Like a Sprout Through the Concrete--March 16, 2023

Like a Sprout Through the Concrete--March 16, 2023

"Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing in the glory of God. And not only that, but we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." [Romans 5:1-5]

In a culture that is practically obsessed with teaching us to brag about our own greatness, it can be difficult to move against the stream without giving in to arrogant ego-inflation.  But it's even more difficult to keep your head above water if you do go along with the constant flow of "Look-at-me-I'm-great" messaging we get from everywhere else, from folks showing off the fancy dinner they cooked or ordered and posting photos on social media, to demagogues at podiums preening like peacocks as they take credit for accomplishments they had little to do with, to the voices at work telling us we have to keep doing more and more to make a name for ourselves and get the company more and better PR.  It can feel like we are constantly under pressure simultaneously to DO "great" things and to PROMOTE ourselves so that everybody else around will know about just how "great" we are.  And it is absolutely exhausting to keep at both.  You can try it for a while, but it hollows you out before long, and you find yourself empty inside a highly polished, but eggshell-fragile, surface you've projected for the world to see.

And then along comes a voice like the apostle Paul's, who poses a question that shakes all of that to its foundation by asking, "What if you just didn't have their game?  What if you didn't have to keep inventing reasons or accomplishments or accolades to boast about?"  In fact, Paul turns the tables and suggests that if anything, we can boast about how good God has been to us even in the midst of all of our weakness, struggle, and suffering.  Instead of arrogantly advertising to the world, "Look how great I am!" Paul dares us to imagine being the voices who say, "Look at how good God is, since God has loved me as I am, and God's power is able to take even my worst moments and raise up hope in the midst of them like seedlings through cracks in the asphalt."

That's part of the delicious irony of Paul's choice to use the word "boast" here in these verses from Romans 5--words many of us heard this past Sunday.  He says that we followers of Jesus have grounds for boasting, but it just about takes the word "boast" and turns it inside out.  Instead of "look-at-me-I'm-so-great" kind of thinking, Paul says that even the things others would look down of us for don't need to make us ashamed.  We don't have to hide our struggles; we don't have to cover over the messes in our lives, or the sources of our pains.  We don't have to invent some fake version of ourselves to make us the envy of our neighbors [and enemies], because we know, fundamentally, that we are already beloved of God as we are--and such love can bring promise from pain.

The thing is, it's really easy in this life to take our successes and turn them into reasons to get puffed up while looking down on others.  It's dangerously tempting to look at your title at work, the degrees on your wall, the size of your house, or the newness of your stuff, and to tell yourself, "I did all this--my awesomeness made this happen!" and from there to tell yourself that all the good things in your life are your just reward for being so great.  And from there it's barely a hop, skip, or a jump to infer the opposite--that others who have less, earn less, or struggle more are also getting lesser things as a "just reward" from the universe because they aren't as good as you.  It is really easy to take my successes and treat them as proof I'm better than the next person, and their struggles as evidence that they're lazy, or immoral, or just plain bad.  Grace has a way of clarifying things, though, and reminding us that the good things we know in this life are gifts of God--and that they are never meant to be hoarded as "just" for me.  Grace helps us to see how empty is really is to brag about ourselves or puff ourselves up, but rather to see in our times of deepest struggle that God is committed to staying with us... so that we can hope.

I know it can be hard to read these words about "boasting in our suffering" and how "endurance produces character" and not hear it as that line of Friedrich Nietzsche that "anything that doesn't kill me makes me stronger," just telling us to fake a smile, suck it up, and toughen up so we can keep bearing the beatings life sends us.  But I don't think that's really what Paul has in mind here.  I think Paul has in mind, rather, that when you are so exhausted from putting up a fake, polished version of yourself in order to impress others, you can finally discover that God is actually building something good, worthy, and solid in us even though the things we used to cover over or hide.  It's not that every instance of suffering automatically makes you tougher--it's that God promises not to leave us to fend for ourselves but takes even the hardships of life [that we used to be embarrassed about showing to the world] and makes a new creation out of us.  And when we realize that it's all about God's gracious power working through us, we lose all grounds for arrogantly puffing ourselves up, because it's clear that "success" [whatever that means] isn't a reward for our awesomeness, and "failure" [again, whatever that means] isn't punishment for being inadequate, either. But in that very same instant, we are freed from having to gin up applause or "wows" from anybody else, because we are already beloved by God as we are.  God's love has never been contingent on us "making the grade" or "becoming a success" or "winning" in life, but rather has been at work all our lives long even taken our most painful experiences and deepest struggles and fashioning a new creation out of them.

Knowing that allows us to simply stop playing the game of approval-seeking that everybody else seems to be stuck in like a hamster wheel going nowhere for all of that furious spinning.  So maybe today's the day we can be done with the exhausting and fruitless labor of "looking like successes" and use that newly freed-up energy to let God transform our struggles into something new... like a sprout through the concrete.

Lord Jesus, keep us grounded in your love so that we can let you make new creations out of even our deepest struggles.