The Stained-Glass House

Rush Limbaugh had a good laugh when former President Barak Obama, speaking about immigration, said the Bible says don’t throw stones in glass houses.   Limbaugh was eager to find any blunder he could find, and when Obama put something into the Bible that just wasn’t there he had a field day. Remember his statement, “I hope Obama fails?”   Even though in July 2006, when conservatives were in power, Rush said, “I’m getting so sick and tired of people rooting for the defeat of the good guys.”  Do you see the conundrum?

Presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, along with all the so-called “liberal” cable networks and even the students in the room snickered and laughed when then candidate Trump speaking at Liberty University read from “Two Corinthians 3:17” rather than from “Second Corinthians.”   Rush Limbaugh barely mentioned this blunder.

We all mess up.  We all make mistakes. “People who live in glass houses, shouldn’t throw stones” may not be in the Bible, but it speaks a truth. Why shouldn’t we throw stones?  Because  we, like every other human being live in a glass house and are vulnerable to the rock-throwing of others.  We live in a fragile glass house where our mistakes can also be seen from the outside in.

Well, then, does that mean no stone-throwing at all?  Of course not!  What it does mean, however,  is that if you throw stones at any glass house, it is likely that stones will come flying back at your glass house.  To throw stones at another glass house makes your own glass house vulnerable.  In other words, when you throw your stones you have to be aware of your own failures and blunders—and the fact that sometimes those stones you’re throwing are meant for your house also.  

Robert McAfee Brown wrote, “The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture,” but that is precisely what the Church has done.  Now, given the Grand Jury findings in Pennsylvania, we are all throwing rocks at the stained-glass house (and well we should—but we must keep in mind that our own houses, too,  are vulnerable). And how many of us have lived for years in that stained-glass house, blindly casting our stones at others and everything and anything, while proclaiming that stained-glass house as somehow better and superior than all others?