PERFECTION
February 25, 1990
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Matthew 5:43-48

"You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
-Matthew 5:48 (RSV)

That's quite an assignment. Be perfect. Not "try harder." Not “do
better and better everyday." Simply, “Be perfect..." and, to define it
further, if anyone needs further instruction... "as God is perfect."

That's quite an assignment.

It comes at the end of a sequence of moral teachings of Jesus that
seem to be increasing in intensity and strenuousness... The Sermon on the
Mount.

-You are salt of the earth

-Your goodness must exceed the goodness of the Pharisees who, as
everybody knows, were the moral superstars of his day...

-Anger is wrong. So is lust.

-You must turn the other cheek, don't resist evil, give away all
your clothes, pray for your persecutors, love your enemies...

~Be perfect.

The Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the most beloved and most
frequently cited portion of the New Testament, mostly in isolated,
manageable portions... And at a safe distance, the way we go to the Art
Institute to see Monet's "Haystacks" and are inspired by Monet's incredible
deftness and subtlety - without concluding that it is in us somehow to
paint like that, or even to aspire to. Or the way we watch, if God smiles
on the major league baseball negotiations meetings, and the owners and
players keep at it, as Shawon Dunston spears a hard hit ball off to his
right and then does what no human body ought to be able to do, pivots 180
degrees in the air and throws the ball 100 feet and nails the runner at
first, without concluding that one can do that...

The Sermon on the Mount, that is to say, as spectator activity,
something Jesus did and Peter and James and John approached; but not me,
slogging it out here in 1990, in a world of serious moral ambiguity...

where there doesn't seem to be any comfortable or clear moral alternatives

about the great issues of justice and morality... Slogging away day by day,
getting angry, feeling lust, living on the shadow side of what is right and
good in order to keep a job, or a relationship, or a reputation... Hoping

no one gets hurt as a result of how I live and hoping, that God, at the end
of the day, will somehow find the end result net too offensive

But - Be perfect? If there is anything we understand it is our
inperfection.

The combination of these moral imperatives can cause despair,
cynicism, guilt - or simply a rejection of the whole business... Thus it is
my proposal this morning that we take a second look, a careful look, to be
very certain we know what Jesus of Nazareth was saying and not saying...

First, the background: The simple fact is that we continue to define
religion in negative, not positive terms. And in that propensity we
continue a human tradition, thousands and thousands of years old. In
Jesus' day the law of Moses had become the instrument of faithfulness,
defining in negative terms, a person's relationship with God and with the
rest of the community. The common idiom has it that most of the good
things in life are either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Religious
morality usually comes to the same conclusion and it's unfortunate
corollary, namely that if you manage to avoid doing the wrong things,
eating the wrong foods, saying the wrong words, doing the wrong deeds, you
will have succeeded in fulfilling the moral law, or maybe even saving
yourself. That is the background against which we must hear these words of
Jesus.

The original hearers, the disciples sitting on top of the mountain,
the people at the bottom of the mountain - the Pharisees and seribes and
Saducees - standing around the perimeter of his ministry for three years -
those were not bad people. The Pharisees particularly were good. They
knew they were good. They had it made. They obeyed the law, all of it...
and what they heard Jesus saying was congratulations, but that isn't
enough. In fact, if that's all there is to your faith, you have missed the
point.

You have heard - “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." That's in
the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, twenty centuries before Christ. The
Jewish people picked it up from the Babylonians. It is the standard
foundation for public justice throughout much of the world. Its purpose
was to restrain the human propensity for overkill; it was a curb on
vengeance, and an attempt to set appropriate penal standards. No more will

be exacted from the perpetrator than he or she took: “eye for an eye,
tooth for a tooth." Jesus said, that's not it if we're talking about
faith. Jesus said “don't resist evil, turn the other cheek.’

That's revolutionary. When people have the courage and strength to
live it, things begin to happen. As a matter of fact, what changed the
laws and then the heart of this nation twenty years ago were television
images of young black and white people sitting at a lunch counter with a
jeering mob surrounding them, ketchup and salt and coffee-cream and spit: an
their heads and faces - not resisting evil... literally turning the other

2/25/90

cheek. The power of the Civil Rights Movement was Martin Luther King,

Jris. insistence on non-violence, on praying for the persecutor, loving the
enemy and seeing liberation as freeing both oppressed and oppressors from
the evil of racism.

Jesus was careful not to reject the traditional moral standards of
his culture. "I have not come to abolish the Taw," he said, “but to
Fulfill it." But, in point of fact, what he did was completely redefine
the nature of religion itself. He did it in the Sermon on the Mount by
selting up six antitheses, “You have heard that it was said,... but J say
to you." Six times he does that. Six times Jesus isolates a traditional
moral-religious precept, and enlarges on it, expands it, and has it begin
to define this new way of life he's talking about.

“You have heard that it was said... ‘You shall not
kill.'... But I say to you everyone who is angry with his
brother shall be liable to judgment.

Six times Jesus holds up traditional moral standards and says, in
essence, these laws are good, valid and necessary. But faithfulness to me
means more than these. The power and tension mount as he lays out the six
incidents until he comes to the finale, the climax... “You must be
perfect, as God is perfect." Now if religion is legalism, simply
following the rules - you and T are not going to make it or else Jesus was
wrong, absolutely irrelevant.

So let's look at the critical word - Perfect. People who spend
their lives in classrooms with biblical materials tell us that perfect is
probably an unfortunate English translation. Unfortunately, because it
plays so easily into our propensity to turn religious faith into legalism.
It does not mean morally flawless. In fact, it doesn't have anything to do
with traditional morality. The word perfect means complete, mature, full
grown, whole.

(Now let's back up and apply that to what he says about anger.)
Psychologists have assured us that it is unhealthy and ultimately
impossible to deny human feelings. You can't not feel anger. In fact,
Jesus did not. He got angry enough one time to knock over the tables of
the money changers and drive the merchants out of the temple.

But Jesus was right. It is connected to destruction, murder, even
self-destruction. You do not have to live out of your anger. You can be
adult enough to restrain the behavior which wants to grow out of the anger
you're feeling. One of my favorite Frederick Buechner vignettes is his
wonderful definition of anger -

"Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To
lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past,
to rol] over your tongue the bitter confrontations still to
come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you
are given and the pain you are giving back, in many ways it is a
feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are
wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."
{Wishful Thinking, p. 2}

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Perfection as maturity means not living oul of your anger.

Perfection as maturity means being alj that we can be - mature adults
in Christ. Apply it to another seemingly impossible admonition: "If anyone
sues you and takes your coat, give him your cloak as well." A Jewish man

in the first century, particularly a poor man, did not have a drawer full
of underwear, shirts and sweaters. He owned, T am told, two items of
clothing. A coat, an undergarment with sleeves, and a cloak, an outer
garment, also used as a blanket. For a poor man to give up both would
leave him naked.

Knowing that, I believe that Jesus! hearers knew immediately that he
was not proposing a new set of rules to be added to the old list. They
knew he didn't mean for them to be naked. They knew he was asking them to
think in a new way they had never thought before and then to live in a new
way... beyond the traditional negative definition of goodness, a way that
could only be described as complete, whole, mature. Generous - giving -
caring for the needy - responsible for the needy ~ related to the needy as
brother and sister... in a new way.

You have heard that it was said, "Love your neighbors and hate your
enemies." There is nothing particularly strenuous about that. In fact, it
is altogether passive. How you act in relation to anether human being is
determined by how that other person is acting toward you. If she is
friendly, so are you. If he is an enemy, SO are you. As we think about it
for a moment, we see that our personal identity is actually being
determined by that other person. Jesus wants more, a goodness beyond the
minimum standards. Jesus is here teaching something very important, namely
that true human life, mature, full human life, is determined not by other
people but by God; by God's grace and love actually beginning to operate in
your life. You and I are called to he neighbors regardless of how the
other is acting toward us. [See Fred Craddock in The Christian Century,
2/7-14/90]

Think about what a difference that would make in our closest
relationships... if instead of allowing a spouse or friend to control who
we are by hooking into our anger, resentment, pettiness... if somehow we
were adult enough not to respond in that vein... to love and accept and
forgive with disciplined intentionality. What a difference it would make.
Jesus told the disciples to emulate God in their dealings with other human
beings. And his point, the point of his whole life, in fact, was that God
is love - Gad loves all. God's love is inclusive - dependent on nothing in
the other person; that God's love comes to all individuals regardless of
their merit.

How different that was - and is - from traditional religion:
religion as keeping all the rules, avoiding all the evil. Religion as
legalism misses the point. Legalism suggests that our value, our identity
comes not from God but from what we do and how we do it. Legalism can keep
us in a perpetual state of guilt because we are not perfect. Legalism, if
superimposed on these difficult words of Jesus, makes our situation
enormously painful. We cannot measure up. We cannot live without the
range of feelings which are natural and belong to our humanity.

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Legalism leads to guilt and it also invites judgementalism...
constantly criticizing others because of their obvious imperfections.

The sad thing is, the shame is, that in adapting lepalism as a
religious lifestyle we have missed the point. We have missed the teaching
of our Lord that there is a whole new way of thinking offered here; a new
way of being human and faithful and Christian. A way based on Good News —-
God's love for us.

“Sin boldly and have great faith,“ Martin Luther advised. Living in
this world involves taking some risks, making moral decisions that are not
always clear. What Jesus taught his followers was not a new legal
prescription but a new way of being - created by God's love, motivated by
God's love, shaped by God's inclusive love for all - equally - without
reservation.

Sometimes it breaks through, right into the ambiguity of human life.
One of the very humbling and moving aspects of observing ethnic and
religious hatred become violent throughout the world is a renewed
appreciation that this country somehow managed to live through a Civil War:
managed to survive deep hatred and one of the most violent conflicts in
human history, certainly the most costly in terms of American lives lost
Part of the reason we survived a Civil War, part of the reason we are one
nation today, historians agree, not the only reason, but part of it, is
that the President of the United States at the time knew a little bit about
the creative power of redemptive love, knew a little bit about the Sermon
on the Mount, that is to say.

In his Second Inaugural Speech, as the war was coming to its
inevitable and awful conclusion, Abraham Lincoln looked ahead and said
things victors don't usually say -

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with
firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us
strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation's
wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for
his widow and orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a
just and lasting peace.”

What a mistake it is to see religion only in negative terms. How sad
to regard the Christian faith as nerely another set of rules.

What Jesus wanted of his followers was maturity, independence; he
wanted them to be adults living up to their full potential, living
thoroughly in the world, but on a radical new basis — God's perfect, all
inclusive love.

In one of Robert Fulgum's delightful little stories he tells about
visiting the Cathedral in Ulm, Germany and recalling one of its famous
characters, Hans Ludwig Babblinger. Babblinger, who lived in the sixteenth
century, thought he could fly, devised some wings, got lucky and caught an
up-draft and soared safely to the ground. When he was asked to repeat the
performance for the King, however, he went to a different place, caught a
down-draft and plunged into the river.

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ro

“The next Sunday, from the pulpit of the preat cathedral, the Bishop
of Ulm called Babblinger by name and shamed him for the sin of pride.”

“Human beings were not meant to fly" thundered the prelate.

Babblinger was so crushed by the accusing wrath of the Bishop, he
never appeared in public again and not long after, died of a broken heart.

Fulgum was watching a 747 jet plane, 35,000 feet overhead when he
thought of Babblinger and he mused:

“Historically, the symbol of the pulpit (and we could substitute
legalistic religion} has been the pointing, damning finger. Accusing men
and women of sin, failure, wickedness, iniquities, and the pride of
thinking too highly of themselves. Preaching that on this earth there is
no hope, in this life there is no glory.’

“I say the pulpit should stand for wings. Not angel wings or eagle
wings or any other wings you've ever seen. Wings of the holy human spirit
- wings that lift heart and mind to higher places." [It Was On Fire When I
Lay Down On It, p. 191-194]

Jesus said - “Be perfect."

It is finally, I think, a choice we must make. If we choose to live
in Christ, we are choosing to live under orders to love as inclusively and
thoroughly as God loves... That will mean making tough decisions, not
always simple and clear decisions... and it will never be easy.

There will be times when we will not be able to not resist evil...
when we cannot not be angry... when we will not turn the other cheek.

And in those moments, instead of despair, we nay remember that the
one who set the standards loves us -— lived for us - experienced every bit
of our lives with us ~- died for us, in fact - died so that we might live as
adults, free, strong... fully in this world.

It is quite an assignment... the promise is that we are not alone in
this. The promise is that God is with us, giving us the strength to
Jove... The promise is that we live in God's love; that our judge is also

our Savior.

eK *
You call us to live faithfully in a complicated world, O God... When
we are confused, remind us that we are loved. When we make inistakes,

remind us that we are forgiven. When we feel alone and frightened, remind
us that we are yours forever; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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