No Measuring Up--July 19, 2023

No Measuring Up--July 19, 2023

"For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." [Romans 8:2-4]

Let's be completely clear here: God isn't a part of the dating scene, and God isn't looking for "The One."  God has found you... and me... and all of us, as we are, and chosen to love us, rather than forever looking for some hypothetical (but ultimately non-existent) perfect partner to receive God's love.  God loves imperfect people, because that's all there are, and makes us right with God, even while we're crooked stinkers.

Or, if you want to get all fancy and theological about it, you can borrow the wording of our older brother in the faith, Martin Luther, who put it this way in his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation:  "The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it."  In other words, God isn't searching eternally to find some perfect being who measures up to an absolute standard of purity and goodness, and then decide to reward that being with love for being so worthy, but rather God finds us as we are and makes us worthy by the fact of God's love for us.  Or, as another classic hymn of the faith, "My Song Is Love Unknown," sings it, "Love to the loveless shown... that they might lovely be."

God meets us, knows us, and chooses us even at our worst and most unloving--and says, "I choose you.  I'm declaring it: I hold nothing against you."  There is no endless (fruitless) quest for "The One," despite all the pablum we've been fed by countless romantic comedies (and dating services, who make their money off of keeping that search for the perfect person as long and drawn out as possible) that there's some single solitary "right person" you need to find in life.  There ain't.  At least, there's not for God.  God doesn't wait to love the perfect person, but loves us and by that very choice makes us worthy.  Through Jesus, God has said to all of us, "In Christ I choose you, and in Christ I will do for you what you could not do for yourselves.  I choose to love you apart from earning it."

That's what I love about Paul's phrasing here--that God has done what the law and our sin-tainted natures could not do.  After all, all a law can do is tell us when we've messed up and yell at us to behave, but it can't actually make us "be good."  Even God's commandments don't have the power to "make" us into good little boys and girls--they can only hold up the bar of what God intends for us and then call us out when we don't measure up.  If God were the sort who were creating a dating profile for what kind of persons God wanted to love, perhaps God might have wished for people who are always compassionate, perfectly honest, deeply just, completely faithful, and totally peaceable.  That's what "the Law" calls us to be, after all.  But the trouble is, none of us are that--at least not all the time, and not all the way.  Nobody is.  So instead of waiting around for us to achieve moral perfection or looking for some human being somewhere who actually lives up to all those expectations, God takes us as we are... and in Christ God has made us worthy when our own ability or virtue wasn't enough.  But that means to some degree God makes the constant choice to love us in our unloveliness, to accept us as we are, to put aside the question of our not-measuring-up, and any set of futile expectations.  God does for us what we could not do for ourselves, rather than giving up on us or waiting for us to achieve some impossible ideal.  it is the fact of God's love in Christ that makes us more fully and deeply like Christ, to be sure, but God doesn't wait around until we're perfect to accept us.

If we take that seriously, it will shape the way we face the world and interact with every other person.  Realizing that God has loved us, not like it is a prize for our perfection but as a gift that meets us where we're at, well, that keeps us from looking down on anybody else, doesn't it?  It removes any sense of being "holier-than-thou" because we realize that none of us has earned our beloved-ness, and nobody else is "beneath" us, either.  If I can hear the news that God's love isn't a reward for my innate moral achievement but a gift I didn't earn, then I will need to acknowledge that's how God's love meets everyone else I'll ever meet, too.  God has done for us what our own exertion couldn't do, what the law's stern shouting could not compel, and what my own limitations cannot accomplish.  So everyone else I meet is a recipient of grace as well--maybe that realization will take a bit of the hot air out of my over-inflated ego the next time I want to condemn somebody else for not measuring up.

Maybe this was never about measuring up anyway, because God was never looking for "The One" only to be disappointed by our sinful selves--God has only ever chosen us as we are and loved us into worthiness by the power of that very love.

Good Lord, let us see the way you love us truthfully, so that we can love others with the same grace and forbearance you show us.