On Being Good

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 9
July 9, 2023
The Rev. Mark Nabors, Vicar

Readings: Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

​That poem is by Mary Oliver, the renowned contemporary poet who writes so eloquently about the natural world and the spiritual life. She shows how the two are intimately connected, and how we, beloved creatures and children of God, are bound up in the middle of it all. But perhaps when I started the poem, you raised your eyebrows. Her opening line, you don’t have to be good–well it flies in the face of a lot of what we think about, of the story we tell ourselves, of what we think of when we think about leading a Christian life. 

Growing up, I wanted to be a good boy. I’m a first born, and it’s possible that desire to have approval as a good boy is baked into me. But I think at some level we all want to be good boys and good girls, and even as adults, we crave that approval from others, from the world, from God, and from ourselves. Sometimes we are good. We take care of those around us; we are good stewards of the gifts God has given to us; we take time to be with God. But sometimes we are not good–or is that just me? We get puffed up with pride; anger and wrath take hold of us; greed and envy weigh us down; God gets put on the furthest back burner, and our neighbors, too. At those moments we feel that we must walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

In our reading from Romans, St. Paul is trying to deal with this. He sets it up as a kind of paradox. When he wants to be good, he turns out doing bad. “I do not understand my own actions,” he writes. “For I do not do what I want [the good thing], but I do the very thing I hate [the bad thing]. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” The reason, he says, is because sin continues to dwell in him, confounding his will and distorting his desires, taking him from the path of God. 

St. Paul’s experience is a universal one. As I said earlier, sometimes I do good. I feel good about what I do. But so often my natural inclinations are toward pride and vainglory, wrath and deceit, greed and envy. Like St. Paul, even though I have been claimed by Christ in baptism, even though the Holy Spirit dwells within me, I fall down. 

That is to be expected. We do fall down, all of us. So it should be no surprise that our baptismal covenant makes us promise that whenever we sin we will repent and return to the Lord. Not if we sin, but whenever we sin. 

It is with this realistic lens of who we are that we should read again the words of Mary Oliver. She says we don’t have to be good. She is not saying that we shouldn’t do good or seek to be good people. Rather she is saying we don’t have to be good–perfect–to earn God’s love. She knows that we fall down. And in our falling, we twist ourselves into knots, making ourselves walk through the desert, denying ourselves grace, forgetting that we are sinners with a God full of grace and mercy and forgiveness. Those old stories about being good boys and good girls, about impressing people around us, about earning our love and place in peoples’ hearts–those old patterns are hard to break. If we’re not careful, we turn Christianity into a how-to-be-good programs. And when that doesn’t always happen, and when we inevitably fall, we get frustrated and want to give up, because what’s the use? How can God love me, the miserable wretch that I am? How can God care for me–because look at all I’ve done wrong!  

Jesus knows that about us. So today he invites us to come to him like children. To put our complete trust in his grace and love. And to know that when we fall down, he will pick us up. He will not beat us up with those old stories about how we should be good little boys and good little girls and somehow earn his love and grace. He does not seek to beat us over the head, making us prove ourselves before we can be loved. No, his love and grace, his forgiveness and mercy are all there for us as a gift. 

Jesus says come to me like a child, trusting that we will be taken into his arms of love. Come to him, because that’s what we were made for. Like those geese in Mary Oliver’s poem: 

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
​are heading home again.
 
Why? Because that’s what they were made to do. It’s hardwired in them. 

You don’t have to be good. You won’t always be good. You will fall down. You will be hurt and bruised and battered, and you will try to yoke yourself with all sorts of burdens–guilt, pain, shame. I know because I’ve done it. But what if, instead, we take those wild geese as your guides and head home to God, to grace, to love, to peace and forgiveness and mercy–all gifts from God’s abundance. For that’s what we were made to do; that’s what we are hardwired for! What if we lay down those burdens we lay on our backs? What if we lay aside those lies we tell ourselves about how we could never be good enough to be loved by God? What if we just went to Jesus as a child and took his yoke upon us–for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Then, with St. Paul, we can say, miserable wretches that we can sometimes be: thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, anyhow!