Ordinary Lives Can Be Holy
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – February 18, 2024
Ordinary Lives Can Be Holy – Luke 4:1-14
In today’s scripture story the devil tempts Jesus with glory, fame, and a quick fix. Those of us who have read this story many times know that Jesus doesn’t go for any of it. He responds with pithy one-liners and sends satan slinking away until an opportune time. But the temptations would mean nothing if they weren’t actually obviously tempting in Jesus’ place and time.
What are the temptations that catch our ears today, singing out promises that our lives should be better, more special, or less hard than they are?
In their book, Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection, Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie write “If you check your social media feed, the debate has been settled. Yes, you can be perfect. Other people are living beautiful, joyful, effortless lives. In fact, it’s embarrassing that you haven’t joined their ranks already (vii).”
Social media didn’t invent the practice of projecting a perfectly polished image to our neighbors, of course. That existed long, long before. But it did take it to a particularly portable, persistent new level for a large swath of the population. Studies now show its rise has been a major contributor to the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young people.
Many of us, regardless of our age or our social media use, can fall victim to the temptation of judging our insides by other people’s outsides. We know our own struggles. We know the stories we keep hidden. What we see of others can so often be only the polished best. It can be easy to imagine we’re the only ones struggling or to begin to become paranoid about what everyone else is hiding.
If we think it was easy for Jesus to turn down those temptations, maybe we would-be Jesus followers start to think we can and should be just as perfect and we turn the message of Christianity into an injunction to live a flawless life. In that way of thinking, those who struggle are no longer welcome in our midst, lest we catch their infection. In that thinking, our own flaws become things we must hide and defend at all costs lest we lose our own position. We may even begin to moralize and judge things that have no inherent moral weight, scouring ourselves and others with an acid wash of shame.
In February of 2020, therapist KC Davis gave birth to her second child. She had an extensive support plan in place. Various relatives, friends, and paid caregivers were scheduled to help KC’s family care for themselves and their newborn. Then, abruptly, in March of 2020 everything shut down. No one came into their home, leaving the growing family completely isolated. KC developed postpartum depression. Never an immaculate house keeper, KC struggled to simply feed herself, her working from home husband, her toddler, and her infant, let alone clean their home. She took to social media to share self-deprecating footage of her living space, hoping to make light of the harsh situation and find some solidarity on the internet. Instead, judgmental comments came flying back. The one that struck her most? One word: lazy. How lazy of this completely isolated mother with postpartum depression not to be able to keep everyone in her home alive and keep her house spotless at the same time, during a global pandemic.
She was hurt by the comments but as a therapist she also already knew the shame, judgment, and morality that in the US often surrounds deceptively complex care tasks like cooking, cleaning, and personal hygiene.
In the best selling book that she went on to write, How to Keep House While Drowning, she shares, “I have seen hundreds of clients who struggle with these issues, and I am convinced now more than ever of one simple truth: they are not lazy. In fact, I do not think laziness exists (5).”
What does exist, according to KC Davis? “Executive dysfunction, procrastination, feeling overwhelmed, perfectionism, trauma, motivation, chronic pain, energy fatigue, depression, lack of skills, lack of support, and differing priorities (5).” Any one of those things could lead to a difficulty in caring for oneself. But none of them are moral failings.
When the wilderness times come for us, as they eventually do for us all, I cannot think of anything less helpful than an extra heaping of shame upon an already hard situation. Why has this bad thing happened? Why is this so hard? Is it something I have done or not done? It can be terribly difficult to accept that the wilderness just is itself. Terrible things happen with or without our permission and no matter how good or special we try to be.
Jesus himself walked through his own actual wilderness in which he met the personification of evil. Keep in mind he hadn’t even eaten for 40 days. If I don’t eat for 4 hours, I can’t handle much. No, life was hard sometimes even for Jesus, God in the flesh. And life is just hard for us sometimes, too. Judging ourselves for our suffering isn’t going to make it any easier.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I think we don’t get things wrong and that there aren’t ways that we contribute to our suffering that we might like to stop. As Bowler and Richie write, “Perfection is impossible but transformation isn’t…There are some things we can do to inch toward a deeper, richer, truer kind of faith (ix-xiii).”
Neither is it that I don’t believe in evil. For me, I see evil in the dehumanization it takes to murder thousands of Palestinians and internally displace millions more.
It’s just that I think God will someday, somehow ultimately heal all evil and reconcile the world to wholeness and that God is doing that even now.
It’s just that I think there’s a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt tells us we’ve done something wrong and helps us change. Shame tells us that we’re wrong just for being and in that there’s no hope of change.
So we can continue to bully ourselves with shame for all the things that aren’t the way we’d like them to be in ourselves and in our world. Or, we can apply self-compassion and forgiveness to all the places where we experience guilt, suffering, and shame.
Throughout How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis shares the encouragement to allow ourselves to be human. She quotes Brene Brown in proclaiming “humans are born with the birthright of worthiness,” but she goes on to argue “they are also messy, fallible, imperfect creatures who cannot and will not ever get everything right all the time. And this messy, fallible imperfection never detracts from our inherent worthiness.”
According to Davis, the good enough care routines she encourages to keep folks functioning with more ease and more joy are not settling. She declares, “Good enough is perfect.” I, for one, believe that goes well beyond our attitudes toward laundry.
Our lives may never be as easy as we would like. We will never escape all the calamity and suffering while we draw breath. Our world will not be set to rights in our lifetimes. We will get things wrong. We will harm others. We will fall short of our own expectations and others will do that, too.
The good news is that does not make us unworthy of love. It does not separate us from the possibility of transformation. It does not separate us from the eternally healing presence of God. Some translations of today’s text read that the Spirit led Jesus to the wilderness, but I like the NRSV’s translation better at least for the theology. Because it tells us Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, sounding to me as if the Spirit never left Jesus’ side. Even though he was hungry, tempted, and visited by the devil himself, the Spirit was with Jesus through this hard time.
I believe the Spirit of God is with us through every wilderness, too, whether naturally occurring or self-inflicted. The Spirit of God is with us – not saving us from all suffering, not making sure we never mess up or lose face, and not even keeping us far from the presence of evil. But with us, reminding us that no matter how ordinary and imperfect we may be, we are still loved. We are still loved, and that is more than good enough.
Thanks be to God that it is so. Amen.
