Beauty and Grace

July 9, 2023 

Written and delivered by: Rev. Ashley Bair 

 
Title: Beauty and grace 

Scripture: Romans 7: 15-25a 

 
Prayer - God of mercy and grace and love, stir something within us as we contemplate this scripture. May we hear what you want us to hear, today. May these words offer us reflection and open our hearts. Amen.  

When I was in college, I took one of my first professional jobs at a courthouse. And about two weeks into my job, I came to work one day and noticed a little bustling in our shared office space. I worked in a department with about ten people. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone pass by my office and head into our conference room down the hall. And another one of my coworkers came up to me and said, “Oh, Ashley, you're here, come join us in the conference room.” 

I went into the conference room and saw party decorations all over the walls, a cake and candles and gifts everywhere and it turns out it was one of my coworkers birthdays. And I had all of two minutes to gather that before she walked in, and everybody started singing happy birthday.  

So, I was singing along as they were all handing her gifts. Everybody was celebrating her as I sat there while another one of my coworkers had noticed that I didn't bring anything in. She turned to me and said aloud, in front of everybody, “Did you not know that it was her birthday today?” 

I just flushed red; I was put on the spot. I said to my coworker “No, I didn't know today was your birthday. I'm so sorry.” She was great about it, but I was seething. I felt embarrassed and upset. I was also angry that all of my coworkers had planned this and didn't include me or tell me about it. So afterwards I went to another coworker and said, “I really wish somebody would have told me I would have loved to have known, I would’ve brought a card or something.”  

And she said something like, "You know, we plan birthdays in advance and didn't think to put you on the email and we will next time.” I was just livid. I was in a terrible, bad mood for the rest of the day. I was short with people. I was anxious all day. I went home and at night I couldn’t sleep. I remember staring at my ceiling replaying all I had done and felt through the day.   

Logically, I realized that leaving me out of the email and calling me out in front of everyone in the room probably wasn’t malicious. As I laid in bed, I could let a lot of that go. But I couldn’t move past all I did as a response. I kept replaying how I behaved for the rest of the day: the way I kept my distance, the way I was short with others, the way I let my embarrassment and frustration impact me so much that I was saying and doing things I didn’t want to say or do.  

I just started this job, why did I let it get to me? If it were my birthday and someone didn’t know, I wouldn’t care at all! It doesn’t matter. Why did I do all of that? It quickly spiraled to thinking to myself: maybe I’m not ready for this job, maybe I’m not capable, maybe they didn’t want me there, maybe I did this to myself, maybe I’m a horrible person for the way I acted? As I stared at the ceiling all night, I was thinking something very similar to: oh, wretched person that I am. Have you ever resonated with those words of Paul, too? 

I felt ashamed. And while I can talk about this now, years later, and recognize how silly of a thing it was and is, the process of those feelings of shame, weren’t a product of that particular incident, but from what it brought up inside me that I had not yet worked through.  

When I felt left out, it brought me back to moments as a child when I was left out of family decisions, and school events, and friends' parties. When I felt called out, it brought me back to moments like a confirmation class, when the pastor at my church asked me to tell the class what the sermon on Sunday was about, when he knew I wasn't there.  

All of the feelings were rooted in ways I felt insecure about myself, inadequate, unworthy, imperfect, really. So much so that little things like a coworker's birthday party could surface some pretty deep stuff. That’s what shame does.  

Shame is a central experience of ours as fallen human beings in a broken world. And collectively, shame lives, because we give it life. In this world we come to believe that our deepest insecurities are harmful to ourselves and others and must stay away. That our imperfections are weaknesses. So, it has become our expectation that things will be bad, that exposure of our true selves leads only to shame.  

Shame makes us want to cut a hole into the ground and just crawl down into it. Away and out of sight. Because if we don’t, we might not understand our own actions. We might find ourselves doing not what we want, but doing the very thing we hate.  

The other day my friend Deanna called me and said, I saw on Facebook a note that read “I live in the expectation that every great thing would be multiplied.” - and then she paused and said, well isn’t that just CRAZY? That’s not how I understand God and things in the world. And she’s right, that while we might come here and claim that good things can happen, we also collectively live in an understanding that we are wretched, inherently bad people who do bad things. We’ve taught ourselves that and we live in it. As Paul says, “For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability”.   

What would it take to be able to change from living in the expectation of bad things, to living in the expectation of every great thing?  

I know for me, when I was able to recognize the feelings of shame that arose in situations like the one from my college job and began to name them aloud and understand how they affected me, I began to think differently about myself and in turn about others. It took making space for those feelings to surface beyond my internal self and my mind as I stared at the ceiling at night.  

Maybe that’s why Paul wrote this bit in his letter to the Romans. In Paul’s writing, he is making space for feelings like that, too. Paul takes us down some rocky, windy roads in his letters, but he highlights that while much of the Bible isn’t relatable because it's dated to its context - we’re not sacrificing goats for our sins, or weaponizing shellfish, or turning into pillars of salt - while that seems distant to us, the one thing that has never changed is the human condition.  

Even then, people were living with the reality of shame; even then people in Rome were waking up the next day saying, who was I yesterday when I said that?  

Here in Romans 7, Paul is speaking to the human condition of us all. Why is it that I do things I know I should not do? Why, even when I try my best, is it not enough? Why do I feel like the me I want to be is always just out of reach?  

These questions posed by Paul are the basic questions of our self-actualization. And to Paul, the root of the problem does not lie in any human weakness or in any lack of self-knowledge, but the problem is sin. Sin, to Paul, doesn’t equate to our mistakes or foolish behaviors when we’re not at our best. The sin Paul describes is its own power in the world - whereas the works of God are an agent for good, sin is an agent of evil, it is the system of death.  

Sin’s power in the world is that which works to kill us, to diminish us, to make us feel powerless and ashamed, unworthy and less than. It is a system that we often buy into and live into. Following the God of Jesus, the God of good and life, means always being at odds with the systems of death.  

The systems of death make money off people who are ashamed. But Jesus lived with those deemed sinners, ate with those who, because of their circumstances, felt insecure, inadequate, unworthy, and imperfect. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “... go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but those you call the sinners.” (Matthew 9) 

Those moments where we feel stuck, staring at the ceiling, feeling wretched; the moments where we want to dig a hole in the ground and crawl in it; those are the moments God is waiting with us. God does not see us for the things that have hurt us or held us back from being ourselves and being with our community. God comes to be with us and calls us good.  

The transformation toward living in the expectation of every great thing, Paul says, will begin with us no longer being able to ignore the ways systems of death live within us. Embracing Paul’s take on sin gives us a viable place to begin. It tells us the truth, which is that we are both beautiful and living in a broken world, made in God's divine image, but caught in something that actively wars against our efforts to be good and do good.  To use the word "sin" is to insist on something more profound and more clarifying than, "I make mistakes," or "I have issues."  To use the word sin is to understand that we need Jesus to be more than a good role model.  We need Jesus to save us — to break an ancient and malevolent power we cannot break by ourselves.  

So, to address the systems of death within us, we must ask ourselves: in our shame what is it we are avoiding? Deeper than the moments of embarrassment and anger or frustration that lead us to act in a way unlike ourselves lie the pieces of us we have buried, that’s where sin festers. And really addressing it means that our whole being will be flipped, it would mean never seeing things the same again, it would mean understanding how those things continue to live in our own bodies and thinking differently about ourselves and others. That’s our task when we confess our sin and when we ask for forgiveness. There we give space to name the things keeping us from living into the goodness of God.  

At the end, Paul invites us to give thanks for spaces like that. For the moments of surrender, to say, yes, we have been caught in sin and desire to live fully into God’s goodness and to the beauty of grace. By grace alone do we move our eyes from the ceiling and bodies out of the holes we’ve dug, knowing that if we didn’t do what we wanted to do yesterday, today we get to start again, again.  

As we ponder this space Paul invites us to, may we ask ourselves: what is one area of our life where we still feel Paul’s words resonate, calling ourselves wretched?  

Can we surrender the shame, despair, and hopelessness we feel to God? And can we ask God to make good on God’s promise to live out God’s ways of life? Can we live in the expectation that every great thing will be multiplied?  

It is in sin that we find ourselves caught in the trap of the things of death and destruction. It is God that we find ourselves bound to never-ending grace, mercy, forgiveness, fullness, love, and beauty. Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ OUR Lord. Amen.  

REFERENCES: 

“A Lighter Burden” by Debie Thomas, for Journey with Jesus on June 28, 2020.  

The Word is Resistance podcast episode titled “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” on July 9, 2023.