Perfection

Gospel reading: Luke 16.1-13
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Have you ever seen one of Sam Maloof's chairs? Let me take a stab at a new trick. There's one on the right side of the page. They're compelling, I think. The bend of the slats and the curve of the crest rail and the arms that reach out just so. They're compelling, but not perfect.

At least they're not perfect as we usually conceive perfection. This isn't my opinion, by the way. It's their maker's.

Sam Maloof has practiced and taught woodworking for years in Alta Loma, California. And in an interview he once described the difficult task of getting his students away from the age old association of perfection with precision. He said that if one was having trouble sharpening a chisel, she need not go out and buy a contraption to hold the tool at precisely the proper angle to the stone. The source of the trouble is more likely an unnatural motion in the hands of the woodworker. Likewise he would preach that woodworkers have no need for micrometers, as though they were milling surgical instruments from stainless steel. No, lumber needs a different kind of attention. It changes with humidity. It's grain must be honored. The wrong notion of perfection means we never get a Sam Maloof chair.

Kathleen Norris suggests that Christians have been distracted and maybe even hamstrung by wrongheaded notions of perfection. We too confuse it with precision and freedom from flaws. But Norris tells us that the word often translated 'perfection' from the New Testament is closer to completion or maturity. It carries the sense that a thing or a person has become what it was intended to be.

This is good news. Norris offers Martha Stewart as "the high priestess of Perfection: one dare not let the mask slip, even in one's home, where all is perfect right down to the last hand-stenciled napkin ring." Most of us can't sustain that kind of perfection with regard to homemaking, much less with regard to our moral and religious lives. But progressing toward a more authentic self, toward the person I was made by God to be, that sounds like good work to take up rather than the burdensome work of keeping up - with God's impossible expectations or the Jones's.

Our gospel reading on Sunday was that unsettling parable of the dishonest manager. Read it and try to make sense of it while holding on to our default definitions of perfection. A rich man fires his manager for squandering his property. Then the manager goes out to his former employer's debtors and settles accounts for less than full value. And the rich man approves. The manager apparently made the best out of this bad situation. The parable implies that this must have been the real job he was hired to do.

Jesus' interpretation of the story is just as unexpected. He tells us to make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth. He ultimately tells us we can't serve God and mammon, but we apparently can't live free of contact with mammon either. Perfection isn't accomplished by a kind of quarantine from dishonest wealth. It has something to do with serving God in spite of the dishonest wealth we encounter which may be kind of like that manager's making the best of a bad situation.

On this 50th anniversary of the witness of the Little Rock Nine a reevaluation of our notions of perfection seems relevant. A few brave students changed our world. But our world isn't perfect. Race relation troubles are hardly a thing of the past. But sometimes the shrillest voices seem to describe some other world. One voice says, "Everything's fine now. There are laws on the books that legislate perfection. Access is no longer denied." Another voice says, "Nothing's changed. And we won't say things are better until... [Insert your own vision of utopia. It usually entails a world in which everybody has migrated freely to your point of view.]"

In the world we actually inhabit, isn't the real question How can our culture, how can our churches, how can our schools participate in the maturing of people into the fullness God intended for each of them? This is a messier task than pressing each person into a single mold labeled 'perfect'. Those who struggle with moral and religious OCD should beware.

But Jesus seems to be telling us that our call is to live faithfully in this imperfect world. Maybe even the pursuit of justice needs to be like building a Sam Maloof chair. The knots and curls in the grain must be incorporated into whatever beauty we will manage. The beautiful things of this world don't pretend to be made of materials from another. They're perfect. They have become fully themselves. Blemished and beautiful.