"The Paradox of Being Human" (July 5, 2026 Sermon)

Preaching: Rev. Edyth Potter

Texts: Romans 7:15-25a & Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

You ever feel like you’re carrying two lives inside one body: the person you want to be and the person you see in the mirror? We start with Paul’s blunt honesty in Romans 7 about the inner struggle, then we widen the lens to the paradox of being human: craving freedom and security, wanting rest while chasing proof that we matter, longing to be seen while fearing exposure. Instead of treating contradiction as hypocrisy, we treat it as a place where God can do real work. 

From there, we go back to the foundation of Christian faith and identity: every one of us is made in the image of God. We talk about how that image gets marred, not only by the things we do wrong, but by a deeper heart drift that swaps God’s truth for a smaller god built from our limited experience. That drift shows up in how we judge our neighbors, how we decide who belongs, and how we miss the sacred right in front of us. 

Then Jesus steps into the center. In Matthew’s words, we hear how easy it is to critique God’s messengers while ignoring God’s mercy. We explore presence as a spiritual practice, Jesus’ invitation to the weary, and what it means to take up an “easy yoke” that forms us from the inside out. We close with a hopeful charge: your life matters, your gift is real, and you are uniquely placed to reflect Christ’s love where you already are. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs rest, and leave a review with the line that challenged you most.

Follow us on Instagram @guilfordparkpresbyterianchurch
Follow us on Facebook @guilfordparkpc
Follow us on TikTok @guilfordparkpreschurch
Website:  www.guilfordpark.org

Transcript

Prayer For Illumination

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Please listen now for the prayer for illumination. Merciful God, in this moment of stillness, wash us clean of our presumptions. Receive us as your weary children. Then, by the power of your spirit, bless us with a word that revives. For we pray in the name of Jesus, your living word. Amen. The

Paul On The Inner Struggle

SPEAKER_00 0:36

first lesson this morning is taken from Romans chapter 7, verses 15 through 25A. Bear with me with this one. I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now, if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh, for the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched person that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God.

Welcome And A Familiar Connection

SPEAKER_01 2:36

It's such a joy to be here with you all today. I have worshiped at this church before. You just didn't know it because I'm one of those lurkers online. I started worshiping here way back in COVID days with my sister and brother-in-law. I've known Stephen a long time, and I know him because his best friend is my nephew Joseph, who is also a Presbyterian minister. They went to PC together and then to seminary together. So I've known Stephen in many different places in his life, before he was married, all sorts of stuff. So if you need any good gossip, come see me later. I also want to thank you for the warm welcome you gave to me. I think I met most of you by name before the service, and I'm so glad y'all wear name tags because there's no way my 62-year-old brain will remember all of that. But thank you all so much for the warm welcome and for your desire to make me feel welcome.

Jesus On Missing What Matters

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Now let us listen to our second reading, which comes from the words of Jesus Himself. But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another. We played the flute for you and you did not dance. We wailed and you did not mourn. For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say he has a demon. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. At that time Jesus said, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and to anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Holy wisdom, holy word.

The Paradox Of Being Human

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Isn't it great being a human being? I mean, really, especially in this time and place, where we are in our society, with all that's going on in the world, isn't it just great being a human being? Isn't it great, especially when you're at my age, when the knees are starting to fail, and every new sound your body makes makes you wonder if you need to run through the doctor. Isn't it great being a human? In preparing for what I was being led to share with you today, I looked up a lot of things about humanity and I found a lovely critique of what it means to be human, written by a woman named Amber Howard. And I want to share it with you. It's called The Paradox of Being Human. We are walking contradictions, sacred, spiraling, often unresolvable, and still we still try to make ourselves make sense. We want freedom and we want security. We want to be fully seen, but we're terrified of being exposed. We want to rest, and yet we want to prove ourselves. We want to love without condition, but we draw boundaries to survive. We want truth and we want comfort. We want to believe in something bigger, but we also want control. We are taught to be clear is to be pure, that certainty is power. That contradiction means we're unstable, hypocritical, or weak. Excuse me, that contradiction means we're unstable, hypocritical, or weak. That changing our minds is betrayal, that confusion must be fixed, that ambivalence is failure. But none of this is true. The older I get, she says, the more I realize that what it actually means to be human, what it means to live is to hold paradox, to feel joy while grieving, to long for something you already have, to be healing and hurting, to speak a truth that contradicts the truth you told yesterday, not because you're lying, but because you've grown, to stand inside the tension of opposites and not collapse. And yet so many of us run from this place. We try to figure it out, we pick aside, label it as right, and exile the other. We shame our confusion. We spiritually bypass our rage. We try to shrink ourselves down to something singular, sharp, and easy to explain, but we are not easy to explain. We are vast. We are changing. We are rivers and storms and still water. We are animal and angel, logic and dream, flesh and frequency. And on our refusal to be boxed in, in our courageous willingness to stay inside the contradictions, we remember what it is to be whole. Isn't it great to be human? Oh, the paradox of what it means to be human. With her wisdom, she barely scratches the surface. And so I'd like to start at the very beginning.

Made In God’s Image Yet Marred

SPEAKER_01 8:22

So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them. This is the foundational premise of our faith and what it means to be human. We are made, each one of us, in the image of God. But then something happened. Something happened. And herein lies the first paradox. Paul spells it out very well in the passage that we read from Romans. The image of God is marred by what Paul calls sin. The things we know we shouldn't do, we don't, that we the things we know we should do, we don't. The things we don't want to do, we do. And this is the paradox of being human. It is complicated and messy and paradoxical. I differ with Paul a little bit on sin. I differ with the way that he says, it's not me that did it. Because you know what? It's me. Sometimes it is me. I also differ with them a little bit that sin is all about what we do and what we don't do. Because I think it's more than that. There are certainly things we do that we can label sin. There are certainly things that we can all agree that God does not want us to do that we do. But the spiritual problem, the paradox of being human, it goes much deeper than that. It's more than self-control or following the rules, the do's and don'ts. Sin with a big S is our predisposition to negate the image of God within us and to trade it for our own interpretation of who God is. It's a problem of the heart. Don't get me wrong, it does show up in the way we act out in the world, but the primary source is the heart. Somehow we forget the foundational basis of who we are. That to be human is to be made in the image of God. And yet there is that internal struggle between the image of God that I truly believe is in each one of us and the image we see in the mirror every day. Or the voices around us that tell us who we are or what we should be. It's the difference in looking at our neighbor and seeing what we think they should be, and who we think they or what they who we think they should be, and not recognizing the image of God. We as human beings live on a very slippery slope of interpreting being made in the image of God and creating God in our own image based on the short view of our very own limited experience. But God is bigger than that. Right? I sure hope so. I sure hope God is bigger than that. If not, let's all just call it a day and collapse into the chaos that seems to be all around us. And

Jesus Reveals The True Image

SPEAKER_01 11:44

then comes Jesus. Here is the good news. Jesus showed us exactly what it looks like to live out being made in the image of God. As Scripture bluntly points out, he is the image of the invisible God. If you want to know what God looks like in the world, look at Jesus. I love this passage from Matthew. Jesus has been doing his work, and those who have been kind of created in their own, who have created God in their own image from their own experience question his motives. I love how Jesus turns to them and says, get a grip. Stop it. We played the flute for you and you did not dance. We wailed and we did not mourn. In other words, you're not paying attention. You're simply not paying attention. You're so wrapped up in your own idea of how God should work in the world that when I heal a leper, you think I'm outside the bounds of grace. How bizarre. You're so wrapped up in who should be in and out that when John comes down to the river and baptizes anybody that shows up, even Roman soldiers, you think he has a demon. You're so wrapped up in your own image of what God should be that you're missing out on who God is. We played the flute for you and you did not dance. We wailed and you did not mourn. For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say he has a demon. And the Son of Man came eating and drinking. And you say, look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Yes, exactly. A friend of tax collectors and sinners. Jesus comes into this world, fully human, fully God. Jesus comes into this world to break us out of that bubble of our own existence, to show us the image of God. The image was certainly different from what the people of his day thought it should be. John and Jesus had different ways of bringing the truth to God to the people, and the people who thought they knew the truth couldn't see it because they thought they already had the way God works in the world figured out. It certainly wasn't like John, who invited anyone who came up to start anew, hanging out on the river's edge, dressed in camel hair, and eating locusts and honey. It certainly wasn't like Jesus, who lived life to the fullest and turned water into wine and touched lepers and ate with tax collectors and spoke to women on the streets. It was so much easier to keep God in the temple and the set of carefully constructed rules than to imagine that these two were actually doing the work of God where they were.

Presence Over Striving For More

SPEAKER_01 14:42

And I think a little lesson to learn here from Jesus is this the path to finding the image of God within us, to living into the paradox of being human, is to be present. We can't have our minds so made up about life that we miss what is really happening around us and how God is working in the world. It's so hard sometimes being raised in this culture, this America, because we are taught that we should always look to the future. We should work harder to attain where we should be. That doesn't necessarily mean monetary gain or anything like that. It just means we always are taught that we need to strive for the future. And in our striving, sometimes we miss the present. But being made in the image of God, I think, calls us to be present in every moment. When we're rushing through Target to get the toilet paper, to notice the person that is standing beside us, and to smile and recognize the image of God in them. While we're sitting at home watching TV, to take the time to take a few minutes out of our day to just be silent and say, What do you want me to do today? I love the image Jesus uses about revealing things to infants instead of the wise and the intelligent. That is a paradox for us. And it brings up the old adage, the more we know, the less we really know. It's almost like he's saying, the more we live in this world, the more we learn, the further away from the inborn image of God we get. But it doesn't have to be that way. Tracy Wright Corvo says these words. She says, a paradox is something that seems contradictory on the surface, yet reveals a deeper truth when we look more closely. It's not a logical mistake, it's an invitation to shift perspective. In human life, paradox shows up everywhere. The very things we are taught to pursue, certainty, control, clarity, success, and happiness, frequently leave us tense, fragmented, and empty. Meanwhile, what we are told to avoid, uncertainty, vulnerability, surrender, and stillness, often becomes a doorway to depth, insight, and peace. It isn't a flaw in the design, she says. It's how life teaches. And so

Rest, The Yoke, And Christ Consciousness

SPEAKER_01 17:26

the invitation comes to us by Jesus. Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon me and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. One of the things that brings to me that call that Jesus gives to me. One way I like to interpret it is to say, go back to the beginning. If you want to find the image of God in you, you have to find the image of God in Christ. Come like an infant, like an infant who has new promise and new purpose every day. And believe the image of God has not been beaten out of you by the paradox of being human. This is very different than being religious and following all the rules. It's even different than belief in Christ. Christ consciousness is recognizing the image of God within you, believing Jesus, when he says that I have placed my Holy Spirit within you. Believing Jesus when he says things like, Greater things you will do than I have done. Believing that Jesus is here not just to save us, but to empower us to become Christ into the world because Christ said, You are my body. That may be look very strange to the world around you, this living into Christ, this cultivating of a Christ consciousness. Sometimes it's look it looks like welcoming a stranger. Sometimes it looks like rejecting long-held belief systems. Sometimes it looks like eating with sinners. Sometimes it looks like overturning tables. What it is about is about being present in the world and tapping into the image of God that formed your inward being. And paradoxically, it is also recognizing the image of God and others around you that allows you to love as Christ loved and bring the healing Christ brought into the world. Just where you are. No more, but certainly no less. It's in listening to that still small voice your pastor mentioned in his sermon last week. If you didn't hear it, look it up on YouTube. He's pretty good. Here's one of the real paradoxes of being human.

Your Unique Gift And Final Charge

SPEAKER_01 20:15

God chooses us to carry on the work of Christ. You and only you. You are only you, but you are you. You are the only you that God has ever created as you. And if you're here, you're here for a reason. You are placed in this world to be the image of God shining through. To be the Christ that dwells within you. Just where you are, no more, and certainly no less. Here's one of the God chooses us to carry on the work of Christ. Each of us is unique, and yet so may each of us is a piece of the puzzle. Your life matters. For you, if you accept the challenge on taking on that yoke of Christ, you are the face of Christ to the world today. And that means something. Bill Plotkin is kind of a guru these days for a lot of the enlightenment community. But one of the things he says, I think, is really profound for us today. He says, the gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world, but to fully belong to it. It's not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring you to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift, your true self, is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs. Yep. We're still gonna mess up because humans are messy. But you and I are the one who God chooses to work with. And sometimes it's in our greatest failures that God can bring the greatest joys. That is the paradox of being a child of God. And so I challenge you today to live into that challenge that Christ gives us, to really recognize that we are part of the image of God in this world. Each a tiny spark, each called by Christ to be uniquely who we are, with all our messiness, with all the paradoxes, to take Christ's yoke upon us, to learn of Him, and to share our love in this world. Thanks be to God for making us human and thanks be to God for redeeming humanity. Amen.