Bowling onto Perfection

Jeremiah 31:31-34, Hebrews 5:13-6:1a

FUMC, Eugene, Dec. 30 2007

It’s almost the new year. Not the beginning of the liturgical year; that’s the beginning of Advent. But the new year on the calendar of our everyday worldly lives. So it’s a moment when many of us are setting up new calendars, plotting fresh commitments onto clean white pages. It’s a nice feeling, a starting anew of sorts. As we look at those clean pages of the 2008 calendar, we are sorely tempted to think we can make the new year a better year, maybe even a perfect year. So we craft some ambitious resolutions, some new commitments for a new year.

I will get more exercise,

I will eat healthy food.

I will organize my time better.

Students say, I’ll study harder.

Parents say, I’ll be firmer with my children. Or in a different family, they say: I’ll be gentler with my children.

Clowns say, I’m going to be funnier.

Preachers say, I’m going to be more profound.

Right.

The text that Phil read from Hebrews just a moment ago urges us go on to perfection.....So maybe we are on the right track when we make new year’s resolutions. Or maybe we’re kidding ourselves.

John Wesley, the chief instigator of our Methodist movement, made “going on to perfection” a major emphasis of his teaching. But I find talking about going on to perfection a bit scary. And more than a bit confusing.

Now I opened up the newspaper this morning and found this: “Perfection is the name of the Patriots’ game.” They ended a perfect season of football, 16-0. This kind of perfection is really hard and very rare according to the article and my husband’s explanations. He played football in highschool. I’ve never played it and never understood it– so there is not any realistic hope that I could ever be part of that kind of perfection.

But thank God for bowling. I have gone bowling, I understand the basic rules, which are pretty simple  and perfection is crystal clear. If you get a bowling score of 300 – you have bowled a perfect game.¹

Not many things in life are so clear. You may win a race, but you can’t say you ran it perfectly, because there is always the possibility that you could shave a few fractions of a second off your time. You can build a beautiful home, but it is never perfect.

Some day there will be a need to add a room, making the heating more eco-friendly, or someone moves in from another culture who finds the placement of the fung shei all wrong. But bowling, in every bowling alley in every culture, has the possibility of a perfect, indisputable, unarguable score of 300.

Nice.

Wesley does not have a nice number to define his understand of perfection, but he does define it. Not by suggesting that everything in our lives should go perfectly:

We can still have poor eyesight and need glasses. We can still be distractable and forget where we set our eyeglasses. We can still misspeak and hurt someone’s feelings, or add incorrectly when we do our taxes and get a nasty letter from the IRS.

Listen to some of what John Wesley wrote about this: “Christian perfection therefore does not imply... an exemption either from ignorance or mistake, or infirmities or temptations. . . . Indeed, it is only another term for holiness. They are two names for the same thing.

Thus, everyone that is perfect is holy, and everyone that is holy is, in the Scripture sense, perfect. . .  In a word, holiness is having 'the mind that was in Christ,' and 'walking as Christ walked. .. .. ..”

For a person who bowls, this must mean putting on the mind of the perfect bowler, walking as the perfect bowler walks.

How many of you have ever bowled? How many of you have bowled frequently at some point in your lives? Anyone ever get a 300? Then you know that bowling is not just a simple physical act of walking forward and tossing the ball towards the pins.

[Lift and show bowling ball] You take this weight, this burden. It can weigh up to 16 pounds. What it most wants to do is stay put. What the earth most wants to do is to suck it straight down, and beware the toes that may be in between. What you most want is for it to move, spinning from the side of the lane inexorably toward the center, into that sweet spot between the head-pin and the three-pin. [Place ball on altar.]

You want it to look natural, even graceful. You take a burden, and transform it into a partner in grace. You take a weight, and move it without much more force than gravity and inertia give it, and send it in a new direction. And you must never forget a very important part: letting it go. Trust me, once you’ve had your fingers stick and the ball not leave your hand at the right moment, you’ll always remember the importance of letting go.

Now all that makes sense, but there’s more. What a real good bowler will tell you, so I’m told, is that what you do after letting go of the ball is just as important as what you do before. This is called follow-through. If your arm doesn’t swing up, and your eyes don’t track correctly down the lane, and your Obi-Wan Kenobi imagination doesn’t visualize the pins tumbling artfully down, then the ball will know it . . . and wander off into the gutter.

The unknown author of Hebrews tells us to grow up. An infant depends on milk, but as we mature we need to take in solid foods. Good bowlers know how to prepare, to study technique, to practice, to let go at the right moment, and to follow-through– getting mind and body all working together to send the ball rolling toward that sweet spot that will take down all the pins.

When you start bowling you awkwardly try to imitate the way good bowlers walk, and how they hold the ball. You repeat to yourself little suggestions, like, start at this line, look at the pins, breathe, drop the ball, step, bend right knee, ...etc. A mature bowler incorporates all the little suggestions, adjusts them to create his or her own style and it begins to feel natural– all of one piece: body, mind, ball all working together.

Followers of Christ are called upon to grow from simple explanations of faith, to a mature living out of our faith. The complete natural and continuos connection to God’s goodness would be reaching that perfection.            Growing into naturally having the mind of Christ.

I went bowling last week with my daughter and her friend.  I got a 98 and a 146. I think 146 is the highest score I’ve ever gotten. The first time I went bowling was when I was about 10 and I probably got a 40. If I discount the 98, and as it is my sermon I can do that, so I can say that by bowling a 146 I’m almost half way to perfection. Thinking mathematically, if I continue to improve at a constant rate, I’ll get to a perfect score on my 120^th birthday!

Maybe I could get there faster if I worked at it more. Before going bowling this last time I read a little about bowling. I admit, it was the first time I had ever read anything about how to bowl. So I suppose I could study more. I already bowl quite regularly, like once every 4 or 5 years. Maybe if I want to get to 300 I should practice more often.

When I was there last week, I saw lots of people leaving after playing in leagues. Maybe if I joined a league with other people who were trying to perfect their bowling I would get better.....Just maybe.

In our brutal zero-sum world, someone has to win and someone has to lose. In sports (bowling included), somebody wins and somebody else loses. And despite the condolences that our side played well – up until that last moment in overtime when the Beavers won – we still know that we lost. We’re losers. And we take that attitude too often from the field into the bedroom or the sanctuary or the market.

We can feel like losers if we have a good marriage but not a perfect marriage, if we have a healthy church but the sanctuary isn’t packed, if our store turns a profit over Christmas but had less of an increase in sales than it did last year. Or if we love God and our neighbor–but not quite all the time.

If you’ll spare me the analogy, we are called to enjoy the game of bowling all the time–and celebrate all the spares, the occasional strikes, and those times after throwing three gutter balls that we finally manage to knock down four or five pins. We put an extra wiggle in our bowler’s butt as we sashay back to the plastic seats and share in a round of high-fives. Ahh... partial victories.² Walking with God, even a little, God keeps walking with us.

Now even bowlers who have gotten to the magic 300 don’t stay there. You don’t quit bowling, and you won’t always get that score the next time you bowl. I asked at the pro-shop where I went last week. The pro there has had four 300s this year. And some six other people have bowled 300 games there this year. Two of them did it twice. But no one, no way, bowled 300 every time they stepped out onto the shiny hard wood.

If we’re only going to be satisfied with a score of 300, most of us, even the best bowlers among us, are going to be frustrated most of the time. You see, it’s not reaching perfection that works for us. It is going on to perfection, it is enjoying and sharing God’s love every day, every imperfect day, that leads us onward to perfection.

Maybe those special “ahah” moments, when love and mercy and justice take concrete form around us, are small appetizers in the banquet of perfection, moments no matter how fleeting when we are in perfect connection with God and the universe. Random perfection.

Throwing a strike even though we muffed the approach and didn’t follow through. That’s grace.

The first text that Phil read this morning was Jeremiah. This is one of my favorite texts: “I will make a new covenant.... says Yahweh, I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

That is perfection: God’s law on our hearts. God’s law won’t be something to struggle to remember and obey in fear. Rather, God’s law will be our desire, our choice. God’s law on our hearts, Christ’s mind in our minds.  Our hearts and minds will know and want to do what is good.

Notice that Jeremiah is writing in the plural. He is saying that reaching perfection is not really an individual task, it is a common goal.

Shalom, whole peace. Whole people. Whole universe. The banquet table, where all share together in God’s goodness. The Kingdom of God. Where everyone is invited and everyone knows God’s love, because it is on our hearts. Communion in the fullest sense.

A bowling league as koinonia, high-fives around the bread and wine, a community where we help each other let go at just the right moment, and where follow through is something we do together.

Blessing:

May God’s shalom

be written on our hearts each day,

now and forever. Amen.