Scripture: Matthew 5:43-48.
I said last week that I would have something to say about the non-financial aspects of stewardship, and I do have something I want to say along those lines. I have a thought that I want to try to express, but I’ve been trying to express this thought for some time, both here and in other contexts as well, and I’m not sure how adequately I’ve done it before, or how adequate I’ll be today.
But speaking of adequacy, let’s start today with the scripture, in which Jesus suggests a standard that’s a little bit higher than adequacy, namely perfection. This is probably not an obvious stewardship text, but to me it has a lot to do with stewardship, at least as I’m thinking about it today. But I’ll have to work up to that. Let’s start, as I say, with the text.
“Be perfect, therefore, as God in heaven is perfect.” Why would Jesus say such a thing, and what could he possibly meant by it? Psychologically, humanly, this just never seemed to me to be very good advice. None of us are, after all, perfect. None of us are gonna be. And people who somehow think they ought to be perfect, or have some inner urge to be perfect—such people are very likely to drive everyone crazy, themselves included, themselves most of all. Spending our lives trying to measure up to some impossible standard, and worrying about all the ways we have fallen short in the past, just doesn’t seem to be what we should be striving for. We would all be much happier and healthier to just give it up.
So for a long time, I had no answer to the question of why Jesus would tell us to be perfect—like God. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have the definitive (the perfect) answer. I didn’t have even a very good answer…or even an adequate answer…or even a plausible one. I didn’t really have an answer at all. As far as I was concerned, this was one of Jesus’ inscrutable sayings (of which he has several), where I could easily envision myself as one of the disciples, listening and nodding my head and hoping Jesus wouldn’t ask me if I understood what he was saying—because I didn’t.
Then, somewhere along the line, embarrassingly far into my ministry, I read a commentary on this passage that said that from a linguistic point of view, the word which is translated in most Bibles as “perfect” doesn’t really have the connotation of perfect in the sense of just right, or perfectly done, or morally perfect, but that the word “perfect” here has more of the sense of being “whole” or “complete”. This is not just a question of translation, but a question of understanding, and when I read this rather dry, technical commentary on this scripture, it began to give me a different way of looking at things, and it inspired me to at least have some thoughts about what Jesus might have meant.
First of all let’s talk about the perfection of God. The meaning of perfection as I was just talking about it suggests that the perfection of God is not exactly a moral perfection. There’s a song or chorus that I’m sure many of us know: “God is so good…” And often we do think of God that way, don’t we? At the same time we all know those passages in the Bible where God doesn’t seem so good, where God is commanding the destruction of whole groups of people. At one point King Saul was punished by God for not destroying everyone and everything of the Amalekites. He had spared the king and a few animals. Sometimes God doesn’t even seem good when God is doing something good like freeing the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. But what about the Egyptian army that God drowned in the Red Sea. Couldn’t God have just maybe drugged them up good so that they would become real mellow? That would be a good thing for God to do to all armies—just make everyone real mellow. Lots of times in Bible even God doesn’t seem to pay any attention to what Jesus had to say in the first part of our scripture today, the part about loving our enemies.
Now I know that we don’t have to accept this image of God—the war maker, the destroyer, the avenger—we don’t have to accept this as a true image of God. And I don’t. Not only does my theology not include a bloodthirsty God. My theology does not include a God who visits misfortune on people as a punishment, or as a test, or for any reason. So in one sense I do believe that God is good. God’s will is for good to come to us, all of us. But my theology does say that there is more to God than goodness. God is more, a lot more, than good, and the perfection of God is the full richness of the being of God, which we, of course, can’t in any way begin to understand.
If I can refer back to the service, almost a month ago now, where we lifted up the issue of inclusive language, and especially the language we use about God…in a way we were talking then too about the perfect-ness of God. As I understood what everyone was saying that morning, it was partly just this: that we not be limited or limiting in the ways we think or feel or talk about God. It is not only a question of gender, though gender concerns are important. It is a question of trying to capture in our language as much of the reality of God as we are able and not cutting off from ourselves whole aspects of God’s being. It is also not only a question of language, though language is important. It is not only a question of inclusive language but seeking more inclusive notions of God. It is a question of how we imagine God. It is a question of who God is for us.
This scripture about the perfection of God has led me to bring this up again, because inclusive language is not a topic that we can sort of isolate, focus our attention on for one Sunday, and then move on to some other topics—not unless we can say that God is a topic we will focus on occasionally and then move on to something else. Nor is this some small part of church life that we have to figure out how to deal with. If the underlying question is “who is God for us” and part of that is how “who God is” gets reflected in our language, then this is necessarily a concern for all of us, all the time—and we need to be conscious of how we are referring to God and describing God, whether we are giving a sermon, listening to a sermon, giving a children’s message, listening to a children’s message, reading the scripture, listening to the scripture, praying openly, praying silently. We are all constantly engaged in exploring who God is for us, and as I say part of that is being aware of the language we use to do our exploring, and our believing, and our responding.
When we refer to God with predominantly male language, we make God one-dimensional. And we do this in other ways too. I don’t really have time to go into all this today, but we who tend to say that God is a loving God and perhaps even say that God is love can also run the risk of being one-dimensional in our images of God, if we never take account of or consider the possibility of God’s anger or God’s judgment or God’s sorrow. Those who believe in God’s presence need sometimes to consider that God can also be absent. Those who have known the comfort of God may need to meet the God who discomforts us. Those who have found, maybe after long struggle, a God whose love is unconditional may also still need to rediscover a God who calls us away from where we are and may even make demands on us. And so forth. The fact that all these words and images of God do not fit neatly together to make a pretty little picture of God, just means that we do not have God in our pocket. And it means that perfection for God is not a matter of having everything in order but that it involves a reaching out for always a more complete, a more whole way of imagining God.
Now—Jesus connects our perfection with God’s: “Be perfect as God in heaven is perfect.” If reaching for perfection is reaching for completeness or wholeness then certainly that does have some meaning for me. We could talk about what that might mean for us personally, on an individual level. That’s a large discussion and will mostly wait for another time. I will just say two things for now. It does not mean trying to be, or do, everything. We are not talking here about being a well-rounded person, having a lot of interests, and so forth—which is all fine, but not quite what wholeness is all about. And the second thing is that we can’t talk about our being complete or whole just on an individual level.
That brings me back to stewardship and what I wanted to try to say about the non-financial aspects of stewardship. Everyone knows that stewardship in the church is more than money. It is common to think in terms of the gifts of time and talent that we offer to the work of the church along with our gifts of monetary support. And that’s good and necessary, but I have always been somewhat uneasy and have become increasingly so about the way we think about this and go about it.
I was talking last week about the kind of double vision we need to see the church, being able to see it as an institution or an organization with all the support and maintenance needs that organizations have, but at the same time being able to see it as sort of an anti-organization, denying the importance of its own needs, pointing to concerns other than its own, staying clear that we are not called by or to the church, and hoping and praying that we may all have a calling that is holier than a calling to the church.
That double vision about the church that sees it at once as very important and then as not at all important has for me implications that apply to my financial support of the church, which I tried to speak to last week. It also has implications for what I am trying to say this week about the non-financial aspects of stewardship.
If we see the church through organizational lenses, then what we will see are needs that the organization has determined and that the organization hopes will be met: positions to be filled, tasks to be done. We all know that those needs are real. There are a certain amount of things that just need to get done somehow, by somebody, and the more people there are who step forward, the more the necessary work can be fairly shared. That’s all real and true and not to be minimized.
But again, there is another way of looking at things, which is also real. What if our human gifts to the church were driven not by the needs of the church but by who we are, and what we care about, and what we feel called to. No matter that it doesn’t have a churchly title like moderator or trustee or committee chair. No matter that it doesn’t fit neatly into some obviously church related activity like worship or Christian education. No matter that there is not already a place carved out and named and reserved for whatever it is that grasps us, gives life and energy to us,
What if everyone brought to the church some gift, some passion, something they cared about, not caring whether anyone had thought to ask for that particular gift or whether the church had defined it as a need? I do have this hope for the church, this vision of a church where every single person is involved at some point where her or his heart is in it, where who we are becomes part of who the church is, where there is no question of whether there is a place for somebody, there just is, because we are about making our own spaces and always making new places.
We need all this to be the case. We need the involvement of everyone, not because we have necessary tasks and we need the workload to be shared, though of course that is true. But rather because we need everyone to be whole as a church community. It is a way of responding as a church to Jesus’ call to perfection, that is his call to wholeness, to completion. In fact, it is not only a matter of responding as a church to that call. Our own individual, personal wholeness depends on the gifts of others. That is a difference between God and us. God can be perfect, God can be whole, just within herself. We can’t. We need each other in order to be whole. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 12, 2000