Matthew 5:38-48
2/17/19
“Perfect”
We will delve a little deeper this morning into the sermon on the mount,
we will wrestle with Jesus’ bold, clear, and seemingly impossible command:
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
I think about this section of our scripture,
more or less constantly,
in this season of polarization and injustice.
For it – like much of what he says –
carries both personal,
and also collective.
dare I say, political, in the small p sense –
meaning and challenge and encouragement.
And as we wade deeper into Black History Month,
I also want you to know a little of the story of the Rev. James Lawson.
Who believed this bit from Jesus,
as much as anyone ever has.
Lawson is not a household name,
but he was one of the intellectual architects of the nonviolent movement for Civil Rights,
He supervised, with Diane Nash,
the lunch counter sit ins in Nashville,
which sparked a national movement.
When Lawson was once spat upon by an angry white counterprotester,
he responded by asking his spitter if he had a handkerchief,
and if he might borrow it.
Which began a relationship.
Lawson traveled to India to study Gandhi’s movement,
and returned to the American South,
and taught Martin Luther King Jr.,
and organized with him, and many others.
And he is,
and the movement for nonviolence direct action are I think,
what Jesus had in mind,
when he spoke these words.
That responding in love,
without violence,
is both a spiritual task,
and is also how we win hearts,
and win movements.
Lawson is a giant of American intellectual history,
and his life is rooted in our text for today.
So, we’re onto our second week,
of wrestling with Jesus sermon on the mount,
and we’re getting into the really messy, meaty, gritty, world-changing stuff.
but if you’re anything like me,
before you can even begin to take this passage seriously,
before we can even think about loving our enemies,
or turning our cheeks
we have to address that very last line.
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Or in the unforgettable King James:
Be Ye, therefore, Perfect.
Some of you,
many of you even,
might – shall we say – wrestle with perfectionist tendencies.
Might strive for perfect outcomes.
Might linger when you inevitably fall just a little short.
Might wish you could settle for ‘good enough.’
Indeed, though Jesus spoke the words, “be perfect,
you might hear the words, “try harder.”
A surprising amount of what one hears,
in Christian circles can be summed up in those words, “try harder.”
our church in Maine,
hosted a series of sermons over this last summer
led by lay members of our congregation.
This small, struggling church, full of lovely people,
who are always earnestly trying to make their community better,
in this small, struggling, postindustrial New England town.
And every single one of those sermons’ theses,
was simply “we have to try harder.”
work harder. serve more people,
bring more through the doors,
I wasn’t into it.
Now, I mean this as a confession,
but it may come across as bragging:
I have never in my whole life,
been accused of being a perfectionist.
I am objectively terrible at details.
It is a miracle that I survived
my tenure at Colby as an office of one.
I once put out an orientation poster for a multi-faith initiative
that misspelled the word “achievement.”
I still don’t know whether the i or the e comes first.
It is after a C after all.
Even with a terrific coordinator like Stefani,
you’ve likely noticed that I misorder things,
or forget to offer the call to worship.
and I hope you’ll continue to forgive me.
My brain is not wired to strive for perfection.
And I came up in the Lutheran Church,
in which we were bombarded with Luther’s classic suggestion
that we ought to Sin Boldly,
but believe in God more boldly still,
That God is good and I am not,
is an idea baked so deep in my consciousness,
that I often don’t imagine I could even strive to be good,
let alone perfect.
So how, we might wonder –
perfectionists and normals alike –
how could we possibly ‘be perfect.’
What could this possibly mean?
in many protestant circles,
drinking deeply from the Lutheran well,
one regularly hears that this line, “Be Perfect.”
was meant to be absurd.
Meant to convince us, finally,
if nothing else will of our reliance on grace alone.
Since it is self-evident that we are not
and will not be perfect,
we’re left, then,
broken sinners,
praying for repentance.
Awaiting perfection only in the life to come.
But I find myself wondering this week,
if perhaps Jesus isn’t telling us to try harder,
or pointing out how hopeless we are.
so much as giving us a vote of confidence,
after he sets us to the hard work,
of loving the unlovable.
Forgive me another dabble into the New Testament Greek,
I promise I won’t do this every week.
The word ‘perfect’ here has the root ‘telos’
which means
as any good philosophy student will tell you,
something like end, or mature, or perfected.
We often think of perfection as a process of transformation.
But I wonder if it also here,
has the connotation of maturation.
Just as the Oak Tree is ever present in the acorn.
just not yet grown.
Just as the castle is already there in the bags of legos,
just not yet formed.
“Be perfect,” perhaps, is suggesting something that is already within us.
Shackled and battered,
and covered with the dust and grit of the journey.
But, I suspect, there.
We are made for love,
says God,
even to love the really hard people to love,
says Jesus.
And this, I think (at least today),
is less of an admonition,
and more about Jesus’ confidence in us.
You are beloved,
be who you are.
be perfect,
as in perfected
as in completed
as in finished.
Because the end of the story,
is grace and redemption and love.
Not death and hate and violence and despair.
The beloved community, the reign of God,
are not complete,
but they are within us and among us.
Each week we pray,
“on earth as it is in heaven.”
And so,
says Jesus,
you got this.
No, really.
You are loved,
be who you are.
(If you need another Post It note,
I brought some for you this week.)
We won’t get it right all the time,
but that doesn’t stop Jesus from telling us,
that we’ve enough to get up and get loving.
because it’s in us to be salt and light,
in us to love and be love,
even when the world is hard to love
And boy is it hard.
There is a lot out there not to love.
This week, as we marked the anniversary of the Parkland School massacre,
and our painfully slow collective response.
This week, as we declared a national emergency,
because people are at our border fleeing violence.
This week, there are many people
that I am struggling to love
how about you?
It’s easy to dismiss these words,
“Love your enemies”
which have been worn with overuse.
Easy to picture Jesus as an idealist,
who didn’t care much for practicality.
Fair enough, Jesus,
But you didn’t have to deal with global terrorism,
or climate change,
or lobbyists,
or twitter,
or racialized violence.
Except, of course, he did
Not twitter, but
he faced a vast political empire.
And an entrenched religious leadership,
that wanted him dead.
And he wasn’t, as Dr. King was fond of saying,
“playing” when he spoke these words.
I think when we read this passage
we’re meant to think about the ones it’s hardest for us to love:
bullies or siblings,
politicians or evil doers.
and figure out how to take that next right step.
Which doesn’t mean liking them.
It doesn’t mean accepting their position,
it doesn’t mean abiding their policies quietly.
but does mean holding onto hope,
that we will be the ones
to break the chains of hate and despair.
Because our strength comes from someplace different.
And I think,
drawing on the legacies of
Martin Luther King,
and Diane Nash and James Lawson.
Of Desmond Tutu and Mahatma Gandhi,
that it’s eminently practical advice.
loving – not in the sentimental sense,
but in the way that acknowledges that all are loved by God –
That love can be the strongest force in the world.
And that love,
can help us let go of some of the hold that hate and violence,
have on each of us.
Jesus tells us to love,
rather than retaliate.
because we know, that within the best of us, there is some evil,
and within the worst of us, there is some good.
There is no evil I see in the world,
which I don’t see the seeds of in myself.
Just hang out with me for a few minutes,
when I’m hungry,
and have to wait in line,
and you’ll know that under the right circumstances,
I would be capable of almost anything.
Jesus tells us to love,
rather than hate
because it is strength,
True strength that leads to breaking the chain of hate and violence.
Both historically
and personally,
we can always point to someone else’s wrong,
as justification of our own.
But it takes a different sort of person,
a different sort of love,
to acknowledge a wrong,
and not perpetuate it.
Jesus lived a different way,
and paid the price,
and still asks us to do the same.
Jesus tells us to love,
rather than hate.
because love believes,
that redemption is possible,
even in the worst of it.
Dr. King wrote in 1957,
on the cusp of all that has followed:
“Our whole world is facing a revolution. Our nation is facing a revolution. One of the things that concerns me most is that in the midst of the revolution of the world and the midst of the revolution of this nation, that we will discover the meaning of Jesus’ words.” (Loving your Enemies, 1957)
We might say the same today.
it’s easy sometimes
to think of King as too big, too holy,
to be practical here, today, in this Chapel.
Like Jesus,
it easy to love King’s words,
but hard to follow his suggestions.
Which is why I want to return to Rev. James Lawson.
who, as I said,
was a giant.
Who trained almost anyone who’s name we associate with the successes in American Civil Rights.
He – this intellectual and political giant –
was asked about the origins of his work,
and he said this:
“I had my first racial insult hurled at me as a child. I struck out at that child and fought the child physically. Mom was in the kitchen working. In telling her the story she, without turning to me, said, ‘Jimmy, what good did that do?’ And she did a long soliloquy then about our lives and who we were and the love of God and the love of Jesus in our home, in our congregation. And her last sentence was, ‘Jimmy, there must be a better way.’ In many ways that’s the pivotal event of my life.”
Lawson’s is a life, without which, the world would be different.
The seeds of this work,
aren’t geopolitical,
but begin in kitchens,
and churches and chapels,
begin in quiet moments of prayer
in which we convince ourselves,
our soul deep selves,
that there must be a better way.
And there is,
because the one who is the way, the truth and the life,
is already long at work,
and in the midst of us,
Right in the muck and mud of the world,
And he’s telling us,
that he believes in us,
and that we can get on, to the next right thing.
And today at least,
we begin with prayer.