The Challenge of Perfectionism

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"The Challenge of Perfectionism"

The Spirituality of Imperfection – Week 1
March 13, 2011

Matthew 5:43-48 & Ecclesiastes 7:20

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate
your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he
makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the
righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what
reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you
greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?
Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your
heavenly Father is perfect”.

“Surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever
sinning.”

This week is the first of a series of sermons that both Greg and I will be
delivering, all of which are based a special little book by the name of The
Spirituality of Imperfection, written by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham.
I can’t really remember how this particular tome fell in my lap, but as you well
knows, books are always seemingly falling into my lap, from all over the place,
but however it got into my lap, I am thankful it did. What you find in this
fairly short book is some of wisest, deepest and thoughtful meditations I’ve
ever read on matters of the spirit, and I think the reason why that is the
case is because it is written out of an experience of profound brokenness.
You see, the writers attempt to glean what it means to be spiritual in light of
the alcoholic experience, through the lens of those who are recovering from
an addiction to alcohol.   Both Kurtz and Ketcham use the spiritual insights
found in the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, a program that is
profoundly rooted in spirituality, though, admittedly, not an explicity
Christian spirituality, to help the rest of us in our spiritual journey. Perhaps
that non-explicit religiosity is a strength of the AA program, because formal
religion, even our own beloved Christian tradition, is riddled with baggage
that people don’t want to bear anymore, especially when they are in the
midst of unloading what is already a hard burden to bear, that is, their own
alcoholism. Jesus has promised us that is yoke is light, but the yoke so
often placed on others by his followers, well, not so light, not so easy for the
shoulders or the spirit.

And yet not surprisingly, the central insight the book reaps from the
experience of alcoholics is actually found in our own tradition, our own faith
tradition, as well as almost all other traditions, all other religions of the
world. And that simple insight is that we are truly imperfect people, living in
an imperfect world, full of imperfect, flawed, broken people just like us. Now,
it seems so obvious, and I don’t know a lot of people who don’t get that
truth, or, at the very least, give it lip service, but for an alcoholic it is a
central, life changing insight from which to build a new life, a sober life. So
many of us who are addicted to something—food, money, alcohol, sex,
drugs, even romantic love—have had a hard time dealing with what we know
is true of ourselves, that we are flawed, and so we use some thing, some
food, some drink, some drug, to numb us to the reality that the ideal we
hold in our heads is only an ideal, and that, again, in reality, we so often fail
to live up to that ideal.

For me personally, I’ve often said that I can easily understand and accept the
imperfections of others, something that is very, very helpful when it comes
being a minister, where you get to see people at their most noble, but where
you also witness people at their worst, in their meanest or angriest, or even
in their most insecure moments. And yet, the one I am least forgiving of,
the one I struggle to accept as being imperfect, as being full of ego and
selfishness, full of meanness in their worst moments, is me. It’s easy to
forgive and accept the imperfections of others, but not my own—others can
be imperfect, but not me—I have to be perfect—the perfect spouse, the
perfect minister, the perfect son, and brother, and citizen, etc.

This perfectionism is so often rampant amongst us ministers, despite the
fact that we are quite aware of our own failings, so much so that a minister
by the name of J.R. Briggs is organizing what he calls an Epic Fail Pastors
Conference. The following is from an article from the Religious News Service
Scheduled for April 15-16 at a church-turned-bar 25 minutes outside of
Philadelphia, Briggs hopes to makes space for pastors to speak their minds
without fear. The conference grew out of a blog post Briggs wrote last
summer. Most ministers' conferences are flashy events with rock bands and
presentations from big church pastors, who take the stage and talk about
their great successes. But those presentations didn't match the daily
realities for pastors, especially at small churches, Briggs said. "Most of the
time, you feel like I'm never going to be that guy on stage -- I am preaching
to 42 people, including the noisy kids," he said. Briggs hopes the Epic Fail
conference will remind pastors that it's OK to be human and that failure is
normal. After all, most of the leaders from the Bible, he said, were failures.
David was an adulterer who betrayed a close friend. Moses was a murderer.
Paul persecuted Christians before his conversion. And the disciples spent a
lot of time bumbling around after Jesus. "The entrance exam for Christianity
is admitting you are a failure," Briggs said. But pastors, he said, are often
expected to be perfect. That means they can't admit their doubts or failings.
If they do, they can be shamed by their peers and parishioners. "I am not
afraid of failure," said Briggs. "I am afraid of the shame that comes from the
rejection that comes from failure." So Briggs suggested a conference where
leaders could put their worst foot forward. The response was overwhelming.
Hundreds of comments, e-mails and phones calls flooded in, with tales of
ministers' failings, both personal and professional. Now, I have to tell you
that I am not much of a fan of Pastor’s Conferences, for a lot of the reasons
mentioned in the articles, but this conference, this conference I could go to,
especially since it’s been held in a bar.

I suspect many of you in this room are like this as well, you are closet
perfectionists, and you are far more forgiving of the failures of others,
including the failures that effect you personally, than you are forgiving of
those moments when you yourself are the one doing the failing. Not all of us
are like that, but way too many of us are, and I think one of the reasons why
addiction has become so rampant in our culture is our unwillingness to accept
that inner imperfection that simply comes with being human.

And yet, aren’t we asked, commanded even, to be perfect by Jesus himself?
Look at the first text we just heard, a passage from the first third of the
Sermon on the Mount, where, at the very end of Jesus telling us to love our
enemies, to love those who wish to do us harm, is this simple command, one
that has tortured so many of us who seek to be followers of Christ: Be
perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. That call to perfection
has hung over the lives of saints and sinners, which is really one and the
same group, over two thousand years, and has caused all manner of
wreckage to the church and the people of church for far too long. But the
reason why it has caused such pain is because we have ripped it out of
context and failed to realize the ancient Jewish roots from which Jesus
sprouted, out of which Jesus grew and flourished.

First, the context here: in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is giving a long
oration on the spiritual and moral duties we owe to God and to each other,
and in this passage before us he challenges us with the most difficult of
commands: to love those who hate us, who wish us harm, and he tells us
not to return hate for hate, blow for blow, pain for pain. Break the cycle,
Jesus says, and, for the most part, this is very much rooted in his Jewish
background—there was really nothing too radical about this command, in
many ways, for the people who were listening to him thousands of years
ago, even if it sounds awfully radical to us. And then Jesus throws out this
command to be perfect, just like the Father is perfect, and we so often rip
this line out of the context with which it is spoken. What Jesus is saying
here, I think, is that we must love others like God loves us—God loves us
when we are perfect and God loves us when we are imperfect, and we are
asked to do the same with the people who fail us, and who seek to do us
harm—we are to love as recklessly and without rhyme or reason as God has
chosen to love us.

Now, underneath this command to be perfect is something very special,
something found in the Hebrew word for “perfection” that Jesus likely learned
as young man, and, in Hebrew the word “perfection” does not mean
someone who does not fail or someone who does not sin—instead, the
Hebrew is better translated as “wholeness,” as “fully complete.” Be whole, be
fully complete, be perfect, Jesus commands us and those early disciples, and
what I think he is trying to say here, in the context of this command to love
those whom it seems impossible to love, those who hate us and wish to do
us harm, is that those awful people are simply a mirror image of us in our
worst moments, as well. To be whole, to be complete, to be perfect, is to
accept the imperfection of the one who seeks do you great harm, and to love
them as they are, just as God has loved us as we are. For Jesus, perfection
means loving and accepting imperfect people, imperfect people like me and
you, accepting them as they are in that moment, as God accepts us as we
are in this moment. Perfection isn’t about following the rules perfectly, but
loving others as perfectly as God loves us, and we are asked to do the same
for others.

But it’s hard letting go of that inner ideal that we’re never going to live up to,
that perfect rule following, try as we might—perfection is not possible, as our
second passage from Scripture today reminds us—but we have hard time
letting go of the dream of perfection. This truth is relayed in a story about a
priest of the Greek Orthodox Church, Father Thomas Hopko, tells of a monk
he met on Mount Athos. He was in a very bad state [this priest], very dark,
very bitter, very angry. When asked what was the matter, he said, “Look at
me; I’ve been here for thirty-eight years and I have not yet attained pure
prayer, [perfect prayer].” And this other fellow on the pilgrimage was saying
how sad he thought this was. Another man present said, “It’s a sad story all
right, but the sadness consists in the fact that after thirty-eight years in a
monastery he’s still interested in pure prayer, [perfect prayer]. (Kurtz &
Ketcham 42) Not being able to let go of that ideal, and to accept ourselves
as we are, as accepted by God as we are, is a huge issue, and being able to
do so allows us to love and accept others as they are, as well.

But some of us, to be frank, never quite learn the lessons we need to from
our personal failures. Surely some of you have heard a small controversy
brewing about Newt Gingrich’s retort to a university student in Pennsylvania
who questioned his right to decide who should and should not be able to get
married, especially considering his own dubious track record as a married
man, a hypocrisy so common in politicians who want to meddle in the lives of
their fellow adults. The incident was reported this way in an article from a
Pennsylvania newspaper: Newt Gingrich’s bed-hopping past got thrust into
the limelight at a speech at the University of Pennsylvania last night, thanks
to a combative question from a student, Politico reports. “You adamantly
oppose gay rights,” the student, the president of Penn Democrats, began.
“But you’ve also been married three times and admitted to having an affair
with your current wife while you were still married to your second. … How do
you reconcile this hypocritical interpretation of the religious views that you so
vigorously defend?”   Gingrich tried to cut the student off. “I'll bet almost
everybody here can gather the thrust of your question,” he said. “I hope you
feel better about yourself. ... I believe in a forgiving God, and the American
people will have to decide whether that [is] their primary concern.” As
someone has said more eloquently than me, Gingrich would like to remind
everybody that marriage is between one man and one woman whom you
abandon riddled with cancer on her hospital bed while you have sex with your
mistress whom you later marry and then cheat on with a third woman while
screaming with Godly moral outrage about the infidelities of the president,
during the Clinton impeachment hearings.

What Gingrich didn’t learn from his encounter with that forgiving God he
speaks so lovingly of is a bit of humility about trying to manage the personal
lives of others, when you have so clearly not been able to manage your own,
as recently as a decade ago. What I have found from people who truly feel
sorry for what they have done is an incredible reluctance to demand what
they believe to be perfection from others. This grace, this acceptance of
others as they are, is something you often find of folks who are in the midst
of their recovery from alcohol or other addictions: a profound acceptance of
the world as it is, and a profound acceptance of others as they are, even if
who they are is not what they want them to be. I don’t know the heart of
Newt Gingrich, but from his actions, from his willingness to pander to the
religious right for the chance to be president, I somehow doubt that he
learned the lessons he needed in his own moments of imperfections,
moments we all share with him as fellow human beings, of course.

Next week, I’m going to share with you some of the wisdom about how to
strike a balance between the shadow and light within all of us so we won’t
make some of the same mistakes like brother Gingrich has made. But in a
few minutes, we are going to sing a hymn that I find hard to believe that we
include in our progressive, mainline New Century hymnal, the song Just As I
Am. The reason why I find it surprising that we include it in our hymnal is
that it is a favorite hymn of the Baptists and other evangelicals who often us
it in a moment at the end of the service where people are invited to come
forward and make a personal and public commitment to accept Christ in their
heart. As a former Southern Baptist, I have heard this hymn far too many
times, as it would be played over and over until the preacher shut it down,
sensing that he would get no more lost souls coming down the aisle. And I
know that it’s going to annoy a few of you to have to sing it, but I want us
to pay attention to the words, and know the reason why it was written in the
first place.   Charlotte Elliot wrote this hymn in 1835, in a moment when she
felt useless, imperfect in so many profound ways, in ways that maybe you’ve
experienced when you had a professional or financial or personal failure, and
this unease, this deep grief she felt kept her up all through the night,
something she could ill afford to do because of a busy bazaar she was to
attend the next day.   As retold in a book in a very early part of the 20th
century, in prose that reflects that era, it is said that she lay upon her sofa
in that most pleasant boudoir set apart for her in Westfield Lodge, ever a
dear resort to her friends." The troubles of the night came back upon her
with such force that she felt they must be met and conquered in the grace of
God. She gathered up in her soul the great certainties, not of her emotions,
but of her salvation : her Lord, His power, His promise. And taking pen and
paper from the table she deliberately set down in writing, for her own
comfort, "the formulae of her faith."   "Probably without difficulty or long
pause" she wrote the hymn, getting comfort by thus definitely "recollecting"
the eternity of the Rock beneath her feet. There, then, always, not only for
some past moment, but "even now" she was accepted in the Beloved "Just
as I am." The hymns and hymn writers of The Church Hymnary, by Brownlie,
John (1911)