Sermon preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley

12th Sunday after Pentecost, August 30, 2020

Proper 17A: Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105: 1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

There are no plaster saints in the Bible. That’s what particularly strikes me in reading today’s stories about Moses and Peter—Moses the great leader and law-giver for Israel, Peter the leader of the Twelve Apostles. They’re great saints. I’m not questioning that. But they’re not plaster saints—not the perfect, unblemished image of some devoted, unperturbed, holy human being, who works wonders and triumphs over every obstacle without turning a hair. 

Plaster saints are very different from real human beings. They’re people who never made bad mistakes or failed in their love of God or neighbor, people without sin or at least without any sins worth calling attention to, perfect beings. Don’t sound very human, do they? But we have a fascination for them. So much so that we often prefer the plaster image to the real person.

For example, we rarely talk about the faults of the great saints, only about their virtues. But they all had their faults. Of course, they did. They were human like us. I think I first realized it years ago when I was reading some of the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux. I was deeply impressed by how movingly he wrote about love. And it was kind of astonishing to realize that this was the same person who had nothing but contempt for old-fashioned monks who didn’t belong to his new up-to-date order, the same person who persecuted my namesake, St. William of York (I have a personal investment in this one!), and the same person who preached the Second Crusade and recruited warriors for it. All those faults don’t mean he wasn’t a saint. Yes, when he was bad he could be horrid. And yet, in his more graced moments he had insights that can still transform people today. Who knows? Maybe the fact that he wasn’t a very loving person contributed to his understanding of how important love is. Either way, the real Bernard definitely wasn’t a plaster saint.

The Bible seems to be refreshingly immune to the whole business of constructing plaster saints. It tells us about the failings as well as the triumphs of people like Moses and Peter. 

Here’s Peter having his great moment of insight into who Jesus really was—the actual, long-awaited Messiah. (We heard that bit last week.) And now, a few verses further on, he follows it up with an equally great moment of getting everything completely wrong. He goes from “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!” last week to “Get behind me, Satan!” in a matter of just a few lines on the page. 

And the amazing thing is that he doesn’t get thrown out for his terrible misunderstanding of Jesus’ purpose and intentions. He gets both an A and an F for that day’s lesson, and they don’t even get averaged to C. Yet, he’s still the same Simon Peter, still part of Jesus’ inner circle, warts and all. No plaster statue can capture the complexity of this. Only the story itself can convey it. 

Simon Peter’s story is pretty familiar to us. He’s the leader of the Twelve and also, at times, the most clueless of them. And that’s part of why we love him and need him. His very presence in the story means that there’s room for us, too. 

And yet, we also tend to shy away from this kind of real-life complexity, from this recognition of the tensions in real human existence. A part of us wants our saints to be perfect. We idealize them. We sweep their failings under the rug—as if any sign of imperfection would invalidate God’s work in their lives. But, in reality, their failures simply magnify the gift of grace that was at work in them. That’s far more impressive than a flawless Peter could ever be. And far more helpful to the likes of us.

Moses’s story may be less familiar. It’s spread over a longer stretch of scripture and not all of it gets read on a Sunday morning in church. But let’s take a look again at what we heard today, the wonderful story about the burning bush. The first thing we heard was “Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.”

Excuse me! Last week Moses was an abandoned Israelite baby who’d been adopted into the royal family of Egypt. What is he doing in Midian, married to a bedouin woman, and herding sheep? The answer is that Moses had a serious temper. As he grew up, he had difficulty reconciling his Israelite and Egyptian identities, and that led him to commit murder. Here’s the story:

One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. (Ex. 2:11-12)

This didn’t even make him a hero among his own people. It just marked him as a dangerous man. The story goes on:

When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” He answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”

Moses knew he had better skip town immediately. He fled to the wilderness.

So this is the man who came to the holy mountain and saw a bush burning without being consumed and went to look at the curiosity. And there the voice of God laid on him the task of bringing Israel out of Egypt, forming them into a nation, and giving them their laws. Oh, sure! He was suppose to go back to Egypt, where he was probably still a wanted man. And then he had to convince his fellow-Hebrews, who thought of him as a semi-Egyptian murderer, to pull up stakes and leave under his leadership. And he had to persuade Pharaoh to let this exodus happen. 

Moses is frightened nearly to death by the whole thing, as any sane person would be. God even has to make a compromise with him to keep him on track. God revealed God’s true name to Moses: I AM WHO I AM. But God recognized that this would just provoke scratching of heads among Moses’ audience. So God also gave him a more familiar name to share with the Hebrews: “The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me.”

And Moses does go to Egypt. And there he does the impossible, both with the Hebrew people and with Pharaoh. And Moses leads the people out into the desert and somehow shepherds them through forty years of unfamiliar, nomadic existence. And Moses gets worn out. And Moses gets angry. And Moses sometimes loses his confidence in this vast project and in the God who set him at it. No plaster saint. And all the more remarkable for it. 

Now, I’ve led us through all this this morning for a reason—two reasons, in fact. One is quite personal. There’s is a basic truth about us here, about our own spiritual relation with the divine. God is always trying to teach us new things, give us new strengths, call us into love with God and with our neighbors. Our lives with God are always stretching us. And sometimes our “out” is “Well, I’m no saint.” Yeah. Well, neither were Peter and Moses in the sense that we usually mean. We’re not plaster saints. Neither were they. They were real saints, a complicated mix of virtues and flaws and grace that can do great things. 

So we need to get rid of that plaster image in our minds in order to be in deepening relation to God. Sainthood simply isn’t about perfection. It’s about staying in conversation with God, staying open to learning, staying open to the possibility that we may be invited to do things we would never have thought we could do. When we demand perfection, we destroy true sainthood.

So that’s one reason why I think these stories are important to us. My other reason is a social one. Our human addiction to the notion of perfection is affecting and distorting our collective imagination in this country right now. And it takes two forms. One is the kind of pretend perfectionism that so often makes the lives of saints sound so boring. This is a perfectionism that is determined to ignore the faults of whatever human being it’s canonizing as a saint—or hero or some other sort of first-class being. It just sweeps the human faults under the rug. It’s the perfectionism of willful ignorance—the perfectionism of those who cling to statues of Confederate generals and simply refuse to acknowledge that these men were fundamentally oppressors of the weak. Or the people, many of them Evangelical Christians, who have anointed President Trump as their hero and protector, while sweeping all his manifold wrongdoings under the rug of blasé indifference. They don’t call him a saint (at least not yet), but it’s the same phenomenon at work. It’s plaster sainthood run completely amok. 

But there’s also another kind of perfectionism in our public discourse as well. It sees nothing but faults. Any good in the person is tossed into the dustbin along with them. I’m thinking about the “cancel culture,” so focused on sins that it’s forgotten that sin and grace can co-exist and do co-exist in even the best of human beings. Some images deserve to be smashed. I’ve never heard anyone seriously suggest that General Nathan Bedford Forrest contributed anything of value to the common life of our country—only profound harm. But if we pursue this kind of negative perfectionism to its, shall I say “perfect”? conclusion, we will be left with nothing more than cynicism. We need our saints, and there are no saints who are above criticism. 

Saints have to be workers of genuine good. But they don’t have to be perfect; in fact, they never will be. If laying bare the saint’s sins is enough to shatter them and make them worthless and contemptible, there will be no saints any more. I’m not against revealing the sins of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt—the Mount Rushmore club. They’re part of their life-stories. What I find disturbing is the idea that one big sin should cancel all the good a person did. 

If we take that road, what do we lose? Just sticking with Mt. Rushmore, we lose the Declaration of Independence, with its promise so much more far-reaching than Jefferson himself could grasp or admit,. We lose our long tradition of elected presidency that Washington first shaped and then hallowed by stepping down voluntarily from his position of power. We lose the great turning point toward emancipation that Lincoln launched even though he wasn’t yet aware what the fullness of justice would eventually demand. We lose Roosevelt’s passion for the natural world and for economic justice because he also had his particular set of cultural blinders—like everyone else in the history of the world—like us, too, I imagine, though we can’t yet know exactly what they are.

The great thing about saints, then, religious or political, isn’t that they’re perfect. In fact, they’re not and they can’t be. They’re human. The great thing about saints is that somehow they manage to cooperate, however imperfectly, with God’s will for good in our world. Plaster saints are useless. You can’t see their flaws because they’ve all been airbrushed away. But they’re lifeless. But we need the real saints, the Simon Peters, the Moseses, with all their flaws to help lead us forward.

Better to eschew our perfectionism, then, and follow the advice Paul gave us this morning to treat one another with a bit of tolerance and humility: “Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” 

Drop the plaster saints. If they break, all the better. If there is a real saint inside, maybe that will give them a chance to breathe again and give us some guidance and encouragement. We’re all called to be saints. That doesn’t mean that we will quickly or easily be released from our failings and inadequacies. It does mean that we will continue to grow and change and draw yet deeper and deeper into the beauty and delight of God’s love for us and for all the world.