I know...we like to go to church to be inspired and have our spirits lifted...to get what we need to deal with the challenges and the baloney we face everyday. We go to church to get a sense of hope. I totally get that. I also get why it was so important to talk about the heavy things we did this morning.
It is easy to want the glass to be half full, to wish that humans ultimately want to see the best for each other. But the reality is that most of us would admit that people just aren't nice to each other. Sometimes, we are just not nice to ourselves. We certainly aren't nice to creation.
And so we start by calling people names...and then it gets more deep and intense and we start devising ways to put people in their place, and the next thing we know, we disconnect our emotions completely and cannot be empathetic to who they are and what their situation may be. We spend more time caring about what Charlie Sheen will say next, then, for instance, the plight of women who are trafficked in the sex trade. It's easier to care about whether Manny took banned substances than care about the genocide happening right now in the Sudan.
That's the human condition. We're all capable of doing bad things. We do bad things. We sin.
Jesus suffered and died to help us see we can live a different way.
While it was heavy and tough to hear, it brings home the point all the more: by grace our hearts can be changed for the better. Our hearts are changed for the better.
Let's make the human condition-- grace condition.
