Romans 12:2

Romans 12:2New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Are you at all like me that when you see the word "perfect" in the Bible you get a little nervous and twitchy?

This verse from Paul isn't quite as hard for me as Jesus saying "Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect," but yet it is still there.  That word facing me when I know full well that I'm far from perfect.

Unfortunately I think that the word "perfect" has lost a lot of its meaning these days when perfection seems to be the unattainable goal that the world has foisted on us.  God's perfect doesn't mean the same thing world's perfect. 

It isn't the "perfect" body we see in fitness magazines or the "perfect" vacation we dream of.  Or the "perfect" wife who cooks, cleans, drives the carpool and still holds down a full-time job and has time to look desirable every day.

It isn't the "perfect" husband who works 80 hours a week to provide his family the perfect living. 

It isn't the "perfect" student who gets into Harvard with a 2400 SAT score.

It's not the "perfect" beauty in Hollywood or on the cover of Glamour.

It's not the "perfect" child who never acts out or the "perfect" parent who never yells.

It's not the "perfect" government or political system.  

It's no wonder we get nervous when we hear God wanting perfection from us.  We are inundated daily with claims for perfection, and experience has told us they are unattainable.  And some of us - perfectionists - know this and still search for that elusive, unattainable goal.

Instead, God's perfection means something else.  And it's something that shouldn't make us nervous or twitchy.

In the Old Testament it means being complete.  Finished.  

Whole.

And for Paul here too, in the Greek, it is having gone through a process.  Metamorphasizing.  Moving toward completion.

Be perfect for God means be "whole."  Be who I created you to be.  Mind, body, soul.  Not free from mistakes, but free from being a slave to your mistakes.

Seek then, Paul is saying, that which transforms.  What is good.  What is whole.

It may still seem elusive to some of us, and each day may end in a kind of disappointment that we yet again missed wholeness that day.

It is a process.  It is the process of new creation.  Begun at our baptisms and worked out by God in the daily dying to our sins and rising to new life.  Again and again and again.

New Creation.  Whole.  Seeking in our live the things that feed that wholeness.

And knowing that sometimes - indeed most of the time - being whole and complete is going to mean being the opposite of the world's idea of perfection.

God of wholeness and truth, I am your creation, made new and perfect every day.  Help me to see the wholeness not just in myself, but in others, and to surrender the idea of conforming to the world's idea of perfection.  Amen.