Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 5, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Here in church, we talk a lot about how God loves us, each and every one of us. We talk about how God loved us so much that God came to us in the person of Jesus so that we might know the depth of God’s love, know how unconditional and universal that love is for all people. We talk about how as Christians we are called to love all of God’s people, even (or perhaps better especially) those whom the world calls unlovable, those whom the world rejects and scorns. Now, all that talk about unconditional love for all people is all very well and good, but in my experience, for most of us at least, there is one person whom we have the most trouble loving, one whom we cannot bring ourselves to love and accept unconditionally, just as we are, with all our faults and all our virtues, one whom we simply cannot see as worthy of love. That one whom we have the most trouble loving is, for many of us, ourselves.

In my experience of life, which is getting to be fairly extensive now, among us humans low self-esteem and lack of confidence in our ability to cope, to do everything we have to do, to deal with all the things in our lives that we have to deal with, to face what we have to face, is nearly universal. Even worse, as hard as we sometimes find it to give love, most of us (and I certainly include myself in this statement) find it even harder to accept love. If you’re like me and a lot of other people I know, most of the time we can’t think of ourselves as lovable, or even as attractive or likable. Most if not all of us carry deep psychic wounds that keep us from forming a healthy, positive self-image, from feeling good about ourselves, from feeling worthy of being loved.

We often react to our own sense of being unworthy of love in one of two seemingly contradictory ways. Sometimes we idolize others, thinking them better than we are, failing to see their faults and weaknesses, seeing in them what we would like to see in ourselves but cannot. Or we project our own negative self-image onto them, demonizing them to make ourselves feel better about ourselves by feeling superior to those whom we dehumanize. Neither of these responses is healthy. In fact, they both are toxic. The one reinforces our own lack of self-worth and sets us up for a huge fall when those whom we have made into idols turn out to have feet of clay. The other leads to hatred and even violence and does nothing to deal with the underlying psychological issue of our own lack of self-worth.

This unhealthy psychological state has spiritual consequences. Despite all the talk we hear in church about divine love, we cannot believe that God truly loves us and everyone else unconditionally. We project our own self-hatred onto God and find it impossible to believe that God does not have as negative an opinion of us as we do of ourselves. We cannot imagine that the like of us are worthy of unconditional divine love; and since we can’t believe it of ourselves, we can’t believe it of others either, especially those whom our culture tells us are unworthy of love.

Today’s Scripture lesson tells us otherwise. Psalm 8, which we heard read in the original and then heard quoted in part in the reading from Hebrews, actually asks the question that gnaws at so many of us: "What are human beings [that is, who are we, who am I] that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" Psalm 8:4 This question arises from our human perspective on things. It arises out of our wounded psyches and our diminished souls. It reflects our universally negative self image. The Psalmist has the same doubts about us humans as we do. The Psalmist, however, is also aware of God’s response to our nagging self doubt and gives it in the next lines: "Yet you have made them [i.e., us, i.e., me] a little lower than God, and crowned them [i.e., us, i.e., me] with glory and honor." Psalm 8:5 God, even God, crowns us, all of us, with glory and honor. God thinks of us as being little lower than divine. Another translation of "a little lower than God" is "a little lower than the divine beings (or angels)." In God’s eyes, each and every one of us is nearly divine ourselves.

Which leads me to say: If God sees every one of us as very nearly God’s equals, crowning each and every one of us with honor and glory, who are we to doubt ourselves, or dislike ourselves, not to mention hate ourselves? Who are we to say that we are unlovable or to think of others as unlovable? Do we know better than God? That’s blasphemy! If our Christian faith means anything it means that God knows us far better than we know ourselves and loves us, not despite who we are but because of who we are-God’s children created nearly the equals of angels, of heavenly beings.

Of course we are all imperfect. Of course we all fall short of the glory of God. Yet we are nonetheless crowned with glory and honor, and God loves us, just as we are. And so today, as you come to the table, open yourselves to God’s love, know that God loves you just as you are, and be at peace, at peace with God, at peace with all of creation, and even, hardest of all, at peace with yourselves.