Be Ye Perfect

“Be Ye Perfect”

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

September 6, 2020, Labor Day Sunday

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

It is debatable if Unitarian Universalism is still what it once was - a Christian heresy, or if it has come to be something of its own, detached from its historical origins. What is not debatable, is that Unitarian Universalism inherited from Christianity a lot of its world view.

In generations past, members of Unitarian and Universalist congregations gathered and recited on every Sunday an affirmation taken from a sermon given by the Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke in 1886 (please overlook the dated sexist language). 

They would stand and say:

"We believe in The Fatherhood of God, The Brotherhood of Man, The Leadership of Jesus, Salvation by Character, and The Progress of Mankind, onward and upward forever.”

Some congregations deleted the word ‘and” then added:

“…to progressively establish the Kingdom of God, onward and upward forever.”

I was told by the first UU minister I knew, who was alive when that affirmation was used every Sunday, that it was customary for the members of the congregation to point upward with their forefingers when they said the words, “onward and upward forever.” It must have been a great deal of fun.

However, over time that affirmation fell out of favor. 

At the time when our people used this ceremonial verse, they believed that humanity had turned a corner and things would just keep getting better - “onward and upward forever.” 

They thought that there was a hierarchy of progress through time, so that as time passed, things would improve. Just like a chef creates a broth and then lets it simmer, blending the flavors and creating a better and better broth, the world would get better the longer things went on. 

Slavery was thought to be a thing of the past. The scriptures of the world religions had been translated into English, and so new spiritual insights were appearing. 

Technology was advancing and there were passenger aircraft, fast trains and better communication. Consumer goods rolled off production lines in factories so items that had been luxuries were commonly available. 

Mass farming was producing a bounty of food so that many believed hunger would be a thing of the past.

And the wars! The world had fought the “war to end all wars” and surely lasting peace was at hand. 

Historians began to advance something called the Whig Theory of History in the 1930s and 40s. The historians saw an inevitable progressive movement in history. The world went from barbaric tribalism, to warlord leadership (such as is described in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament) to authoritarian monarchy leading to a rise in reason, the development of science, ever greater liberty culminating in constitutionally determined governance. 

To their minds it was only a slightly optimistic exaggeration to believe that the “Kingdom of God (whatever that was) was arriving. 

As Freeman Clarke put it, “"the one fact which is written on nature and human life is the fact of progress, and this must be accepted as the purpose of the Creator.”

God was on the side of progress, and evolution had a divinely directed purpose!

Our spiritual ancestors thought the dinosaur fossils being discovered were evidence that evolution wasn’t a blind process. Instead, evolution was evidence that living creatures were constantly being improved by nature and nature’s God. 

Clarke called this the “coming theology.” A world filled with perfected people was on the way!

In churches of all denominations a hymn by John Addington Symonds titled “These Things Shall Be was sung (it was in the Unitarian Universalist hymnals of the time too).”

These things shall be: a loftier race

Than e'er the world hath known shall rise

With flame of freedom in their souls

And light of knowledge in their eyes.

They shall be gentle, brave, and strong,

To spill no drop of blood, but dare

All that may plant man's lordship firm

On earth, and fire, and sea, and air.

Nation with nation, land with land,

Unarmed shall live as comrades free;

In every heart and brain shall throb

The pulse of one fraternity….

Then another world war. The Holocaust. The development of weapons of mass destruction, the rise of authoritarian regimes, the waves of immigration from Italy and Ireland, the Red and Yellow Perils. The warnings of a “Silent Spring” as an out-of-control technology poisoned the world. Global Warming. People began to realize that our optimism about an inevitable, God-directed upward progress was probably mistaken.

Perfectionism

What inspired this mistaken belief in an inevitable and relentless progress was a belief system that goes all the way back to the very beginnings of the Christian tradition. It was the belief that not only could things keep getting better, but so would people. The claim was that with sufficient effort, one could become perfect in all important ways. Just as society could do it, so could people.

The belief that perfection can be achieved is an old religious doctrine. It is actually stated in the New Testament. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matt 5:48).”

People came to call this the “infinite perfectibility of humankind.” 

A number of religious communities embraced this idea. The largest was the Roman Catholic Church, and those of you who were raised in that tradition no doubt remember the heavy emphasis on guilt and sin. 

That emphasis was there because perfection was held up as the ideal. Had a more humane ideal been selected, like “always try to be the best version of yourself” there wouldn’t have been a lot that would make people try to control their behavior. 

But if the goal was perfection, and you were less than perfect, why then there were lots of opportunities to get you to change your behavior. The church would tell you how. 

On the Protestant side it was the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, who proclaimed the idea of human perfectibility. However, his church would eventually move away from it, because so many people found it demoralizing. 

But many still clung to the belief they could aspire to perfection. When you see fundamentalist congregations that call themeselves “Wesleyian” or include “Methodist” in their title, like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, what they are indicating with that is they still think people can be made perfect as Wesley taught. 

But there is a problem here.

A Bad Translation

It turns out that Matthew 5 is a bad translation.

In the original language Matthew 5:48 doesn’t actually say, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” That is how it was understood, and people acted upon it, but that was simply religious people taking a bad idea and running with it.

What Is Should Have Said

The New Testament was written in Greek, which, by the way, was not the language that Jesus of Nazareth spoke. When we open an English Bible what we are reading is a translation of the Greek into English. The word translated as “perfect” in the phrase, “Be ye therefore perfect,” is the Greek word “teleios.”

In the modern understanding of ancient koine Greek, the word “teleios” means “end,” “whole” or “purposeful.” We talk about things being “telelogical” when we want to imply they have a purpose or goal.

Therefore a better transition of Matthew 5:48 would go something like, “Be purposeful and whole, even as your Father which is in heaven is purposeful and whole.”

That’s quite different isn’t it? Instead of being told we should be perfect in all things, we are instead counseled to have a purpose for our lives - and to strive for a holism in integrating the various parts of ourselves. 

I can dig that!

Unfortunately, Western Christianity and therefore much of Western Civilization went a different way. Indeed, they went crazy.

Scripture as Psychology

As some of you know I based much of my theology on a radical reading of world scripture, the Bible included. I understand these books not as making empirical claims about what the universe is like. Instead, I consider them books of psychology that describe how the human mind works and understands its world.

Of all the psychological counsel given in scripture, the notion that people can make themselves perfect, or that striving for perfection is reasonable, has got to be one of the dumbest things any book could contain. 

Consider the harm that it did.

Families - Parents raised their children in an intolerant way, demanding an inhuman degree of emotional and behavioral control, because the parents thought if they pushed hard enough their children could be perfect children.

It is written in the Book of Proverbs:

“Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them (Prov. 13:24).”

Society - Punitive laws intended to punish people were devised, instead of lifting people from the circumstances that caused them to be law breakers. The belief that if you hurt someone enough they would change, is at the core of our entire prison, legal and even our drug rehabilitation system. 

After all, they could be perfect people if they tried hard enough…or so it is assumed. 

And if they failed to be perfect; if they had a moment of weakness and slipped, stopping short of 100% performance, then back to jail, pay the fine or get out of the therapeutic program.

Occupation - How many of you have had to submit to a performance review where you were rated on a scale of one to ten, or one to one hundred, with ten or one hundred described as “perfect?” If so, you are probably aware the Human Resources Department will usually have set a policy that no one can be rated “perfect” or in the most generous case, “perfect” in a maximum of one category - no matter how good a job you actually did.

The “perfect” score option is there, not so you could be rewarded, but as a way to pressure you to sacrificing even more for your employer - to push you harder to give more work for the same pay.

What an incredible darkness the idea of human perfectibility introduced into our lives. 

Worse, many people internalize this oppression. They buy into it and start to beat themselves up for being imperfect. Every time they make a mistake or flub something due to a misunderstanding or other normal human reaction, they subject themselves to an unrelenting flow of criticism. 

I am often amazed at the way people talk to themselves - with zero empathy, zero forgiveness. If they ever spoke to anyone else that way no one would have anything to do with them.

If this describes you, you’ve bought the con. You have internalized the idea that is used by others to manipulate you, and they no longer have to manipulate you, because you are doing it to yourself.

Every single time you feel bad because you fell short of the goal of being perfect or doing something perfectly, you bruise your own spirit. Over time, those bruises become festering sores on you spirit. The price of them will be your mental, spiritual and physical health.

“Be ye perfect…” Bullshit.

A Scam

The idea of human perfectibility may have begun as a bad translation of a historical text, but it was embraced by the elites in society and the heads of families because was a scam from the start, and they found the scam useful. “Be Ye Perfect…” is just another one of those religious memes that arose, and was perpetuated, because people in power found it useful to manipulate other people. There is a lot of that sort of thing in religious history.

A Fool’s Errand

You see, perfection is a fallacy. The only things that can be perfect are those things that exist in the realm of definition. I can give you the definition of a perfect circle. But outside of that definition, perfection does not exist. We can define a perfect circle, but no human alive can actually draw one nor can any machine.

Even if you designed a circle-drawing machine with parts made from the hardest materials and set a computer to craft a drawing of a circle, the drawing would still be imperfect. 

The nib of the pen used would be wearing down at the atomic level every time it moved, and the line it made would not be exactly the line it made before. The bearings in the mechanism would also wear at the atomic level with each motion made, and no matter how well-calibrated at first, the finished circle would be flawed. You wouldn’t be able to see it with your eyes. But it would be flawed.

Nothing that exists can be perfect.

In 1889 by international agreement a definition object of the standard kilogram was made. It was a solid cylinder, height equal to its diameter, made of platinum-iridium alloy, the hardest material known. The standard kilogram object was kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures laboratory at Sèvres, France. An exact copy was also made at the same time and stored at a separate location for safekeeping. It was said to be a perfect copy in case something happened to the original. Perfection had been achieved with a perfect object and a perfect copy.

However, in 1989, a century later, it was discovered that the prototype kept at Sèvres was 50 micrograms lighter then other copy of the standard kilogram. The perfect pair of cylinders were no longer perfect. The differences were caused by changes in humidity, the friction of air particles over the surface, irregularities in the gravitational field of the two locations, loss of atomic nuclei due to age in some of the alloy, and other tiny disparities.The two objects became imperceptibly different the instant they were created. It just took one hundred years for the changes to be noticeable. No object in this universe can be unchanging. In the realm of reality, nothing can be perfect. 

In response, and to avoid the problem of having the kilogram defined by an object with a changing mass, the General Conference on Weights and Measures agreed in 2011 to redefine the kilogram not by a physical artifact but by a fundamental physical constant - Planck’s constant - when expressed as a unit of mass. 

That’s far more complicated than a cylinder in France, but it is perfect, because it is a definition, not an existing object. Nothing that actually exists can ever be perfect. 

Beating oneself up for being less than perfect it foolish, because everything that actually exists is less than perfect. It isn’t theoretically possible for perfection to be achieved in any existing domain of discourse. Trying to be perfect. Holding yourself accountable to do things perfectly, is a fool’s errand. That means if you attempt it you are a fool.

The Price One Pays

But the price we pay for not understanding that the ancient command to “be ye perfect” was a mistake from the moment it was written, is vast. 

How much unhappiness has come from people feeling they have failed because they were not a perfect employee, professional, son, daughter, parent, partner or spouse? How many people feel shame and guilt because their best efforts fall short of perfection? 

Yet it’s impossible for anything or anyone to be perfect. When people try anyway, they either beat themselves up for failing at an impossible task, or worse, they pretend to be perfect by concealing their imperfections and appearing to be other than as they are.

You’ve met them and so have I. Nothing is ever their fault. The responsibility always was elsewhere. They may even claim that the things they say or write, even their telephone calls, are “perfect.”  This results in personal, mental and spiritual fraud and hypocrisy as it’s not even theoretically possible to be perfect.

I used to fall for this. I come from a family where I was disliked and scorned. Because everything I did, good grades, success at my after-school jobs, even getting an award in history given my by High School, was dissected, critiqued and dismissed. Because all of these thing were necessarily less than perfect, as everything is, there was always something that could be used to throw some shade my way.

I struggled with this throughout my young adulthood and it did a heck of a number on my self-esteem. Then a girlfriend read a passage to me from the work of the French writer Voltaire, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

If you try to be perfect, or do things perfectly, you will fail because that is not possible. Perfection cannot exist in the physical realm.

In that failure you will loose the freedom to enjoy doing things well, or the satisfaction of being “good enough.” Good enough isn’t bad.

In fact, in my early years as a Unitarian Universalist minister I had a card under the glass top of my desk. It said, “Done is Good.” Even done imperfectly, it was far, far better to have something moving forward that to have it stagnate because I couldn’t figure out how to get every aspect right. That was an important understanding because, believe me, parish clergy are routinely criticized no matter what they do because everything they do is necessarily imperfect. 

I will close with the words of a favorite pop philosopher of mine, Ashleigh Brilliant. He said, “I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.” And that’s fine. I am not perfect and neither are you. I do not do things perfectly, and neither do you. But we can be excellent, if only in part. That’s good enough.

May we all take that to heart this Labor Day.

And that’s my sermon.