"Even Rocks Cry Out"

My dad loves to fish.  I love to fish.  My mom loves to read.  Now, I love to read. My parents raised me in a Christian home and brought me to church each Sunday.  Now I work for a church and go to several services each Sunday.  My dad loves baseball.  I love baseball.  My sister taught me how to cook.  Now I love to cook.  It seems as if I am a lot like my family.  Those things are just some of the good things passed on to me, things that are really insignificant when it comes down to it.  I got my values, preferences, and story from my family.  Unfortunately, I also inherited a lot of my shortcomings, biases, judgmental soapboxes, criticisms, and stubbornness from my family as well.  Don't get me wrong; I love my family, but not everything I learned growing up should be applied to my life today.  I think we can all admit that in some way or another.
Before I go any further, let me back up...Sunday morning I had the opportunity to preach.  We looked at John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery.  Each one of us was given a stone to hold in our hands.  As we walked through the story, we watched as a woman encountered Jesus while facing certain death.  After her accusers had left and Jesus refuses to condemn the woman, she is told to sin no more.  Coming away from Jesus, condemnation is replaced by the opportunity for transformation.  As she leaves the temple, she walks into the light of the sun as it rises over the Mount of Olives east of the temple in Jerusalem.  No wonder in the next verse, 8:12, Jesus calls himself the light of life.  We talked about taboo sins the church holds on to...things like premarital sex, divorce, abortion, homosexuality...things we as a church don't stand for.  The woman in the story had committed a scandalous crime, something taboo of her time.  After all her accusers had turned away and dropped their stones, she remained standing with Jesus.  Rather than run off to hide like you or I would do, she remained.  There was something about the way that Jesus handled the woman and her sin.  To Jesus, she was a woman, both a heart and a soul.  The way in which he cared for her kept her from running away in that moment of death.  Instead, she stood in the light with her sin exposed.  And in that same exposure of sin, she stood in the light of life, in the presence of Christ.
We were challenged at the close of the service to drop our stones on the steps of the stage in an act of surrender, obedience, and commitment to grace.  What we did Sunday morning was not condone sin, but we committed to replacing condemnation with opportunities of transformation.  Might people remain in church, in our youth programs, if we dropped those stones and let them encounter Christ instead of our glares of judgment and accusation?  That's where grace brings on the real transformation of lives - where the stones are dropped.  That's how we live in an Easter reality where we are continually transformed by the stone rolling away and revealing the empty tomb.  We let our stones of bias, judgment, fear, and condemnation roll from our hands so that we can hold onto and be bearers of grace in this world.
I wonder what stones we are putting in the lives of teenagers as parents, volunteers, and youth workers.  I wonder what stones of judgment I may pass on to my kids.  I wonder what stones of bias that I will place in my kids' hands that keep them from sharing the love of Christ.  Maybe instead of my shortcomings, biases, judgmental soapboxes, criticisms, and stubbornness I will pass on GRACE.  What will you pass on?
The noise of stones dropping into baskets on Sunday was exciting and moving.  As they crashed against one another, the noise of stones falling was one of praise and worship.  Even rocks cry out!