On Being Less Than Perfect
Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff
September 27, 2015
The Kittamaqundi Community
Mark 9:38-50
Every day this week, I’ve felt like I could hear fall approaching step-by-step.
It’s been hard to stay indoors—I feel drawn to witness the change of season. There
are trees on my street whose leaves seem to change color between the morning and
the afternoon this time of year. The beauty of fall is different from the beauty of
spring. Things aren’t shiny and new. There are no delicate petals or tender sprouts.
The plants in my garden all look like they’ve endured a few rounds in the ring-they’re staggering but still swinging.
This time of year, I often re-read some chapters from Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek”. Do you know the book? It’s a collection of observations of the
natural world and reflections on life and death, meaning and purpose and God based
on a year the author spent in the Roanoke valley in Virginia. I encountered the book
in college and have come back to it again and again over the years. In a chapter
towards the end of the book, Dillard writes, “It is mid-September now; I can see in
the fading light the jagged holes in the leaves of the mock-orange hedge outside my
study window. The more closely I look, the more I doubt that there is a single
whole, unblemished leaf left on the bush. I go out again and examine the leaves one
by one, first of the mock orange outside my study, then of the cherry tree in the
yard. In the blue light I see scratched and peeled stems, leaves that are half-eaten,
rusted, blighted, blistered, mined, snipped, smutted, pitted, puffed, sawed, bored,
and rucked. Where have I been all summer while the world has been eaten?”
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Annie Dillard goes on to observe that almost everything she sees in the
natural world is broken in some way. She counts the legs of daddy-longlegs and
realizes most are missing at least one. Every butterfly has a nick on its wing, birds
are missing feathers. “It must be…” she concludes, “that in a certain sense only the
newborn in this world are whole, that as adults we are expected to be, and
necessarily, somewhat nibbled. It’s par for the course. Physical wholeness is not
something we have barring accident; it is itself accidental, an accident of infancy,
like a baby’s fontanel or the egg-tooth on a hatchling.”
“If your hand causes you to stumble,” Jesus teaches, “cut it off; it is better for
you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell.” For years I’ve
heard that passage as a warning to every two-legged, two-handed, two-eyed person
around. You better not stumble, Jesus seems to be saying, because if you do, you’re
going to hell. The part about cutting off a foot or a hand or tearing out an eye always
sounded to me like part of the punishment, a brutal suggestion that it is better to
punish yourself in this life than to suffer unquenchable fire in the next one. But
these acts of self-mutilation are so extreme that I always read them as a warning,
not as a serious recommendation. Jesus’ point, it sounded to me, was to keep your
hands and feet and eyes by avoiding stumbling of any sort.
But this year, I read these words and found myself wondering, “Who does
Jesus like to spend his time with, anyways?” I thought about how he sought out the
people who had been cut out of society, the woman with the hemmorage of blood or
Zaccheus the tax collector. I thought about the stories he told, of the poor woman
who he honored for her small offering at the temple, of the lost sheep that the
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shepherd leaves everything to seek out. Time and again, through his actions and
through his teaching, Jesus showed his disciples that God is passionately invested in
the people who are pushed out, cut off, broken or diminished in some way.
When I remembered that, it hit me that maybe I’ve been reading this passage
wrong. Maybe this isn’t just a straightforward set of instructions about how to get
to heaven. Maybe this passage is better read as a kind of parable, a story that turns
things around and gets us to re-examine our assumptions, like when Jesus says to be
wise, you must be like a child, or in order to be first, you must be a servant to all.
Consider the two kinds of people in this passage—there are people who have two
hands who fumble around and people with two feet who stumble. They look perfect
on the outside, but the aren’t able to get where they need to go, they are breaking
things and dropping things. And then there is another group of people, people who
are missing parts of their body, people who everyone can see are less than perfect.
But those are the people who are on track.
What if the injuries Jesus describes aren’t gruesome punishments—what if
they are simply descriptions of what we’re all really like by the time we’re adults, a
little dinged up by life, each of us limping a little, each with a scar or two with a tale
to tell. Then, the people who are to be pitied in this story are the people who project
an image of perfection to the world. They’re the ones that will plow into you as they
walk along the street. They’re the ones who can’t see where they’re going.
When you read the passage this way, it becomes a version of the famous
parable of the Good Samaritan. The people who are convinced of their own
righteousness are the people who walk past the man who has been robbed and
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beaten. The Samaritan, the one who has been pushed to the outside, the one who
bears the marks of a part that has been cut off, is the one who shows the compassion
which Jesus praises. But this morning’s passage makes the point even more strongly
than that parable. The priest and the Levite who walk past the injured man miss out
on a chance to be kind, to be helpful. The seemingly perfect stumblers in this
passage end up in hell, and the less-than-perfect types can “enter life”.
Jesus repeats that lesson over and over again—why is it so hard for us to
hear? We’re immersed in a world that puts such a high value on perfection that it is
hard to think any other way. We want our cars, our kitchens, our teeth to be clean
and shiny. The closer we are to perfect on tests or on projects, the greater our
reward at school or at work. So even when we admit to failure, admit that we are
less than perfect, we do so with an eye towards self-improvement. This value is so
strong, so dominant in our culture, that it infuses our religious life. We grow up
hearing that Jesus wants us to be good, that God is watching us and checking to see if
we’re doing the right thing.
How strange it is to realize that the central story of our faith doesn’t support
the central values of our culture! How strange that the one who came to show us
the vastness of God’s love would end up crucified alongside two criminals, that
would he would enter eternal life, resurrected life, still bearing wounds on his hand
and side. This is a story that disrupts the dominant story of our culture, the
dominant story even of our religion. And it is a story that challenges us to grow, not
by becoming more perfect, but by becoming more real.
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We need a disruptive story right now, it seems to me. If we continue to live
by the story of continuous striving towards perfection, we are going to look at the
world and despair. But if we change our story, perhaps we can see hope. That’s
how I feel with our racial story—a story that I’ve been re-examining as I start
reading “Waking Up White”, the book that we’ll be studying on Sunday evenings for
the next couple of months. I grew up with a sense that over time, racial equality was
getting better and better in country. I knew racial bias existed, but it seemed like a
remnant of the past, something that would inevitably die out as history moved
along. But I’m starting to understand that there is more to the story of race in this
country than the story of continual improvement. It isn’t easy to have my vision of
the world disrupted, but it feels necessary. Recognizing that we are all wounded by
our past and present divisions, recognizing that we have not yet solved the problem
of racial injustice, we are more able to work productively together.
At the end of her September chapter, Annie Dillard reflects on her own sense
of self, given the world she has observed. She writes, “I am a frayed and nibbled
survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have
done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining
world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a
splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air,
whose bloodied and scarred creature are my dearest companions, and whose
beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of
them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply,
“Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.”
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