Anne Vouga St. Paul’s, Henderson
Epiphany 7, Year A February 20, 2011
Matthew 5:38-48 and Leviticus 19:1-18
When I was an elementary school teacher, I did a good deal of reading on the education of gifted children. One of the most damaging things that teachers and parents of a gifted child can do, I learned, is to praise the child for her perfection. Constant admiration and congratulations for straight A’s, for getting all the answers right, or for winning the contest, create young perfectionists, children whose self-worth is totally bound up in their accomplishments, children who think that they are loved only when they achieve. As a recovering perfectionist myself, I cringe, then, when I read Jesus’ words in our Gospel lesson for today: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Like well-meaning but misguided teachers, how often we Christians use these words to perpetuate a kind of moral perfectionism! How many preachers have waxed eloquent from the pulpit about the “gifted” saints of God who are perfectly humble, and perfectly chaste, and totally unworldly, with never a willful or a cross thought in their heads. “God loves me only when I achieve perfection,” we conclude, even though we know intellectually that God’s love has no such limits.
The weight of the expectations in today’s Gospel, combined with the weight of God’s similar command for “holiness” in our reading from Leviticus (“You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy”) are enough to cause the perfectionists inside of all of us to throw up our hands in despair. But wait! Before we either give up hope or try to reason our way out from under the weight of today’s readings, let us look at what God is really asking. Let us not get hung up on the words “perfect” and “holy.”
“Perfect,” here, does not mean morally perfect. It does not mean avoiding all sin. The Greek word that Matthew uses in this imperative of all imperatives means perfection in the sense of arriving at the goal. It means “completeness,” or “wholeness” or “accomplishing one’s God-given purpose.” “Do things all the way,” Jesus says here, “in the way that God does them all the way.” “Accomplish what God has created you to do, as God does what God sets out to do.” Or as Eugene Peterson translates in The Message: “Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.” God is complete and perfect in God’s love. God made us to love just as abundantly. Therefore, we are to live that way.
Interestingly, God’s command in Leviticus for us to be “holy” as God is “holy,” is very similar to Jesus’ imperative here in Matthew. God is holy, in the sense of being set apart, in the sense of being strange, of being above and beyond all of our categories and rationalizations. Yet, what is it exactly that sets God apart from the world? What is it that makes God’s ways strange to us? Is it just God’s power and might that set God apart? I don’t think so. God’s holy strangeness lies above all in God’s abundant love and grace, in a generosity that is totally foreign to our human way of seeing the world. A God who makes the warm sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends life-giving rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous, a God who loves God’s enemies and who shuns vengeance, a God who honors the poor and lame as much as the rich and famous—that is the strange and holy God that we are being asked to imitate. To be holy is not to puff oneself up with piety or to lock oneself away from the world. To be holy is to love the world with God’s strange kind of love. To be perfect is to act in the image of the gracious God who created us in love and who is pouring out that sustaining love upon us still. As it is written in I John, “if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
Both Leviticus and Jesus are very clear about how we are to go about living in love. It sounds simple. We are to care for the poor and the foreigner. We are to be honest with one another. We are to act justly with one another. We are to love each other—even our enemies--as we love ourselves. We are to resist evil in non-violent ways. St. Paul gets it. He writes to the Ephesians: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
If it were only that easy. The problem with today’s readings is not that they are unclear or difficult to understand. The problem is that, despite their apparent simplicity, they are difficult to do. In Chapter 19, Matthew tells us the story of Jesus and the rich young man, who asks Jesus what he needs to do to have eternal life. Jesus tells him to follow the commandments, such as they are presented in our reading from Leviticus. “Oh, I do that,” says the young man. What else do I need to do?” “Well, to be perfect,” answers Jesus (and here’s our word again), “to be perfect, to follow God completely and wholly, you need to give away all of your possessions and follow me.” That is when the rich young man turns sadly away.
I was in New York City last week. My children sent me on a mission to walk a few blocks from my hotel on the Upper West Side to get H&H bagels (which claim to be the best bagels in the world!) and to bring them, on the subway, to Brooklyn, where my daughter lives. I was tense about this adventure. I didn’t know exactly where the H&H store was, and I had never been by myself all the way to Brooklyn on the subway before. By the time I found the store, I was running late. As I approached, I saw a huge line ahead of me, too, snaking out of the store onto the sidewalk. Sighing inwardly, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a bedraggled, homeless man standing on the curb right outside the bagel store. “I’m hungry,” he called out to passers-by. “I’m hungry,” he called out to me. No one seemed to be stopping to give him anything. You would not think that it would be rocket-science for a priest in God’s Church to give a bagel or two to a hungry guy on a sidewalk outside a bagel store, would you? I know what the Scriptures say. I even thought to myself as I went into the store, “This is easy. I don’t need to worry about giving him money, I just need to get some extra bagels and give them to that man.” But at the same time, I worried. “Should I even approach him?” I thought fearfully while standing in line. “What if he grabs my purse or yells at me? Does he really even want bagels? Should I do this, or not?” Before long, other worries crowded out all thoughts of the hungry man. “What kind of bagels did my kids say to get? How much cream cheese should I get? How many people will be there and how many bagels will they eat? Now, which subway lines do I take again?” Worry after worry passed through my mind as I waited in line, the homeless man much too quickly forgotten. Finally, late and bagels in hand, I came out of the store to see him still standing there, and he was still hungry. I had forgotten the simple act of getting extra bagels. But I wasn’t about to get back in that long line again to get some more. Afraid not to have enough if I shared, I scurried quickly by, eyes on the pavement. I knew what Jesus expected of me in that moment. I knew the story of the rich young man. I knew the Sermon on the Mount. I knew about the feeding of the 5000 with only 5 loaves. I knew all about God’s abundant love, so why didn’t I feed the hungry that day? What got in my way? Mainly fear, as usual. Fear of the stranger; fear of not having enough; fear of getting lost; fear of upsetting my kids by being late; fear of rejection. Fear is what usually stops me from the wholeness to which God calls me.
Think for a moment about what most often stops you from following God’s command to love. Is it shame? Resentment? Fear? There are all kinds of shadows deep inside our hearts that block our God-given response to live generously, to love one another and to love God. The good news, however, is that the closer that we draw near to the One in whose Loving Image we are made, the more we can be transformed into that likeness. The closer that we draw near to the one who was crucified to show us perfect Love, the more strength we will find to mirror his strange sacrifice. St. Augustine would say to those receiving the Body of Christ at the Eucharist: “Receive who you are. Become what you have received.”[1] As we approach the altar today for the Eucharist, I invite each of us to hand over to God those things that block God’s love from flowing through us. I invite each of us to receive our whole, complete selves—our perfect selves--from Jesus Christ, to grasp and taste the gift that we receive, to become true sons and daughters of God, true brothers and sisters of one another.
Receive your perfection. Become the perfection that you have received.
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