The Blessings of Imperfections
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 02 October 2011 01:00
- Written by Elaine Beth Peresluha
Please note that this is the written text from which Elaine speaks extemporaneously. The words will not match what you hear on Sunday mornings. To hear exactly what is said please go to our podcasts of Sunday's sermons.
Be thou perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.
Perfection seems to one of the lessons our Puritan roots really, really takes to heart. We are continually striving to fulfill some perceived expectation of perfection. Whether it is our physical shape, our economic solvency, and our level of political correctness. Or academic achievement... we strive, endlessly. Look at the current standards high school students must achieve to get into a college. And nothing less than Harvard will do- Not only must they be musically gifted, athletically excellent they must get straight A's, having started and directed a non profit that is reversing global warming, as well. And then, they may still be rejected because of some flaw on the SAT's. We are all holding to some version of these highest of standards ... Be Thou perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect. Nothing less will do. And with that measure, we continually fall short of the mark. Leaving all but a very few- feeling extremely tired- or less than... inadequate... and \/or competitive, angry.... guilty.
There always seems to be someone out there who has achieved the perfect relationship... the perfect job... the perfect life... proving to us that we are not measuring up...and then we feel even more the disappointment of our own failings. Or... we turn our sense of failure in the other direction- finding someone who has missed the mark even more blatantly than we have... He has really blown it...allowing us to indulge in judgment... blame and the feeling of being superior....
At the age of 84, my mother started dating a man named Bill. Bill was 90 at the time. They dated until Bill died six years later. For years (my mother lived for another ten years) my mother would get this whimsical look in her eye, sigh, and even after so much of her memory was gone, say “Remember Bill? Bill was such a good, good man.” There would be this long starry eyed pause, and she would add, “He always brought the grocery cart back.”
Would that it were that easy to be good! I still remember Bill, his sweet disposition, the twinkle in his eye, every time I am in the parking lot of a grocery store, my cart empty. I look. It is a long way to the cart return. I am in a hurry. I am tired but this is it, my chance to be good. I always bring the cart back. Is it in honor of Bill? Or am I trying, just this once- to be perfect.
One afternoon, a young boy, Shaya and his father walked past a park where some boys Shaya knew were playing baseball. Shaya asked, "Do you think they will let me play?" Shaya's father knew that his son, developmentally disabled, was not at all athletic and that most boys would not want him on their team. But Shaya's father understood that if Shaya was chosen to play it would give him such an important sense of belonging. Shaya's father approached one of the boys in the field and asked if Shaya could play. The boy looked around for guidance from his teammates. Getting none, he took matters into his own hands and said, "We are losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him up to bat in the ninth inning." Shaya's father was ecstatic and Shaya smiled broadly. Shaya was told to put on a glove and go out to play short center field.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shaya's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shaya's team scored again and now with two outs and the bases loaded with the potential winning run on base, Shaya was scheduled to be up. Would the team actually let Shaya bat at this juncture and give away their chance to win the game?
Surprisingly, Shaya was given the bat. Everyone knew that it was all but impossible because Shaya didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, let alone hit with it. However, as Shaya stepped up to the plate, the pitcher moved a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shaya should at least be able to make contact.
The first pitch came in and Shaya swung clumsily and missed. One of Shaya's teammates came up to Shaya and together they held the bat and faced the pitcher waiting for the next pitch. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly toward Shaya. As the pitch came in, Shaya and his teammate swung the bat and together they hit a slow ground ball to the pitcher. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could easily have thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shaya would have been out and that would have ended the game. Instead, the pitcher took the ball and threw it on a high arc to right field, far beyond reach of the first baseman. Everyone started yelling, "Shaya, run to first. Run to first!"
Never in his life had Shaya run to first. He scampered down the baseline wide eyed and startled. By the time he reached first base, the right fielder had the ball. He could have easily thrown the ball to the second baseman that would tag out Shaya, who was still running.
The right fielder understood what the pitcher's intentions were, so he threw the ball high and far over the third baseman's head. Everyone yelled, "Run to second, run to second." Shaya ran towards second base as the runners ahead of him deliriously circled the bases towards home.
As Shaya reached second base, the opposing shortstop ran to him, turned him in the direction of third base and shouted, "Run to third." As Shaya rounded third, the boys from both teams ran behind him screaming, "Shaya run home!" Shaya ran home, stepped on home plate and all 18 boys lifted him on their shoulders and made him the hero, as he had just hit a "grand slam" and won the game for his team.
"That day," said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, "those 18 boys were perfect- as God is perfect."
In his book The Medusa and the Snail, the biologist Lewis Thomas observes that we humans "are built to make mistakes, coded for error," We learn by trial and error… In human evolution- that is the way it is done. Progress requires error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments."
This same blessing of imperfection permeates all of creation. It is the very stuff of which evolution is made! Take amphibians. The first one that crawled out of the water onto the land many not have done so because its feet were so strong, it may have migrated because its gills were too weak. The imperfection of its gills made that first amphibian into an animal of a higher order. But can you imagine its parent' s distress?? Having a child that was so conspicuously unable to live a normal aquatic life, a child with which there was obviously something wrong, and can you imagine how it must have been jeered at by its peers? Nor did that poor pioneer have any idea what was happening... It had no idea that its wrongness had led it into betterness.
Human beings are the only creatures created on this Earth with the awareness of the wrongness... of the error, the imperfection in themselves and to react to that wrongness with self doubt and a sense of failure or in a way that tends to overcome it.
You know that wish for perfection is in that driver behind you who is leaning on his horn, sure that you are asleep because you have not instantly responded to the green light. Or the person shouting obscenities at you because you have been driving the speed limit in the left lane of 128, forcing her to pass you on the right so she can go 80 mph. I wonder about those people flashing me insulting hand gestures – how perfectly justified they must feel, angry, entitled, put upon. They, obviously, have never cut someone off changing lanes, have never failed to notice an oncoming car and pulled out in error terrifying all. I can appreciate that in a world of fools making errors, it is frustrating to be perfect
I do not know this congregation well enough to be able to predict the response to the reading of scripture, it varies in every U.U. congregationon a wide continuum. So here is our learning moment. And please look around you. How many of you had a reaction, slight to my reading from the Bible? Please raise your hands. How many of you were appalled to have the book of Matthew quoted as a reading- felt icy exclusion, or post traumatic stress? Thank you. How many of you appreciated the scripture reading ,felt included and/or comforted? Look around. Look at the hands. See how hard it is to be a U.U. minister? Chances are pretty good that I am going to disappoint someone.
I need you to know, right from the start, I am not perfect, not even practically. You are going to witness my imperfections. I will be late to a meeting, forget your name, lose my temper, or not have the answer or response you want or need. I will disappoint someone. I may pull out in front of you in an intersection- Please, forgive me- appreciate that Ford Rangers have this horrid blind spot for traffic coming from the right… remember this sermon.
In the wizard of OZ there is that oh so truthful moment when Dorothy yanks back the curtain in the Wizards palace chamber to reveal the old professor back there twirling his knobs and booming his powerful voice through all the smoke and mirrors… and Dorothy shouts with righteous anger “ You are a very bad man!” and he responds- “Oh no- I am a very good man… I am just a very bad wizard.”
Recently, someone shared with me her first impression of First Parish, as perfect. When she first arrived many years ago, toddlers in tote, she was filled with the warm and fuzzy feelings of having found a home... a community... a sense of finally finding the place that fit...perfectly. She was in heaven. Now, many years and many committees later, she said, a bit disappointed, "It’s not perfect!" She saw conflicts, budget woes, incomplete or sketchy policies.... the lack of clear information. Who is doing what anyhow! Personalities, egos, bruises- all there for anyone to see. The curtain had been pulled back on her perfect church, exposing its all too human realities. Is this a bad church? No, it is a very good church. It was just a bad illusion.
All the disappointing reality of human imperfection exist right here in me, in First Parish. Does that mean we are frauds, hypocrites, Bad? Have we failed to somehow live up to an expectation of what a church or minister should be? I don't think so. For it is precisely in our imperfections that we find the holy amongst us. It is imperfection, which gives meaning and opportunity to the human enterprise. It is in our imperfections that we are most human offering the greatest of possibilities to one another, the possibility to grow.
Life carries disappointment, hurt and failure. In acceptance of that we find the capacity to embrace all of life.
We all try to do well
We all fall short and at some point do something not so good
We make mistakes
We are not so perfect- and that is OK.
Life is the sum total of all our choices in behavior- the good ones, the not so great ones- the really bad ones. The meaning of our life is not identified or quantified on the balance sheet of one vs. the other. The meaning of our lives grows out of our response to our errors and successes- out of our relationship with the sum total of our life that make more than a bottom line.
“Be thou perfect” is not a call to live a two-dimensional artificial version of a perfect life. It’s a call to be real. To appreciate the realness of others. To try, to fail, and to try again, because that’s what we do. That’s what it is to be human and, so, for humans, that’s what it is to be perfect. What Matthew’s author was saying- “Be thou perfect.” can also be translated, “You are perfect. Just as your heavenly father is perfect, you are perfect.