Sermons are way better when you listen to them...I promise.
Grace, Mercy, and Peace to you from the Holy Trinity. Amen.
I was listening to NPR this week on my way to text study, which is a time when a bunch of preachers meet and talk about the Bible readings assigned for the coming Sunday –, when suddenly a story came on which kind of blew my mind.
There is this growing movement called The Quantified Self movement. Basically, there are several dozen apps that tell you everything about yourself. There are simple ones that count your steps, ones that take your picture over the course of the day from your webcam and tell you your overall mood at the end of the day, and others which can tell you your blood sugar, from your phone. There's even a life expectancy app which will email you with your current life expectancy based on your behaviors from that day and tips to improve your odds of staying alive longer.
All of these apps are designed to turn everything in our lives into numbers, so that we can determine the quality of our life from graphs and spreadsheets. And those who are part of the quantified self movement claim why being able to know all of that information is important. Because knowing can make you a better person, it can dictate how your future goes, it can point out glaring holes in your life.....it can give you confirmation of how good you already are at things, so that you can then become that self congratulatory person that no one likes...
And it kind of feels like Paul begins the reading from Corinthians today in that same self-quantifier way....making checklists of himself so he can take a quick look at everything and determine what kind of a person he is.
circumsized, check.
israelite, check.
pharisee, check.
hebrew born of hebrews, check.
blameless under the law, check.
Paul starts out his letter today by quantifying himself. Giving scores and rankings on himself, and it seems like he's doing a pretty good job, from what's on paper. If only we could all have his positive outlook on life and on ourselves. I, at least, tend to give a lot more time and energy considering the things I could improve on than the great and outstanding parts of myself...I think we all do, to some degree.
How much easier is it to obsess about and quantify the darker parts of our lives...and to obsess about their power over us.
didn't get out of bed twice this week because I'm depressed. check.
fought with my girlfriend, check.
got too frustrated with my kids, check.
didn't finish my to do list, because I'm afraid what would happen if I reached the end of it, check.
lied about my sexuality to myself too long, check.
didn't let myself be loved by others, check.
blamed myself, check.
These checklists can go on ad nauseum if we let them. Either the self righteous ones like Paul, or the self deprecating ones that are so easy to make. And neither checklist is helpful...The way I am reading it, Paul’s checklist seems to be making himself into God...showing off only his virtues...and the other checklist seems to be a way of not seeing any inherent goodness of being created in the image of a good and gracious creator.
When looked at another way, Paul does admit it's not the best way to view himself, especially in light of Christ and the resurrection. He can no longer continue to give numbers and values to anything in his life. And any attempt he can make will all pale in comparison to the value his life has in light of Christ's love and grace in his life because the amount of Christ’s love surpasses any numerical value we can give it.
Like Paul, recognizing that his list of virtues wouldn’t get him anywhere in the face of a grace filled God, we too are given that gift of grace freely. You can be sure that daily God gives forgiveness and grace to you and all people, not caring about the quantity.
Because, unlike us, God is not in the business of accounting, keeping track of numbers, taking performance evaluations, or making talley marks for every good and bad thing we do or don't do. Instead, like Mary pouring out nearly a years worth of wages onto Jesus' feet, God pours out love extravagantly over our cracked, broken, dingy selves, rubbing it into our wounded parts to help them begin to heal. And sometimes that kind of grace can sting.
Because this experience of Grace is humbling to be sure...there's never been a moment in my life where I've experienced grace from people, or grace from God where I've felt like I needed to then start checking boxes like Paul did...the ones about how highly I think of myself. Because then it’s not grace, it’s reward. Instead, the extravagance of grace I've known in my life always leaves me feeling both undeserving and eternally grateful.
But undeserving of grace though I may feel, God doesn't seem to care, because God continues to show me, to show us, grace.
God continually, pours grace onto our broken and wounded selves like costly perfume, covering us in the sweet smell of God's mercy and forgiveness. God continually pours grace onto us wastefully, and extravagantly, and without regard to amount because God does not have apps which check boxes when quotas are met. Grace is only grace because it cannot be confined to a box to check. Grace is grace because it exists in death on a cross and resurrection 2000 years ago which encompasses all of creation. Grace is grace because it exists in a shared meal of bread and wine which is free and for all.
God's grace, God's mercy, God's forgiveness means we don't have to check boxes about ourselves. We don't have to keep track of how good or bad we are doing. We don't have to look at those parts of our lives that we don't like and feel bad about them...because God doesn't. God looks at us and sees us as creatures worthy of love when we can't let ourselves be loved. God looks at us and gives us grace which removes the fear of sharing ourselves with people who are important to us. God looks at us and gives us grace to heal the woundedness we have inflicted upon ourselves and upon others from trying to spend our lives checking off boxes of perfection, (like spiritual pinterest)boxes that help us keep up appearances, boxes that give us power and control over other people.
The Grace of God isn't quantifiable. It changes our way of thinking, our way of experiencing the world. Grace makes us understand that no amount of box checking will ever help us earn it, no self tracking app will tell us how much grace we've received. Because when it comes to the grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God, there's always enough to go around.
Amen
