On (Not) Taking an Imcomplete (Philippians 1:3-11, Advent 2C, December 9, 2012)

On (Not) Taking an Incomplete

Philippians 1:3-11
Advent 2C
December 9, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

I took an unconscionable length of time to write my doctoral dissertation.  I kept applying for—and getting—extensions and the time went on and on.  For several years I was a kind of departmental old-timer.  I think that’s why new graduate students in my department would ask me for advice.  I regard this as strange because the longer I stayed around the less qualified I was to give advice.  But I would try anyway.

I would say, “When you use any kind of source material, make sure that you record all of the bibliographical information so that you don’t have to make a late-night dash to the library to find the source again and get a page number or a publisher.”  That was good advice at the time, although most of the time the advice-seeker was looking for something more cerebral and less practical.  And anyway, the advice is out of date now.  Today’s students use on-line sources so much that they aren’t really sure where physical books or journals might be or what they might be useful for.  And they have software to extract publication data and plug it into footnotes and bibliographies. 
 

Other advice has stood the test of time a little better.  I would advise new students when making notes about sources to use to make a note about why they thought a source might be useful.  It’s a frustrating experience to be staring at a reference to a book or journal article, to know that it must have seemed important enough to write down at some time, but to have no idea of why you had done it.

And perhaps the best of all: Don’t take incompletes.  By the time students get to graduate school, they are presumed to have good—or at least—better judgment than college students.  The rules allow for more flexibility.  Getting an incomplete, for example, was pretty easy.  If you said you needed to take an incomplete, professors signed off on them and the department generally approved.  This, however, is a trap.  I saw students accumulating incompletes faster than student loan debt.  When the incompletes came due they were in a bind: having never actually done a semester’s worth of a work in a semester, they were not prepared to do two semesters’ worth in the same amount of time.

But taking an incomplete is pretty tempting when the papers are all due and the time you spent with your colleagues in the grad student watering hole complaining about your heavy work load (rather than actually getting it done) caught up with you at the end of the term.  It’s a pretty easy pattern to fall into, a human pattern.

It can be a mindset.  A friend of my sister says about term papers, “There are some research papers that you abandon rather than finishing.”  The deadline comes and you hand it in and hope that it is good enough.  I hesitate to confess how often that is true of sermons as well.  Whatever good intentions I had during the week for close reading and careful crafting of the sermon must be set aside in favor of finishing something sometime before Sunday morning.  I can only hope that my efforts are good enough often enough.

“Good enough” and “close enough” are phrases that come into play all too often.  I am comforted a little at least that my profession isn’t the only one that succumbs to the temptation to settle.  “If it doesn’t fit, get a bigger hammer,” is a saying that shows there are others who find themselves in a similar place.

How often do we give up “excellent” because “good enough” lies so readily to hand and we are under a deadline?

The season of advent, though, reminds us that there is one place where good enough simply not good enough, where only the perfect will do.  Advent reminds us—and it’s good that it does so at the beginning of the church year—that we who are a part of God’s covenant people are caught up in God’s enterprise.  God has plans that we did not make.  God has purposes that we did not choose.  And in these plans and in these purposes the phrase “good enough” does not figure.

God has in mind to finish the work of creation.  In our gospel text from last week this work of creation was seen on a cosmic scale.  We had promises of mayhem to come as the stars, the sun, the moon and the earth are all shaken as the forces of chaos that had been confined at creation are let loose.  We may have found this quaintly primitive or profoundly disturbing.  Whether the one or the other, though, we know that the first step in remodeling is demolition, whether it’s being done in the kitchen or the whole cosmos. 

But this week the scale shifts and the reading addresses us and our lives and what God’s plans and purposes for us may be.  Our reading from Philippians lacks detail, but it doesn’t really need it.  If we’ve been paying attention for the 2011-12 church year we might have noticed that God’s purposes for us and for our lives have been spelled out a little at a time in each week’s lessons.  If you missed it, don’t worry, the weekly lessons in the 2012-13 church year will do the same thing.

Paul’s letter to the few dozen households who were the Christian community in Philippi begins—as they all do—with his greeting and then it launches into the prayer that is our reading for today.  I know, it doesn’t sound much like a prayer.  It doesn’t start with “Dear God” and it doesn’t end with “in Jesus’ name.  Amen” but it’s a prayer nonetheless.  The clues are the phrases “I thank my God…” and then “And my prayer is this, that…”  And what is Paul’s prayer?  For what does he give thanks and for what does he pray?

Paul gives thanks because the Philippians have a share in the ministry of good news.  They have been caught up, like we have, into God’s plans and purposes for our world.  God’s work has begun in them as it has in us. 

But wait, there’s more: Paul gives thanks because it doesn’t stop there.  We are works in progress.  God continues to work in us.  Furthermore, God will keep renewing, refashioning, redeeming, and restoring us until we are finished.  God will keep working until we are completed.  God will not rest with a creation that is half-finished and God will not quit with us still incomplete.

That’s why Paul gives thanks.

Based on those facts in our case, Paul goes on to pray for us in slightly more detail—not too much detail, but slightly more.  The purposes that Paul believes are God’s purposes in us and therefore the purposes he will support in prayer have to do first of all with love that grows and grows and second with the kind of knowledge that comes from experience.  These things will yield “a harvest of justice.”  All together they will render us pure and blameless.  How’s that for high hopes?

God’s ambition for us goes beyond our being a people who are “mostly good” and “pretty nice” all the way to pure and blameless.  Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with being mostly good and pretty nice.  The world could use a lot more of mostly good and pretty nice.  But God does not intend to settle for that.  God wants love that continues to grow, the knowledge that comes with experience, a harvest of justice, purity and spotlessness.  And until God fashions all of those in us, God’s work in us will not be done.

I know that not many of you grew up in churches in the United Methodist family tree.  You may not have heard much about the founder of our tradition, John Wesley.  I grew up as a Methodist and then a United Methodist, and I didn’t learn much about him either, so you’re in good company.

John Wesley spoke and wrote about “going on to perfection.”  He had this notion that, given God’s love and God’s grace, there was no reason why we should not be able to love with perfect love in this lifetime.  John Wesley never claimed to be perfect in love himself, but argued that it was possible.  And if it is possible, then this should be something that we strive toward.   

Some of you may remember Bishop Clymer.  Bishop Clymer ordained me as a deacon, which used to be a step along the way from being a lay person to being an elder.  Bishop Clymer met with all of us who were being ordained as deacons that year for a conversation.  He went over some of the questions that we would be asked.  Two of them had to do with this strange Wesleyan notion of Christian perfection:  “Are you going on to perfection?”  and “Do you expect to be made perfect in this life?”  The answers to both of those questions needed to be “yes.”  He knew that these were pretty bold claims to make and that some of us at least would be reluctant to answer “yes” without feeling that we were overreaching ourselves by more than a little.  Bishop Clymer said, “If you’re not going on to perfection, tell me, what is it you’re going on to?”

And that’s the question that’s being posed to us in the reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians.  “Are we willing to commit ourselves to journeying toward a perfect love?”  That question and this, “Are we willing to trust that God will get us there when our own power is not enough?”  If I am reading Philippians rightly, God is not willing to take an incomplete.

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