Library
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Perfectionism: Wanting to be God
By Rev. Jerry Herships
Scripture: Matthew 5:48
48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Many of you know of Anne LaMotte. She is an awesome writer and writes about God and faith and not in the most traditional of ways. Someone posted a quote from her on their Facebook page this week: "Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.” Now that is a great quote, but what I noticed was how many people commented on it. TONS. People REPOSTED it on their page. Clearly this hit a nerve and got me to thinking about how does trying to be perfect all the time affects our lives and why this relentless pursuit?
I don’t think most people openly admit to wanting to be perfect and I think the pursuit of excellence is important. I think we all should try to be the best we can be. But there is a difference between wanting to be the best we can be and shooting for perfection. I also found myself thinking about what is attached to the drive towards perfection. What happens when we don’t achieve it? How is our performance attached to our understanding of self worth, our understanding of others or our understanding of our relationship to God?
I wonder if, at the core, there is some kind of thinking that if we do everything JUST RIGHT, THEN everything will work out. That is TREMENDOUS pressure to put on ourselves, every Step…just right. I’ve heard people say, “I did everything just right, I did everything I was supposed to do…and then THIS.” I think it is this thinking that every step in our lives has to be perfect that sometimes prevents us from taking that first step at all. The rest of the quote by Lamotte, says perfectionism, “is the main obstacle between you and a lousy first draft.” But she didn’t use the word lousy. There is a mind set there these days that, “if it can’t be great right out the chute, I don’t want to do it.”
I have had to adjust my thinking with preaching and writing. When you do stand-up, you work on a given twenty minutes for YEARS. Every breath, every pause, every word….constantly edited and reworked. With preaching you are given one week to strike gold. And then….you will never say those words again!
If you are a perfectionist, that is a recipe for crazy making. Plus it leaves no room for the Holy Spirit to work within you and come out in your writing and in your speaking. Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, "I am the Vine; you are the branches. If someone remains in Me and I in them, they will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."
That does not just apply for preachers doing preaching. We have to allow God to work in our lives, all of our lives. Part of the problem of perfectionism is the mindset that we can do it (whatever the “it” is), ourselves. We have to remember we are in partnership with God in our lives. It is like the St. Augustine quote, “Without us God will not. Without God we cannot.” It’s a partnership.
I think this is one of the things that we forget when we begin to lead a perfectionist life. We edge God out…We have said before that E.G.O. is an acronym for Edging God Out. I think this is at the center of perfectionism. In those moments we catch ourselves thinking, “I…can…do…it…myself!” that we get in trouble. I have had those moments.
We can trace this back, I think, to fear. What will people think if I am less than perfect? What will my co workers think? What will my kids think? What will my parents think? What do I think of myself if I am less than perfect? What will God think?
We don’t even have to go all the way back to the Bible. Our own John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was fond of saying we are moving towards Christian perfection. He wrote an entire book called A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. So we have Wesley and Jesus telling us to be perfect.
Which brings us to today’s reading. It is just one verse. We see it in other Gospels as well. In Luke it is slightly different…it substitutes “merciful” for “perfect” so we are off the hook there.
What is Jesus telling us in this passage when he asks us to be perfect? I have spent this whole time trying to persuade us not to be perfect and then Jesus comes along and mucks up the works. Are we to be perfect or not? Shouldn’t we do what Jesus tells us to do? Isn’t it our job, as disciples, to follow in his word? If he is calling us to perfection we should go, right? The words are pretty simple aren’t they? Actually, it might not be as straight forward as we might think it is.
This is not the only place in the Bible where we are told to be perfect. We first see it in the Hebrew Bible which we call our Old Testament. It is in Deuteronomy 18:13. “You shall be perfect before the Lord your God.” When we couple this with, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in Heaven in perfect,” it almost seems like we are not just being asked to be perfect, we are being commanded to be perfect. THAT’S PRESSURE!
The first thing we have to do is look at the time when this was written. What did the words mean then, what do they mean now? How has the meaning of the words changed?
The Hebrew Bible word, used in Deuteronomy, is tamim, which means wholeness in the sense of not being partial. To “be perfect” is to serve God with the whole heart, not a partial heart, to be single minded in devotion to the one God. It is not splitting our focus. It is not having more than one God. It is being in love with God; completely and totally.
When we get to the New Testament, the Greek word, "perfect," in this Matthew verse is telios, a word which doesn’t imply a no mistakes kind of perfection, but instead means full development and growth into full spiritual maturity. The focus of the verse falls more along the lines of meaning a "committed and close relationship with God." (The Complete Biblical Library:101) This verse is also in the context of love. The challenge is to love as our God loves, not only loving those who love us, but loving even our enemies and those who persecute us.
So the Deuteronomy verse is telling us to love God with our whole heart, our whole self. And the Matthew verse is telling us to love our neighbors. When we put these two together it sounds an awful lot like what we hear later in Matthew 22:37. It says for us to love God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor. This is called the greatest commandment and we’ve talked about that before. Suddenly, “Perfect” looks a lot different now doesn’t it?
See I’ve discovered it is not to be thought of the way we think of being perfect today which has its root in the Greek philosophical understanding of perfect. Perfection is not to be understood in the Greek sense of living with absolute perfection, which we know is impossible for us to do.
We are not asked to not make mistakes. We are not asked to live a life that never fails. We are not asked to make the perfect and right decisions every minute of every day.
We are asked to give our whole heart to God. That is the “perfect” God wants from us.
So that clears up what the Bible means by perfection but it doesn’t clear up our desire of perfection, does it? I think there are maybe a handful of us who put the perfectionist pressure on ourselves because of these verses. I’ve got to be perfect because of Matthew and Deuteronomy. But I think that’s not the case for most people. I don’t think most people even know about passages. I think the pressure comes from any number of other places; our culture, our families our co-workers. I, also, think the vast majority of us put the perfectionist label on ourselves. It might have started in one of those other places but I think we are the ones who turn up the volume on our desire, or drive, our need to be perfect.
There is only one perfect. That’s God. When we want to be perfect, we want to be God. When perfectionism kicks in, we find ourselves, on some level, wanting to be like God.
So what can we do about it and how do we know if we are a perfectionist?
On a quick search of the internet, I found the following perfectionist thought patterns. See if any of them sound familiar to the tapes that might have played in your head in the past…by the past I mean up to the last hour.
- I should be liked, approved of, and loved by everybody, especially those important to me.
- I should be able to do anything and everything perfectly; if I cannot, it's better not to do it at all, or wait until I can. In other words, I will procrastinate in doing anything until I am convinced I can do it perfectly
- I must be perfectly confident and successful before I can consider myself to be a worthwhile person, or before others can consider me to be worthwhile.
- I should be able to make and keep everyone around me happy; if I don't, there is obviously something wrong with me.
- Here’s one for the Social Justice folks. It is my personal responsibility to right the wrongs of this world, to solve its problems, and to correct all of its injustices.
- Because I have never been able to fully please my parents, friends, and/or peers, I must be less than desirable and worthwhile as a person.
Here are some that have to do with how we think of God and being perfect:
- God only accepts and loves me when God can approve of everything that I am, think, feel, say, and do.
- God saves by God’s grace, but only maintains this relationship with me if I read, pray, witness, serve, and do enough for God.
Perfectionism is about self image. It is about how we see ourselves and how we think the world sees us. Neither of these are the right source from which to get our information. We need to constantly remind ourselves that our worth comes from God and God’s love for us. This is a love that is equal to all. This is a God who loves Mother Teresa & the drug dealers the same, a God who recognizes all as children of God, and a love that’s not determined by income, skin color, sexual orientation, neighborhoods or countries of origin. That’s God’s love and we’re being asked to love the same way.
Our identity comes from what our God thinks of us and our God loves us regardless of how we perform, the titles we have, the grades we get, or how “perfect” our last project turned out. Nothing can stop God’s perfect love…and that’s all the “perfect” we need in our lives. Amen.