Disasters during worship

The blogsphere is full of accounts of disasters during worship: liberals who disregard rubrics and a sense of the sacred, conservatives who make unauthorized "corrections" to translations and do nothing for the congregation, preachers who do little but repeat their favorite topics over and over again, well-meaning but stressed-out priests who stumble through the rites, mediocre musicians, cranky ushers, etc. etc. etc.

Today's first reading (from 2 Kings 17) tells of the punishment meted out to the children of Israel who "followed the rites of the nations" and not the ways of the Lord.

Yet in today's Gospel (Matthew 7:1-5) our Lord reminds us:

Stop judging, that you may not be judged.
For as you judge, so will you be judged,
and the measure with which you measure
will be measured out to you.

Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother,
'Let me remove that splinter from your eye,'
while the wooden beam is in your eye?
You hypocrite,
remove the wooden beam from your eye first;
then you will see clearly
to remove the splinter from your brother's eye.

Yes, we should do what we can to help improve how we worship as a community, but too many of us allow ourselves to be distracted by the imperfections of others and pay too little attention to our own deficiencies in our prayer.

May we always seek the mercy of the Lord, to heal what is broken and build up what is lacking among us and within us, that we may worship our God, by his grace, with holiness and righteousness all the days of our life.