Walking Towards Perfection

Proverbs 22:6 Train children in the way they should go; when they grow old, they won’t depart from it.

Note: While we don’t know who wrote the Book of Hebrews, it has been historically attributed to Paul; however, many scholars believe another Jewish Christian wrote it. For the purposes of this sermon, I will go with the “historical” attribution.

Hebrews 5:11-6:8 We have a lot to say about this topic, and it’s difficult to explain, because you have been lazy and you haven’t been listening. 12 Although you should have been teachers by now, you need someone to teach you an introduction to the basics about God’s message. You have come to the place where you need milk instead of solid food. 13 Everyone who lives on milk is not used to the word of righteousness, because they are babies. 14 But solid food is for the mature, whose senses are trained by practice to distinguish between good and evil.

Chapter 6 So let’s press on to maturity, by moving on from the basics about Christ’s word. Let’s not lay a foundation of turning away from dead works, of faith in God, 2 of teaching about ritual ways to wash with water, laying on of hands, the resurrection from the dead, and eternal judgment—all over again. 3 We’re going to press on, if God allows it.

4 Because it’s impossible to restore people to changed hearts and lives who turn away once they have seen the light, tasted the heavenly gift, become partners with the Holy Spirit, 5 and tasted God’s good word and the powers of the coming age. 6 They are crucifying God’s Son all over again and exposing him to public shame. 7 The ground receives a blessing from God when it drinks up the rain that regularly comes and falls on it and yields a useful crop for those people for whom it is being farmed. 8 But if it produces thorns and thistles, it’s useless and close to being cursed. It ends up being burned.

INTRO

We have heard Proverbs 22:6 before. It is often used to justify why the world is changing for the worse. School shootings, violence, robberies, and anything negative going on in society are because we “took God out of school” and “failed to raise children who walk in the way of Christ.” When children misbehave, run in church, or do this or that wrong, the phrase “train up a child in the way they should go” comes flying off our lips. It becomes the means by which we insult those parents who are “allowing their kids to misbehave.” The coupled message is clear…your child ran in church, they don’t respect God, so they are the ones adding to the problems of our society. However, this is not what the author of Proverbs intended this verse to mean. Training a child up in the way they should go is not about when to run or play in church. It has nothing to do with taking God out of school. It’s about learning the ways of Christ as we move onward toward perfection.

In his sermon On the Education of Children, John Wesley writes that “had we been perfect as God created the first man, perhaps the perfection of our nature had been a sufficient self-instructor for everyone.” Yet, sin entered into the world, and just as sickness and diseases have created the necessity of medicine and physicians, so our inability to see God rightly because of sin necessitates education on and teachers of God’s Word. For Wesley, training a child up, or the education of children then, is to recover the loss of original perfection. By perfection, Wesley did not mean that one lives a flawlessness or sinless life. He meant perfection in the sense of maturity. Christian maturity is found in one who reflects the love of God to another.

For Wesley going onward toward perfection is about growing in one’s love of God and one’s love of the other. He says so at the end of his sermon “Ye that are truly kind parents, in the morning, in the evening, and all the day besides, press upon all your children, “to walk in love, as Christ also loved us, and gave himself for us;” to mind that one point, “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

If we are honest, I would actually argue that using Proverbs as a means of keeping parents or children in check with our standard of behavior or in line with our moralistic code about what is proper or improper in the church is distorting the message of the gospel and comes from a place of pride. It is an indicator that we have some self-reflecting to do and our own growing in love for God and others that must take place. Frankly, we are not fully mature Christians, and this kind of theological discourse that mandates children sit quietly in church is reflective of the same childish faith that Paul is speaking against in the Book of Hebrews.

Paul’s text from the Book of Hebrews seems harsh. He wants them to learn something new, but they have already grown weary. What he has to share with them will push aside that which is familiar to them and requires a new way of thinking and interacting with the world. So the question becomes: How does he coax his reluctant students to grapple with the challenges of going deeper and growing in their knowledge of God? One might say he seems to use a bit of reverse psychology.

The New Testament lesson begins with these opening lines from the preacher: “We have a lot to say about this topic, and it’s difficult to explain because you have been lazy and you haven’t been listening.” Interestingly, he is using a play on words here. A more literal translation of this text is “The word we have about this is much” - the language of “the word” is used elsewhere in Hebrews for God’s Word. The word of God calls people to obedience. Paul is challenging the reader and the listener to not only hear the word but to obey it.

It’s not so much that Paul is tired of teaching the same thing over and over again, but that Paul is tired of the surface-level repetition. Paul is tired of the Hebrew people repeating the language of Christ but failing to internalize and live it out. At some point, the hearing of the Word needs to be put into practice. This is one of the top reasons why people do not want to come to church. They view Christians as hearers of the word and not doers of the word. We proclaim that God calls us to love everybody, but when we discover someone believes differently than we do, we aren’t sure how to engage them, so we ignore them. Or we use the scriptures to justify our own rationale, to cement why our interpretation, our view, is correct.

We refuse to hear one another or have already built a defensive wall. We know that we are supposed to lean on the side of grace, but when someone cuts us off in traffic, all bets are off. We know we are supposed to love this person, but he’s homeless, and we don't want him near us. We know we are supposed to forgive, so we offer forgiveness to this person, but other things we consider to be unforgivable. Paul is tired of our failures to internalize the gospel and its implications for our living. So Paul, in his letter, is not just provoking the church of his time but also ours.

After provoking the reader by calling them not just immature but infants who can’t even partake in solid meat, One commentary notes: “Though one cannot see it on the printed page, there is a dramatic break between 5:14 and 6:1. Having playfully insulted the congregation by telling them they are too immature for the real meat of the faith, the Preacher pauses here long enough for the indignant protest to rise from the pews: “Hey, who do you think you’re calling immature? How dare you suggest that we are too dull to understand this. Dish it out; bring on the theological meat!”” We, too, echo this sentiment. I’m sure some of us in the pews this morning feel this way. We don’t need milk; bring on the big stuff.

You see, Paul is pushing the congregation to the point where they begin to engage the basic tenet of the faith at a deeper level. Paul wants them and us to move past the basic teachings we’ve grown up with. Paul wants us to move past the Golden Rule towards a deeper understanding of how our faith calls us truly to wrestle with what it means to love as God loves. Paul is convinced that Christianity is not a stagnant religion. We are always moving. We are either moving forward, or we are backsliding. We are growing deeper in the faith or drifting back to the shallow waters of our comfort zone.

In Creating a Culture of Renewal cohorts, they actually reframe the golden rule from “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and change it to “Treat others how they want to be treated.” Do you notice the difference? It shifts the focus from how you want to be treated to truly seeing other people, recognizing the humanity inside of them, and engaging them in meaningful ways. This is a deeper sense of relationship. This is the same way that Paul pushes the congregation to move deeper in their faith. How, then, do we begin to move deeper into the faith? How, then, do we move more toward being doers of the word? How do we open ourselves up to engaging more deeply with others?

We do this by engaging our brothers and sisters in Christ. Christianity was never meant to be a solitary religion. The community of faith was created to be a place where we can engage in theological discussions and debates. The sign of a mature Christian is not found in following moralistic codes of right in wrong. It is not about when to sit, how to sit, where to sit. Nor is it about when to play or how to play. Growing in faith, and being trained in the way of Christ, is found in openly engaging the other. Allowing one another to speak and be heard by wrestling through the sacred text together in a way that offers one the freedom to believe differently than we but still hold on to the basic tenets of the faith.

You see, Christians maturity longs to see not rigid, carefully constructed moralistic understandings of faith but seeks the freedom that comes only from loving relationships: a freedom where we build one another up and want to see the beauty of each person as they live fully into who God calls them to be. That’s what a relationship with God offers us, after all: a chance at a new life. A life that is lived with the very God of creation, the very God who raised Jesus from the dead, the very God who is faithful until death and beyond. It is an opportunity, as the Charles Welsey hymn says, “to die to self and chiefly live by thy most holy word.” It is an opportunity to put away our worldly views and understandings, to put away our earthly ways of living, and live into who God calls us to be. It’s a call to move from “being careful” to loving vulnerably.

We can only be moved from being careful, basic, milk-drinking Christians to mature Christians when we are open to others’ views, experiences, and scriptural interpretations that they bring to the table. One commentary says it this way “A reluctance to listen and learn, and thus progress to spiritual maturity, may be the first danger sign.” Being mature, then, is the willingness to teach others and to be taught by others. It is the understanding that our faith goes beyond “doing this or that”; its chief aim is to know and embody God’s love not just for oneself but God's love for others. We don’t always have to agree, but the call to love transcends belief or understanding. One of my favorite John Wesley quotes is, “Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?”

Children and adults will normally depart from a set of rules, especially as they grow older, and find those rules to be unjust. However, if we raise up our children to love God, love themself, and love others the way Christ loves them…that kind of love sticks with you and radiates from you; it's hard to depart from Godly love. May we train one another up, build each other, and challenge one another to grow in our love for God and others as we wrestle and learn to appreciate those who hold different perspectives, for the mark of Christian maturity is being perfected in Christ’s love. Then the saying in proverbs will ring true.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go forth from this place, renewed and empowered to play better players, to engage with others in hard conversations and theological discussions that your faith may be strengthened and deepened. Let us sharpen each other so that we might move closer and closer to perfection in love and share that love with others. Go in peace. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.