Life From Our Deathliness--March 10, 2023

Life From Our Deathliness--March 10, 2023

"For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it written, 'I have made you the father of many nations')--in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." [Romans 4:13-17]

In a world obsessed with projecting artificial versions of ourselves to show off to the world, it's really a relief to hear the Scriptures tell us that God doesn't need us to impress anybody.  In fact, it's the unconditional love of God for us that lets us be honest about our frailties, and from there to love other people as they are in all of their frailties.  In the words of James Baldwin, "Love takes off masks we fear we cannot live without and now we cannot live within."  And the Love whom we have met in Jesus has been doing that for generations, even all the way back to old Father Abraham.

It's a matter of learning to see differently--or maybe, of learning to let God train our eyes [and hearts] to see the world through love.  When I know I am beloved, I don't have to constantly compare myself to others or try to make myself seem better.  I don't have to push you down or puff myself up.  Being loved allows me to love others, because I'm no longer obsessed with covering up my own insecurity in a thick wrapper of arrogance as insulation.  And that's possible, Paul tells us, becuase God takes what others might see simply as our liabilities, our weaknesses, or even our dead-ness, and with the eye of a master artist, God raises up beauty... grace... strength... life. Or, like the song by U2 puts it, "Grace makes beauty out of ugly things... grace finds goodness in everything."

That's what I hear in these words from Paul's letter to the Romans as he thinks about our ancestor in the faith, Abraham. Paul recognizes that Abraham isn't really the hero of his story--God is. What Abraham brought to the picture was his near-dead-ness: he was approaching a hundred years old, had been worshiping the idols of the Chaldeans, and had no prospects of continuing the family line through children since he and his wife didn't have any. Abraham didn't even have a perfect permanent record of rule-following, since there was no "Law of Moses" yet, and the commandments hadn't been given yet. In other words, what Abraham had to offer looked only like weakness, nothingness, and near deadness.

But in the eyesight of Love, what seems only like weakness becomes the source of beauty and strength and life. What seems dead becomes the point where resurrection breaks out. And as Paul sees it, it is not any obviously impressive traits or accomplishments of Abraham that puts him in good standing with God--it is only his willingness to trust, even feebly and shakily, that God can bring life out of his near-deadness, and that God can bring beauty out of what looks to anybody else only like ugliness.

Abraham is the subject the story, but God is the storyteller who lifts up the vitality in what otherwise might seem a tragic life story. It is an act of creation out of nothing, or an act of resurrection if you like. And this is exactly what the God of the Scriptures keeps doing all of the time: finding us just as we are, and, without waiting for us to fit anybody else's definition of being "good enough" or "strong enough" or "great enough" or "beautiful enough," God just brings life from our deathliness. It's not a lie or a fiction, but it is the work of a master artist whose creative eye raises up what otherwise would have gone unseen.

And this is how God keeps operating for each of us. Where the world looks at you or me and sees only our brokenness, our non-good-enough-ness, or our dead-ness, God creates something beautiful and true out of us. God acknowledges the struggles, the setbacks, and the sorrows we bear, but instead of just tossing us away as damaged goods, God raises us up and brings life to the foreground.  When we see how God's love accepts us--yes, embraces us--even when all we bring to the table are our liabilities and inadequacies, we no longer need to try and impress others or cut them down to make ourselves feel better.  We're already loved as we are.  We can just sit with that and know it's true.

Maybe the challenge of this day is not to pretend our struggles, our weak places, or our needs are not there, but to seek for God to show us ourselves from the viewpoint of God's own Master-Artist perspective, where life comes out of death, and where things come into existence that you'd have sworn weren't there a second ago.

May we have such courage and vision to see things through the resurrection perspective of God, and may that vision enable us to love others as we have been loved already.

Lord God, we offer you ourselves as we are, asking for you with your creative eye to help us to envision life in us where we might have overlooked it, and to bring life out of us where we can see only deadness.