Rev. Barbara Turner Delisle
July 11, 2010
Amos 7:7-17, Colossians 1:1-14
Psalm 82, Luke 10:25-37
Ah Yes! Perfection!
Don’t you love it when things work out just right?! Like when you invite guest over for dinner and you managed to get the house completely vacuumed and dust free, all the magazines cleared away, the windows sparkling, the air smelling Fabreze fresh early in the day (or even the day before!) leaving you time on the day of to arrange the fresh cut flowers from the voluptuous blooms in your backyard garden …which is free of weeds…
The bread has been baked and is resting under a blue checked linen cloth on the cutting board your grandfather crafted in his youth. The sun tea is brewing nicely in the brilliant light of this mid 80’s summer day. The beans, cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes harvested in the cool, dewy morning hours are chopped, sliced and arranged to look like a giant zinnia in your grandmothers porcelain salad bowl. The marinated meat has been timed just right and it comes off the grill with edges charred and succulent juices running from a slightly pink center. The wine is chilled perfectly and your outfit is just right for the day…not too dressy or too revealing or too casual…just right. Ahhhh perfection!
Or maybe on a more serious note, how about when just the right words come out of your mouth at just the right time… a time when you just happened to offer your friend much needed words of encouragement or support…and perhaps you didn’t even know that friend was suffering at the time until she revealed she had been struggling with alcohol because of deep financial worries.
Or, perhaps you experience the perfection of a personal achievement…a painting or a photo comes out just right. Or maybe your son or daughter has just achieved a goal you never thought but had always secretly hoped and prayed would happen.
Perfection!
These moments of perfection are lovely to experience but don’t happen too often. Maybe that’s by design. Maybe God wanted us to know we are a work in progress. And a work in progress is often messy!
How often have I just missed being perfect?! Too many times to recount! And yet I strive for it over and over. Perfection is such a seductive friend! More often than not I am caught realizing moments after that I have missed a perfect opportunity to excel. Like the freezing day I drove by a woman walking huddled against the cold wind. I could have stopped and cleared off my cluttered front seat and offered her a ride. I had the time. I could have turned around and gone back but I didn’t. I wonder if the priest in today’s story of the Good Samaritan had similar regrets. He messed up way back then and we’re still talking about it!!!!
It’s not that you want to walk around wearing a badge saying look at me. I’m wonderful. I helped the blind man find his wallet. Or I saved a child from drowning.
When those real moments of perfection occur you know it was not so much you but God in you that was acting! It is by or through the grace of God that such miracles of perfect perfection happen. These are not the stuff of ordinary human beings on ordinary days.
Perfection is over rated. It is not real. We are wholly imperfect beings only made perfect through Christ’s forgiving grace and the love of God. Perfection may be an ideal to be strived for but not one to expect to be achieved on a regular basis. Let it be a surprise now and then…a gift from God…rather than the source of back breaking stress.
I love the quote by Ted Loder that is listed in your bulletin this morning. “Empower me to be a bold participant, rather than a timid saint in waiting, in the difficult ordinariness of now; to exercise the authority of honesty, rather than to defer to power, or deceive to get it; to influence someone for justice, rather than impress anyone for gain; and, by grace, to find treasures of joy, or friendship, of peace hidden in the fields of the daily you give me to plow.”
I think this is what is meant by the story of the Good Samaritan. Be a bold participant. That’s what the Samaritan was doing. He was participating boldly in life. He boldly stopped to care for this stranger when no one else would risk doing so.
Those who are timid saints in waiting are the ones looking for perfection. They are not going to risk their saintly reputation by doing something they don’t know the outcome of in advance. In this way they may keep their halo from being tarnished but they will miss out on the depth of life.
Look how the Samaritan cared for this injured man. He treated and bandaged his wounds so the man would not die from infection or bleed to death. But, he didn’t stop there. He delivered him to a place where he could rest in safety and cared for him through the night. But, he didn’t stop there either. The next day he took money from his own pocket and guaranteed more if needed to the innkeeper to care for this stranger found in the ditch. Very bold behavior!
The Samaritan was boldly participating in life. He was living in the moment. Some might call it practicing present moment awareness. The priest and the Levite passed by on the other side… perhaps thinking, “I would love to help and I should help but I just don’t have time to stop. I have to get to the Temple to lead services or to the market before it closes. It’s against the code of purity for me to touch a dying man anyway!” They were living for what comes next and in the process missed out on the soul satisfying opportunity to live in God’s timing.
Our gospel passage opens with a question to Jesus about what it takes to gain eternal life. Jesus in typical fashion answers with a question back to the smarty-pants lawyer who is thought to be trying to trick Jesus.
A lawyer’s duty back then was not like today. In the time this was written lawyers were to study the Scriptures. (In German it reads Schrift-gelehrter which stands for “scholar of the Scriptures”). So, the lawyer knew the answer was the Great Commandment. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus answers with a parable that points out a glaring incongruence. Samaritans and Jews were enemies and had been for eons. Like homeless and well heeled or like a gay liberal democrat and a straight, conservative, fundamentalist Republican, they don’t mix easily. So, it is extraordinary that the Samaritan stops to help this injured Jew. This is made even more dramatic by the fact that the injured mans fellow Jews, the priest and the Levite didn’t even stop to help.
Because the lawyer was trying to define the limits of who the law applied to Jesus replied with this outrageous situation. With his answer he made it clear that no one is to be excluded, not even your enemies. That’s the kind of perfection to strive for!!!
So, let us try in the weeks and days ahead to live boldly in all of our imperfect ways. Let’s strive to participate in life fully and live as we were made… in the creative image of God. Let us not limit our actions so we can appear to be perfect beings. Let us risk perfection and cross all the human created barriers between race age, class, denomination, and sex and remembering our oneness in God’s light. Let us love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength by loving one another…even when to do so might look less than perfect in our limited world eye view.
