Hilton Head Island, SC – July 5, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Philippians 3:1-11; 12-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. – Philippians 3:12 (RSV)
In last week’s sermon, I had occasion to call attention to the meaning of the Greek words telos and teleios. I am going to do that again today.
Both these words are translated into the English Bible as “perfect.” The trouble with perfect as a word is that it isn’t perfect. At least it isn’t perfect in the sense that we ordinarily mean when we say the word “perfect.” To us perfect ordinarily means flawless, or without fault or defect. Thus a perfect July Fourth weekend day would be one where the sun was shining all day, the highest temperature was 74, and there would be no coronavirus lurking in the wings. Lotsaluck with that kind of perfection. A perfect race car is one which runs faster than all others, rounds curves gripping the road better than all the others, and never breaks down in the middle of a race. Lotsaluck with that too.
But what is a perfect person? What constitutes such a human being? Last week’s sermon text was I John 4:18, where the writer said, “Perfect love casts out fear.” This week’s text is from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi, Greece. He was writing about himself (which Paul had a persistent tendency to do). In the first part of the third chapter he listed a kind of spiritual resume’, enumerating the stellar features of his being: “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, as to the law a Pharisee” etc, etc., etc. In Paul’s mind, his pedigree was how English speakers understand the word “perfect;” Paul had seen himself without fault or defect, which is to say, flawless.
But that isn’t what “perfect” means in New Testament Greek, and Paul knew it. Instead, it means “complete” or “finished” or, we might say, “that which is intended by God.” To express it differently, if anything is incomplete, there are missing pieces, but if it is complete, everything that should be there is there. In that regard, Paul (who has always seemed to me to be something of a braggart, which might really mean that he actually felt inferior) knew he wasn’t a complete person. After this litany of superior attributes, Paul admitted that he wasn’t what his pedigree would indicate he should be. “Not that I have already obtained this” (everything to which the pedigree pointed) “or am already perfect” (complete, finished, the person God wants me to be), “but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”
What is the “it” to which Paul referred in that sentence? It was to seek completion; not perfection as we understand that word, but completion.
Paul had an experience which few if any of us have had. The resurrected Jesus personally encountered him on the road to Damascus. The Book of Acts tells us that Paul went to Damascus, intending to persecute Christians there, because he was convinced that is what God wanted him to do. The resurrected Christ dramatically disabused him of that notion. In so doing, Paul, perhaps for the first time in his life, realized he was not the admirably finished product he thought he was. Instead he had a lot of work to do to become the best he could be.
Early on in this sermon I want to offer an opinion. No one ever becomes the finished product God wants us to be; no one! We are all getting there, or least we should be trying to get there, but we’re not there yet, and we shall never fully get there. The problem is that we’re human; we aren’t divine. God is perfect, and complete, and “finished,” but we are not. And that’s something we must never forget --- about everyone else, but especially about ourselves.
Now let me tell you an important secret. For those of you who have ever been married, before you were married, and in the early years of your marriage, you thought the person you married was perfect. He/she was exactly what she/he was meant to be, and couldn’t be any better. But then, after several months or a few years, you began to notice that there were small flaws in you beloved’s personality or character. She/he didn’t have every quality you thought he/she had. Your initial infatuation prevented you from seeing that, but with time, you realized your perfect partner lacked what you considered to be ultimate perfection. Of course you did your best to hone off those rough edges, and did it with grace and kindness, but even with the most admirable of intentions and the most deft of suggestions, you didn’t change that beloved other into the person you wanted.
And now for an even more important secret. Your other half discovered those same imperfections in you. In the beginning you thought she/he was the perfect catch, the perfect match, but when you actually lived together, you realized he/she needed some adjustments. To your utter astonishment, you were not able to accomplish that. YOU were the perfect catch and match, but somehow that other person turned out not to be quite everything you anticipated. The same little annoyances you discovered in your spouse are the same or similar annoyances your spouse discovered in you.
The other night Lois and I watched a sixty-year-old movie on Turner Classic Movies called Two for the Road. It starred Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as a married couple traveling throughout Britain and Europe over several years of time, with many flashbacks. In both of our opinions, the Albert character was an overbearing, self-centered, moderately-philandering man, and the Audrey character was a loving and forgiving woman who ultimately had had enough, but jumped off the wagon for only one night. In the end they resolved to stay together, because by then they each fully knew who the other was, and they decided there was only incompletion in each other, and that was going to be as good as it was going to get.
In a more recent but even more classic movie, As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt are the seemingly ill-suited pair who in the end decide to pursue their love either to the altar or to City Hall, despite the glaring incompletions he has in his obsessive-compulsive personality and she shall have in a very difficult kind of life trying to adjust to his querulous quirks.
For all of us, one of the most difficult challenges of life is to learn to live with approximations. That means almost getting what we want but never everything we want. It means accepting less than finished products in everyone and everything else because we ourselves are not as complete as we should be. It means putting up with human foibles in others because we too have our own foibles, and who are we to hold it against someone else that they don’t fully measure up when we don’t fully measure up either?
Or consider the incompleteness we so easily saw in our parents when we were children or teenagers. They were so inflexible and we were the epitome of reasoned flexibility. They had so many rules and we were behavioral residents of the State of New Hampshire: Live Free Or Die. They never seemed to be as flawless as our friends’ parents, but the strange thing is that our friends thought our parents were better than their parents. Nobody was the person they should be back then; everyone was a pale approximation of what they should be, an unfinished product.
We’re now old enough that we may no longer clearly remember what our parents were really like. In our minds the passing years have made them perhaps other than they were, and we have chosen to elevate or to lower them in our memory bank. But we remember our children better, because most of us still see them on a somewhat frequent or infrequent basis. We wonder why they didn’t do what we thought they should do or become who we thought they should become. Our lives would be complete if only their lives had become complete as we imagined they should. However, if I am only a flawed copy of what I was meant to become, how can they be criticized for not becoming what we thought they should become? And anyway, don’t all of us turn out the way we turn out because that’s essentially how we wanted to turn out?
We are so much easier on pets than we are on people! We accept approximations of acceptable behavior in our dogs and cats much more readily than in our spouses or significant others or children or friends or acquaintances. We know there’s only so much you can do with a belligerent Beagle or a surly Siamese, but we become despondent when those of our own species don’t act the way we think they should act.
One of my favorite writers is Bill Bryson. His book At Home is a humorous but pointed compendium of nearly every aspect of British life through many centuries. Quoted on the front of today’s bulletin is this sentence: “There can be few more telling facts about life in nineteenth century Britain than that the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals preceded by sixty years the founding of a similar organization for the protection of children.” He goes on to say, “It is perhaps no less notable that the first named was made the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1840, a little more than a decade and a half after its founding. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children remains to this day regally unblessed” (p. 415).
In all of his numerous books, Bill Bryson seems willing to live in harmony with the incomplete approximations of what every individual should be, while calling us to task for collectively making a colossal mess of so many factors in human life. Would that all of us also could do that.
Jordan Spieth was an amazing young golfer in his first two years on the professional tour. For the past several years, however, he has been only a dim approximation of what he was back when he was rookie. He is my favorite golfer, and I still yearn for him to win big again, but so far, I have to live with the approximation of what he once was.
In his early years, William Faulkner wrote some incandescent if also somewhat incomprehensible novels. As time went on, and his addiction to alcohol took its toll, he became a dim approximation of the writer he once had been. Even then he was still a spectacular if also uniquely challenged and challenging writer.
It is not only approximations of the potentialities of people we must learn to live with. We also must make our peace with events and trends which evolve with vexing incompleteness. Recent peaceful demonstrations against police misbehavior have somehow occasionally turned violent. We know that the police should be fair to everyone they apprehend, but we are left to wonder whether the best way to force accountability are public demonstrations in support of equity to all if the demonstrations might again get out of hand. Nearly all police do their best to serve and protect everyone in society. But all of them, like all the rest of us, are an approximation of what collectively they should be. Freedom of speech is one of the first rights cited in the first amendment of the Bill of Rights, and most of the demonstrators are doing that and nothing more, yet they too are an approximation of what they should be. We who are neither police nor demonstrators are called upon to live with their approximations, especially since we only watch from the sidelines.
There is much talk about what will be the new normal after COVID-19 is finally defeated, if it is defeated. Everyone seems to agree that whatever the new normal is, it won’t be like the old normal before all this descended upon us. Whenever the post-COVID world emerges, we will have to live with the approximations it will represent from what we had six months ago.
As this election year limps to its conclusion on November 3, what we are seeing is an opaque approximation of every other political campaign we have ever witnessed. Probably it cannot be otherwise, and that is very unsatisfactory. Furthermore, neither of the two major presidential candidates is likely to change what he is doing to try to make themselves and their views more transparent, one because he feels it is unnecessary and perhaps unwise, and the other because he has proven incapable of changing almost anything he is doing.
Only relatively unimportant things are almost total approximations of what they used to be, things such as peanut butter, Cheerios, Nelson DeMille novels, M*A*S*H reruns, Dial soap, and Hershey bars. Everything else seems to be in a downward spiral of imperfections.
And yet, and yet: God is not finished with us. God is never finished with us. He is working on all of us to overcome our imperfections and to eliminate our incompleteness.
Paul knew that. He suggested his own solution to his own imperfect, approximate, unfinished, human being. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own….(F)orgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 12,14).
There were so many things in Paul that he needed to press on in order to overcome his obvious limitations. But one of the things I most like about Paul’s use of language, of which he was a master, is that he often call Jesus “Christ Jesus” rather than “Jesus Christ.” Christ was not Jesus’ last name. Jesus did not have a last name. Almost no one in Judea in Jesus’ day had a last name. Jesus in his own culture would have been known as Yeshua ben-Yosef; Jesus, the son of Joseph. Christ is a Greek title; it is not a name. It means “Messiah”: Mesheach. “Messiah” means “the Anointed One.” All of the Israelite the kings were anointed. Thus by Christological extension, Jesus is really King Jesus; he is not Jesus King.
Now, to return to Paul in Philippians and to end this sermon: God accepts all of us in all of our approximations. But we must never stop pressing on. However, we are obligated to accept the approximations represented by everyone else, but we ourselves need to keep pressing on toward the goal. The goal is the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. And God isn’t finished with us yet. Nor are we yet finished. So we press on, and move beyond our own approximations. Will we ever get there? No. Must we keep trying? Yes. How else can we expect to be properly finished?
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