Rev. Doug Gray
Feb. 23, 2020
Several years ago, I had the chance to go on a mission trip to Jamaica, working in an impoverished community on the north side of the island. It was hot, hard work digging out an outhouse pit for the church we were helping. The soil was red clay, and as the hole got deeper, the humidity in the ground combined with the heat to make it feel as if we were shoveling in a sauna. Just 15 minutes of shoveling took its toll. Our work had gathered an audience. Who were these crazy white people who would dig like this? I struck up a conversation with one young man, perhaps in his late teens-early twenties. I asked him if he was married. No, not yet. He wasn’t ready to get married. “If you get married, you can have only one wife. The Christians do that.” I looked at him, a little confused. He explained, “I’m not good enough to be a Christian yet.” At the time,
First, love is always truthful.
Love is always truthful. As a teen, I was in love with my first real girlfriend, and it was a perfect Saturday in Spring, and I thought wouldn’t it be great to spend an afternoon together. So I called her up and we figured out a good park to have a picnic that we could bike to because neither of us had our license. For reasons that escape me now, maybe embarrassment, I told my parents I was biking to the library. So I had a wonderful, sunny afternoon with my girlfriend, walking in the park with the sunshine sparkling off the leaves, blowing dandelions and making wishes. In due time, we had to leave to get home on time, and I biked home. When I got home, I learned that one of my friends had come over, heard that I had gone to the library, and had gone to find me there. When he didn’t find me there, he had returned to my parents with the news. I was completely and utterly busted. The thing that was most crushing to me was that my parents didn’t go ballistic and start shouting. They just looked at me with the eyes of people whose full and loving trust has been completely broken. Their disappointment and hurt cut me to the core, and I never lied to my parents like that again. Jesus calls us to account for having different levels of truth. Are you more truthful if you say something, and add “Swear to God!” or “I swear on my mother’s grave!”? Does that mean that if you don’tswear to God that you are less truthful? Jesus that’s all nonsense. Love is always truthful, because love is all about trust.
Alright, alright! Yes, I know, there are times when not telling the truth may be kinder. Several years ago, I went to see Evelyn Pease. She was a very kind, long-suffering follower of Jesus, and her son, Monte, had died of a heart-attack just a few weeks before. Evelyn had come to the funeral and been incredibly lucid, but she was on a memory unit. Not long after I got there, Evelyn said that Monte was going to be coming by soon. The staff member sitting with her said, “But Evelyn, Monte died, remember?” Evelyn said, “He’s dead? Monte’s dead?” The staff member would say something like, “Yes, Evelyn. I’m so sorry.” Evelyn burst into tears and we cried together. A few minutes later, Evelyn said that Monte was going to come by soon and take her to McDonald’s, and the conversation repeated, and Evelyn burst into tears like it was the first time she was hearing that her son had died. After two or three times in this loop, I excused myself and called Evelyn’s daughter. Could we tell Evelyn something else? We agreed that we would all start telling Evelyn that Monte had moved to Indiana to be close to his wife’s family. Things got a little easier for Evelyn and for all of us after that. Were we lying? Yes, we were…and I would do it again. What mattered for Evelyn was that Monte had gone away and who knew when she would see him again. I am very ok with lying in that situation so that Evelyn would not have to experience her full grief every 10–15 minutes. Whenever we tell a lie, we are headed into dangerous waters. My experience tells me that as long as we are truly being loving to the other person, telling the lie because it truly helps them instead of helping us, we are probably safe. It’s so easy to deceive ourselves, though, that most of the time I find I would rather tell the truth and let the chips fall as they may. Love is always truthful.
Second, Love does more than is required. A little girl was in kindergarten and was given the assignment to make or draw a birthday cake out of paper and crayons. When the children finished their projects, they should bring them to the teacher. The little girl took a pink piece of construction paper, cut off the corner went up to the teacher. “Here’s my birthday cake, Mrs. Applebaum.” The teacher was surprised that the little girl had finished so quickly, saw that not much had been done, and asked the little girl to do a little more so that she could tell it was a birthday cake. The little girl went back, drew one candle on the cake and took it back to the teacher, who asked the girl to make improvements. This process repeated itself several times, with the little girl adding the bare minimum, until the teacher finally decided that she had had enough. Jesus calls us to account for only doing the bare minimum. Should we hurt the people who hurt us? When someone asks us to do something, do we make their life a living hell while we do it? Mahatma Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Love does more than is required.
Finally, Jesus says we are to love our enemies, and I want to revolt. But then, Jesus talks about how God loves. God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Should we only love the people who love us? Are we only kind to the people who are kind to us? God does so much more. How many blessings have you received this week? Were you perfectly good, perfectly grateful, perfectly loving even to the people who gave you the hardest time? Yeah, me neither. And then Jesus drops this bombshell, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” I don’t know about you, but that really kicks in my perfectionist self. I start to think, “I have to be the perfect son, the perfect husband, the perfect father, the perfect pastor—everything has to be perfect.” If I fail to be perfect, then I must be a bad person. I heard some of you echo this last week, as we were talking after worship. Did Jesus raise the bar? Several of you felt Jesus put the bar out of reach! Jesus has created a standard of not expressing our anger, or our desire or thinking about others in relationship that’s impossible.
My friend in Jamaica was thinking like this. I’m not good enough to come to Jesus. When I get my life together, then I’ll think about praying. Jesus has a word of hope for our overwhelmed, perfectionist selves: the word Jesus uses for perfectdoesn’t mean get a 100% on the test. A better translation would be “Be mature, therefore, as your heavenly Father is mature.” “Be complete and whole and finished, therefore as your heavenly Father is complete, whole and finished.” All of a sudden, things start to make more sense. Instead of a God who is mad or frustrated with us for not loving perfectly or getting angry or lusting after someone or swearing all the time, Jesus shows us that God wants to help us become more mature. No, not the boring kind of mature, the beautiful kind of mature. The kind of mature that really treats everyone like the child of God that they are—that’s grace! The kind of mature that is rock-solid honest no matter what’s at stake—that’s someone who can be trusted. The incredible thing about Jesus is that Jesus modeled a life of full trust in God, standing for the truth when others were beating him down, sticking with God even though the world may have evil, brutal, thoughtless people in it. That’s the meaning of the Cross and it’s the meaning of grace. We don’t have to be perfect before we come to Jesus. Jesus died for us before we were good. In fact, the whole point is to come to Jesus when we aren’tperfect, when we can’t help ourselves, when we are hopeless and helpless, to find the love and power to become more what God wants—whole people, fully energized and fully surrendered to His will. More than anything else, God is looking for a lot less perfectionism, and a lot more maturity.