Holy and Perfect? Not me!

February 23, 2014

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; Matthew 5:38-48

7 Epiphany

Raise your hand if you would describe yourself as “holy”.  How about “perfect”?  Me neither.  And yet, that’s what God sets out for us as our tasks in our Old Testament and Gospel readings this morning.  From Leviticus, God tells Moses to tell the people: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”  And from Matthew, Jesus refers back to Leviticus, changing it just a bit as he tells the people: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

            The dictionary defines holy as "divine or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness; set apart”.  And defines perfect as “having no mistakes or flaws”.  They are words we use for God without much problem, but these aren’t usually words we think of for people, unless the person is Jesus who had a bit of an advantage on us, or maybe someone like Mother Teresa or St. Francis.  Or someone who lives out in the desert praying all the time, removed from the world.  Holy and perfect don’t seem like they work as well for people like us in a world like this.  People that are balancing and multi-tasking and rushing around all the time and confronted with all kinds of grey areas in the regular world.  These words seem irrelevant and impossible.

            So what if we look at them a little differently.  What if we think of the words holy and perfect more in terms of wholeness. 

            If you were at the Celtic service last week, you heard me mention that last Sunday on the way to church I heard Krista Tippett interviewing an artist about an exhibit called “Sacred” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  Pieces of what I heard stayed with me, so I read the transcript of Krista’s interview with Ann Hamilton, an artist who does huge interactive installations.  Ann calls herself a “maker” rather than an artist because she thinks the word is more accessible and all-encompassing.  Krista asked Ann how she kept up with her artwork in the midst of the busy-ness of her life and Ann’s answer has been bouncing in my head ever since as a helpful way for me to think about wholeness in life.  Ann talked about a time when life was way too busy for her to be even thinking about her usual artistic “making.”  She had a small child and the child was sick, so she was home worried and taking care of her child.  In the midst of that, she was in the kitchen making soup to comfort her child and she realized that in that moment she was still a “maker.”  Even though what she was doing looked and felt different than what her artistic “making” usually felt like, this piece was part of the same whole.

Maybe holiness and perfection are like that too.  If every fiber of our being is intimately connected to our God who made us and loves us and holds us close, then everything we touch, every word we say, every move we make, every relationship we are part of, has a potential for holiness.  A potential for responding to God, loving God, loving our neighbor, and pointing the way to God.

            This week in my house we celebrated the anniversaries of Maya’s and Sophia’s baptisms.  On Wednesday I realized the next day was Maya’s day so told her we’d celebrate and light her baptism candle.  When she woke up on Thursday morning she told Holden, “I’m getting baptized today and I’ll light a candle!”  She loves the idea of baptism, loves seeing baptisms in the font here and pretending to baptize her dolls and stuffed animals at home, so she was excited about the idea of getting baptized again.  And so we’ve been talking about how baptism works this week.  About how it only happens once for each person.  About how we splash water on the person getting baptized just like Jesus had for his baptism.  And about my favorite part, the holy oil that goes on our foreheads in a cross with the words "You are...  marked as Christ's own forever."  The cross is invisible, but it’s always there, marking us as set apart – belonging to Jesus forever.

I think that’s what these instructions for us to be “holy” and “perfect” really mean – learning to live into our identity as Jesus’ own.   In our baptisms, we are set apart for God and God’s purposes even, and maybe especially, in the midst of the dailyness of life.

The problem is, of course, that that all sounds very beautiful and worthy, but what does it mean?  One of my friends from seminary wrote in his blog this week the complaints he sometimes gets from parishioners that his sermons are too open and theological and they wish sometimes he would just tell them specifically and practically how to live out what he was talking about.  And he thought the readings this week would lend themselves to that kind of sermon.  Today’s readings are unusually concrete.  They are about how we live in the here and now.  About how we live our lives as those marked as Christ’s own people.

            What does holiness and perfection look like out in the real world?  What do those words mean when it comes to daily living?  Check out the examples in our readings this morning. 

In our Leviticus reading, there are so many random thoughts about what holiness might look like that my Bible labels this reading “Miscellaneous Instructions,” and it does have that feel to it.  Holiness is about so much more than we might have imagined.  Holiness is about how when you reap your fields you leave the edges so that the poor and the alien can have that part of the crop.  Holiness is about dealing with others honestly.  Holiness is about treating the disabled well.  Holiness is about not bearing grudges.  At its heart, holiness seems to be about that last line of the Old Testament reading “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

            And the Gospel is full of actual examples of how to be perfect – by turning the other cheek, going the second mile, giving to those who beg and ask to borrow.  And Jesus takes the Leviticus instruction to love our neighbor one step farther; we aren’t just to love our neighbor but also to love our enemies.  How we live with one another is the practical expression of the holiness and perfection God instills in us.  These readings aren’t about how we feel, but about what we do.

            I think each one of these examples is something to think about and apply to our own lives.  What grudges are we harboring, for instance?  Or what might it look like for us to turn our other check in some situation we are confronted with?  Since Lent is fast approaching, it occurred to me while working on this sermon that thinking through the pieces of these readings and trying to apply them to my life might be a good spiritual discipline during the weeks of Lent. 

But the example that intrigues me the most is the idea of leaving the edges of our fields unharvested so that people in need can reap the remainder.  I know at first it may seem like the most unlikely example to pursue, since how many of us (other than Don Heinrichs, maybe) have fields worthy of leaving the edges unharvested?  But when you get into it, this is actually a great, concrete example of integrating real life (what you do for a living, your property and toil) with how you love neighbor (by leaving a portion of the fruit of your labor for those in need).  What might that look like for us in the 21^st century?  Think about what you do for a living, or what you most love to do in your free time, or what you spend a lot of time doing.  Is there some way that you can offer the skills or results of your job, vocation, or hobby to those in need?

I can’t imagine how that might look in my own life yet, much less in any of yours.  We are all living different lives, with different family situations and different work situations and different struggles and heartaches and dreams.  So I challenge all of us to think about what that might look like specifically for each of us, practically in our own lives.  To think about how we each might live out our God-created identities as holy and perfect people.  And then try to do it, maybe just one little step at a time.

            And let me know how it goes, if you don’t mind.  Because we preacher types need to hear about how the Gospel plays out in practical and specific ways in your lives just as much as you need to hear us talk about how it works in ours!