Hi all. My name is Jessica Cooper, and my family and I have been coming to the church for about 8 months now. It has been such a blessing and an answer to prayer to participate and experience God’s spirit of worship and fellowship. I feel grateful to be able to share my experience when reading this scripture with you all. When I read the Bible, it is a slow process for me and more of a personal self-reflective and revealing journey. I feel grateful to anyone who has an open heart to read and receive the reflections in this month’s bible readings.
One of the themes I notice in these readings are pride, shame versus grace, and the creator-creature distinction.
Mark 16
In Mark 16: 7, Peter was specifically singled out and called separately by name from the Angel. This is significant because this is an opportunity to be healed by grace. When God calls us out specifically, we can choose to get defensive and deny, blame, become prideful and hide our shame, or we can turn with humility to the one healer. If we choose to get defensive and feel attacked, belittled, disrespected, or embarrassed when we are are singled out, that is only a revelation of the brokenness that is inside of us rather than a reflection of God’s lack of love for us.
In Mark 16:11, I want to look deeper at how Jesus revealed himself to the disciples in another form, and how they did not believe. I’m sure that they would have loved for it to be true that Jesus was not dead, as they were mourning his death. After Jesus died, they chose to trust in their own experience of Jesus’ death, which did not allow them to see Jesus who is right in front of them. When we trust in our own understanding or experience over the God of creation who is revealing himself to us, it leads to building our ego and creating a false world where our immediate pain can lessen, and we think we are more in control. This makes me think about my own journey, and how countless times I have denied God revealing himself to me because of how I feel and what I think. I have rejected the faith and chose to believe it was just luck, or random, or even chance. When I think about God showing up to us in different forms, I think about how God is in everything that is good, and everything that is good happens only because God is good. I will bring this point up again in Romans 1:20. This shows me that being able to see doesn’t start with my own eyes, but it begins in my heart and my spirit.
Romans 1
As I begin to read about Paul sharing that it is only by grace through faith that we are saved, it makes me reflect on how I grew up experiencing that it was by works and following rules that we earn the right to be saved. My father growing up parented me in an authoritarian parenting style, which I internalized as having to earn my acceptance by being perfect. This belief that I have to, and in fact can be, perfect builds my ego. Naturally, as an adult now, I project my experience with my earthly father onto my Heavenly Father. This leads me on a constant struggle to understand and accept God’s free grace. Because of the unspoken rule of perfectionism I learned as a child, I freeze up when I fear making a mistake (which is survival for me because as a child in order to survive, I need to be accepted. And if being perfect allowed me to be accepted, it was a matter of life and death). All of these patterns are rooted in shame and hiding the pride in me and in my family of origin. For me to think that I can ever be perfect enough, means that I think I can do it all on my own, which means that I don’t need God and what Jesus did was not as much as I can do for myself. I make it all about myself and my own strength. This is a hard awakening I needed to come to and unlearn in order to be able to receive God’s grace. In Romans 1:16, Paul talks about not being ashamed. This to me means that he is not so prideful to think that he can do it on his own. That means that we can be humble in acknowledging our need of a savior. For those who use pride and ego to hide shame (which is me also), the gospel itself brings up shame.
In Romans 1:18- 21, Paul talks about how we have no excuse, that God reveals himself in all his creations, that even his worldly creation understands who God is as he has his mark on everything he made. The stars, the trees, the sand, the mountains bow at his name. This is the creator-creation distinction. The natural process of things knows and understands naturally who our creator is. We, as the creation, cannot put God, our creator, in a box of what we think is and is not possible. God is in us and in all of what we see around us. God reveals himself through the way the sunset is always there every night and how he is an amazing ray of light that is warming and consistent. The sunset brings awe. God reveals himself through the strength and oxygen of the trees. We would not have breath without them. God reveals himself in that bird I saw this morning, with its armor royally red and majestic. The bird revealing God’s strength and righteousness. God reveals himself through the neurons of our body and how they branch out and connect with each other to share and express a message, how God intends to communicate with us with his Holy Spirit and have a relationship with us. God reveals himself through the beauty of the leaves in the fall, inspiring and transformational.
Romans 1: 24 talks about how God gave up those who rejected him to their own sinful desires. He let them have what they wanted—those who exchange the truth of God for a lie, and those who worshiped the creature rather than the creator. Here we have again the creator-creature distinction. We want immediate gratification by thinking that the creation is what saves us, rather than seeing who the creator is. We worship a car, or a preacher, or our children, rather than the one who created everything. This verse is also significant to me personally because it puts a stop to enabling and takes away the responsibility of changing others on us. I come from a co-dependent home where the distinction of responsibility and roles were distorted and chaotic. I grew up thinking and feeling that I was responsible for my parents' emotional health, as well as everyone around me. This disrupted my development and created an unhealthy attachment style. It taught me that I was not responsible for myself, but for others. This prevents accountability and autonomy, and also here we have my ego building again. Here, God makes a clear distinction of autonomy. God gives us free will and we get to choose if we accept him or reject him. With this choice, there are positive and negative consequences, but God’s love will never change.
Romans 2
In Romans 2, Paul is again clarifying the creator-creature distinction. I like how in chapter 1 Paul is pointing out the sinful choices people make, which may lead us to be confused and run with that thinking we can now judge people. In verse 2, he clarifies that the right to judge does not lie in our hands. God, as the creator, is in fact the clear judge. When we try to take on that responsibility, it destroys us because it was never meant for us. Paul continues on through verse 16 preparing us for the positive and negative consequences of our choices. If we choose immediate gratification, it leads to long-term pain. If we choose delayed gratification and short-term pain, it leads to God’s goodness, development of character, and faith.
Romans 3
In Romans 3: 5, here, again, we have Paul pointing out the obvious, the creator-creation distinction. As the creator, HE is righteous. In Romans 3: 3- 8, Paul reveals our entitlement to God’s grace. When we are prideful and entitled, we cannot allow God to shed light on our shame that would allow healing. In that case, it’s not even God who is choosing to refuse us grace; it is by our own choice that we are refusing God’s grace. As the creation, we are not entitled to anything. Everything that we have is an act of love only because of God’s grace, not because we deserve anything or have earned it by our works. Gratefulness is what takes it all back to the beginning of God’s creation, to what God’s original design and intention was, for us to live in grace and love. If it is by grace and through faith we are saved, then that only means that for us to live in freedom is to live in grace.
Romans 4
In Romans 4, it continues to be revealed to me that to live in God’s grace is freedom, and in this freedom, we can choose to believe and have faith, that in this faith, we are not only free, but we are saved. If we are justified by faith, we need grace to get to that faith. In Romans 4:20, Paul talks about how, though we may experience unbelief and doubt, when we choose to have faith and believe, we can be strengthened.
Romans 5
Romans 5:1-5 is twisted from what the world will say. We perceive pain as something we all want to avoid and get out of. These verses are saying that we can perceive and experience pain as something transformational, leading to growth and strength. Life’s trials that include pain are a means to grace. I have experienced pain that I often try to get out of, but because God loves me so much and believes in me, he knows that I am strong enough to withstand the pain in order to get to the place where I can receive his grace. A lot of this for me has been being a stay-at-home mother and raising 5 children. It is intensely hard work, and I break down daily, but those moments of grace are worth it. Paul also talks about hope. The imagery I see is how hope is a seed in our hearts that was placed there by the Holy Spirit and that is being watered by God’s love.
In Romans 5:8-9, Paul is making the distinction between the perfect creator and the sinful creation, the clear roles of how we deserve God’s wrath, but instead we were given a saving grace. In verse 10, it not only identifies again the role that, because of sin, we were enemies of God, but because of God’s grace we were reconciled to God through Jesus. We deserve death, but only because of God’s grace do we have life, and more.
Romans 5:12-14 sets the bar equal for everyone. We all carry the sins of Adam and no one is exempt. Because of this, the natural feeling and experience of shame comes up and grows. From infancy, because we are imperfect and raised by imperfect people, we cannot do it the way God intended. We know instinctively and naturally that something is wrong. Shame is the feeling something is innately wrong with us. We are broken somehow, with this deep feeling inside that we are missing something. This only makes sense because in God’s original design, we were made in every way to live in his love, trust, and grace. When we go outside of this design, we are ashamed living apart from our creator. When we are apart from him, something is very wrong indeed. This feeling of shame will never be rectified until we are in the grace of God that we were meant to be in. Here is a metaphor I can use to describe this. We each have a gift and a purpose in God’s original design as God, the creator, intended. Let’s say I am a pencil. I was made specifically to write. Let’s say I am moved to the utensil drawer where the forks, spoons, and knives are. Someone takes me out and tries to use me like a spoon, but I am failing. I am not picking things up like a spoon “should.” So, I feel like I am broken, not working, and that something is innately wrong with me. This is shame. If I were to go and be used as a pencil, I would be able to write beautiful things and be in alignment with why and how to meet our entitlement.
Romans 3:20 hits on the issue of the law being incapable of saving us, but the law being an acknowledgment of sin. The transformation of the heart by grace and the act of faith that takes us closer to God is what empowers us to follow the law that can help us follow the boundaries God gave to us to help us, not to save us.
Romans 3:23-26 brings me to the question of “What does justice mean?” The world teaches us that justice is for someone to pay, to get revenge, or for us to get what we think we deserve. We think that this will fill us, but it only leaves us emptier with our expectations being ruined. My interpretation of these verses is that to live in God’s grace is justice. That is why I was created. If I returned to my original design, I would feel accepted.
To end my reflections, I pray. Let us not take Jesus’s sacrifice for granted by hiding our shame through pride. Let us humble ourselves to recognize the creator in all of his glory, to accept our role and our purpose, and to give him all the praise and the glory. Amen.
