The Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B, May 10, 2009
Acts 8:26-40 / Psalm 22:24-30 / 1 John 4:7-21 / John 15:1-8
Looking over the readings for this Sunday, I’m immediately brought up short by this line in the Collect, that prayer that summarizes – or collects – the themes of our scriptures: “Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life.” Oh my, how this pushes my ‘institutional church’ buttons.
The specific button-pusher here is the word “perfectly”. C’mon. It’s daunting enough to attempt to follow Christ, challenging enough to try to model our behavior and attitudes on his, but to perfectly know him? For me, all sorts of interior warning lights and sirens go off when confronted by such a requirement.
This is probably because I have devoted a large chunk of my adult life to recovering from trying to be perfect. Somewhere along the way – most likely courtesy of some over-zealous parenting and thanks to the nuns who ruled my grade school religious ed. classes — I picked up the idea that God expects me to be perfect, in the sense of flawless, always thinking the right thought, always doing the right thing.
Very “either/or”. Either you’re perfect or you’re not, right? As part of my religious education, Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 5:48 to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” was lifted out of context and cited in support of this unreasonable expectation.
This did not seem like ‘good news’ to me. But, considering the terrifying alternatives offered by the church of my childhood, I decided I’d just have to attempt the impossible and strive to be the flawless human being God apparently required me to be. As you can imagine, my image of God was long on remoteness, sternness, and rigidity and mighty short on compassion.
Initially, Jesus wasn’t much help. Not only was he the one who said the thing about being as perfect as God, but it seemed that everywhere I looked at church there he was hanging on the cross, bleeding and suffering — my religious mentors at the time implied –because of humanity’s abject failure to meet that perfection standard. Humanity…that would be me, right?
It’s a wonder I didn’t give up on religion altogether. Why didn’t I? Because I kept encountering a Jesus who was not nailed to the cross, dying; a Jesus who was teaching and healing and hanging out with his friends, living. I kept learning new things about this Jesus, things that simultaneously re-wound him backwards into his earthly ministry while fast-forwarding him into my own 20th century life.
The wonderful mysterious multi-layered stories he told, stories I couldn’t get my mind around but that made something true in me ring like a struck gong. The infirmities of mind and body and spirit he mended. His penchant for speaking his mind to the religious authorities that made me wish he’d sat next to me in religious ed. His ability to make something out of nothing filled me with hope. His calling of bumbling, quarrelsome, cowardly, radically imperfect people to discipleship helped me believe that I might be called to follow him, too, flaws and all.
Flaws and all. The disciples’ varied and glaring character defects make it abundantly clear that perfection, in the way I had been taught to understand it, is not a prerequisite for discipleship. So, what does Jesus mean when he says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”? The Greek word which becomes ‘perfect’ in our English version of the New Testament is teleios. It means “complete”. How many of us feel unfinished? How many of us feel incomplete? Now, here was something to which I could relate.
It began to dawn on me that my quest for perfection had been all about seeming, acquiring, constructing. If I just made myself behave in a certain way, maybe form would follow function. But what lurked beneath the façade – the unfinished me, the fear, the resentment, the need to control, the hollow place from which they came – always won out. Perfection, in the sense of flawlessness, was clearly impossible for me to achieve.
But perfection, in the sense of a process toward completeness, that was something to which I could aspire. I discovered that teleios comes from telos, which means “end” or “goal”. Becoming whole is a marvelous goal, a goal that is central to Jesus’ ministry of healing and reconciliation. So, I devoted myself to recovering from trying to be perfect and began the process of submitting to completion.
And I came to understand that this process begins deep deep inside, at the very heart of who we are, and works its way outward, sort of the way a puncture wound heals from the inside out, finally manifesting in an integrated true way of being and behaving that expresses something of the nature of God.
Remember I said earlier that that line from Matthew about perfection that caused me such trouble had been lifted out of context? Well, the context is Jesus’ extended teaching that has come to be known as The Sermon on the Mount. The line about being perfect comes immediately after a series of statements Jesus makes about how keeping God’s law is all about what goes on inside each one of us.
For example: “You have heard it said…, ‘You shall not murder’ and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.”
And it comes just before Jesus’ teaching about not practicing piety in public in order to be seen by others, but rather giving alms and praying and fasting in secret where it’s just between you and God.
This reinforces my sense that the process of being perfected, completed, made whole, is interior. And, I would offer that it is not something we do by ourselves. I don’t think we can do it by ourselves. We cooperate. We participate. We allow. We turn again and again toward the light. But the work of transforming fear into trust, hatred into love, resentment into acceptance, control into letting go, is completed by Jesus the Christ in his incarnational role as embodier of the presence of the Divine in us.
So, in a very real sense, becoming perfect involves offering our unfinished selves to God and allowing God in Christ to inhabit that hollow place within, and from there, from the core of our being, work outward his remaking of us through all our many layers, until our way of being in the world begins to change. This change from within is not illusory. It is real. And because it is brought about by Christ, because Christ inhabits it, it is one with Christ’s being.
The writer of 1 John touches on this intimate and living relationship. “[I]f we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” There’s that word again. And it’s communicating something that should shake us to our very foundations. The statement that God lives in us should be enough to take our breath away. But, the writer of 1 John goes on to say that God’s love is perfected, brought to completion, in us. Now, this may mean that God in Christ is working in us to bring our love to fruition – that is, to make us better lovers.
But it could also mean that we are, somehow, with all our inner loose ends and unfinished business, essential to the completion, the fulfilling of God’s love. That your learning to do and, more importantly, be love and my learning to do and be love is vital to the fullness of God.
Please don’t ask me to explain this. I can’t. I am simply flabbergasted by the implication that we are not just complicated reclamation projects, being rehabbed by God into dwelling places for God’s love, but that we are necessary elements of that love. We are photons without which the Great Light is diminished. We are essential particles of creation, vibrating with infinite potential. It’s not complete, it’s not full, it cannot come to fruition without us.
This is huge. And, for me, so new that I know I must move carefully into it, letting it work in me as I have learned to let Christ work in me. I offer it to you so that it may work in you also. Take heart from something else the writer of 1 John says — “We love because [God] first loved us.” We don’t have to manufacture this love. It is already flowing . Take heart from our gospel metaphor. We are branches, growing out of and of the same substance as and dependent upon the Vine.
But hold this – it is we, the branches, whose part it is to flower and bear the fruit. AMEN.
