Remember the Sunday school lesson: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Tell about a time when you have to put down that rock.

The last thing you need is a sermon from yer Ol' Buddy Scotty,so let's skip that part, OK? “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”... Remember the story? The authorities took an adulterous woman to Jesus, asking Him what he would do with her. They stood ready to stone her to death. He responded to their queries with some version of the “let him who is without sin…” thing.
Biblical scholars say that this story was added centuries after the Bible was written, so there must have been a point to make, huh? I don’t think it was about condemning the death penalty, and I don’t think the point was to “live and let live” either, nor do I buy into the “judge not lest ye be judged” stuff. I think the point was to embrace the sinner, but not the sin. In other words, you can still love your friends, or your family, or even strangers, without supporting their mistakes.
Good idea, right? Let me give ya an example of how this works. A few years back, I was a laborer at a local factory. As with most factories, there were laborers of several races, speaking several languages there. The work was hard, so making a friend to talk to helped pass the day and forget about our exhaustion. One of my friends was a really friendly young farmer. We would talk from time to time, tell jokes, generally pass the day. Then one day a Hispanic fellow came to work with us. Although Hispanics were common in this factory, my friend, the amiable farmer, without even knowing this fellow, turned to me and proceeded to spew forth a virtual mountain of racial epithets. He refused to work with anyone who was not Caucasian. I was dumbfounded. Apparently my friend was severely racist, and no amount of coaxing on my part would change his mind.
Now what? I had a decision to make. I decided to “drop the stone” and keep my friend, although we did not agree on the issue of race. The point is, we all have issues, and we all believe something, or do something, or ARE something, that our friends and family don’t agree with. The hard part is “dropping the stone” and loving that person for who they are, or sometimes in spite of who they are.