Scoring or Stooping?
Word From Wiese
August 26, 2026
“Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger.” — John 8:6
I’m a Far Side fan.
How many of us have belly-laughed at the witty cartoons of Gary Larson? Far Side books were some of my favorite Christmas presents, and they still bring me chuckles. Do you remember this one? A man is walking down the street, oblivious to a piano hanging over his head. Meanwhile, God is at God’s computer, ready to hit the button labeled, “smite.”
While it’s a funny cartoon, what’s not funny is that many people think God operates that way. God has nothing better to do in his remote palace in the sky than to mete out judgment, calamity, and punishment upon folks. They see God as a scorekeeper, watching our every move and adding tally marks to our grand scorecard.
Viewing God as scorekeeper feeds into a second dangerous lens when it comes to reading the Bible: moralism. (This past Sunday, in our sermon series kickoff, Better Ways to Read the Bible by Zach Lambert, we explored the first way Scripture can be weaponized: hierarchy. Thanks for the texts, emails, and hallway conversations regarding your reactions! If you missed it, check Sunday’s email for a link to the service.)
Moralists miss out on the joy of Jesus because they’re so focused on the rules.
Their lenses see the Bible as a rulebook to be followed, not a wonderful 66-book adventure showing God’s ongoing commitment of love to God’s children. They also miss out on the joy of other people because they’re spending energy judging everyone’s lifestyles, while also using emotional bandwidth worrying if their own life performance is cutting the mustard.
In John 8, we meet some of these moralistic scorekeepers: the Pharisees. They catch a woman in adultery and bring her to Jesus. (Why not the guilty man, too??? Maybe a little “hierarchy” at play, as discussed last Sunday.) The Pharisees expect Jesus to let her have it. She’s clearly broken the rules! It’s a slam-dunk case. She deserves to be stoned.
But scorekeeping isn’t what Jesus does. Instead, it’s stooping. As Jesus shows mercy and defends this woman caught in a dangerous spot, he stoops two times. Two times, he stoops down, draws in the earth, and offers a game-changing perspective: “Whoever here is without sin, cast the first stone.” Aha. The Pharisees and the whole crowd know the score, and they’ve all broken the rules in some way.
It’s quite a moment that God Incarnate would stoop down—not to pick up a stone, which the law and rules allowed, but to offer protection and hope for this wayward daughter in God’s family.
I hope you’ll join me in worship as we dig deeper into this gospel story this Sunday. We’ll continue to celebrate that all of Scripture and all our lives get to be interpreted through the lens of Jesus, not some harmful lenses so popular throughout history and even today, like hierarchy, moralism, literalism, or the apocalypse.
As for today, I hope you can claim this story as your own, too. Jesus comes for you not with stones or scorecards. But with stooping to get close to you. As Zach Lambert writes in Chapter 5, “If you ever feel people are standing over (you), holding rocks in their hands, ready to belittle and bruise (you), Jesus kneels next to you. This is Jesus’s posture in the story of the woman caught in adultery, and it is God’s posture toward all of us.”
Yes, by all means, morality matters, and our daily conduct is essential to our functioning as salt and light for Christ, “but reducing the Bible to a moral guide and God to a moral judge is terribly misguided. Scripture is so much more than a rule book and reading everything in it through the moralism lens not only turns the Bible into something it was never supposed to be; it also really harms people. It’s time to take off the moralism lens so that we can see both Scripture and the God it describes for what they truly are.”
See you Sunday.
Questions for Reflection
- Where in your life are you tempted to keep score (of yourself or of someone else) and what might it look like for you to “stoop” instead?
- When you imagine Jesus kneeling beside you rather than standing over you, ready to judge, how does that change the way you see yourself and your relationship with God?
- How do you explain the value of Scripture’s 10 Commandments and guidance for life without making rules the Lord of Scripture instead of Jesus and his grace?
In Christ’s hope,
Pastor Fritz
Let us pray:
Loving God, thank you that you do not stand over us keeping score, but stoop beside us with mercy, grace, and hope. Help us lay down our stones, release our need to judge, and see ourselves and others through the compassionate lens of Jesus, not moralism. May we carry that same posture of grace into the world today. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
