Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
“I’m right, right, right, and you’re wrong, wrong, wrong.”
It was the litany of the Rigney household. My brilliant, narcissistic, schizophrenic father must have said it to Mom and the four of us kids at least daily. Some of us dealt with it by attempting to prove him right. Others dealt with it by 
exacting perfection, or as close as we could come to it, from ourselves and others.
“I’m right, right, right, and you’re wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Consider by contrast the words from today’s lectionary readings. In the first reading from 1 Corinthians 4, Paul doesn’t worry about what others think of him, nor does he judge himself:
I am not conscious of anything against me, but I do not thereby stand acquitted; the one who judges me is the Lord.
Similarly, in Luke 5, Jesus challenges the scribes and the Pharisees when they criticize his disciples for eating and drinking, unlike theirs and John the Baptist’s followers. There’s no basis for comparison, he in essence says; I am the Way, and you can’t just graft what the Lord wants onto what you’ve always done. It’s time to start fresh…. no matter how right, right, right or wrong, wrong, wrong you’ve judged yourselves and others in the past.
And so we move forward, knowing the only one who’s right 24/7 is the Lord.
