The Scripture Readings this week are:
- Psalm 15
- Psalm 24:3-6
- James 1:21-27
The Sermon title is Am I Worthy?
Early Thoughts: How do we make ourselves worthy? Do we just have to work harder? If we just try harder, do more, spend more hours in service will we make ourselves worthy in the eyes of our families? Our neighbours? Ourselves? God?
Some (many?) of us wrestle with feeling worthy from time to time. For some people the default is to assume that for some reason they are unworthy: unworthy of love, unworthy of friendship, unworthy of success, maybe even unworthy of life. We might pick up those messages from a variety of places: family, teachers, peers, social media, our own self talk, tv/movies. How do we counteract that?
To be honest I don't think our readings this week help with that. Both Psalms seem to set a pretty high bar for being eligible to stand in God's presence. Not that any of those attribute we find listed in them are bad, in fact they are indeed good things to aspire to, just that how many of us can honestly say that our lives meet that standard all the time? Maybe, like Wayne and Garth, we fall to our knees and declare:
And yet, in the years when I was most beset by feelings of guilt/shame and inadequacy the church was one of my refuges from those feelings. I think there were a couple of reasons for that. One was certainly the community, the community that I had been a part of for so long, the place where so much surrogate family could be found. But there was also something deeper. Since I was a young child the church taught me about the God who looks at creation and says "it is very good", the God who sees me as their Beloved Child, the God who knows my failures and mis-steps and offers forgiveness. In short the church reminded me that in God's eyes I have worth.
Sometimes we might think that if we were just 'better" that would make us feel worthy. We just need to do more (and better), to work harder and longer, then we would earn worthiness. Our culture can support that idea, the idea that we are only worthy because of what we do/accomplish/earn (and buy). But I think that misses the mark.
I believe that God call us worthy by virtue of existing. This does not mean we always get it right, t means that we are worthy even when we get it wrong. So I think the Psalmists might be a bit off. Or maybe the Psalmists were being aspirational, encouraging us to live into God's vision for who we could be. Maybe James is doing that too. Because there is a mirror to not feeling worthy, it is to get too comfortable in the idea that God calls us worthy "just as I am without one plea". The path of wisdom is in remembering that we are called worthy and Beloved AND that we can probably do a bit (or a whole lot) better.
--Gord
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