Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, by Fr Edwin

‘Press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.’

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

I know that all of you looking at me today will have but one word in your mind, and that is, of course, ‘perfection.’ And it’s on the theme of perfection in the Christian life that I’d like to reflect today. On this day—or more precisely, last night—800 years ago exactly, St Francis of Assisi died; the man G.K. Chesterton described as ‘the only perfect Christian’. Now that is a huge claim, and one that is certainly up for debate, but at its heart, what Chesterton and others meant by that phrase is that Francis lived out his Christian life without compromise. He heard the demands of the Gospel, and he fulfilled them.

The story of St Francis is one that might well be familiar to us. The hedonistic, affluent youth in love with pleasure, who hears God calling him to go and rebuild his church, and instantly obeys, renouncing all worldly possessions, even the clothes on his back, in order to serve Christ, his Church, and his poor brothers and sisters. His wholehearted response to the Gospel is a beautiful and revolutionary thing. Francis hears the Gospel command to sell absolutely everything you have and give to the poor, and he does it, or to take absolutely nothing with you for the journey, and he does it. Two thousand years of Christians have explored how practically to live out the Gospel of Christ, and in the middle of those two thousand years we have the example of a man who realised the only way to live out the Gospel perfectly was impractically: a wholehearted, uncompromising, intoxicated leap of faith.

Christ demands all, and Francis gives all, holding nothing back. Christ commands us to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect, and Francis gives everything to come closer than anyone ever has. A faith without compromise. Perfection.

But St Francis didn’t have kids. He wasn’t having to pay for his mum’s care home. He wasn’t nursing a spouse with dementia. I am not undermining the costliness of St Francis’ choice to follow Christ without compromise, but it is true that he wasn’t shackled by some of the same compromises that govern our lives. I don’t think we’d venerate him as a saint, or call him ‘the only perfect Christian’, if he’d abandoned his kids to become one. We just can’t be like St Francis. We can’t be perfect.

So what do we do? Because, the fact is, that is what Christ calls us to be. The parable of the vineyard in our Gospel reading today tells the story of a God who longs to be known by us; who reaches out to us again and again with his goodness, his glory, his love, his perfection, and asks for the same in return. But we can’t meet those demands, can’t keep up with the repayments. We can’t be perfect. So what are our options? I think we have three.

The first is not even to bother. We cannot be perfect, so why try? Christ died for our sins, his grace will save me, so I might as well not try to be perfect, or even that good, and trust that I’ve got a divine safety net. But to do so is to abuse God’s goodness, God’s grace, God’s love. If we acted selfishly, coldly, cruelly to a human partner, knowing they love us so much that they’d just forgive us every time, we’d rightly be called an abuser. To do so is to be like the workers in the vineyard, who reject God’s requests for our love and service, and trust that the death of his Son will get him off our backs.

The second is to dilute, or explain away the demands of the Gospel. When Christ tells us to sell all we have and give to the poor, he’s speaking metaphorically. When Christ tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves, he’s talking about our feelings towards them, and not any practical action to help them. When Christ commands us to be perfect, he just means as good as circumstance and social propriety allow. In this way we forcibly lower the bar that Christ sets, until we can convince ourselves that we’re clearing it. But to do so is to turn our back on the power and the love of God, to stop our ears against what he is truly saying to us, to make Christ into an idol of our own comfort. We convince ourselves that the odd grape here or there will satisfy the master of the vineyard, and refuse to listen to him, no matter how many times he reaches out to us, or even get angry when we’re asked to give more.

The third option is the hardest of the lot. And that is, to live with the challenge. Not to give up, or to pretend the challenge doesn’t exist, but to live with it. In our reading from Philippians today, St Paul sounds a lot like St Francis. He describes his former worldly glory as rubbish, his gains as loss, compared with ‘the surpassing value of knowing Christ’. He has suffered the loss of all things in order to gain Christ, even to the point of renouncing his very life and becoming like Christ in his death. Yet another perfect Christian, right?

But then comes this line: ‘Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.’ St Paul is not a perfect Christian. His holiness comes from recognising that he is not perfect, but recognising too that he should strive to be. To know Christ as Paul knows Christ means to know his perfection, to know that we will never measure up to it, but to know too that we must never stop trying.

The master of the vineyard doesn’t want just a few grapes. He doesn’t want our excess, our surplus. He wants the whole harvest. He wants more than we can possibly give. But he wants this, not because he is some tyrant, but because he knows that the more we give to him, the more fruitful we will become; the more we harvest from the vineyard for him, the more the vineyard will yield. And while we know it will fall far short, infinitely short of what is demanded of us, we know too that if we truly give him all that we can, the Son will bring our meagre crop back to the Father rejoicing, and by his grace, make up the shortfall.

So, no: we can’t ever attain perfection. We can’t even get as close to it as St Francis or St Paul. But that does not let us off the hook. Christ the perfect one claims us as his own, and calls us to be like him in his perfection, graciously strengthening us as we strive for it, and picking us back up each and every time we fail. Until on the Last Day we can and will finally make that glorious goal our own, just as Christ has made us his own.

‘Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.’

Amen.