[Paul writes:] "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me." [Romans 7:15-20]
It's messy being human--even on a good day. At our best, we are walking contradictions, pulled between what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" and our worst impulses. That's true, not only for the world outside the church, but for all of us inside it as well. As our older brother in the faith Martin Luther would put it, it is precisely we Christians who are "simultaneously justified and sinful" [the fancy Latin phrasing is simul justus et peccator if you want to impress your friends].
We can be compassionate, wise, and noble in one moment, and then crooked and cruel the next. We can be brave and truthful today, and then find ourselves succumbing to the temptation to be chicken-hearted liars tomorrow. We know that about each other just from living on this planet. People who have been virtuous in the past can turn out to be vicious in the future, and vice versa. Sometimes we can be respectable and rotten at the same time. And we know from looking honestly at ourselves, too, that each of us is a bundle of conflicting motives, and that sometimes we choose something 'good' for selfish reasons, or do something that breaks a good rule but tell ourselves we have an even better reason for it. In our best moments we want to be decent, caring, and reliable, perhaps... and at our less-than-best moments we fudge the truth, cut corners, and flake out on people. This is all we've ever known as human beings: we are flawed people who make flawed choices and get hurt sometimes by other flawed people.
So, if we know this about ourselves... and clearly the apostle Paul saying out loud what we are generally too insecure to admit... then God has to know the messy truth about us already. And of course, that's part of Paul's point here. What he can say out loud about all of us in our sin-sick condition is what God already knows about us. Nobody can pull the wool over God's eyes or get God to pay attention to us only in our best moments of good behavior. God already knows both the great beauty and awful horrors we are capable of, as well as the mundane and the mediocre in between. And yet... God bears with that in us, and loves us anyway, already, as we are--with a vision, too, of what we will become. But mind you, God doesn't only love the future version of us--God knows and loves the schemers, sell-outs, and sinners we are right now, even now. God bears with all the mess that comes with loving us, because, well that's what love does. It bears. God abides with our jagged edges, tragic flaws, and broken places, because God loves the actual people who come with them. And then it is that same love that makes a new creation out of us, where the contradictions and tensions are resolved like the final chord of a hymn.
These days, when I come across this section from Romans 7, which many of us heard read just this past Sunday, I think of a favorite poem of mine, by contemporary poet Maggie Smith. Her poem "Good Bones" makes this honest observation about the world and the people in it:
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you..."
But then Smith adds a hopeful hook about this very same world. After noting how a realtor tells prospective buyers to see the potential in a run-down house [the "good bones" of the title], she closes with these words, about both a house for sale and the world of crooked and kind people:
"This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful."
Of course, as anybody who has put labor into a fixer-upper knows, the only way you make a place beautiful is to love it now, with eyes wide open about all of its brokenness. That allows you to bear with the broken places and live with them while you put the sweat equity into working on them.
That, I believe, is how Paul sees God's love for us. God sees us as we are--warts and all, relapses into sin and all, messy contradictions and all. And God loves that version of us: the real, present-tense complicated version of us, bearing with our sins while God makes new creations out of us where sin no longer mars our spirits and our deepest selves. That's what it means to say that love is always bearing--it means there's no fooling God into only seeing our best behavior, but rather God sees with utterly terrible clarity... and loves us all the same, right now, without crossing the divine fingers or just hoping we turn out all right.
Someone you know--maybe even someone you'll cross paths with today--is struggling with how to believe they are actually loved right now by God as they really are. They are honest enough with themselves to see their own failures and flaws, and they can't imagine that God (or maybe anyone else) could love them right now, before they've gotten their issues in check or started to show some improvements.
Someone you know needs you to be the one to tell them, like Paul is doing for us--that we are loved even in the mess of our humanity right now, even before love has made us beautiful.
Lord God, we admit to you and to ourselves just how conflicted and tangled up our lives are, and we ask your loving hand to hold us as we are, while you also undo the knots we've made for ourselves.
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