...because we don't have to be perfect

The Rev. Brad Sullivan
Lord of the Streets, Houston
July 6, 2025
Proper 9, C
Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16
Psalm 66:1-8
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

People tend to really like the idea of perfection, and at the same time, we have terrible problems with perfection. Perfection is not really for us, and we’re not particularly good at perfection. We just can’t really achieve it, and yet we often try to strive for perfection, and it often leads us off the rails. 

Perfection is unrealistic. It’s unobtainable.

Our desires for perfection do tend to make us fight amongst each other, though. Whoever is closer to perfection gets more money. Whoever is closer to perfection is seen as not only worth more, but also more worthy of anything and everything good in life. Look at the latest bill brought by President Trump. Those with the greatest economic output get the greatest benefit by his bill, while those with the least economic output get harmed the most by his bill. The president’s bill follows the lie of perfectionism, that the best are worth the most and the worst are worth the least. 

That runs completely counter to Jesus’ teaching and completely counter to God’s view of human worth. All are worthy, not for being more or less perfect; all are worthy simply for being. We are all God’s children, and we are all equally worthy of love and belonging, honor and respect. We are all worth the same human dignity, regardless of how nearly perfect or drastically imperfect we may seem. 

How do I know this? Two things: Jesus’ teaching and Jesus’ death on the cross.

Look at Jesus’ teaching. In Matthew 20, Jesus told a parable of a landowner who had a vineyard and went out to get laborers to work in his vineyard. Early on, he found some folks who worked all day, and he told them he’d pay them a living wage. Later in the morning, he found some others to work part of the day. Again he found others to work starting at noon, then mid-afternoon, and then he finally found folks who were still looking for work and hadn’t been hired. He hired them to work just for an hour.

At the end of the day, he paid everyone the same. All received the same living wage, which is what they all needed to survive. Those who had worked the full, perfect day were outraged that they hadn’t received more than those who had only worked the woefully insufficient one hour. They weren’t perfect; they don’t deserve as much. 

Not so, the landowner said. They were only able to work an hour, but they had to live a full 24 hours each day. They were just as worthy of getting to live as those who had been able to work all day. Our ideas of perfection and worth based on productivity run totally counter to Jesus’ teachings.

What about Jesus’ death on the cross? Did Jesus die for the worthy or for the unworthy? He died for all: worthy, unworthy, greater, lesser, middling. Jesus died to join all of humanity’s sins and mistakes with God. We’re told in Hebrews that Jesus was the perfect sacrifice to atone for humanity’s sins, and we’re told that Jesus made the perfect sacrifice because we couldn’t make the perfect sacrifice. 

If we look at the prophets, though, we also find that God didn’t really want all these sacrifices. God wanted us to treat one another like the landowner did in Jesus’ parable. God wanted us to bear one another’s burdens and to live the law of love for one another. We were never going to be perfect at it, and God never expected perfection from us. We’re human. We’re screwed up. We can’t be perfect, and God knows that. 

So, God became the perfect sacrifice for us, essentially telling us, “Y’all, the perfect sacrifice has been done, it’s finished, once for all, so you don’t need to do any more of this sacrifice things on an altar type stuff. The sacrifice is done, and it was perfect. Y’all don’t need to be. So, stop worrying about being perfect, and get on with loving one another. Get on with bearing one another’s burdens. Get on with treating one another as equally worthy of love and belonging, honor and respect.” 

Jesus was that perfect sacrifice for us not because God needed it, but because we did. We thought we had to be perfect. We couldn’t be, and God finally said, “Guys, I’ll just do it for you because you can’t be perfect, and you don’t need to be.” God stepped in to help us because our self-sufficiency was not enough.

That continues in all of our lives, Jesus joining with us to help us when our power and our self-sufficiency is not enough. We’re not meant to be in this life alone, and we’re not meant to be perfect. We’re meant to share this life with others, and we’re meant to seek help from God. 

With that help, we can then accomplish what we can’t do on our own. With God’s help, we can be in greater unity and love with one another and do together what we can’t do on our own. Then, for all those times when we hurt one another and screw up, God has already made amends for that so we can make amends with each other. 

We don’t have to become right with God. We are, so we can get on with the business of loving one another. 

That’s a lot of the message that Jesus told his disciples to go and preach to others because the world was pretty messed up, and the world is still pretty messed up. People still need that message that we don’t need to be perfect, that it’s not the great who are worthy and the not great who aren’t worthy. We’re all worthy, and any law or supposed gospel that preaches that only those who produce a lot, or work a lot, or are worth a lot of money, are the ones who are worthy…any gospel or law like that is completely anti the Gospel of Jesus. 

So, we get to go out and proclaim this message to others. What did Jesus say about those who didn’t want to hear it? We heard last week that his disciples wanted to rain fire down upon them, and Jesus said, “no.” When people don’t hear it, we say, “ok,” and we go. We leave them, hopefully, in peace. We don’t lose ourselves in rejection and get upset. We let our peace remain. We take our peace with us, and we go on to bring peace to others, and if they don’t accept it, that’s ok. We don’t force them. We just say, “peace be upon you,” and we go, because even our sharing of the Gospel doesn’t have to be perfect.

I’d love to say I have a good ending to this sermon, but I don’t, and it’s actually not even finished, but I figure that’s ok, because it doesn’t have to be perfect. 

The questioners, the loners, the kids with behavior problems...

Brad Sullivan

2 Christmas, Year B

December 31, 2017

Emmanuel, Houston

John 1:1-18

The questioners, the loners, the kids with behavior problems...

Over the weekend, a priest friend of mine and I talking and joking together about challenges of church life, and she said, “Yeah, church would be great if it wasn’t for all the people.”  It’s a common joke about the imperfections of the Church which is the ecclesia (or gathering) of Jesus’ friends.  Jesus’ ecclesia of friends began as a rather rag tag group of also-rans, the island of misfit toys type folks who needed and wanted the love and belonging which Jesus was offering.  Being a rag tag group of folks, the church was always an imperfect bunch, and that proud tradition has continued on to this day.

As the church, the ecclesia, the gathering of Jesus’ friends we’re a group of people who follow in Jesus’ ways, except when we don’t.  We love well, giving compassion to those who really need it, to those whose lives have been shattered and need someone to sit with them among the broken pieces of their life and slowly begin sweeping them up and putting the pieces back together.  That is, except for when we don’t love well for a variety of reasons, when our own lives just aren’t up to it, or when our own brokenness prevents us from seeing the broken person in front of us as a person, and we instead just see a broken thing.

As Jesus’ ecclesia, his gathering of friends, we love God and love people above all else.  That’s our way of being.  Some friends of mine recently told me that in their efforts to love God and people above all else, they’ve been going through their house get rid of anything that they would be really upset about if it was broken by a child…or an adult.  They want their home to be a place of love, where adults and children know they are loved, and that they are loved more than the stuff in their house.  That’s a great model for the church, where we love God and love people above all else, except of course when, in our efforts to love God, we end up loving things, and we place that love of things in front of loving people.  It happens.  The church is imperfect because it is irrevocably peopled with people.

In John’s Gospel this morning, we heard that the Word of God, which is God, is also the life and light of all, and that the Word of God became human, as Jesus, and lived among us as one of us.  That was really his first mistake, wasn’t it?  The Word of God already had a perfect ecclesia going, a perfect gathering of beloved friends with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  This perfect ecclesia remained perfect until the Word became flesh and lived among us.  Then, Jesus joined us to the ecclesia of God, along with all of our imperfections.  That’s kind of the beauty of it.  If God had wanted a perfect ecclesia, then I suppose he wouldn’t have become human at all.  We wouldn’t celebrate Christmas, and there would be no baby Jesus, or adult Jesus, or even teenage angsty Jesus.  There would just be the perfect ecclesia of God, without humanity, but God didn’t want that perfect ecclesia, a perfect church.  God wanted the ecclesia of Jesus’ friends, the church, the gathering with humanity, along with all of our imperfections, even if that meant that we mucked things up a bit.  So, “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

In becoming human and living among us, God showed us his love for us, not his desire for us to be perfect.  I mean, I suppose it’d be nice, but God showed that he loves us, warts and all.  He then formed the church, the ecclesia or gathering of Jesus’ friends, so that we could further share his love for people, warts and all.  Jesus wanted not a perfect ecclesia, but an ecclesia that shared his heart for people and his willingness to sacrifice personal comfort and convenience (and quite a bit more than that) for the sake of people…especially the ones no one else seemed to care that much about. 

The questioners, the loners, the kids with behavior problems.  Seek them out, invite them in, and love them more than your stuff, Jesus has taught his church, and be willing to sacrifice your personal comfort and convenience for their sake. 

The people who don’t have life figured out and have spent their life mucking it up for themselves.  The people who have life figured out and learned from a young age that life is harsh and cruel.  The people who have been rejected by their peers, rejected by society, rejected by their church or family.  Seek them out, invite them in, and love them more than your stuff, Jesus has taught his church, and be willing to sacrifice your personal comfort and convenience for their sake.

The people who aren’t like us, who make us uncomfortable, whose very existence disrupts our world, shattering the illusions we created to make our world seem safe.  The people whose need is greater than we can provide, whose loneliness and despair are deeper than we can see, and whose desire for connection and companionship is greater and more beautiful than even they are aware.  Seek them out, invite them in, and love them more than your stuff, Jesus has taught his church, and be willing to sacrifice your personal comfort and convenience for their sake.

We’re not going to fix every problem or make any lives perfect.  The lives of all people still have that one flaw in them, that all lives involve people and are therefore irrevocably messed up, messed up just like the church, the ecclesia, gathering of Jesus’ friends, and Jesus didn’t form his ecclesia of friends in order to make a perfect institution.  Jesus formed his church, his gathering of friends, in order to share with us his light, because he simply wanted us to be a part of the life of communion shared between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and so with all our imperfections, we reach out with that same light to others, and we sit with them in their imperfections, not to make them perfect, not necessarily to fix them, but simply to dwell with them, to shine some light into the darkness of their lives, and to join in communion with them, becoming friends, and joining together in the Church, ecclesia, the gathering, of Jesus’ friends.