Love Made Rich (Philippians 1:1-18; May 6, 2018; 6th Sunday after Easter)

Love Made Rich

Philippians 1:1-18
May 6, 2018 6th Sunday after Easter

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

I've already explained to the younger folks that the word graduation comes from the Latin word for step: graduum. To graduate means to take a step. A graduate is one who has taken a step.

In one way that is a big deal. You who are graduating from high school in a couple of weeks have been at this for a long time: nearly thirteen years. Once you've completed this step, you'll be prepared for the next step. You'll go to college or university or a technical school. Or maybe you'll enter a trade program, an apprenticeship. You've learned (or you are supposed to have learned) the basic stuff to be a citizen who can have conversations with other citizens. You've learned how to find out how much carpet you'll need to cover your living room floor. You should know who Abraham Lincoln was and the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Some of what you have learned will be immediately useful and some not so much. In fact, I will go so far as to say that few of you will ever solve another quadratic equation. I still remember Avogadro's Number (6.02 x 10^23) but I have no idea how to use it.

However, education doesn't have to be immediately useful to be valuable. The point of education is to become a better thinker, one who is able to reason logically, engage in civic conversation, and have the beginnings of an idea of what a good life might be. This is in order that you might be someone who can make a contribution to our shared life in this nation and on this world, someone who cares about and can add to the commonwealth. This is why we are willing to pay taxes to pay for education.

If you have decided along the way that the most important goal of education is to secure a high-paying job for you, you are wrong. If someone has told you that this is the most important goal of education, they are wrong. I'll stand by that, even if that person was a parent, a teacher, or even a principal.

As you gain more experience, my hope as your fellow-citizen is that you will also gain in your ability to help perfect this nation and our shared life in it. There is a great deal to do.

But before you take that on, there is time for celebration. And we do celebrate your accomplishments so far. Enjoy the applause. There are very few times in life when you will get it. So savor the moment.

And then get back to work, because in another way this is no big deal. Graduation is just a step. It's a milestone along the road. And remember that the English word mile comes from the Latin word mille, the word for one thousand. Romans counted their steps each time the right foot landed, so a thousand Roman steps is very close to an English mile. The milestone is only as important as the nine hundred ninety-nine steps that come before it. So, by itself, graduation is no big deal. It's the steps that come before it and the steps that come after it that justify setting up a milestone.

You will learn soon enough if you haven't figured it out already, that you may finish an educational program but you will never finish learning what there is to know or even what you need to know. Of learning there is no end.

It's not just true of learning, but of life and of faith. Paul not only understood this but wanted his friends at Philippi to understand it as well. "I'm sure about this," he wrote to them, "the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus." We are God's works in progress. You may discover, if you go on to college and certainly if you ever find yourself in graduate school, that some papers are never finished; they are just handed in. "Done is better than perfect," says my sister Jody. And she is right.

Done is better than perfect. Deadlines are what make the wisdom of this obvious. Almost every week, I stand up here and I deliver a sermon that is full of holes, with weak transitions, and points that aren't quite what they ought to be. But done is better than perfect. Done is better than standing up and instead of a sermon announcing that the sermon I was working on isn't perfect yet and I’m not going to deliver it until it is. Deadlines force us to put forward even our imperfect works, as if they were finished.

But God doesn't seem to have the same problem as we do, at least not according to Paul: "[t]he one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus." God is at work in us and will continue to be at work in us so that the job will get done by the time it has to be done.

This is one of those verses that John Wesley seized upon as he developed a peculiar idea that Methodists have been stuck with ever since. Many Christians in his day believed that, human nature being what it is, no real progress in the Christian life is possible. Others were pretty casual about their Christianity and seemed to feel that no progress in the Christian life was necessary. John Wesley disagreed with both. He saw no reason why Christians should not be able and expect to become perfect in this lifetime. This sounded pretty ridiculous when I first heard it.

But before we scoff, we ought to let him tell us what he means. Well, he did not mean that we would never make mistakes. No, our minds are limited; our understanding is limited. Of course, we will make mistakes. We are all subject to the usual weaknesses. We might set out to do something and fail through weakness. That's not what he meant. What he meant was just as we learned to love through the grace of God, we might learn to love God with the same love with which Jesus loves God and this also through the grace of God. In other words, he preached that we who are followers of Jesus could learn to follow Jesus even in this. When he spoke of perfection, he meant perfection in love. This was not something that he claimed to have reached, although others claimed it. He hadn't reached it but he wasn't going to let it go either. If perfect love was God's dream for John, it would be John's dream for John as well.

Now, like Wesley, I've known a few people who claimed to have become perfect in love. In fact they claimed that this perfection not only made it possible for them not to sin, but even meant that they were no longer able to sin. Like all people who believe that they are perfect, these people were insufferable.

I'm not sure about Christian perfection as Wesley preached it. He thought that being perfected in love would mean that we could be free from conscious sin. And maybe so. But after Freud, I'm not sure that means a great deal. The worst and most dangerous of our sins are unconscious, at least for most of us, and they are things like racism, sexism, trans- and homo-phobia, ableism, ageism, and classism, and all the biases and filters we use to discount the value and experiences of others so that whatever privileges we enjoy are made to seem natural.

When I was ordained, I declared before the Annual Conference that I was "going on to perfection" and that I "expect[ed] to be made perfect in this life." Now, I'm not so sure about that, at least not in the sense in which I intended it then.

I've changed in my understanding of Christian perfection in at least two ways. One of our bishops, Wayne Clymer, was helpful in my journey. He said, "If you are not going on to perfection, tell me, what are you going on toward?" Perfection is not a destination so much as it is a direction. And I would rather fail in the direction of loving perfectly than succeed in any other.

The other way that my understanding has changed is about what I think the obstacles to perfect love are. I used to be pretty focused on the rules. The Great Commandment (and the one that is like it), the Ten Commandments, and the Sermon on the Mount all provided an unflattering mirror in which to find myself unacceptable on a daily basis. An endless cycle of failure, repentance, prayers for forgiveness led me exactly nowhere. I here found that battling "sins" is not a way to progress toward perfection of love.

What I have found in recent years are two things. Another bishop, Bishop Palmer this time, helped me shift my focus from my failure to God's character: "God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it" is the good news. Being forgiven or accepted has nothing to do with anything that we do or are. It doesn't hang on our keeping the commandments. It doesn't hang on saying a particular prayer. It doesn't even hang on believing anything. God loves us and there is nothing we can do about it. We are always already forgiven. We are always already accepted. We are always already God's children. And nothing can change that.

But. We can, if we want to, be a part of God's work in the world. We can, if we want, allow ourselves to be open to God's action in us and through us. We can, if we want, become part of God's good news. We can, if we want, begin to experience in our own lives the same transformation that God dreams of and has decided to bring to the whole of creation on what Paul calls the day of "Christ Jesus."

Every bit of brokenness in the world has some counterpart within me. Racism, sexism, are not just problems out there. They are also and at the same time, problems in my all-too-human heart and mind. Going on to perfection means more than keeping my divine rapsheet clean. Going on to perfection is the sometimes painful but deeply worth it process of having trans- and homo-phobia recognized, identified, and uprooted. This is why a program like Reconciling Ministries of which our Inclusive Ministries group is a part is so important. That's why I went through the leader's training so I could lead a "White Privilege: Let's Talk" group. That's why our connection to Potrerillos is so vital.

They all allow us to see our own implication in the oppressive systems that keep our world from being a blessing to all and keep us from perfection in love. In these ways, Paul's prayer is fulfilled: "that [our] love might become even more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight."

I'm not done. But God is at work in me. And I can work alongside of God. None of you who are graduating are done. But God is at work in you. You can work alongside of God. None of us on this earth are done. But God is working still. And we, if we want to, can work alongside of God.

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