that it directly lead to her forgetting her infant in the car.

This theme strikes me as remarkably silly. Its been a few years since I attended this school, and I was never privy to a list of names with a salary next to them, but I was close enough to several professors that from various things they said, along with their type of lifestyle I know that there’s a good chance you’re making more than they do. The professors who teach at this school don’t teach in order to build a career and buy gold plated rocket cars, they do it out of their passion for building the kingdom of God. They have effectively chosen to pass up an opportunity for prestige, and a higher standard of living to teach there.

In this woman’s case she earned a PhD from Purdue in counseling. I’m sure she had the opportunity to teach at larger schools that would have given her the ability to earn more money, research more and teach less and so publish more papers, and build that career the commenters are writing about. Or at the least she could have gone into her field and built a business around her ability to counsel, a career track that certainly would have brought in more cash than academia.

Of course, none of the commenters seem aware of these circumstances. One commenter comicly demonstrated ignorance about what neighborhood the school is located in by proclaiming sagely that if the school were located in that neighborhood which it is located in the swat team would have been dispatched to round her up and imprison her in Guantanamo Bay for daily waterboardings.

Which brings me to the whole point of this. The more distance there is between two individuals, the easier it is to heap up mountains of condemnation. When you are separated by ideology, education, race, marital status, and have never met the person its easy to demand a public lynching.

Perhaps, especially as followers of Christ, it would be wisest if we withheld condemnation on people and circumstances we know nothing about. Especially since the God we worship, who Isaiah tells us has ways and thoughts higher than our own as the sky is from the ground, and who Paul tells us is the only one who is holy, didn’t come into the world to condemn it, but to save it.In other words, God has the distance and the moral high ground to condemn us, and instead sent Christ to save us.

Should we show any less grace to others?