Karen Karpow
United
First Sunday in Lent
Psalm 25.1-10
An Excuse to Be Better
“Are you
going on to perfection?” the bishop asks.
Many of us
laugh nervously. One brave soul says,
“You bet!” (We should probably modify
that to “You could place a wager on
that if Methodists didn’t have a strict policy against gambling.”)
“Are you
going on to perfection?” The person next
to me leans over and whispers, “Obviously.”
“Are you
going on to perfection?”
What kind
of question is that? Well, it’s one of
the historical questions asked of every candidate for ordination in the
“By the
grace of God, I am.”
V V V
What does
it mean to go on to perfection? Exactly
what it says: to move in a positive
direction, to make progress, with the goal of becoming perfect, as Christ
commands in Matthew 5.48:
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly
Father is perfect.
Does
anybody else find that a little intimidating?
Perfect? What is Jesus
thinking? It seems outrageous, really,
especially to a reformed perfectionist like myself. I’m much less obnoxious than I used to be,
though I still have an eagle eye for typos and I do like my grammar just
so. I was much worse about the
perfectionism thing when I was younger.
Looking back on it, I suspect I was a complete pain.
But since
he’s not here today to claim his dinner—the rule is that I buy dinner for
anyone whose story I use in a sermon, as long as they’re here to hear it—I’ll
tell you a story about my husband’s former perfectionism. When he was a young man, still very excited
about his beard, Serge was a fanatic about a perfect close shave. He had a beautifully groomed mustache—which
he still had years later, when I met him—and a whole collection of different
shaving implements for the rest of his face and neck: single blade and double blade razors, a
couple of electric shavers, shaving gel in a can, shaving soap and brush. He had a routine by which he switched off
between them. He had to use the
electric shaver a couple of times a week, even though it gave a much less than
perfect shave, because otherwise his face would have been hamburger.
One day
when he was getting a haircut, the barber said, “What happened to your
face?” (It was covered with nicks and
scrapes, maybe a little scrap of toilet paper to stop the bleeding.) Serge said he was on a quest for the perfect
shave, and asked if the barber had any tips.
“Yeah,” the barber said.
“Relax. It grows back no matter
what you do. Don’t try so hard.”
But don’t
we have to try hard if we want to be perfect?
Jesus commands us to be perfect—not to be perfectionists. It’s easy to get confused. Isn’t a perfectionist someone who pursues
perfection? Not exactly. Here’s the difference:
·
Perfection: state of being without flaw or defect.
·
Perfectionism: a disposition to feel that anything less than
perfect is unacceptable.
God is
perfect—without flaw or defect. Thank
God, God is not a perfectionist.
Otherwise, we’d be in big trouble.
If God suddenly decided that anything less than perfect had to go, I
think most of us would be gone. I
certainly would be. God wants us to
become perfect—not to be perfectionists.
We’re supposed to direct our attention to our own flaws, work on our own
set of improvements, not worry about other people’s. It’s not up to us to say who is acceptable or
not. It’s not even up to us to say
whether we are acceptable or
not. That question has already been
answered—by Jesus, who died for us. God
loves us, and has declared us acceptable.
Not perfect—but acceptable nonetheless.
Perfectionism
gets in the way of grace, of forgiveness—of perfection. If you’ve ever spent much time around a
perfectionist, you know it can be exhausting and frustrating and, in fact,
de-motivating. Perfectionists tend to be
better enough than most of the people around them to give them the moral high
ground in the superiority department.
They can say that they are only expecting—demanding—of others what they
themselves do, and that might very well be true. However, it is my experience that there is no
pleasing them—not for long, anyway—so why bother? I just don’t live up to their standards. When I get carried away, I don’t even live up
to my own standards. I have not ever met
a single perfectionist, including myself, however, who was perfect, “without
flaw or defect.”
John
Wesley fully believed it was possible, though.
Back in Wesley’s time, Methodists used to meet at least twice a week—for
worship, of course, and also for class meeting.
Classes were small groups that met mid-week for Bible study, prayer, and
what we would call “sharing.” The class
leader would ask, “How goes it with your soul?” and “Are you going on to
perfection?” People would reflect
publicly on the progress they were making toward being like Jesus. That kind of accountability provides…focus. If I know I’m going to have to tell my group
about how I yelled at my daughter not because she did much of anything wrong,
but because I was stressed out, I might think twice before I lose my
temper. With practice, and by the grace
of God, Wesley thought it was possible that someone might reach
perfection. He knew that he himself had
not, but who was he to judge someone else’s report? (A habit of being overly critical interferes
with perfection, you know.) He would
listen patiently when people occasionally came to him to tell him how they had
become perfect.
What,
exactly, did Wesley mean by “perfect”?
He did not mean a person who
no longer makes mistakes—“It is as natural for a human being to mistake
as to breathe,” Wesley explained. We
will always make mistakes because we don’t know everything. Rather, he meant
…one in whom is 'the mind which was in
Christ,' and who so 'walketh as Christ also walked;' [one] 'that hath clean
hands and a pure heart'… and who, accordingly, 'does not commit sin.'
To be perfect is to be free of sin. The process of becoming perfect in the
Christian sense, attaining clean hands and a pure heart, begins when we are
made right with God. This happens when we accept Jesus’ sacrifice for our sake,
and let him apply that gift to our life.
At that very point, we are set free from guilt and sin—forever. The war is won—but we don’t always behave as
if that is true. In us, the battle
continues. The process of going on to
perfection lasts a lifetime. The Holy
Spirit works gradually on our soul, cleansing away all sin. For most people, as we understand it, perfection
comes at death. Even so, Wesley
emphasized that God can “cut short God’s work” to bring sanctification—total
perfection—in a moment, rather than as the culmination of a lifetime of
striving. Although he could not name
anyone who attained this glory in life, he believed that it was possible.
In response to the critics of this
doctrine—and there were some, as you might imagine—John Wesley explained that
if, in fact, all things are possible for God, then how can anyone refuse to
accept the possibility of being made perfect through Christ’s grace?
In other words, what have you got to
lose by believing that perfection is possible?
V V V
This is
the message of Lent. These forty days
are a time set apart from our usual lives.
During Lent we prepare ourselves for Easter by trying to be better, in
some way, than we usually are.
I think
that most of us know we could be better than we are. I suspect we could all name a tiny
improvement or two, some progress we could make toward perfection. Don’t you want to be better? But change of any sort is hard, and many of
the improvements we might want to make would cost us time or effort or
discipline. And the thought of “forever”
can be a bit intimidating. In our “Three
Simple Rules” discussion yesterday morning we talked about what it might be
like to “do no harm” (Rule #1)…ever. To
do our very best never to cause any harm to anyone or anything. And we easily came up with a lot of reasons
why we might not want to commit ourselves to that.
But Lent
gives us an excuse to try. During this
six-week period of preparation, we can experiment with different ways of
getting closer to God. Fasting from
sweets or chocolate or beer, as some people do, is a fine thing—but we can also
try something different. We can try
fasting from gossiping, or complaining, or procrastinating. We can let the Holy Spirit choose one
improvement we can practice during Lent.
The key to
this is found in our scripture reading today, from Psalm 25:
4 Make me to
know your ways, O Lord;
teach me your
paths.
5 Lead
me in your truth, and teach me,
for you are
the God of my salvation;
for you I wait
all day long.
God’s path leads to
perfection. If we place our lives in the
care of the Holy Spirit, we will know what to change, and will have the power
to change it, a little bit at a time.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt once
said, when a group of people came to see him about a program they wanted him to
implement as President: "I agree
with you, I want to do it, now make me do it." Lent is our time to do it, whatever it
is. Lent gives us an excuse to do better
than we normally do; to be better than we usually are.
Let’s let go of any lingering
perfectionism—any part of us that judges the less-than-perfect to be
unacceptable. That judgmentalism gets in
the way of improving anything. Once
we’re free of perfectionism, we are free to go ahead and pursue the
perfect. What have you got to
lose by believing that perfection is possible?
Are you going on to
perfection? [Congregation replies:] By the grace of God, I am.