Practice Makes Perfect (sermon, June 7, 2009)

Isaiah 65:17-25
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13


Although my children haven’t yet learned to play a musical instrument, I can already tell that when the time comes, it’s not going to be easy to decide what they should play. My husband, Derek, wants our kids to play something he thinks is practical, something they can play in their rooms and on church retreats: the guitar. But I want them to learn a classical instrument, preferably my personal favorites, the cello or oboe.

So I asked a friend of mine, Denise, a professional musician, for some advice on the matter. When I did, she told me this story. Her parents signed her up for piano lessons when she was six years old. Although she wanted to learn the piano, she hated to practice. She would fight her parents when they told her to practice and she would fight them when they tried to help her practice. The only thing worse than knowing you needed to work on a particular skill, she said, was having your mother call out from the other room: “Dear, that last part didn’t sound quite right. You’re playing too fast and you hit some wrong notes!”

Of course, the whole reason Denise’s parents wanted her to learn a musical instrument was because they believed it would help her be a better person. It would teach her the value of perseverance, of sticking with something long enough to get good at it. But although this was the original intent, what actually happened was that playing the piano dramatically increased the level of conflict in Denise’s family. Although she kept playing, she deeply resented the pressure her parents put on her to play and their constant nagging to practice, practice, practice.

The prophet Isaiah was like a nagging parent to the people of Israel. He always let them know exactly when they hit a wrong note in living the way God wanted them to live. Isaiah constantly demanded that the people live more righteously and practice justice more faithfully than they were. The gist of his message was this: “You are God’s chosen people! You, yes you, are the children of God. Now start acting like it!” Because, as so often happens, God’s people had turned away from the God who created them and saved them and they had started worshipping other gods. Because then, as now, there was no shortage of other gods to worship and those gods appeared, at first glance, to be more interesting, more powerful, more dynamic than the God of Israel. Sometimes these gods weren’t overtly religious; instead they were things such as money, power, or fame. But Isaiah kept showing up to remind the people who they were, which had everything to do with WHOSE they were. He told them, in no uncertain terms, that they needed to remember their true identity as God’s chosen people and start living out of that identity.

When the Israelites heard Isaiah, it seems that many of them responded with an apathetic, “What’s the point?” Apparently, it seemed to them that this God of whom Isaiah spoke so highly hadn’t really been listening, hadn’t answered their prayers, hadn’t given them what they wanted or saved them from suffering. So why should they have to do the hard work of being God’s people?

In today’s passage from Isaiah, the prophet answers that “What’s the point?” question, painting a stunning picture of what the world will look like when God’s kingdom arrives. Listen again to his description, spoken as if from the very mouth of God: “I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. 20No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed…They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain...”

When the people heard Isaiah’s words, they had three choices, the same choices we have today: they could ignore his words and continue living as they had with no concern for God. They could succumb to despair because the world they lived in was so far from the new heavens and earth Isaiah described and sit around waiting for the prophet’s words to come true. Or they could choose to believe Isaiah’s words and do what they could to make them true.

Ignore God’s word.

Wait for it to come true.

Or live as if it were already true.

Surely we all know how tempting it is to choose the first option and just ignore God’s Word. After all, there are many good arguments to be made that God doesn’t exist. And if God doesn’t exist, then we can decide what we want the world to look like and work to make our own vision a reality. That would certainly be easier than trying to grasp God’s vision for the world and then figure out how we can participate in that vision. But I’m assuming that option is not going to work for you, because, well, because you are here…and just by being here you declare your belief that God exists and that God’s Word matters. If we are truly going to follow Jesus, then ignoring God’s Word is simply not an option.

The second choice is what Paul warned about in the portion of his letter to the Thessalonians that we read. Apparently, many of the first believers were so convinced that Jesus would be coming again in a matter of months, or, at most, a few years, they thought they didn’t really need to do any kind of work or make any contribution to their community. Paul states emphatically that this is not so, even though he too shared the belief that Jesus was coming back sooner rather than later. Regardless of when Jesus comes back, says Paul, we are called to work and live in such a way that we demonstrate our faith to any who see us. This has the added benefit of setting an example for others. So, I think we can safely say that choice number two, sitting around and waiting for God to establish the new heaven and new earth, is not our calling.

So it looks like the only truly faithful response to the promise of God’s coming kingdom is to live as if it that kingdom is already here.

Sometimes, in order to achieve a goal, you have to act as if you’ve reached it before you’ve actually arrived. But if you’ve ever tried to practice any discipline – music, sports, art – you know that there are days when you feel like practicing and days when you don’t. And if you only practiced on the days when you felt like it, you would never improve your skills. Without the commitment to practice regularly, you would never achieve your goals.

In spite of all the conflict it created with her parents, Denise kept practicing the piano. She played all through elementary and middle school and into high school. Eventually she got her driver’s license and was able to drive herself to her weekly lessons. One day, her mother gave her an envelope which she asked Denise to take to the main office of the college where she took lessons. When the woman in the office took the envelope she opened it and then handed Denise a receipt for the check inside. Leaving the office, Denise glanced down at the piece of paper and stopped in her tracks, shocked at the sum of money representing just one semester’s worth of lessons. She saw for the first time the financial sacrifices her parents had made so that she could learn to play the piano. “I felt about this big,” she told me. But from that day on, she had a different attitude toward practicing the piano. “I stopped practicing so that I could say I played the piano and I started practicing to truly be a pianist.”

As Christians, we have already opened the envelope; we’ve seen how much it cost God to bring about the new heaven and new earth. When Jesus walked on this earth, teaching and healing, pockets of God’s kingdom opened up wherever he went. He died on a cross so that there would be a sure and strong connection between God and God’s people, a connection that could not be broken because of our inevitable tendency to turn away from God.

So for those of us who know what it cost God to bring the new heaven and earth to us, our job is to get practicing, to get to work opening up pockets of God’s kingdom even here, in this broken and sinful world. After all, we didn’t accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior so that we could call ourselves Christian but so we could be Christian, which includes doing what we can to make the world a place where grace and justice reign, to make this world, even our tiny corner of it, look a little more perfect, like the new heaven and earth Isaiah promised. Isaiah believed that the new heaven and new earth wasn’t here yet because God’s people kept choosing to turn away from God. He reminds us that when we act like God’s people, we will see that we are God’s people, and we have been all along.

Okay, so here’s the rub: how do we do it? How do we live in such a way that God’s kingdom is visible here and now? Well, like anything worth doing, it requires practice, practice, practice. And we’re not called to practice in order to become more perfect people. We practice in order to make the world a more perfect place, more like the kingdom Jesus showed us, where the blind can see, the lame can walk, the captives are released, and there are enough resources for everyone.

There are lots of ways to manifest God’s kingdom, the new heaven and new earth, here and now. Extend grace to the people around you, the people you love best and the stranger on the street. Be kind even when you are having a lousy day. Instead of assuming the person who cut you off in traffic has a personal vendetta against you, try assuming instead that they might be having a really bad day and pray for them. Cultivate gratitude by praying before meals and at the end of the day, acknowledging that all you have isn’t owed to you but rather it is a gift from God. Give things away – money, time, talents – and watch all your riches multiply. Ask yourself some hard questions about how you contribute to the systems of corruption and injustice in our country and in our world, and find some way, if only very small, to change or offset them.

Oh, and one more thing. Remember, above all, that the only perfection in this world comes from God. We are not called to be perfect. We are human after all, created in such a way that we will inevitably make mistakes, we will fail to live up to our calling as Jesus’ disciples, we will engage in practices that hurt others, sometimes without even realizing it. We can and should strive to follow Jesus ever more faithfully. But we must also remember that the perfection toward which we strive is perfection that only God can achieve. And God will bring it about; someday the world will be a place where peace and grace and life and love will come together in a sublime state of true perfection. In the meantime, may we all do our part in making that perfect world a reality. Amen.