Here’s a little-known fact about me: I have this thing about guilt; I know it should be a healthy response to having done something wrong. If I hurt someone, I should feel guilty. If I back over your prize begonias or snap at my wife because she forgot to remind me to pay the credit card bill like I specifically asked her to—feeling guilty afterward is an appropriate response.

Good social hygiene requires us to feel some guilt for messing up. People who feel no guilt,  who have no conscience, are dangerous. Sociopaths. Psychopaths. Malignant narcissists. We’ve been living that nightmare with some of our politicians for a while now.

So, feeling guilt is a necessary part of being … what we in the profession call … a grown-up. To live together in community, we need people to take responsibility for their actions. And one of the ways that humans are motivated to do this is by feeling guilty when they do something wrong.

Okay, so fine … guilt is a useful part of living with other human beings. But, I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t like it. I don’t like feeling guilty one bit.

I’m a Type-2 diabetic. Both my parents and one grandparent … diabetic. The nutritionist told me that for me, it wasn’t really a matter of if I’d get diabetes but when.

Anyway, living with diabetes has introduced an entirely new category of things to feel guilty about. So, yay me. Knowing you’re digging your own grave with your mouth presents a new and urgent sense of guilt.

One of the ways this newfound gastronomic shame has manifested in my life is a profound dread of going to the doctor—which feels a little extra to me. I mean, my doctor is great. Super supportive. Doesn’t berate me. Doesn’t try to make me feel guilty. All he does is read the lab work and make recommendations about how we’ll move forward in this new war against my obstreperous pancreas.

So, my doctor doesn’t try to make me feel guilty; in fact, he takes great pains not to make me feel guilty. But he represents a reality check—holding up a mirror that displays my health, a mirror that produces guilt in me. And I don’t like it. Not one bit.

In my experience, most people don’t like feeling guilty—which means there’s a second thing most people don’t like: feeling judged.

Interestingly, one of the places people avoid most assiduously for fear of being judged is … you guessed it: church.

I get it. I was a preacher’s kid. I attended my share of tent revivals where the preacher leaned into the whole “you’re-going-to-hell-unless-you-repent” thing. I remember feeling completely lost. I’d been taught that “Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know.” I loved church. I loved God. Heck, the parsonage we lived in contained my dad’s student church in the basement. I was around that stuff all the time, and I wasn’t scared at all—until it came to those hellfire and damnation dopes, who really messed with my head by making me feel judged and guilty.

Of course, at the tender age of seven, I’m not sure now what I was supposed to have done that would make God torture me forever … but the revival guys (it was always guys) were insistent that I was on the express train to perdition if I didn’t get my spiritual act together.

So, I grew up knowing whatever else I might be or do, I wasn’t going to try to get people to love God by making them feel guilty. I always responded better to a loving God, a doting parent, a merciful teacher. I figured that was the God I was interested in talking about—not the other.

Interestingly enough, this pastoral and homiletical stance on judgment and grace wasn’t universally embraced in churches I’ve served. In a couple of churches early on, after I’d preach a sermon about how much God loves us, I’d invariably get people who’d meet me at the back door and say something like, “That was real nice, Brother Derek, but I don’t feel like I’ve been to church unless the preacher steps on my toes a little.”

That whole judgmental-God thing didn’t make much sense to me. But after the Rodney King verdict and the Los Angeles riots that ensued, I figured maybe I’d get on people’s good side by condemning the kind of institutional racism that caused a Black man to be beaten half to death—all on videotape. I went full Old Testament prophet, talking about the injustice of racism and how God expects more of God’s children than this kind of violent disregard for human dignity.

I was scared to death.

Turns out, some people didn’t actually mean that whole “stepping-on-our-toes-is-a-good-thing”—at least when it comes to some issues. Don’t swear. Don’t have sex outside of marriage. Don’t steal. Make sure you do your daily devotions and go to church every Sunday. Some people apparently like to feel guilty about that kind of stuff.

But they draw the line at being told God has a problem with us being racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, ableist, or xenophobic. “That,” they say, “is too political.”

Nevertheless, “God-as-judge” has fallen on tough times, hasn’t it? Most of us don’t particularly care for folks with bullhorns and sandwich boards walking around telling us that we’re sinners dangling over the precipice of hell by the thinnest thread.