By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Before the closing notes of the postlude faded away, an angry woman pushed through the crowd of departing youth to confront my sister.

"What right do you have to tell these kids that Christ doesn't expect perfection from them?" she demanded. "Don't you know your Bible? It says right there in Matthew 5:48 that we are to be perfect! You liberal preachers with your 'anything goes' kind of thinking just twist the Bible to suit you and ignore the tough demands of Jesus."

The woman was clearly afraid that Sandy's sermon would send those 300 youth back into the world with permission to indulge in all of their human imperfections, namely sex, drugs, and rock and roll, a fear that probably said more about her relationship with her church youth than it did about Sandy's theology, but the woman's declaration that Jesus did in fact demand perfection from us could not be debated. There it is in Matthew 5:48 where Jesus not only requires human perfection of us but godly perfection. "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," he said. It seems to be a command set up to cause us to fail for who among us could achieve such perfection, or if we did, who would ever want to live with us?

What does it mean to be perfect? What is perfection and how do we know if we have achieved it?

I thought a lot about perfection this summer because I spent much of my four weeks as I have spent them the last three summers trying to achieve the perfect sail. And what I learned in that quest I think might help us as we grapple with this seemingly impossible demand of Christ so let me talk for a moment about sailing.

As most of you know, I spend my summer vacation at my family's cottage on Lake Ontario where for the last 45 years I have spent a lot of time messing about in boats. I kayak, canoe, row, and even putt about with a little 3 1/2 hp motor, but my favorite mode of transportation on the water is sailing. Now, when I say that I like to sail, you shouldn't picture me on some 20 foot sloop plying the waves of Lake Ontario like a captain in America's Cup. My sailboat is 9 feet long and it's plastic. And to make sure no one mistakes this sailboat for a world class schooner, the company painted the body bright yellow and the sail primary blue so I probably look like I'm sailing around in a big banana with a blue-flagged toothpick stuck in it, but no matter what it looks like, my little sailboat has this in common with its bigger brothers and sisters: it depends on the wind to move. If I am going to achieve the perfect sail, I will need the perfect wind.

The first thing I do then, when I arrive at our cottage is to hang out my American flag not just out of a sense of patriotism but because looking at the flag can help me judge the quality of the wind. When I get up in the morning, I check that flag, and thoughout the day, whether I'm reading, or playing ladderball, or mowing the grass, I'm always stealing glances over at the flagpost ready to grab my life jacket at a moment's notice and head out in the boat. If the flag is flapping wildly parallel to the ground, I'll continue with my current activity because a wind over 10 mph is like a hurricane to my little boat. I'd end up swimming instead of sailing. On the other hand, if the flag is hanging at a 90 degree angle to the ground and not moving, butterflies will fly faster than I'll be able to sail. The ideal angle is 45 degrees indicating a wind of about 8 knots, or 9.2 mph for you landlubbers, so when the flag is at a steady 45 degree angle, I'll head out on the water.

But just because I'm out on the water in my sailboat with a nice 8 knot wind doesn't mean conditions will be perfect for sailing. Besides wind speed, one must also consider wind direction. If the wind is coming from offshore, it gusts and eddies as it passes by obstacles on land meaning that I'll have to constantly trim the sail. If it's coming directly from the west, I'll have to tack a dozen times just to get away from the shore. A wind from the southwest is the best but a wind from the southwest brings yet another factor into consideration, namely the size of the waves. Because our cottage is on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario way up there near Canada, a wind from the southwest has blown unobstructed all the way across the lake from Rochester giving it lots of time to build up some nice large waves. While the captains of bigger sailboats might enjoy the stiff chop of two foot waves without even spilling their martinis, those same waves can bounce me around like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco.

So for the last three summers, I have been looking for that perfect combination of factors that will result in a perfect sail: a day with an 8 knot wind from the southwest following a calm night (so that the waves haven't had a chance to build up) and steady enough that I don't end up a mile from the house suddenly fighting a gale or sitting becalmed watching the butterflies pass me by because the wind has died. And for the last three summers, I have spent a lot of time on the water not having that perfect combination of factors. I have done 180s on the lake when the wind gusted suddenly from a different direction to spin me around like a top. I have had roller coaster rides plunging up and down the sides of large swells trying to choose between the best tack for the wind and the best tack to avoid getting broadsided by the waves. And more times than I can count, I have started out my sail thinking, "Oh, too much wind, too much wind," only to end it an hour later thinking, "Not enough wind, not enough wind." Albert Einstein defined sailing as "the fine art of getting wet and being sick while slowly going nowhere," a definition that captures the elusive quality of that perfect sail.

Unless maybe perfection is something else altogether. Which is what I thought about a lot out on the water this summer, a summer when the weather was particularly finicky, and when I often had to choose between sailing in less than ideal situations or not sailing at all.

"What if," I thought as I disappeared into the trough between two large waves, "perfection is not the absence of challenging circumstances?"

"What if," I wondered as I inched along so slowly that a swimming lady bug left me in her wake, "perfection is instead being able to balance all of the opposing tensions so that no matter how difficult or contrary those tensions are, you will be able at least to continue to move forward?"

What if, in other words, the perfect sail is not one in which the wind is the right speed from the right direction for the right amount of time allowing you to sit back with your feet up drinking your martini as the wind pushes you perfectly along, but what if the perfect sail is the one in which you are able to react to all of the opposing factors in a way that brings them into a momentary balance so that the boat moves forward? If this is the real definition of perfection, then the only bad sailing day is the one in which you end up paddling or overboard. If the boat is moving and you are still in it, you are having the perfect sail.

As I considered this possibility out on the lake in all manner of conditions, I also considered what would happen if we approached all of life with this understanding. We tend to think of perfection as elusive, and the one who pursues perfection as an idealistic fool, because we define perfection as the absense of difficulty and tension. The perfect family, we think, is the family in which no one ever disagrees with one another and the home is filled with constant sunshine and warmth. The perfect spouse is the one who loves unfailingly, has no annoying habits, matches your interests completely, and is attentive to your every need. The perfect job is the one in which every moment of your day is filled with exciting meaningful work for which you are paid large amounts of money and given an equally large number of vacation days. We think of perfection as an ideal in which there are no problems, no trade-offs, no compromises to make, an abstract condition that exists without any help from us that in reality none of us is likely to find. We live with a constant sense of resignation that the world will never be perfect and so the best we can do is just suck it up and live with our disappointment.

When we define perfection in this way, perfection becomes impossible, with the result that Jesus' command to be perfect is at best unreasonable and at worst inhumane. Attempting to suppress all of our inner contradictions and our outward differences of personalities and opinions with others to achieve some sort of ideal abstract complete calm could lead only to insufferable self-righteousness or debilitating neurosis! But what if perfection is not the absence of tension but the perfect balance of all of those competing factors? Then perfection is still challenging but not impossible.

And in fact, the Christian understanding of God as triune sees God's perfection in this very way. The doctrine of the trinity was developed to remind us that God is at God's fullest not the absence of contradition but the perfect balance of seemingly contradictory attributes. God is at once both beyond time as Creator and within time and history as the incarnate Jesus. God is at once both larger than any single human experience and at the same time personal Holy Spirit who moves within each individual human heart. The concept of the Trinity baffles us all because we want to erase contradictions. How can God be both one and three, divine and human, in the past in Jesus of Nazareth but also alive in our present experience? I admit that I too have had a lot of problems with the Trinity, and trinitarian language is not part of my normal Christian vocabulary but I have also come to appreciate over the years that the doctrine of the trinity resulted from the church's recognition that the only way to really communicate our experience of God as beyond human, God as seen through Jesus, and God as personally alive to each believer is to incorporate those seemingly contradictory experiences into our very definition of who God is. God is that which holds all of those tensions in perfect balance.

And so too, Christ calls us to pursue our lives in such a way that we seek not to eliminate differences between us, or smooth over the internal tensions between our weaknesses and strengths, beliefs and doubts, but rather to hold them in some sort of balance. We can achieve the perfect marriage by learning to balance the needs of each partner so that neither person comes to dominate the marriage at the expense of the other. We create the perfect family is created by working with the personalities each of us brings to that family without so indulging one of us over the other that everyone else ends up giving way before that person.

And the perfect disciple that Christ calls each of us to be is not some fictional saint who is never tempted, who never doubts, who never comes into conflict with another nor ever falls prey to sin. The perfect disciple, like the perfect sail, is the person who instead is willing to engage all of the tensions, contradictions, and competing claims on the heart to try to bring them into a balance that will allow us all to move forward without ending up completely dead in the water, or worse, overboard.

Remember, if your boat is still moving and you're still in it, you are having the perfect sail.