Old Enough to Know Better (Sixth Sunday after Pentecost)

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Even though it’s sometimes a pain, I often enjoy getting involved in property projects around the church. And this has always been the case, even many years ago at my first church.

One time back then, I was at the church while Frank, our Property Committee chair, was outside working in the parking lot… (we had these concrete bumpers which we had needed to move in order to get a truck into the back yard…)

And I decided to be helpful! Figuring that I could swing this huge block of concrete while Frank was lifting it with a lever, I grabbed hold of the thing, in spite of the fact that Frank kept telling me that he didn’t think this was such a great idea…

And Frank was right! Just as I had the block right where it needed to be, I lost my grip and it dropped on the parking lot. Unfortunately, it also dropped on two of my fingers that I couldn’t pull away in time.

So, for the next couple of days, using the Mouse was a painful experience! But on the other hand, it was Lent and the color of my fingers sort of matched the purple in my vestments, so at least I looked appropriate for the season! However, after a day or so, Frank was by again and started telling me that I really ought to have a doctor look at my fingers, because it looked like it was getting infected.  (Frank, besides being chair of Property, was also the retried chair of the microbiology dept at the University of MD, so I figured he knew from microbes…)

So, I went to the doctor’s office, but my regular doctor wasn’t there, and I ended up seeing one of the other doctors who I hadn’t seen before.

And since I hadn’t seen this particular doctor before, when she came in, she introduced herself and told me that, even though I had answered the usual questions before, since she hadn’t ever treated me, she had to ask me the usual questions.

So, we went through the usual stuff: Are you taking any medications? Are you allergic to any medications? And how old are you?

And I looked down at my hand, and then back at the doctor, and said, “Old enough to know better!

In fact, I was old enough to know better. And experiences like that only serve to remind me that sometimes just “knowing better” doesn’t always keep you out of trouble, or from doing dumb things… (that’s why they say “experience is the ability to recognize a mistake when you make it again”!)

And actually, that’s what Paul was struggling with as he wrote to the early Christians in Rome in this morning’s second reading. Paul was, after all, a Pharisee who had dedicated his life to understanding and living God’s word. He had practiced all his life, and after Jesus had revealed himself to him, he had gained an even deeper appreciation of God’s will and God’s love…

You’d think Paul was old enough to know better! Certainly, Paul thought he ought to be!  He says, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”…

Paul figured out that “knowing better” wasn’t enough. Even though he worked hard all his life to know and do God’s will, in the final analysis, he wasn’t ever going to be able to get things right enough to stand before God and say that he had finally learned to be the kind of person that God wanted him to be.

But Paul didn’t despair.  And that’s because even though he realized that neither he nor anyone else would ever be able to save themselves by “knowing better”, Paul also found out that God’s relationship with him and with the whole world depended not on “knowing better”, but on the love and mercy of God found in Jesus. And so it is that Paul concludes, “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord”…

And that’s a crucial lesson for us to remember as well. For a lot of the time, we Christians rightly stress the importance of growing in our understanding of God’s will so that we will indeed, “know better”… (it’s one of the reason we keep doing adult Bible Study and do it some more at VBS!)

But for us, too, “knowing better” is not the key, just as it’ wasn’t for Paul. Instead, like Paul, we’re called to be people who:

• trust that God is still acting and working in our lives, even when we should have “known better”. God isn’t going to walk away from us, and we’re called to be people who live with hope and confidence in God’s love and mercy, rather than our ability to always get it right, or even to get progressively better …

• are willing to let God work through our weaknesses – even when we clearly should have known better – instead of insisting to God that we’re only ready when we’ve got our act together, and have figured out how not to make mistakes …

• really hear God’s words of forgiveness – words which aren’t some kind of “get out of punishment” decree, but words of love which tell us that if God isn’t going to beat up on us, we should stop beating up on ourselves with “I should have known better” and instead, get up and try again …

I learned from that experience in the parking lot never to ever try to manhandle a parking lot bumper again! I now know better. But over the years, I’ve also messed up in plenty of other ways when really, I should have known better!

And that’s the way it is with our lives as disciples of Jesus, too. We ought indeed to take every opportunity to learn and grow in God’s Word. We ought to learn from our mistakes. And we ought to struggle not to make the same mistakes again.

But instead of relying on our own abilities to “know better”, or even “do better”, we ought to rely on God’s forgiveness, both for ourselves and others. We ought to trust in God’s love instead of our own good intentions. And we ought to find such hope in Jesus’ promises that we are always ready, with Paul, to say, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Amen.