Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11
Standing in God’s holy Temple, in the sanctuary, during worship, with, “Holy, holy, holy” ringing in his ears, Isaiah is confronted with the presence of the most Holy God and is so overwhelmed with his worthlessness in the presence of the Almighty that he cries out, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips!”
The apostle Paul, facing up to his history of persecution of non-Jewish Christians, when thinking about Christ appearing to the holy disciples and finally to him, thinks of himself as unfit even to be called an apostle or follower of Christ. He describes himself as one “untimely born,” meaning a fetus born too early even to survive––in his mind, consigned to the garbage.
And Simon Peter, the fisherman who can’t catch a fish all night, experiences the abundance of Jesus and the miracles that God works through him, and feels so worthless that he begs Jesus to leave him alone, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”
It would seem that there is a long tradition of feeling worthless in the eyes of God. Or maybe just worthless in general. You might have heard about “Imposter Syndrome,” which is this feeling that while it looks to the outside world that you’re successful in life, and doing great, and holding it all together, inside you feel like a total fraud. An imposter, constantly anxious that one day soon the front will fall and everyone will see how disorganized you are, scrambling to keep it together, and then they’ll know the truth and the jig will be up. Of course, nobody admits to having Imposter Syndrome, because that alone would start things falling. Instead, we hide our feelings of worthlessness, from the world, from our friends, from our colleagues, from our family, even from ourselves.
We even hide these feelings from one another, here in church, the one place where we should be able to share them. We make sure we wear our nice clothes to church, not our comfy slouching-around-the-house clothes, with the hole in the armpit or the elastic that’s going at the waist. Someone asks us how we are, and we say, “Oh, I’m doing great,” even though maybe we’re in the middle of a long-standing argument with a family member, or we’re doing a terrible job at self-care, or we’re stressed because even though we have a job we still can’t manage to pay off the entire credit card balance. Instead, we smile and shake hands and do our best to look organized and with it and worthy.
Even congregations can suffer from Imposter Syndrome. We have this idea that we have to look good on Sunday morning, or people might question whether we are worth belonging to, or might even question our dedication to God. In church, Imposter Syndrome can look like anxiety over how guests will perceive us, whether they will want to come back, whether we are keeping the youth, whether our music is enough to keep the children interested, whether the service flows perfectly smoothly without any mistakes. We worry, even in this place, that we are worthless and so we try our hardest to make sure things are as perfect as possible.
The problem is that even though we pretend we are more-than-worthy, deep down we feel different, and this feeling seeps out in unhealthy ways. Because when we feel worthless, we try to get rid of that feeling by transferring it to someone or something else. Maybe you’ve heard about the kick-the-dog effect? Your boss comes down hard on you for something, and you go home and snap at your spouse, who then snaps at the kids, who then go and kick the dog. But what do you want to bet that it didn’t start with your boss? That when they were at home, maybe their spouse snapped at them, and they went in to work and snapped at you. And their spouse in turn was snapped at by the cranky neighbour. It goes round and round, this feeling of worthlessness, from one person to the next. There is something about the way in which our worthless feelings about ourselves spills out of us, without us even realizing it, and the solution we have––dumping it on someone else––certainly doesn’t make the feelings go away.
Now I can tell you that you are not worthless, and that in the eyes of God, you are oh-so-worthy. And I will tell you that, but at the same time, I don’t know if you’re going to actually believe it. You see, holding on to the feeling that we are worthless is familiar. It’s safe. If we are worthless, if we are small, we can just live small lives. We can say no when God calls us to the big things, like Moses saying to God, “No, I can’t be your spokesperson in Egypt, I have a terrible speaking voice.” Or like Job saying, “No, I can’t go to Nineveh to be your prophet, I’m not strong enough to go that far.” We see from the Bible what happens when people do accept that they have been made worthy before God, when they put aside their feelings of worthlessness and accept God’s call. Isaiah proclaimed terrible truths to Israel and the Talmud (historical Jewish commentary on the Bible) says that he died by being sawn in half. Paul said yes to God’s call to proclaim Christ to Gentiles, and he got thrown in jail and persecuted by the Roman Empire. Peter said yes to being a disciple of Christ and ends up being crucified in Rome by Emperor Nero. I suspect that on some level, each of them wished that God had just passed them by.
The thing is, holding on to our feelings of worthlessness when God has proclaimed us worthy is, ironically, a denial of God. We talk a lot about the sin of pride and arrogance, but there is an opposite sin, which is that of false humility and of allowing our own feelings of worthlessness to become more important than what God is telling us. God makes us holy, God makes us worthy, and to cling to the self-image that we are not is to refuse to allow God to use us in the world.
Indeed, we see this with Isaiah. He laments, rightfully, that he is unworthy to proclaim God’s word to the people. But God uses a seraph, an angelic being, to purify Isaiah with sacred fire, a coal on his lips, so that the words that pass through his lips are pure and holy. And then Isaiah goes to the kings and the people of the time and proclaims God’s Word. God makes Isaiah worthy, Isaiah doesn’t do it himself, and Isaiah can no longer refuse to utter God’s words, because that would be refusing to believe that God had purified him.
And it’s the same with the apostle Paul. “For I am the last of the apostles, unfit to be an apostle,” he says, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.” Through the actions of Christ, Paul is forgiven his persecutions of non-Jewish Christians, and grace makes him worthy to proclaim the Good News. If Paul had continued to wallow in his past, and continued to say that his unworthiness made him incapable of doing God’s work, then God’s grace would have been in vain. Paul would have been denying the power of God’s grace to make us worthy.
And then there’s Simon Peter. Jesus Christ chose him, of all people, to spread the Gospel and later to take care of Jesus’ sheep, not because Peter was worthy in and of himself, but because Christ made him worthy for the job. And if Peter had refused to follow Jesus, he would have been refusing to believe that God had made him worthy for it.
To witness to the power of God, to live our lives as faithful Christians, is to believe and trust that God has made us worthy to do so. Not to trust in our own worthiness, but to trust that God knows what God is doing when God invites us to follow Christ. It is, in a way, to live as if we are worthy despite knowing that we are not, because we live trusting that the power of God to make us worthy is stronger than our own worthlessness.
This is a different way of living. It is living in God’s grace, instead of our own. Living in God’s grace means, for one thing, living more authentically - it means accepting that we so often feel like imposters and that we don’t have it all together, and being honest about that. It means believing that “the truth will set you free,” because keeping up appearances just imprisons us in a lie. It’s saying, “Yeah, I had a crummy week and it’s hard to be here today,” when someone at church asks, “How are you?!?” It’s realizing that there’s no point in pretending that we’re doing great with this whole life thing or even this whole church thing, because a) we’re all in the same boat and b) it’s not about our attempts at worthiness anyway.
Because living in God’s grace also means accepting that the truth that, because of God’s work in Christ, we actually are worthy after all. We are filled with the worthiness of God. We can follow Christ, we can carry out the work of Christ, because God is at work through us. It means giving up our feelings of inadequacy, of incompetence, of failure. God has transformed you - you have been made worthy and now you are so. No matter what is going on in your life, no matter what you have together or what you don’t, God has chosen you and has made you worthy to stand in the presence of our most holy God, to bear the image of God to the world, and to embody God’s love to all.
When we start being honest about our own feelings of unworthiness, and simultaneously accept that God makes us worthy nonetheless, life gets easier. We don’t spend so much energy pretending everything’s perfect. We stop kicking the dog. We have compassion for others when they mess up. We live in the confidence of what God has done for us, even as we grasp our complete unworthiness in the presence of God. We say, “Here am I,” we say, “by the grace of God I am what I am,” and we follow Jesus. Thanks be to God. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment