The Gap Between Who We Are and Who We Should Be (June 23, 2024)

“And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

If you’ll excuse me for being morbid for a moment, but I must confess to you that I’ve been thinking a lot about death this year. Hopefully for each and every one of us here, it will come in a long time, but it will come. There’s an important Christian meditative practice called memento mori: remember that you will die. I love that we have a cemetery on our property because it’s a perpetual reminder of that. It has long been believed that the acceptance of our deaths is the key to living a good life. “Teach us to number our days,” the Psalmist says. Philosophy, it has been said, is learning how to die. When we become aware of our finitude, it forces us to attend to the present moment in a new way because we know we won’t be here forever. If we practice some form of memento mori, we will be more intentional about what we prioritize right here and right now because we have to ask ourselves: are we becoming the kind of people we want to be? I won’t ask for a show of hands about who thinks they’re there yet, but I’m sure if I asked, most of us would not be able to raise them. We’ve all got work to do.

But why is there a disparity between who we are and who we should be? The answer is sin, original and actual. Original sin is the deficiency with which we are born. It’s the tendency we have to replace and suppress the truth of God that’s been made evident through creation with a lie. It’s also found in the tendencies we have to be attracted to fleshly pleasures in an immoderate way. Actual sin are the sins which we commit. The more we consent to sin, the more it pulls us down because “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). One of the insidious aspects of this living death called sin is that it affects the world around us. When Adam and Eve sinned, their fall tarnished all of creation. The world no longer operates in perfect harmony the way it was intended to. And so, as we heard from Paul this morning, all of creation groans because the world, while still retaining something of its original beauty, is profoundly broken. The Orthodox theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart when wrestling with this tension in the wake of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed over 225,000 people observed that “The Christian should see two realities at once, one world within another: one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish: and the  other world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply ‘nature’ but ‘creation,’ an endless sea of glory radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days.” Creation is in the midst of groaning to be liberated from this state. And it’s not just the rest of creation that groans; we groan along with it, as St. Paul says. We do this because of that gap we feel in ourselves between who we are and who we’re supposed to be. Unlike the rest of creation, God gave us a rational nature which means we have this ethical dimension to our being that our dogs (and definitely our cats) don’t have. But when we consider our, conduct, we know that we never measure up fully. In the preceding chapter of Romans, Paul wrestles with this in himself: “the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” Paul is not unique here, we all see the sin that we live with in ourselves. It is living in death that causes us to groan. Who will deliver us from this body of hope?

The answer is Jesus Christ who by his Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection defeats the power of sin, death, and the devil. But this recognition places us in a paradox that many theologians call “already-not yet”: on the one hand, we can fully say that Christ has won: he was raised from the grave, he harrowed hell, we know how the book ends. But at the same time, we have to wait for the redemption of our bodies. You only need to look around for a minute to see that we’re still struggling with sin, people are still dying. The reason for this future promise of redemption rather than one that’s delivered to us all at once, is that it gives us something to aspire to, it helps us build the theological virtue of hope which is not a vague sense of optimism, but rather a specific and concrete confidence that the promises God made to us will be fulfilled. What St. Paul longs for in our Epistle reading, what we all long for, is resurrection, new life untainted by death, unmarred by sin. But let’s pause for a moment and ask an important question: is our hope just a dream? One of the criticisms of Christianity, or really religion in general, by Karl Marx is that religion is just an opiate of the people. What he meant is that institutions gain power over the present in exchange for a future fantasy.

This critique of the faith would be true, and in some places and times it has been true to some degree. Yet it can’t be totally true for for one important reason: the resurrection. The Gospel tells us that our hope is not in vain and that we can be confident because the resurrection of Christ was the firstfruits of things to come. Because God raised up his Son from the tomb, we know that one day, we will experience the same at the Resurrection of the Body. But this doesn’t just remain a future promise. The Gospel tells us that the power of the Resurrection has a way of breaking into our lives. Perhaps sometimes it does this faintly or in germ, but it’s real, nevertheless. Resurrection life comes to us in the Sacraments in which we receive the gratuitous grace of God ; it comes to us in prayer, the ability to communicate with him in conversation; it springs forth from the pages of Scripture and shakes us out of our complacency; it comes to us in the beauty of holiness. I think this is why the teachings of Jesus in Luke 6 that we read today are so powerful: “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” This command is based on what God does for us. He is our Father and we are his children, so therefore we imitate him just as a child imitates their father. He has shown us an infinite mercy in making us his children and so we are called to exercise the same kind of mercy to others, without exception. When the pattern of our lives becomes God-shaped, we are living that new, resurrection life. It’s so contrary from how this groaning world works, and that’s part of how we know it’s authentically resurrection. And so yes, we anticipate the future resurrection when we don’t have to bear the burden of these imperfect and sensual bodies, but we can catch glimpses of that future right now: we see glimmers of it every time we see a spouse forgive their spouse for something they’ve done wrong, or when a parent gives sacrificially for their child or vice-versa, or when the humanity of someone is recognized and celebrated across political, socio-cultural, racial, or national boundaries.

And so we can live our lies now in such a way that the resurrection comes increasingly in view. But we do have to listen to Jesus’ warning that we take the log out of our own eye because it blinds us from rightly seeing ourselves and seeing others. When we see ourselves, we can realize what great love and mercy we have recieved and turn those outwards towards others; the resurrection we life we experience gets extended to those we come in contact with. You know, God doesn’t love us because we’re lovable; he loves us into being lovable. And so when we meet people in our lives, they may not be lovable, but that’s not why we love them; we love them because we recognize who they are underneath all of their rough exteriors and, by loving them with God’s love for us as our model, they can become lovable. That’s the power of love: it breathes life into this dying and groaning world.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.