This summer I will be turning 30. This milestone event is not one that comes with much grief but has given me the opportunity to reflect on these last nearly 30 years. In this reflection, I have realized something, something that has been a bit disappointing. As I measure up these last nearly 30 years, I have realized that I thought my life would be perfect by now, you know, just like Jesus tells us to be at the end of our gospel reading.
In many ways, my life can seem perfect. I have a loving marriage, 2 happy healthy children, a job that I love, a community to belong to and experience God’s presence in. I guess the part of perfection that is missing is that I thought, after spending most of my life preparing to be something, now that I am many of those things, I’m shocked at the amount of growth still left to do.
I thought I had arrived, only to learn this is not a final destination, only a part of a greater journey.
It’s quite disappointing to realize that you won’t figure out everything by age 30, but anyone with greater wisdom, life experience, or maybe just common sense probably could have told me this. But it brings me back to our text. “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect”
As Christians, I think sometimes we can think as our faith milestones as markers that we have arrived or reached our spiritual destination, at least in this lifetime. Whether baptism, confirmation, or a mountain top experience, sometimes our faith can feel a bit like my perceptions of turning 30. We believe in Jesus, we have arrived. But yet it’s really just another starting point and no where close to a final stop.
As we hear this call to be perfect, it may feel like Jesus is setting an unattainable goal in front of us. Especially as Lutherans, with our beautiful theology of sinner and saint… well to just be perfect doesn’t really fit that description. Or our emphasis on God’s unending grace. If we were perfect, would we need it?
To answer these questions and understand what Jesus could be talking about, we must dig into the text a bit deeper. When looking at the Greek word that translates to perfect, a better word choice would have been something along the lines of completion or an intended goal. This more accurate translation changes the way we hear Jesus’ command from a flawless lifestyle to one that is continually working toward something.
That something is also not an ambiguous goal.
This call to persistence comes in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is presenting what the Kingdom of God is all about - its ethics, its practices, and its make up. He shares what it means to be blessed by lifting up the ones who had been put aside, the hurting, the hungry, the oppressed, those striving for peace and being persecuted in Christ’s name. Calls us to be salt and light, shares wisdom and new interpretations of God’s law concerning some of the very basic characteristics of being in relationships and truth-telling, and then into today’s text.
Jesus again reinterprets God’s law. “You have heard it said” “but I say to you” each time calling us to go beyond a retaliation and 'get even' model of justice, and instead calls us to something more, to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give up your cloak also.
These calls to go beyond are not just out there comments Jesus says to illustrate how far we need to go, these would have been real examples to the people whom Jesus was gathered with to show just how far God’s love calls us to resist evil.
Not only to not fight back, but to give more to those who take from you.
To pray for those who persecute you.
Because anyone can love the people who love them, even the tax collectors.
But Jesus calls us to a countercultural behavior and lifestyle this is persisting to live a life transformed by God’s love and grace.
This is what it means to be about the Kingdom of God.
This also comes as an address to a whole community and even uses the plural form of “you” so a little more like “all y’all” are to work toward the goal of living out God’s kingdom.
We persist in this kingdom work together.
We persist on a journey to continue to strive to life lives transformed by God’s love, not to earn God’s love or grace, Jesus took care of that for us, but we are to be communities transformed by God’s love and grace in such a way that
in the face of hate we persist to love
in the face of brokenness, we persist to reconciliation
the face of fear, we persist to hope
These are kingdom values, God’s intended goals for communities of disciples to persist to and we do it because God so perfectly and persistently strives for this kingdom for our sake.
Amen.
Thank you for these words of persistence and going the extra mile.
ReplyDeleteJames says, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (1:2-4)