Perfect

A sermon for Sunday, July 26, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who knows each of us and calls us by name, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known among us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I have to admit, though it likely won’t surprise anyone here, that I have, throughout my life, been haunted by our last verse from the gospel of Matthew this morning. I know you know it. “Be ye perfect therefore as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” I just never seemed to be able to be perfect. Once, in fifth grade, I got 99 questions right on a multiplication test, and I cried because I didn’t get a hundred. I don’t care to count the number of paper towels I’ve cleaned up from public bathroom floors and sinks, washing my hands afterwards, but somehow, still, there are always more. And let’s not even talk about the time at the sixth grade science fair when I routinely said tongue dispensers instead of tongue depressors or in eighth grade when I said die-sentry instead of dysentery in a speech in front of the entire Soil and Water Conservation Committee. Y’all, it was rough.

But of course, we all know that nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We’re not God. So what does Jesus mean by, Be ye perfect? What superhuman feat is Jesus asking from us now?

Well, as I said last week, I think that in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is showing us how to think about the highest ideals of Christian life. Again, this is by no means the only place that Jesus teaches us about the way to live our lives, as I know y’all know, but I take this chapter of the Sermon on the Mount as a couple of examples about the way we can think about the life that Jesus of Nazareth, our Christ, is calling us to live, and the greatest example of that is his call for us to be perfect. It hinges on what the word “perfect” means. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Let’s start by looking at the first four verses in our passage this morning, verses 38-42. The piece of context that we miss here is that “An eye for an eye” is actually a law, going back to the code of Hammurabi, an ancient set of Mesopotamian laws from nearly 2000 before Jesus’ birth, which the Jewish scriptures adapt into their laws, and then continue to adapt and interpret over the centuries. The law “an eye for an eye” is actually a de-escalation of violence, as far as ancient laws are concerned. It means that someone in power can’t overreact against a slight done by another. It’s not “a head for an eye,” it’s “an eye for an eye.” It’s a law of equal retribution. It’s actually the basis behind some of our legal thought today, but instead of an eye for an eye, we ask, “How much money should the aggressor have to pay for an eye replacement?” Actually, in Jesus’ day, in the Second Temple Period, this same type of system, money instead of physical retribution, was already taking shape.

So Jesus here is talking with the law, with justice, in mind. When someone hits you across the right cheek, offer them the other. In Jesus’ day, if you hit someone on the left cheek would mean backhanding them or hitting them with your unclean hand. Hitting someone’s left cheek would do them a great dishonor, but it would be an escalation of violence. Anyone who let their anger get the better of them in this way would bring dishonor on themselves.

It’s the same idea with the coat and the cloak. The coat mentioned here is really something more like a shirt, a lower-cost item that could be replaced or even done without, but cloaks are expensive. If you were travelling and couldn’t find a place to stay, your cloak was your shelter.

Suing for someone’s cloak was actually illegal in Jesus’ day, since it would deprive the poorest among them of their only shelter. So if, when sued for your shirt, you handed someone your cloak too, and they accepted it, they would bring dishonor on themselves.

And the same again with the “go one more mile.” Roman soldiers could, under Roman law, requisition anyone to carry a burden of up to twenty pounds for about a mile. Going the second mile would bring dishonor on the soldier who let you do it. It’s a way of protesting the law by exposing its injustice. With each of these examples, Jesus tells his followers to be exemplary in the face of violence and legal injustice, because your actions will show the injustice for what it really is.

Which is why he follows these teachings up with verse 44: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. This is the wisdom that underlies the previous teachings. We don’t go the extra mile because we want to enrage or shame our enemies or those who hurt or oppress us. We do it because we love them.

Now, love here is that agape love we Christians hear so much about. It’s the unconditional, unending, persistent love that God has for each of us. It’s the love that we so often experience as grace. It’s the love that creates us, saves us, and sustains us. It’s the love that holds us tight, just as we are, and the love that never lets us go, never stops seeking us out, even when we ourselves have strayed. It’s the love that wakes up our conscience, the love that speaks to us in a still small voice, calling us to do better because we know better. It’s the love that stays with us all our days and the love that will bear us home when our days come to an end.

So it’s clear that agape love is not passive love. It is not love that lays down in the face of wrong. It’s love that goes the extra mile whenever there’s injustice. It doesn’t do that for its own sake. It does it for the sake of the one committing injustice.

See, if we love our enemies, we want the best for them, and that means that we can’t let them remain abusers and oppressors. When you abuse someone else, when you oppress someone else, there’s something fundamental that breaks inside you, just like something fundamental broke in Cain when he killed Abel. And healing from that break can be the work of a lifetime. But, as we all know, admitting you have a problem is the first step to healing. If you don’t know there’s a problem, you don’t know that you need to seek out help.

So Jesus tells us to go that extra mile for the Roman solider. It will, we pray, wake them up to the reality of the injustice of the law. Give away your cloak to those who sue you for your shirt. It will, we pray, wake them up to the reality of the injustice of their suit. Turn the other cheek to someone who hits you. It will, we pray, wake them up to the reality of the injustice of their violence. We pray, we pray, we pray for our enemies to wake up, so that we can both heal.

Because Jesus here understands the deep truth that the rest of us forget over and over again. We cannot be free until all of us are free. It’s all of us or none of us. Or, to use later Christian language, Christ is the head of the body, the firstborn, the first to enter into the fullness of life that is promised to all of us, but all of humanity is the body of Christ. If we leave anyone behind, we are incomplete.

This is what Jesus means when he says perfect. The Greek word is τέλειοι, meaning mature, full-grown, having reached your goal or purpose, or complete. It’s not about memorizing your multiplication tables or being tidy or knowing how to pronounce every word. We will all make mistakes like that. No, being perfect, as our Parent in heaven is perfect, means being perfect, being complete, in love. We are complete when we can love our enemies, and those we look down on, just the same as we love our siblings. We are perfect when we realize that without each other, we are incomplete.

This is hard. Believe me, I know it. It is so much easier to write off others as lost causes, to proclaim that they are beyond saving. (And sometimes it’s easier to believe that about ourselves, but that’s another sermon.) It is so much easier to let fear overpower us, the fear of what we might have to give up in order to love one another, and let that stop us from actually loving one another. It is so much easier to stay divided instead of doing the work of repenting, forgiving, restoring, and reconciling, because that work is hard.

And it’s hard because we, too, can be Christ’s enemy. I know that I have been the Roman soldier, asking for too much from someone who is struggling because it’s allowed under the law. I know that I have been the accuser, asking unjustly for an apology or a repayment that I was not due. I know that I have been the one to strike another, standing there with my hand ready for the backslap. I know that I have, even unknowingly, been on the side of the oppressor and it has only been through the deep love of my Black siblings, my Latinx siblings, my Native siblings, my LGBTQIA siblings, my siblings with a disability, my siblings in poverty, and my siblings struggling with mental health and addiction that I have in turn learned how to love them better and in so doing become more complete. The love of those who we have considered enemies heals us.

It’s so hard to do this work of love from either end, especially now, when there’s a pandemic, when everything feels so tense and uncertain, when we can’t receive the normal comfort we would from our families, whether they be the families we grew up with, the families we’ve formed, or our church family. Every day exhausts us with its challenges and real, palpable worries, especially those who are caregivers and peacemakers by nature, those who long deep in their hearts for conflict to cease and get eaten up from the inside out when it won’t. I know. I feel this way too. It is a hard thing for Jesus to ask this of us, always, but especially now.

But my friends, my friends, I promise that we can do this hard thing, and I don’t promise this under my own authority. This is a promise that comes from Jesus himself, the one who sent us the Holy Spirit, our advocate and comforter, the one who goes alongside us and strengthens us to do this hard thing. You are always, always, wrapped up in the arms of Almighty God and there is nothing that can change that. For who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We are always surrounded and supported by the love of God that will not let us go.

So go out and love. Love those who love you, freely, as best as you can, because you are loved by God. Go out and love those who you usually ignore or disregard, freely, as best as you can, because you are loved by God. Go out and love your enemies, freely, as best as you can, because you are loved by God. Go out and let others love you, freely, as best as they can, because God can and will change our lives through the love of others, and know that in all of these attempts at love, God’s grace will come rushing in to fill the gaps that we cannot bridge. Stand surrounded and grounded in the love of Jesus our Savior, knowing that no matter how difficult the conversation, how painful the lesson, how frightening the prospect, we can love and be loved by our enemies, and that love will heal this hurting world.

In fact, in the end, love will make it perfect.

Amen.