Hebrews 10:1-18 "Nobody's Perfect?" Scott Hoezee

We have any number of ways to express it, ranging from pop slogans to traditional clichés, from song lyrics to sayings emblazoned on t-shirts or bumper stickers. But whatever its precise form, what all such sentiments boil down to is the universally acknowledged fact of our very flawed human race. Perhaps someone notices that you made a mistake and so you throw your hands up even as you say, "Hey! Nobody's perfect, y'know!" Or you sum up why someone is a good friend by saying, "She's my friend because she accepts me, warts and all!" In the song "It Had to Be You" we hear a lyric whose meaning married people understand well: "Nobody else gave me a thrill, with all your faults, I love you still." The faulty nature of even good marriages is reflected in another well-known song, "You Always Hurt the One You Love." "To err is human," we say when explaining our goof-prone lives. Or sometimes we cast this into a pious context as when you see a car bearing this on its bumper: "Please be patient: God isn't finished with me yet."

Indeed, "nobody's perfect." Nobody's perfect, and we like that little two-word phrase because it is at once descriptive and exculpatory--it explains a lot about life even as it gets us off the hook a bit. When you burn a batch of cookies in your kitchen or when in your wood shop you very carefully saw a board one-inch too short, it's comforting to know that this kind of thing happens all the time to most everybody. "Misery loves company," we say. So when you accidentally call "George" "Harry" or dial Jenny's phone number when you meant to call the pizzeria, it's nice to know that we all mess up sooner or later. After all, we're "only human" and within that family of humanity, "nobody's perfect."

Of course, that line gets stretched to the breaking point when the misdeed in question is not something trite like ruining a batch of cookies but more serious like breaking a plate in anger as you lose your temper or getting arrested for drunk driving. There is bad behavior that cannot be written off with a casual shrug of the shoulders and some flippant excuse like "Hey, I'm just as human as the next guy!" Still, even when the deed in question is morally weighty, we do not doubt that what underlies all our faults, both big and small, is our very error-prone human nature. Nobody's perfect, after all.

Except that Hebrews 10 tells us that in Christ we are perfect. We are not told here that one day by and by (when God is "finished" with us at last) we will be made perfect but that we have been made perfect. It's not just the simple past tense that the author uses but the perfect tense, which refers to something that is not only in the past but quite a ways down the road in the past at that. It's a little like the difference between saying, "I told you that yesterday" and saying, "I have told you that umpteen times before!" That way of putting it is more emphatic, more definitive and decisive. So also here: somehow because of Jesus' sacrifice we cannot say "Nobody's perfect." As it turns out, in Christ everybody's perfect!

Still, Scripture passage or no, that does not square with our everyday life. The fact of our imperfection is as plain as the nose on my face. Because of the sins we commit, the flaws that attend my character and your character, and the mistakes we make every single day we cannot accept Hebrews 10 at face value. If someone followed you around for a few months only to then conclude, "You are absolutely perfect!" you'd wonder where he'd been!

"Nobody's perfect" describes us all-too-well--so much so that this chapter's declaration that in Christ "Everybody's perfect" seems like a pious wish. Of course, on one level we are dealing with semantics, with different meanings being placed on the same word. If "perfect" means never sinning or making mistakes, then we know this is not true of us. So unless we want to just erase Hebrews 10 out of the Bible, we need to figure out what "perfect" means in this passage. By now you have probably already recalled the meaning here: we are perfect in God's sight in the sense that nothing more needs to be done to forgive us. A sacrifice has been made which has taken care of everything once and for all. It does not need to be repeated because the only things you need to repeat in life are the things which either just didn't take the first time or which were just temporary to begin with.

So if you bring your child to a photographer to get her two-year-old portrait taken, there are two reaons why this may need to be repeated. If the photographer forgot to put film in her camera, you will get a phone call to come back for another round of picture snapping seeing as the first attempt flat out failed. Then again, even if the pictures turn out great, because your child keeps growing, you will find yourself back in the studio the next year for the three-year-old portrait. No matter how pleased you are with how a picture turns out, you never say, "This is so good we will never need to have another picture taken!"

Something like that explains the tradition of animal sacrifices in the temple, according to this author. Important though it was to acknowledge sin in that dramatic, bloody way, any given sacrifice was at-best just temporary. Sacrifices never completely "took" in terms of solving humanity's overall problem with sin and so they needed to be repeated as fresh sins kept accumulating, piling up and so creating a road block between humanity and God.

Maybe this explains that tension which runs throughout the Old Testament: on the one hand God's law required sacrifices--large swaths of books like Leviticus are consumed by all of the rigamarole, regulations, and rules governing sacrifices. This had to be done by God's own decree. Yet on the other hand are all those passages in which God essentially says, "I don't really want sacrifices!" This seems odd. Suppose you demanded that someone bake you a chocolate cake, and not just any old chocolate cake but one which had fresh cherries in the batter and icing made to exacting specifications. Suppose that someone made just such a cake and then brought you a thick slice. Wouldn't it be rude if you looked at this person, now with flour dusting her cheeks, and then said, "No thanks--not hungry!"?

On the surface that is how you could read parts of the Old Testament: God asked for sacrifices but when the people brought a sacrifice, he said he didn't want it after all. Yet it's finally not like that. The author to the Hebrews goes so far as to say that the more basic problem is that all along it was "impossible" for the blood of animals to take away sin. Yes, God forgave sin because God is gracious and overflowing with lovingkindness. For those who were truly penitent and genuinely sorry enough for their sins as to offer up sacrifices, God did forgive them. Ultimately, though, something more was needed.

There needed to be a power shift in the universe. If evil is like a raging Siberian tiger, then sacrifices were just a way to keep the tiger quiet for a little while. But so long as the tiger kept its claws and fangs, it was only a matter of time before it started to threaten folks once again. Something needed to de-fang and de-claw the beast. Somehow, in the deep mysteries of God's plan of salvation, just that dramatic a change was made through Jesus' death. Nowhere is this fully explained. The precise mechanism for how Christ's death removed our sin is not laid out in some simple 1,2,3 series of steps. Yet Jesus' sacrifice did have this effect. This at last was, as it were, the genuine chocolate cake which had been needed all along but which could never be baked from our side of things alone.

We are perfect now, not because we never goof, never sin, but because those things have lost their ability to hinder our relationship with God. They don't pile up any more into some kind of road block; they don't make us dirtier and dirtier until finally we stink so bad as to make God gag at the sight of us. So although we still acknowledge and confess our sins, the fact that in God's eyes we are already perfect should have a profound effect on us.

In verse 3 the author says that at least one of the inadequacies of animal sacrifices is that they provided such a vivid "reminder of sins." Apparently that kind of a reminder is a bad thing. That sounds fine except that for ages the church has had a bevy of ways likewise to remind us of our sins. What is our weekly liturgical act of confession if not a reminder of sin? What is that definitive Christian symbol of the cross if not, in part, a reminder of sin? What is the entire season of Lent if not a reminder of sin? Indeed, what is this table of the Lord in the sacrament of holy communion if not, in part, a reminder that we are sinners? So what is the difference between the way a dead goat used to remind the Israelites of their sins and all of the Christian ways by which we are still reminded of our sins?

Perhaps the difference is the effect it has on us. Perhaps the difference comes from the fact that despite all of our proper acknowledgments and reminders of sin, we know that even so we remain perfect in God's sight. The sins of which we are reminded in any hymn, litany, act of confession, or at this table do not remove us from God's love. Not now. Not ever. In the paradox of grace we may be flawed but we're still perfect; we may have sins to confess but we're still holy. In Martin Luther's famous description, the mystery is that for now we remain simul justus et peccator: simultaneously righteous and sinful.

But what is this like really? What is it like to know we are perfect even if, for now, we recognize that our behavior is most certainly not perfect on the average day? How can we remember our sin without being led to the dark conclusion that our status with God is up for grabs? Well, perhaps there is an analogy in how we now remember polio.

Not so very long ago the specter of polio struck fear in people's hearts. Just hearing that a child up the street had contracted the dreaded "infantile paralysis" was once enough to set off shockwaves of panic among parents who would whisk their children indoors and keep them there in order to shield them from the very real, very live threat of polio. That doesn't happen anymore. It's not that we have forgotten about polio. Some of us remember it firsthand or we know people who had it. Or perhaps we recall polio whenever we see pictures of President Roosevelt in his steel braces or when we see him seated in a wheelchair (as you can now see at the new FDR memorial in Washington).

But our remembrance of polio is different now than before the polio vaccine came along. Polio still exists--in fact, every person in this room carries traces of polio in his or her body. When you receive the vaccine, you receive a bit of polio which your immune system promptly memorizes in order to ward the disease off were the germ ever to come your way. For now polio has been defeated and so though polio exists in pharmaceutical laboratories, in our memories, and even within the cells of your own body, it is no threat.

Something like that needs to be our attitude toward our sins given that in Christ we have been made perfect: we must not be happy about our sins, nor should we be complacent about them. We also should not be so dishonest as to deny their reality. This supper of holy communion this morning calls us to seriousness and candor. If you refuse to see sin as your problem, you don't even belong at this table! It's just that we don't allow those sins to have the last word on our lives. If God still sees us as perfect in Christ, then we have more than sufficient reason to proceed forward in life with a spring in our step, a song in our hearts, and joy setting the tone for our average day.

Maybe what I'm describing is a kind of mental tightrope: not to confess sins is wrong. Then again, it is also wrong to focus so much on our flaws as to forget that what the Christian life is finally all about is not a perpetual beating up of ourselves but a perpetual celebration of what Jesus accomplished to make us perfect! If you've been inoculated against polio, it makes no sense to live every day in mortal fear of the disease. In fact, if you did live that way, there would be good reason to wonder whether you really understood the reality of the vaccine.

Most days we feel the pinch of the slogans "Nobody's perfect" and "I'm only human." Yet every day we live in the presence of a Jesus who was perfect because he was not "only human" but also God in skin. One dark afternoon that good man died like the greasiest sinner who ever lived. One bright morning he rose again as the bright center of God's perfecting of all people and things. And that, as they say, was that.

In verses 11 and 12 the author uses a clever image. He points out that so long as there was work to be done in the old system of animal sacrifice, the priest in the temple was always standing up when people arrived. There was no end to the sacrifices that needed to be made for such constantly faulty folks, and so the priest was always on his feet, always busy. But, this author says, when Jesus finished his sacrifice, he sat down! He took a seat in heaven as a sign that it was finished now.

This morning we find Jesus sitting at this table as our divine host. And though we are properly reminded of the sin which led Jesus down that terrible road to sacrifice and hell, what Jesus by his Holy Spirit mostly has to say this morning is, "Welcome, my perfect and holy children! Welcome home! Please, sit down. Take a seat with me as we celebrate the gift of new life!" Come then, O holy people. Come. Pull up a chair. Have a seat and nestle down into God's never-ceasing, always-perfecting love. Amen.