October 2005 - WORKS IN PROGRESS
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Philippians 3:4b-14
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
As many of you know, about seven years ago this congregation was gracious enough to give me a three-month sabbatical. As many of you also are aware, among the several projects and studies that I undertook in those weeks, one of the most fulfilling was working with a master woodworker in his woodshop in Orleans, Massachusetts. Hands-on work in the morning with this incredible gift from the trees of God's creation...then reading and study in the afternoon...some time for meditation and perhaps a long walk, then lighter reading in the evening and sometimes music, drama, or documentary from PBS. It felt like a balanced rhythm of living. While the woodworking was the most satisfying piece of the rhythm, it was also the most challenging and spiritually revealing part of the sabbatical.
I made several reproductions of items of Shaker furniture, one of them being the trestle table of cherry that sits in a daughter's informal dining area and is used daily. It is a beautiful piece of work, but as its creator I know that it is not a perfect piece of work, and that is the spiritual issue I wrestled with amid the sawdust and the carpenter's glue. I know that in finishing one of the floating end-boards that allow the table top to expand without cracking, I had been too heavy of hand with the belt sander, taken off too much material, and the irregularity showed if you looked close; not a glaring blemish but enough to cast over me a gray cloud of failure and discontent. All those hours, all that careful work, the precision cutting, the fine sanding, the anticipating of a flawless work ...and now, in one of the last steps, an over-sanded end-board telling me that once again I had failed to attain that longed-for perfection that seemed within my grasp. If I over-dramatize, I do emphasize that this brought on a spiritual struggle with what I thought I had mastered: the sin of perfectionism. It helped a little that the craftsman, Dick Soule, showed me a way to cover the defect so you had to look real hard to see it, but I knew it was there. It didn't help much when he tried to assuage my sense of defeat by saying, "Look, you've only just started working with wood." It helped more when he informed me that the original Shakers were known to deliberately include a minor flaw in their otherwise masterful work, because they didn't want to pretend to the perfection that was God's alone. It helped...but it still took a long while to work through this spiritual challenge: it was not just dealing with my imperfect performance...it was dealing with the realization that while I thought I had overcome the plague of perfectionism some time ago, it was still lurking there in some corner. Gotcha! It is a beautiful piece of work...but it is nor perfect.
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"Not that I have already achieved this. I have not yet reached perfection, but I press on, hoping to take hold of that for which Christ once took hold of me. My friends, I do not claim to have hold of it yet. What I do say is this: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what lies ahead, I press towards the finishing line, to win the heavenly prize to which God has called me in Christ Jesus."
If ever there were one, Paul would be the stand-alone candidate for "practically perfect Hebrew." All the right credentials, all the prescribed practices and rituals, from the right clan, of the most pious religious party, stronger defender of the faith as a persecutor of the church...yes, a super-Jew in the very best sense of the word. But Paul has been called, claimed, and redirected. And now it's not his near-perfect resume that will open the floodgates of blessing - they have come to mean nothing, he has discovered - but only the grace of God extended to pilgrims who are always "on the way," exactly where God desires us to be.
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I generally cringe when I hear pronouncements made to the effect "There are basically only two kinds of people in this world..." And I want to cry out, "Yeah, you're right: people who make boneheaded statements like that and people who know better." Humanity is gloriously diverse, but there are at least two kinds of traveling in life: destination people and en route people: the security of home...the adventure of the road; Journey's End...and "What lies ahead?". Most of us partake of both, even if we prefer the one or the other. But I know that when I'm more of a destination person, I'm most likely to get tripped up on my spiritual stumbling block...thinking I've attained it, made it, reached it, have it figured out, possess the necessary credentials, have it within my grasp. Then I lean a little too heavily on the belt sander, and that almost perfect world crumbles and I'm thrown back on God's grace. I also become aware...I wasn't even close. To move ahead, I have to eventually let the past go, work through it but let it go, seeing my failures as instructors of God's grace, tough schoolmasters; and then the good things from the past can remain good if I don't allow them to tell me who I am or determine my worth as a child of God. Paul calls his past rubbish - but maybe it's enough to call it preparatory for God's grace. Imperfection is the wound that lets God into our life. Paul has been called from a high and lofty place to a "downward call" in Christ, because this downward call of reliance on God's grace rather than his virtue is the heavenly call of blessing and delight which we taste and toward which we travel. Grace can keep us from running our life into two dead end ways of life: one way settles in comfortably with the incompleteness of life and the flawed projects, and says, "Why sweat it? It's always going to be this way; relax, and live it up." The other dead end way proclaims, "You're measured by your performance, and until it is flawless, you're less than acceptable and worthy of anyone's love.
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There is another way besides the ways of self-satisfaction and self-condemnation, between status quo complacency and anxious, driven perfectionism. Gerald May writes in one of his books about "the myth of fulfillment." We hear a lot of easy talk about the importance of being fulfilled in life. May says that we are addicted to two things: one is feeling we have to fill up all the spaces in life rather than appreciating and enjoying the spaciousness; work, productivity, efficiency - become addictions all-too-easily. And we find it hard to just "be" in the space of life. The other is the addiction to fulfillment, which is akin to that passion for the perfect. Fulfillment is the eradication of all emptiness in life; but we need the feeling of emptiness that is nurtured by imperfection, to know of our true need: the grace of God. So that feeling of emptiness in life, incompleteness, the radical yearning for love...these, he says, are in fact the most beautiful aspect of the human soul. He says, "We were never meant to be completely fulfilled; we were meant to taste it, to long for it, and to grow toward it....To miss our emptiness is, finally, to miss our hope." (Awakened Heart, p. 103.)
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"Confident in the flesh...circumcised on the eighth day, Israelite by race, a Hebrew's Hebrew, zealous in defending the faith, righteous under the law, blameless, without fault." Yet for all this...the blessed emptiness...the pain of longing that throws up back on God's grace, and having given up the expectation of perfection in our striving, allows us to grow toward the fulfillment of love. Always on the way.
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Here at the Lord's table is one of the places we are nourished by God's grace, for it is the sacrificial and redemptive work of Christ on the cross that gives us access to this grace, and it is Christ's living presence with us that sustains on the way of our incomplete pilgrimage toward true Love and Life. "Be known to us in breaking bread..." Amen.
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