We’ve been talking over the last couple of weeks about the
Methodist emphasis on God’s grace. It’s grace that brings into a relationship
with God and grace that motivates us to serve. To review, we have talked about
how God created us in his image to have a relationship with God and with the
vocation of caring for God’s creation. God allowed the humans a choice to live
into that image and vocation, but they chose to go their own way—a choice the
Bible calls sin. The consequences of sin were separation from God, with the
ultimate end being physical and spiritual death.
But even when humanity rejected God’s vocation and identity
for them, God did not give up. God continues to reach out to humans through
what Wesley called “prevenient grace,” God’s calling us back to himself. When
humans respond to God’s offer of grace and new relationship through faith, God
responds with justifying grace, forgiving our sin and giving us a new birth, a
new opportunity to become the people God created us to be.
As we said last week, though, God does not offer us new
birth so that we will merely stay infants in faith. We eventually have to leave
kindergarten! Our salvation is not simply a moment in time, but a life-long
process of growth into the image of God so that we might participate with God
in the renewal of the whole creation. To borrow Peter’s words (which he lifted
from Deuteronomy) – our goal is to “be holy as God is holy”—to reflect God’s
glory embrace our vocation.
So today we want to look at the third movement of grace. We
might call it “sanctifying grace” but John Wesley called this goal “Christian
perfection.” Now when we hear that word “perfection” we might react pretty
strongly. After all, no one is perfect, nor can we hope to be so. One of the
reasons that John Wesley got thrown out of most Anglican churches was because
he insisted on using “perfection” as the goal of the Christian life.
Wesley’s problem wasn’t so much a theological one as a
semantic one, however. In the Scriptures, there is a Greek word, “teleios,”
that is translated into English in various ways. “Teleios” can mean: holy,
mature, complete, or perfect. “Teleios” is not something we achieve on our own,
but is always dependent upon God’s grace and initiative.
To put it another way, we can’t ever be fully “perfect,”
meaning sinless, flawless performance, but we can be “perfected” or “made
perfect” through God’s transforming grace. Perfection/maturity/holiness is not
about holding up our performance (which would make it “holier-than-thou”), but
rather holding up God’s grace in our lives. The more we are in relationship
with God, the more we grow in grace, the more we mature from our new birth, the
more we begin to reflect the image of God and see the world as God sees it. It’s
not about perfect performance, but perfect love.
When we lived in Park City we typically got 350 inches of
snow a year, which meant that we spent a lot of time snowblowing the driveway.
One day after a big snow I finished clearing off a foot and a half of snow I
looked over at the neighbor’s driveway and saw that it was really buried. He
was away on vacation. I knew he was coming back the next day, so I thought to
myself, “Well, I’ll be a wonderful neighbor and blow off his driveway so that
when he comes home he can pull right in and he’ll never know who did this noble
deed.” Nice, huh? So I run the snowblower over there and start blowing a couple
of feet of snow.
Now, when you live in a place that gets that much snow and
if you run your snowblower often, one of the things you always have to think
about is—where did the morning newspaper land? Because if you hit it with the
snowblower, nothing good will come of it. I knew this from experience.
Well, since Steve was on vacation, I had no thought of the newspaper
because, surely the paper had been stopped. Nay, nay…I hit the Saturday paper,
which caused a shower of multicolored confetti all over the pure white snow. I
muttered a bit, yanked the paper out of the auger, and kept merrily on my way
until, about halfway through, I hit the Sunday paper—with all the ads. Now the
confetti was like a mocking party (Yay! You’re an idiot!). The auger was
completely and irretrievably jammed. I banged on it with a wrench, said a few
non-pastoral words and finally had to take the snowblower to the shop to get it
unstuck.
In the meantime, Steve comes home to a half-done driveway
and a sea of chopped up newspaper. He followed the snowblower tracks to my
house and said, with a smile and a laugh, “Thanks for attempting to do my
driveway.” He understood that while the performance wasn’t perfect, the intent
certainly was.
Wesley would say that’s how Christian perfection works –
it’s perfection of intention, a constant desire to please God and reflect our
vocation in the image of God. The more we exercise that intention, the more our
performance begins to catch up and while we’ll never be flawless performers, we
can get better and better as we learn from experience. We learn to somehow
always look for the newspaper in the theological sense!
Perfection in love, perfection of intention, a desire for
holiness and Christian maturity, is a learning process. Just as we aren’t born
mature and complete, so our initial salvation doesn’t make us instantly into
mature and complete Christians. We need a process of growth, a process of
transformation, a process that forms us continually into the character and
image of God.
This week, I’ve been reading New Testament theologian Tom
Wright’s new book After You Believe.
Wright’s premise is that one of the key things that has been missing in a lot
of contemporary Christianity is an emphasis on the formation of character or
virtue. Instead, he says, most Christians have focused their thoughts in two
other directions.
The first direction is an emphasis on Christianity as a set
of rules. In that view, the gospel looks something like this: I have disobeyed
the rules (sin), but God has forgiven me (grace), so that now I can go back and
obey the rules better. A rules-oriented Christianity is always looking for ways
to proclaim what it’s against. The rules become the operative principle, and
while these Christians claim they have been saved through grace by faith, they
act as though that grace is dependent upon strict adherence to the rules, and
they’re going to make sure that everybody obeys them.
Here’s the thing, though…we can’t keep all the rules. That’s
why we’re sinners in the first place! Not only that, when we are driven by
rules we soon begin to realize that the rules don’t cover every situation, nor
can we even agree on the rules. Rules have loopholes, rules are debatable,
rules can have exceptions. When the rules fall short, what do we do? We make up
more rules!
We see this at work whenever there’s a debate about putting
the Ten Commandments in front of a courthouse somewhere. There are certain
people who believe that if we would just post the rules, then everyone would
somehow “get it” and obey them. We’ve had these rules for thousands of years,
and yet we still have a hard time with them ourselves. What makes us think that
posting them up more will make a difference? As long as the rules are
externally enforced, we’ll always be looking for loopholes.
A rules –orientation can also push us into tempting
territory. A wise mentor of mine once said to me, “Be careful what you preach
against. It’s always better to be for something than against something.”
Otherwise, we risk falling prey to the power of the very thing we’re against.
Ted Haggard’s situation taught us this. To borrow from Shakespeare, we can
“protest too much.” When we live by the rules alone, we can die by them as
well.
Hear me…it’s not that we don’t need rules. We do. They
provide us with boundaries. But strict obedience to the rules is not what grows
us toward maturity. God doesn’t even push the rules down the throats of his
people forever. Whereas in Exodus God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, a list
of external rules, in Jeremiah 31, God says “I will write my law on their
hearts.” It’s not the external rules that ultimately matter, but the inward
character that is formed through maturity in God’s grace.
Wright also exposes the other way that people approach
Christian faith and that is by throwing out the rules altogether. Their version
of the gospel goes like this: In Jesus, God abolished the rules, accepted
people as they were, and urged them to discover their real identity within
themselves. The power is within you, goes this theological idea, all you have
to do is to “name it and claim it.” “Be true to yourself” and “be happy” is a
major theme of the culture and a lot of churches. TV preachers are famous for
this kind of message – you’re special, God wants to bless you, you just need to
release the truth that’s inside you.
Problem is, this is more Oprah than it is Paul or Jesus. The
focus here is strictly on the individual—you just need to be authentically who
you are. Nobody can tell you who you are. Who am I? is the theme of most pop
songs today (well, that and sex). I am the most important thing to God, I am
the center of the universe. Everything I need is within me. God will bless
that.
Here’s the thing…if we buy into that theology, then whenever
we go looking for God all we’ll see is a mirror image of ourselves. What’s
“within me” apart from God isn’t all that great because I’m still broken. My
“true self” apart from God is a mess! Remember the two aspects of faith:
repentance and belief. Repentance turns me away from my own reflection towards
the image of God, and belief is the act by which I give up control of my life
to the Lordship of Christ.
Yes, a good self-concept is a good thing, but we do not find
maturity within ourselves alone. We need to understand that our true selves are
only found when we are embracing the image of God we were created to be!
Instead of looking externally to rules or internally toward
ourselves, Christian perfection, Christian maturity, is about the development
of character—a shaping of our lives inside and out by the sanctifying grace of
God. When we are truly growing up in Christ, our lives will have a very clear
internal compass regulated by the Holy Spirit. People who are “going on to
perfection” don’t have to focus on rules because the principles are written on
their hearts, nor do they think much about being true to themselves as much as
being true to the self that God is helping them to become. People who are
reaching Christian maturity seem to know and do the right thing instinctively.
How do we move toward Christian maturity? Well, Wesley would
say that it takes practice. There are certain habits, attitudes, and practices
that help us move in that direction. Wesley called these habits, attitudes and
practices “the means of grace.” These included worship, receiving the
sacraments, daily prayer and Bible study, fasting, and meeting together with
other Christians. We’ll look at those in a little more depth next Sunday. It’s
these practices, along with some others, that enable us to grow to the point
that our life is always reflecting Christ. Good habits and practices, honed
over years, enable us to act and function the right way, the Christ way, no
matter the circumstances.
I can think of no better illustration for how this works
than that of the “miracle on the Hudson” which took place in January 2009. You
know the story—Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was piloting a US Airways jet
with 155 passengers and crew out of New York when the plane suddenly hit a
flock of geese and sucked several into the engines, causing them to stop functioning.
The plane was going down quickly. The only place to land was in the Hudson
River. 208 seconds – the difference between life or death.
Capt. Sullenberger didn’t have time to check the rule book
on what to do with this situation. To debate all the options, find the
loopholes.
Nor did he decide to “look within himself” for the answer to
the problem – because going there had the potential for panic.
Instead, he relied on his training—honed over 30 years of
flight experience in the Air Force (he was USAFA class of ’73) and in flying
commercial airlines. Hours in the cockpit and in simulators, establishing
habits, practices, attitudes. He was formed, trained and experienced. As he
said to Katie Couric, “I felt like my whole life had prepared me for this
moment.”
He landed the plane and everyone was safe. They call it a
“miracle.” Sully would say that it was training. He was formed over a lifetime into
being the right person for the right time.
John Wesley believed that God wants to form his people for
the right time. That our faith isn’t just an idea that we embrace occasionally,
but the very ground of our being. When we respond to God’s grace, God forms us
in his image, forms us into the right people at the right time—God’s time—Kingdom
time.
We will likely never be called to do what Capt. Sully did.
We may be called, however, to do even greater things for God—helping to save
the lives of people for eternity. For God to use us fully, we need to be
trained, we need to be formed, we need to be holy.
So here’s the question of the morning – what is your life
preparing you for? Do you feel like your spiritual life is moving somewhere, or
is it just another nice idea? Are you growing up? Wesley would say that true
Christians are always on the way somewhere – on the way to being perfected.
This is a key doctrine of Methodism, and one that I think we
need to take seriously. The early Methodists gathered in small groups called
“class meetings” where they took seriously the idea of spurring one another on
to perfection. Everyone was asked about the state of their lives, everyone was
expected to be growing.
I’m convinced that a church, particularly a Methodist
church, ought to be spending the bulk of its energy in shaping people into the
image of God. It’s a different model of church than simply attracting more
bodies with nice programs. It’s a different kind of church because it doesn’t
always tell you what you want to hear. It’s a church that prepares you for
something grand, something dangerous – a church that prepares you for the
coming Kingdom of God.
Recent Comments