Street Crossers

Matthew 5:43-48

June 10, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

So last Sunday evening, my youngest, my baby, graduated from high school, the second of two graduations our family is celebrating this year. Of course, a lot of you were there, because you had graduates to celebrate as well. It was a great night, just as Christopher’s was a month ago, and both of those graduations have made me more than a bit nostalgic. It made me think back thirty-three years to the Sunday afternoon when I graduated from Rossville High School. My class had a whopping 49 people in it, nothing to compare to the 330+ that made up Rachel’s class, but I’m thankful for that little school and the education I got there. That afternoon in 1985, though, when I stood on the stage to receive my diploma, I was thinking about how my last semester had messed up my “perfect” educational career. Now, I told you a few weeks ago about my academic struggles with “Happy Horsemanship,” but the first class that challenged my academic career was high school physics. Mrs. Glover was our teacher, and while she was brilliant and clearly knew what she was talking about, she had trouble communicating the subject matter. Or I had trouble understanding the subject matter. Either way, I had in my mind this idea that “perfection” was getting everything right, and many of you who are firstborns know that there is this unspoken pressure to do everything right, perfect. As if that were possible! Suffice it to say, when the final grades came out, physics reminded me that I was far from “perfect.”

What do you think of when you hear that word, “perfect”? What images come to mind? In some sports (like golf or bowling), there is such a thing as a “perfect game” or a “perfect score.” When a meal comes out particularly well, we will sometimes call it “perfect,” or when two people seem to get along well, we might call it a “perfect match.” We connect all sorts of things with the idea of being perfect, but where do we find perfection in faith? Much to my surprise, when I was in seminary, I learned that John Wesley did teach something called Christian perfection, that this idea was part of our DNA as Methodist Christians. I had grown up in the United Methodist Church and had never heard of such a thing. I’m guessing many of you have not, either. Because it’s so misunderstood, it’s not something we talk about much. But we should. We need to.

We’re in the midst of a series of sermons about recovering our DNA as Methodist Christians, a series we’re calling “Reboot.” “Reboot” is what you do when your computer isn’t working quite right, or it freezes up, or it crashes. And “reboot” is often what we need to do in life when similar things happen. Start over. Go back to the last time things worked. As I said a couple of weeks ago, I began to wonder what a reboot in the church might look like. What would happen if we attempted to recover some of the characteristics God planted within the Methodist movement? So two weeks ago, we talked about the core of who we are: holiness, living a holy life because God is holy. And last week, Pastor Rick reminded us that the genius of the early Methodist movement was and still is found in relationships, in community and small groups, holding each other accountable and doing life together. Holiness, community, and this morning we add to that list Christian perfection.

There may be no belief that raises more questions in Methodist theology than this one, one which Wesley, in a letter written less than a year before his death, called the “grand depositum” of the people called Methodist. The recovery of this Biblical doctrine, he believed, was the primary reason God raised up the people called Methodist. Part of our problem today with this idea is the word “perfection.” We have heard the mantra all of our lives: “Nobody’s perfect.” And so, because we believe it’s impossible, we have largely ignored this distinctly Methodist doctrine. As I said, I grew up in the United Methodist Church and don’t ever remember hearing a sermon or any kind of teaching about it in all those years. On the other extreme are those who want to make this belief the all-important element in our theology and the primary means by which a person “proves” they are saved. If you don’t evidence certain characteristics that this person determines is evidence of perfection, then you’re obviously not “in.” Neither extreme is what Wesley believed God had called him to preach, and where I hope we land this morning is somewhere in the middle because Christian perfection has a critical role to play in renewing the church and changing the world (cf. Harper, The Way to Heaven, pgs. 81-82).

In the midst of what some call Jesus’ most important teaching about the Kingdom of God, Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48). Now, it’s important to remember that when the Gospels were written, they did not have chapter and verse numbers. Those were added in later to make preaching and teaching easier. Nor were there paragraphs or section headings in the original text; those things in our modern Bibles are not inspired. So this verse did not originally end a chapter; it was part of the larger narrative, somehow connected to what comes before and what comes after. What comes before is Jesus’ call to love our neighbors; what comes after is a warning about appearing to be more holy or righteous than we really are. And in the middle of that instruction and those warnings is this call to perfection, this little word “perfect.” Jesus calls those who want to be part of his kingdom to be perfect, because (like holiness) that’s what God is like.

The original word there does not refer to perfection in action or being without any kind of blemish or mistake. It does not refer to getting all “A’s” or making every shot. The word used in this verse had a very distinct usage in ancient Greek; it refers to maturity, to an end or a goal or a purpose. For instance, you would not use the word, for instance, to refer to a kindergartner, someone who is just beginning to learn, but you can use it to describe a high school graduate. Those who walked across the stage last Sunday have learned all they were supposed to learn in school (thus the graduation), their understanding is mature to this point. It’s not complete, but it’s mature. This word is also used to describe something or someone who has achieved their purpose, the goal for which the person or thing was created, made, or born. In other words, “perfect” for the ancient Greeks and Romans was a functional thing. Is this thing fulfilling its purpose, its intended function? Is this person doing that? Then it’s “perfect.” Perfection not doing everything correctly, it is the accomplishment of what you were made for. It’s sort of like this: I am not the most handy person around the house, but I do own a few tools and, believe it or not, I know how to use most of them! So when something is loose or broken at the house, I go out the garage and choose the right tool for the job. When I take the tool in and apply it to the job, it fits, it works, it fixes the problem. So in that sense, the tool in that moment is perfect because it accomplishes the purpose it was created for (cf. Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Volume 1, pgs. 177-178; Augsburger, Communicator’s Commentary: Matthew, pg. 82).

So, if Jesus calls his followers to “be perfect” as our heavenly Father is perfect, we have to ask then what we were made for. What is the purpose our creator envisioned when he made us? As I said a couple of weeks ago, in the very beginning of the Bible, we’re told we were made in the image of God our heavenly Father. So if we want to know our purpose, our reason for existence, we should ask what God is like. The Bible tells us over and over again: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). The Bible even goes further in talking about how that relates to our purpose, our reason for existence: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). If we’re going to be like the God in whose image we were made, we should be people who love. This is exactly what Jesus is getting at in the passage we read this morning, this small section of his sermon on the mount. Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy’” (5:43). The “love your neighbor” part is a direct quote from the Old Testament, so it’s probably something they heard and memorized in Synagogue School. It’s from the same book where the people were told to be holy, Leviticus, that book that few people read anymore (19:18). Now, it’s true that in that context, “neighbor” is generally understood to refer only to those who were like them, fellow Israelites, but Jesus makes that category much bigger than anyone ever thought it was. But then there’s the second part of that command that these folks had “heard,” the “hate your enemy” part. There is no such command in the Old Testament, which would have been all the Scripture these folks had. The Bible did not command them to hate their enemy. There are statements like Psalm 5:5 which says God “hates all evildoers” (NRSV) or Psalm 31:6, a reminder that God hates those who “cling to worthless idols” (NIV), but those statements are about a choice some folks make to reject God himself. Those are statements about the way God regards actions that are taken against himself, not about the people who do them. There is no statement commanding the people to specifically hate their enemies, but somewhere along the way, someone decided that hating the enemy was a natural flip side of the command to love their neighbor. It became not a Biblical command but “common wisdom.” The question really revolves around who our “neighbor” is, and that’s a question Jesus answers on more than one occasion (Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VIII, pg. 195).

The most famous time was when Jesus was asked directly, “Who is my neighbor?” That’s when he tells the story we call “The Good Samaritan.” You probably remember it; it’s in Luke 10. It’s a story told after Jesus sends out seventy-two disciples to share the good news to everyone they could find. Still, people wanted to exclude. That seems to be our natural inclination, doesn’t it, to exclude and draw the circle narrowly around who we want to associate with. So Jesus tells the story of a man who is going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and is beaten up by robbers along the way. He is left bleeding and half dead when along comes a senior pastor who ignores him, and then an associate pastor, who also ignores him. The ones who were supposed to help didn’t. Then along comes an enemy, a Samaritan, a member of the other political party, someone you knew you couldn’t count on. The crowd Jesus was speaking to would have expected this man to not only ignore the wounded man, but maybe to finish the job of killing him, but that’s not the way the story goes. Jesus turns their expectations over. The Samaritan is the only one who helps the man, and not only that, he pays for the man’s care. The crowd would have been shocked; that’s not the way they expected the story to go, nor would they have expected Jesus to say what he says next: “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:25-37). In other words, “Be like the Samaritan. Be like your enemy.” The “neighbor,” it turns out, was the one we least expected to be kind. The neighbor was the one who helped.

In our passage this morning, Jesus is speaking directly into that question, telling his listeners (and us) that the Biblical response is not hate toward someone who is an enemy, but love, because that is who God is. God loves the righteous and the unrighteous, the evil and the good, the one who loves him back and the one who doesn’t. Everyone is included, welcomed and loved. It’s not enough, Jesus says, to just love those who are like you. Even the worst people do that. No, the one who is truly striving to be like God is the one who loves all. The love God calls us to share excludes no one (cf. Augsburger 82).

And that’s what it means to pursue Christian perfection. It’s not perfection in action. It’s not perfection in thought. It’s perfection in love, seeking to love all the same way God loves them. It’s not about performance, it’s about intention. It’s about singleness of heart, single-mindedness in devotion, loving others the way God loves them (cf. Boring 196). Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that purity of heart is to will one thing. That’s what Jesus is talking about here in Matthew 5 when he says we should become “children of your Father in heaven” (5:45). This is, for Jesus, the fundamental command on which everything else depends (cf. Boring 196). Just so we’re clear, Christian perfection does not mean you become a superior Christian, suddenly unable to sin, or that you are now immune from any problems life might bring. It’s not, to use Steve Harper’s words, a “vaccination against reality” (83). It’s also not a onetime experience. As with holiness, the choice to love others, especially the difficult others, is something we have to decide to do often, daily, maybe hour by hour on some days! There are situations where it’s just hard to love others the way God loves them. I know there are days when I am not the most lovable person and it takes Cathy a special amount of grace to be able to love me the way God loves me. And I bet I’m not alone, because none of us are without flaws—though I’m not going to ask for a show of hands! For me, the most helpful thing is to remember that I am loved, in spite of my blemishes, and therefore I can love others even with their flaws.

Christian perfection does not remove the temptation of sin but it does give us power over sin. We begin to approach every situation in our lives with Christ, not on our own, and ask whether our response in that situation will show his loving nature or our sinful nature. Christian perfection calls us to a radical dependence on Jesus, to an ever-closer walk with him because without him, we cannot live this life. And it is an experience to grow into. Just like we continue to mature in our physical lives, we do the same in our spiritual lives. Think about it this way: as our kids were growing up, we would take them to the doctor for regular check-ups and the doctor would do all the measurements that they do, and then tell us the results. Your child, they would say, is perfect for two years old, or four, or whatever. Had they become all they would be? No, of course not. Had they fully accomplished their purpose? No, but even though they were not at the end of their maturing, they were still perfect. They could do everything that age was supposed to be able to do, but there was still much more they could grow into. That’s the same as it is in our spiritual journey. Wherever we are today, there is still more we can and will become if we depend more and more on Jesus. We can and should be growing more and more into his likeness, his image. Our prayer should be that next year at this time we look more like Jesus than we do today. It’s been said that if something is not growing, it’s dying, and that’s especially true in our spiritual life, in our growth toward Christian perfection. We’re called to love others more tomorrow than we do today, but we’re still called to love them today (Harper 84-88).

So, then, here’s the question: what difference does this doctrine make in our world? What does Jesus call us to do with this belief? Quite simply, he calls us to cross the street, to love those we wouldn’t ordinarily think of loving—the Samaritan, the enemy, the outcast. The idea of Christian perfection is tied up in two simple words, according to Leonard Sweet. The two key words are these: “with” and “all.” Our world is made up of a network of “withs,” and all of us are in various groups throughout the day, throughout the week, people we are “with.” Living this out is fairly simple to understand then: the ones we are “with” are the ones Jesus calls us to love. The Christian faith is personal but never private; every person we come in contact with is someone God calls us to love, often in very tangible ways. This is what Pastor Rick was talking about last week, about the importance of seeing one another, of being together, of sharing life together. With. I heard the story of a men’s group that was going to host a barbecue for some students, and when the students arrived, the men were in the kitchen, cutting the fat off the meat. One student asked, “Why don’t you just cook the meat with the fat on it and let us cut it off ourselves?” One older man smiled and took the younger man into the kitchen where the work was taking place. “What do you see?” he asked the younger man. Well, the men were cutting the fat off, and they were joking, laughing, telling stories, and talking about their lives. Around the kitchen counter, they were “with” each other, building community. “This is why we cut the fat off,” the older man said (Sweet, The Greatest Story Never Told, pgs. 77-78). It’s about “with.” In our technological age, we have forgotten how to be “with.” We make things more efficient but we remove the “with-ness” of our world. When we were in Portage a few weeks ago for Christopher’s graduation, Cathy went back to the McDonald’s where she had done so much ministry by talking with and listening to the staff. She was excited to see if any of the crew she knew was still there, but when she came back she said they had replaced the registers with kiosks. More efficient, yes, but now there’s no real way to get to know the people who work there. There’s no “with.” It’s hard to love a kiosk. I’m as much a fan of technology as the next person, but to grow in Christian perfection, to be able to love, we have to put down our phones and be “with.”

And Christian perfection calls us to be with “all.” Sir Wilfred Grenfell was once asked, “Do you mean to tell me, Dr. Grenfell, that you are a missionary?” His reply was quick, “Do you mean to tell me, madam, that you are not?” (Sweet 80). In our DNA is a calling to be in mission wherever we are. Christian perfection, the call to love, is a missionary calling, and not just for those we typically call “missionaries.” Yes, there are those God calls to devote their full attention, time and resources to sharing the Gospel, sometimes in other cultures and other nations. But that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. The Great Commission Jesus gave did not say, “I’m only speaking to you who are called to missions.” No, the command, given to everyone, was to go to “all” the world, and that includes your neighborhood just as much as it does to China or Korea or India or anywhere else in our world. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus said (Matthew 28:19). Not some. All. To the furthest reaches of the world and across the street. To the stranger and the enemy, to the family and the friend, to the co-worker and the neighbor. All. If we’re called to love the world as Jesus does, then we’re called to love all. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Not just part of the world; all of the world.

One author summed up the “four alls” of Methodism this way:

1. All need to be saved.

2. All can be saved.

3. All can know that they are saved.

4. All may be saved to the uttermost (Sweet 83).

We love others so that they come to know the love of Jesus, grow in that love, and then love others into his kingdom as well. It’s a love-filled, gracious circle. So to do that, those of us who aren’t called to go around the world can simply begin by crossing the street, finding out what the needs of our neighbors are, and seeking to meet those needs. We can practice Christian perfection by first loving in practical and tangible ways. “We want every need met, every want fulfilled, every desire matched, every hunger quenched, and every thirst satisfied, except the ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’” (Sweet 81). That kind of motivation is what compelled the early Methodists to start hospitals and care centers, schools and universities, shelters and agencies to meet need. It’s why we take groups to Costa Rica and Haiti and St. Louis, not just to do “good work” but to love the ones Jesus loves. It’s why we support the work of 14th & Chestnut and the Crisis Pregnancy Center and Terre Haute Ministries and the Salvation Army and the food bank, not just to give nice gifts or be recognized but to love the ones Jesus loves. It’s why we have Celebrate Recovery and Grace Unlimited and Vacation Bible School and Upward Sports and the Preschool, not just because “we’ve always done those things” or even because those things are “things churches are supposed to do.” No, we do those things as a way to love the ones Jesus loves. Jesus’ vision of perfection is “lush love and plush hospitality” (Sweet 87). Crossing the street. With. All.

But we can (and should) do more. We haven’t yet exhausted the love we have to give to Terre Haute, Vigo County or the world, have we? I dream of a church where most if not all of us are involved in some hands-on ministry of love. It’s been said that in the average church, 80% of the ministry is done by 20% of the people. I dream of a day where we actually live out our calling that Pastor Rick mentioned last week, of “every member in ministry,” where all of us are crossing the proverbial street on a regular basis, reaching those whom Jesus loves simply because love compels us to do so. I want to encourage you this week to stand outside your home or your business or even outside this church this week and do a 360—turn all the way around and see, really see (maybe for the first time), the people, the homes, the opportunities for ministry. Is there any place near you in need of Jesus’ love, his hope, his mercy and grace? If you say “no,” you need to look again. Ask God to open your eyes and your heart to see the need, to see the broken places, and to begin to develop a passion within you to love the ones around you the way God has loved you.

I know a church that looked around its neighborhood and saw a lot of folks working the night shift in low-paying jobs. One person had a desire to show the church’s love to that neighborhood and invited others to come along. What they did was get together late on the night before Thanksgiving, with everyone supplying home-baked cookies, and they went out in teams to deliver cookies to the night shift workers who had to be away from their families the night before the holiday. All they wanted to communicate was the love of God in a tangible way. It seemed so simple, and yet it turned out so powerful. On Sunday morning, when the church gathered for worship, there was a message on the voicemail from a worker at the nearby Speedway gas station. The caller first apologized for not being very nice to the people who came in, because she was having a rotten evening and didn’t understand at first what was happening. Then she said this, “Your cookies changed my night and touched my heart. You turned my night around. Thank you.” Sometimes, living out our Christian perfection looks like a plate of cookies delivered on a dark Thanksgiving Eve. What else might it look like, in your own neighborhood, on the street where you live or work? What ways might God be calling you to be “with all”? Maybe you can dream about that as you hear the words of this song.

Jesus says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.” That’s what Christian perfection looks like.

There is no doubt about it—our world is broken and hurting and in need of hope. Our world is desperately in need of God’s love. We’re the ones who have it. Our DNA—who we are—is to cross the street and share it. Let’s pray.