It seems simple really. For those of us with a fairly realistic perspective on life, it becomes painful to listen to a preacher or a motivational speaker tell us that life is all what we make of it. We know that isn’t always true. We know that sometimes life stinks. The world hits us with a great deal of pain and turmoil. Sometimes the bootstraps break. There is no pulling ourselves up by them anymore. And the next person who tells us to “Have a nice day,” will probably get punched in the face. Life is hard, sometimes very, very hard. And we need to locate those people and places that allow us to dive into the frustrations of really being human.

This is not a new discovery by any means. However, human beings have always tried to find ways around the “life is hard” reality. The cutesy all organic cotton t-shirts don’t say, “Life is hard.” They say, “Life is good.” We listen to Oprah and Dr. Phil, not the philosophers of old who had stuffy smoke filled offices and pined away about human angst. Dark views of the human condition are out of vogue. We want happy people, happy churches, sanitized Starbucks and multiple ways to achieve our feel-good fixes. Life isn’t so hard if your church doesn’t dig too deep or confess to its own participation in the sins of the world. Life isn’t so hard if the really tragic stuff happens somewhere else, in a far away country that has little to do with us. Life isn’t so hard when we stuff our feelings down so deep that they become neuroses instead. At least we think we know how to deal with those.

But our spiritual forebears understood that the world was not an easy place to be. Yes, they had their own devices to try to alleviate the struggles, but they wrote tales that are to be a reminder to us that those projects didn’t go quite so well. The tower of Babel story is a case in point. Ultimately, we find out that it isn’t good for people to depend on their own means exclusively. When people get too convinced that they are invincible, that they have the power to even build a tower to storm the heavens, God will set them back a few paces. The Old Testament view may be quicker to blame God for why life is so hard, but even Paul’s letters are a reminder that life in Christ doesn’t make anything any better than the olden days. For a single and rather pigheaded type guy like Paul, the “creation groaning in labor pains” analogy is pretty insightful. We aren’t where we’d like to be.

Paul’s writing has the same theological bent as Doug’s – especially here in Romans. Life is hard. There will be hardships, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and death by the sword. He knew about the ways of the world. But like Doug, and Randy, and pastors and theologians past and present, they all have this theological disjunction in common. Yes, life is hard, sometimes very, very hard, BUT – Grace Abounds! They are the truth-tellers that don’t mince words about how challenging it is to be a human being, let alone trying to be a faithful human being, but they give you some help on it too. There will be moments of grace, moments of indescribable peace and calm that can only be described as the presence of the Holy Spirit that intercedes when we can’t even pray as we might want to pray. Bad stuff happens, but even in that turmoil, we know, we really, really know that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The challenge to today’s churches is to find the time and place to meet up and talk about real life. Churches that are inclined to want their market share may be furiously trying to sell the “life is good” t-shirts and keep the truth well hidden from a public that doesn’t want to know. If we plan to be a “life is hard” church, it may mean that our experience shapes up a little bit differently from the church of the happy customer down the street. It may mean we will have to acknowledge that we are imperfect, that we rarely have all the answers, that we fight sometimes, that making up is hard, and that those little moments of grace, though nice, are not always the satisfying fix that we hoped they would be. Yes, it does make life a little smoother to buy into a Christian life that carries with it all the perks. We want the serenity of the Dali Lama and the bustle of American life all at the same time, and it just doesn’t work out that way for the human condition. The tower tumbles. The people are scattered. The languages are confused, and what we thought was up to us has been proven to be not ours at all.

All of my favorite writers and movies tell this same story, the Bible included. “Life is hard, but grace abounds.” After Randy boiled down Doug’s theology to that one sentence that probably wouldn’t sell too many books on its own, he also admitted that he’s a one-sermon pastor, and that all his sermons have the same theme, “I’m not OK, you’re not OK, but it’s OK.” I think I fit into the same category as these two men I admire of telling roughly the same story over and over again. It has been ingrained into my thinking from childhood, confirmed through the rocky period of adolescence, articulated through my theological education, and then inflicted on others in my pastoral ministry. I find it offensive when I’ve heard other pastors tell someone in a really awful situation that with enough faith everything’s going to turn out OK.

However, what I am certain of is that in this hard-knock life, there will be opportunities to witness the absolute magnificence of the grace of God that reaches out to us in our pain. Neurotic semi-spiritual writers like Anne LaMott remind us that grace is not immediate, grace happens “eventually” as in the title of her new book. Her stories are familiar in that they recount feelings of jealousy, anger, and rage tempered by the in-breaking of something funny that jars one back to a life of flawed faithfulness – all that any of us could hope for.

I know the story is true because I’ve seen it happen. I don’t know how anyone can be a pastor and not be amazed by the subtle nuances of God’s grace happening in churches of all places. Churches are full of people. Therefore, they have the same problems and struggles as anywhere else in the world – the same as the School Board, the same as your department out at the labs, and the same as what happens in your own family. We want it to be somehow better, but usually it isn’t. In fact, sometimes we act out at church precisely because we’re not supposed to tell anyone out there in the world that life is hard. My life is hard. Some days I’m not sure if I’m going to make it 5 more minutes. We all have those thoughts and we stuff them down. Then if we’re lucky we may try to bring those feelings somewhere we hope will be safe like the church. Here, I do want you to be able to tell your story, all of it, the rough parts too. For it is in looking at what has been so hard that we begin to realize that through everything: death, life, angels, rulers, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, or anything else in all creation, God’s love will be there. God does not abandon us. The Spirit continues to awaken us and astonish us. It may not be immediate, but eventually grace shows us the way.

Know the truth. Talk about the truth. We can’t save ourselves; Jesus can’t even save us from the difficulties of life. They are just there. Period. What we can do is open ourselves to God’s gracious moments that bubble up from somewhere unexpected and surprise us into a new way of thinking about ourselves – as God’s beloved children.

Amen.