"When we understand holiness as some impossible standard of perfection, we miss the point of holiness."

Rev. William Federici is Senior Minister at Emmaus United Church of Christ.  

Emmaus United Church of Christ is located at 900 Maple Avenue, Vienna, VA 22180. You can visit their web site at www.emmausucc.org.

Let us pray.

Most gracious, most excellent God, 
you are indeed with us in both the preaching and in the hearing of your word. Amen.

I have really good news for you this morning.

But first,
let me ask you...
when was the last time you were perfect?

I was absolutely perfect about a week ago.
I made absolutely perfect soft-boiled eggs absolutely perfectly.

Here’s the secret.

I pretend that I am a highly-renowned, world-class surgeon performing a ground-breaking operation.

Instruments are precisely laid out...
eggs, saucepan, spoon, fork, knife, 
butter, salt and pepper.

Everything is precisely timed....
toaster reader to toast when the eggs start to boil in the water, a watch whose minute hand I scrutinize with a hawk’s eye as it makes its way around the face.

Besides the all-important timing, the other part of the secret is the way I open the eggs.

Holding the egg, cooled with water between my thumb and forefinger, and with the a speed born of intuition, experience and skill, I hit the egg on the side of the still-hot saucepan at very, very exact angle.

There is no mess, no glop, no goo, just a thwack with the resulting clean break.

Then I hold a teaspoon, gently, yet firmly and scoop the egg out of its shell.  This is always accompanied by the most gratifying suction noise.

The texture is always perfect,
as is the white of the white, the yellow of the yolk,
the taste is always perfect.

For as long as I have been making them, my soft-boiled eggs
always, always, always turn out to be perfect...even when I have been dared and challenged by skeptical breakfast guests.

But that’s it.
That is the only thing I do that is perfect.
The only thing.

Yet, this morning, here in our text we have Jesus saying

"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father/mother is perfect."

He is talking to us, not to a carton of eggs.

Here we have Jesus, right smack almost in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, no less, telling us, commanding us to be perfect.

Right smack almost in the middle of the 111 verses that make up the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, as if those 110 other verses weren’t asking us to do enough...to do things you wouldn’t necessarily think were even possible.

Things like:

love your enemies, 
pray for those who persecute you,
turn the other cheek if anyone should strike you, 
do not worry about your life, 
do not judge, 
ask and it shall be given to you.

And we can do all this, Jesus seems to think, even while we are being the light of the world and the salt of the earth.

In other words, Jesus is saying....ok, my salty, cheek-turning, non-judging, non-worrying, enemy-loving bright lights,

be perfect.

And that’s not the all of it...he continues, 

be perfect as your heavenly father/mother is perfect.

That’s a very tall order.  Jesus is telling us to be as perfect as God.

So, when was the last time that you were perfect?
Or when was the last time you resolved to be perfect?
New year’s, your birthday, the beginning of summer?

When was the last time you tried to cut a deal with perfection?

It seems as if whenever there is a break in the order of things, when the rhythms of our lives change, we seem to make resolutions, some private, some public.

We can read GQ and Vogue and resolve to start looking just like the models, even though they have been airbrushed.

We can resolve to be the perfect member or the perfect minister of Emmaus, the perfect parent or uncle or aunt.

These resolutions are too big, too complicated.  They always contain the thread of their un-doing, they always are impossible goals to reach.

Once upon a time, I was sitting around with some friends, giving big, complicated answers to the question of what we were all going to do that summer.

My friend, Pete, said "this summer, I resolve to

a) climb a big mountain and
b) catch a big fish."

I was dumbfounded. such a simple answer - climb a big mountain; catch a big fish.

What, you might be asking, do this big mountain and big fish have to do with Jesus telling us to be perfect as our God is perfect?

Everything.  Because, Jesus never said to be perfect.

He said something better.

Perfect is an English mistranslation of the original Greek.

Perfect the way we know it in the sense of precise, flawless, soft-boiled eggs is really a hard-boiled sense of perfection.

That kind of perfect never came out of Jesus’ mouth.

In the original text, the Greek word is teleioi.

To be teleioi means to be perfect in the sense of 

being complete, 
being full grown,
to bring to an end,
to accomplish,
to have full measure.

Complete, full-grown, full-measure.

Our tall order text could be translated as be full grown, be complete, come to full measure, be whole.

Over in Luke’s gospel, this text has a parallel cousin, one in which Luke’s Jesus says, "be compassionate as your creator in heaven is compassionate."

Yet, back in Matthew, right smack almost in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is telling us how to accomplish all these things, how to come into full measure, completeness and compassion.

He is saying,

if you want to live as God’s children on this earth - and you do - 
if the kingdom of heaven is here and now - and it is - 
if you want to behold this here and now kingdom, this here and now life,
this here and now earth...
you can do it.

You can be holy simply by being whole.
You can be holy simply by being whole.

By being complete, compassionate, full-measured, and that, that

is perfect.

Holiness as wholeness,
rather than holiness as perfection.

Holiness as wholeness
rather than holiness as some impossible standard of perfection.

How differently this sounds from our usual understanding of what it means to be perfect!

When we understand holiness as some impossible standard of perfection, we miss the point of holiness.

We get ourselves and others making complicated resolutions, starting off on impossible quests that are doomed to fail... which lead to feelings of guilt and shame and lead us to be destructive.

The psychoanalyst Otto Rank talks about the disease of perfection and how a quest for what we commonly understand as perfection is a quest of the ego, the smallest part of the self, and not the deeply spiritual quest of the whole person, which is what Jesus is talking about.

Alice Miller, a theorist who was much in vogue over the past decade has written many books on this same theme. She also talks about how this elusive and illusive need for perfection has been passed on from each generation to the other, and how this need becomes life-threatening, sick-making and abusive, physically and spiritually.

If we miss the point and think that holiness is perfection and not wholeness, we tragically dwell on an illusive and elusive perfection. On a personal and social level, on a physical and spiritual level, we miss the whole point of what our personal and communal spiritual journeys are all about.

Jesus suggested that these journeys are about being whole, becoming complete, becoming our truest selves.

This is the "perfect" of Jesus.

How does that happen?  That happens by climbing that big mountain and catching that big fish.

Imagine with me a bit.

If we think of ourselves as a big circle, with a point in the middle, we can name this point "I" as in "I love."

We can think of this "I" as climbing a big mountain,
as reaching up and around into the top half of the circle,
up into the imagination, up into the heights of daring, 
of risk-taking, 
up into the bird’s eye perspective that puts things into their proper place.

What other things come into your mind when you think of reaching up, stretching out, of climbing a big mountain?

We can also think of this "I" as reaching down and around...catching a big fish, so to speak.

Reaching down into the depths of our lives, our secrets, our desires, our mysteries, reaching down as well into those things we tend to hide about ourselves, our fears, our prejudices, the things we’d rather not look at.

What other things come into your mind when reach down, catching a big fish?

Reaching up and around and reaching down and around
makes a circle.

Circles have always been a symbol of completion, for full-measure, for wholeness.

Circles have always in all times and cultures, been metaphors or symbols for the realization of the self, the whole self, the height and the depth of the self.

Be a circle.

Be perfect.

Yet what about that last tantalizing phrase in our text...
be perfect, as your heavenly father/mother is perfect....
is Jesus asking us to become our father/mother parent God?

Is Jesus asking us to turn into our parent?

In a way he is.

Turning into our parents is something that all of us fight or resist.  But we do. We do, in a way, turn into our parents.

My father’s grandmother was Swiss, and she kept house like a Swiss houseperson.  Now my father keeps house like a Swiss houseperson.  Nothing is ever out of place.  Nothing is ever dirty or even slightly dusty.  Everything is gleamed and polished.  Dishes and glasses are always washed. Towels are perfectly rolled.  Everything is folded, arranged, practically alphabetically put away.

You could hold the quarter bouncing Olympics on any bed in the house.

My father makes Martha Stewart look like Roseanne.  And what’s maddening is that he is nice about it.

It drove me out of my mind. It drives my brother out of his mind. We vowed to each other never to do it.

But very, very recently,
as I was admiring my rolled towels and other handiwork in the linen closet,
I stopped and noticed:
that I vacuum four days a week, 
go through Lysol faster than butter,
Windex anything remotely reflective, including a recent weekend guest,
and actually get out of bed to close the dishwasher.

I have turned into my father and my Swiss great- grandmother!!!!

On the divine side of things, following Jesus’ invitation, how wonderful to feel that we can indeed be more like our father/mother God.

How wonderful to feel that we can express more and more of the qualities associated with the divine: compassion, mercy, love and justice.

How wonderful to feel that we can indeed be more whole, just like our divine parent is whole.

God moves into wholeness as our awareness of God moves into wholeness.  As loving relationships grow and change, we and God grow in love with one another.

As God reveals more and more of God’s self, from God’s center point which to us is Jesus. If God is a circle, then Jesus is that point in time and space that shows God climbing a big mountain and catching a big fish.

Jesus is the Immanuel point in the circle of God, in the circle of the divine.

The God with us point.

A spiritual practice, 
a spirituality, based on perfection as wholeness, 
as holiness 
as wholeness 
would accent those words...with us.

God is with us spinning and spiraling, reaching, climbing, catching and stooping...  images of God and images of our selves unfold and unfurl together on the spiritual pilgrimage.

This mutual unfolding and unfurling of the divine and the human reveals the deep, deep power of the healing, full-grown, full-measured, complete, compassionate love in a world that is desperately crying for its triumph,

a world in which children go to school safely,
where no one is a refugee,
where no one suffers,
where everyone, but everyone, 
is compassionate, just, sane and whole.

Where everyone, but everyone is

holy.

Amen.

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