We celebrated Veteran's Day this week, so we used the readings for the Independence Day liturgy. As you will notice in the homily, the text comes from Matthew (not Luke) and is in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount. I chose to focus on an aspect of the reading, recognizing what we were lifting up in the context of the service.
a Sermon for Proper 28C
Text: Matthew 5:43-48
GOD of Hope and Wonder, you reveal your dreams and desires to us and invite us to take them up and make them real. Please continue to trust in us. Amen.
We know that it can be a pretty tall order to be a Christian sometimes, don’t we? Our gospel this morning is at the end of the first act of the Sermon on the Mount, a sermon in which Jesus lays out the standards pretty thoroughly: Blessed are the poor, for instance. After a few minutes, he talks about how much more he is expecting than the Law: he says that we know the Law tells us not to mess around with someone else, but Jesus argues that if you even think about messing around, you have sinned. And then he says to not only love the people you like, but the people you don’t! Well! And as if it couldn’t get any worse, he says: “Be perfect.”
Are you kidding me Jesus? Be perfect. Man, that’s just ridiculous.
So what does it mean to be perfect? Perfect is, well…perfect. We know it as something impossibly true—the pinnacle of what can be perceived. We know that it is impossible to be perfect.
Our modern understanding goes back well over 2000 years to Plato. Two of the things that drove Plato’s understanding were dualism and perfection. To him, the world was structured in pairs: you’re in or you’re out; good or bad; right or wrong. If you had one, then you must have the other. And he saw humans as representing that dualism. We are made of a body and a soul. The soul is perfect and incorruptible, so our bodies, therefore, are entirely imperfect and completely corruptible. Disgusting flesh to go along with the truly perfect soul within. You can see how this has messed with Christian understanding from the beginning!
We might be tempted, then to see Jesus’s encouragement as suggesting we strive for perfection, since Jesus would understand that being perfect would be impossible. But Jesus doesn’t say “try to be perfect” or “drive toward perfection,” but “be perfect.”
But what does Jesus actually say? “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” Jesus isn’t a Platonist-he sees this as relational. Our perfection is related to GOD’s.
We are made in the image of GOD and we believe that GOD is perfect. For Plato, perfect is an abstraction—separate. To be perfect or to strive to be perfect would be our confronting GOD, elevating ourselves to GOD. We know from Scripture that this practice is wrong. And yet, Jesus seems to be encouraging this.
We ignore the character of the speaker at our own peril, however. Isn’t it Jesus who is preaching? Isn’t it GOD incarnate, come down to earth? Is it not GOD accepting that evil, corrupting, imperfect human flesh? And his words ring powerfully through the imperfect mouth of the human GOD: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.”
For Jesus, being perfect isn’t about some existential notion of who we are physically, but how we act. To be perfect is to act perfectly—and to act perfectly is to act as GOD acts—as Jesus acts among us.
Stanley Hauerwas, in a commentary discussing the Sermon on the Mount, describes it this way:
“Accordingly the sermon is not addressed to individuals but to the community that Jesus begins and portends through the calling of the disciples. The sermon is not a heroic ethic. It is the constitution of a people. You cannot live by the demands of the sermon on your own, but that is the point.” p. 61
Jesus doesn’t tell us to live as perfect copies of one another in happy harmony with Western culture. We are called to be real together and love one another, recruit weirdos to join us, and to love them too. We are called to change the world so that the sons and daughters of these veterans—and all succeeding generations don’t face the horrors of war. We are called to bring the dream of GOD to this very place at this very moment.
It is a bold GOD that shares perfection with its children.
NOTE: This homily was preached from simple notes and represents not only an approximation of what I said, but some of what I intended to say. In other words, it might sound different.
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