“High Standards?” based on Deuteronomy 30:15-20 (really) and Matthew…

Choose
the things of life, not the things of death.  That’s the gist of our
Hebrew Bible lesson today.  Following the ways of God is choosing
life.  Turning away from God is choosing death.  In the passage,
these are seen as communal decisions.  The desire of God is that the
people choose life, but the passage admits it is their choice.

Deuteronomy
is written from the perspective of the Exile, where the big question
was “why did this happen to us?”  The answer Deuteronomy gives is
“because we weren’t faithful to God and to God’s vision for our
society.”  Thus, when they look back on their communal life, they
yearn to have made better choices, to have been more faithful, to
have chosen the way of life rather than the way of death.  

I
have no idea if more faithful choices on the part of Ancient Israel
would have prevented the Exile.  It seems a bit unlikely, but who
knows.  It is clear that Ancient Israel was not faithful to living
out God’s vision, but it is also clear that the emergence of
mega-empires and being a little country at an intersection of major
trade routes was a dangerous reality.

Nevertheless,
the questions of what way we choose to live still resonate.  It seems
useful to point out that although the words “choice” and “life”
have particular connotations in the debate over whether or not women
have the right to control their own bodies, the phrase “choosing
life” has nothing to do with that.   Rather, it is about the
patterns of decisions that either turn towards God or away from God.
To put it another way, it is about living in a way that enhances life
for everyone and everything, or …. not.

Choosing
death, in terms of Deuteronomy was oppressing the poor, the widows,
the orphans, and the foreigners.  It was wanting a king and creating
wealth differentiations.  It was allowing the justice system to
become unjust for the poor.  It was putting God second and personal
prosperity first.

While
all of that has resonance today, I think there are also personal
aspects to this metaphor.  They may make the most sense from the
perspective of a person who is nearing the end of their life.  What
are people yearning for more of at the end of their lives?  What do
they regret?  What are they grateful for?  

While
people and their answers are different, patterns certainly emerge.
An article on the topic from Business
Insider
offers 5 of the most common regrets of people at the end of their
lives:

1. I
wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life
others expected of me.

2. I
wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I
wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I
wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.¹

These
give us some really good answers as to what are the things of life
(courage, authenticity, feelings, friends, joy) and what are the
things of death (expectations, overworking, fear, distance, and
disconnection.)

The
only thing I think is actively missing from the list is the choosing
death of distractions.  So much of modern life is just a wide-ranging
smorgasbord of things willing to distract us from our feelings, from
discomfort, from our authentic selves.  Many of these distractions
come in the form of screens, but not all do.  It is EASY to numb our
selves out, rather than face our feelings, and (oh my!) respond to
what the feelings tell us about how we need to change our lives.  

Some
of you have heard me say that during my renewal leave I disconnected
from social media and email.  It was GLORIOUS.  I still found myself
picking up my phone more than I expected,  and I eventually got
curious about why.  Quite often, I pick up my phone to play Sudoku
(the only game I permit on my phone).  And so then I got curious as
to why I was doing it. Two reasons:  either because I was feeling
anxious and wanted to be distracted from it or because I was feeling
overwhelmed deciding between things and wanted to procrastinate the
decision.  Those motivations have held true since then as well.  The
smorgasbord of distraction options that keep us from making hard
decisions, or from dealing with our emotions are things of death.   I
suspect they are also things we may regret on our deathbeds, when
time feels precious and like a thing not be wasted away.

In
an attempt to change that pattern, to be more at ease with myself and
less worried about making the “wrong” decision, since coming back
from leave, I’ve been slowly working my way through Brené
Brown’s book “The Gifts of Imperfection.”   This week I read the
section entitled “Cultivating Self-Compassion: Letting Go of
Perfectionism.”  Brown says “Where perfectionism exists, shame is
always lurking.”²
Now many of us are trained to think that perfection is a GOOD goal,
that it is about striving to be one’s best or self-improvement, but
Brown disagrees.  She says, “Perfectionism is the belief that if we
live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid
the pain of blame, judgement, and shame.  …. Perfectionism, at it’s
core, is about trying to earn approval and acceptance.”³
(OUCH.)

Now,
if I’m honest, I have had an unusually difficult year.  Almost a year
ago now, the Church (big C) to which I have committed my life
declared itself morally bankrupt, and that has been …. heavy.  

At
the same time, this church (little c) has been struggling through
incredibly difficult decision making that has resulted in much higher
anxiety in the system than usual.  And, as family systems predicts, a
lot of the anxiety got passed to
me
as the leader.  That’s to be expected.  That’s what happens when
there is anxiety in a system, it gets focused on the leader.

Now, I
know that pastoral ministry is an impossible task to do perfectly.  
There is a reason why there is no universally agreed upon definition
of perfect pastor.  Context matters a lot in ministry – so do
people and their expectations.  Each person in each church has
different expectations of what a pastor IS and should be doing, and
most of those aren’t even conscious.  So those expectations aren’t
clearly articulated, and yet there is a hope that they will be met –
all of them, from all of the people, all the time, all at the same
time.  My own expectations are that I should spend about half my time
on each of the following: visiting the hurting and keeping in touch
with all the people, sermon and worship work, administration and
meetings, keeping up to date with great research and scholarship and
teaching it, considering structural reorganization and systemic
change, making change within our communities, meeting people and
bringing them to church, maintaining a deep and profound prayer life.
At a minimum.

As the
anxiety has risen, my fears of my own failures have gotten sharper,
and the critiques coming at me have kept pace with my own fears.  Yet
my capacities haven’t changed – I still can’t meet my own standards
in any aspect of ministry, and I don’t know that I can meet anyone
else’s either.  

Now, my
suspicion is that I’m talking about something more universal than
pastoral ministry, or even leadership.  I think that most of our
lives have times when we feel like what we’re doing isn’t enough, and
even worse there are times when others agree with us about that!  It
feels awful, and it can be a really ugly downhill spiral.  This is
the stuff Brown is talking about as perfectionism, and boy oh boy
does it make sense to me that perfectionism is about avoiding the
awful feeling of being judged lacking.

Brown
shares about people who are less stuck in perfectionism, and she says
two attributes make them different, “First, they spoke about their
imperfections in a tender and honest way, and without shame and fear.
Second, they were slow to judge themselves and others.  They
appeared to operate from a place of ‘We’re all doing the best we
can.’  Their courage, compassion, and connection seemed rooted in the
ways they treated themselves.”⁴
She concludes that people were operating from self-compassion, and
that it is LEARNABLE.
It has 3 parts:

“Self-kindness:
Being warm and understanding towards ourselves when we suffer, fail,
or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating
ourselves with self-criticism.

Common
Humanity:  Common humanity recognizes that suffering and feelings of
personal inadequacy are part of the shared human experience –
something we all go through rather than something that happens to
‘me’ alone.

Mindfulness:
Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are
neither suppressed nor exaggerated.  We cannot ignore our pain and
feel compassion for it at the same time.  Mindfulness also requires
that we not ‘over-identify’ with thoughts and feelings, so that we
are caught up and swept away by negativity.”⁵

So,
difficult as it is, authenticity and choosing LIFE are about facing
shame and failure, being vulnerable, and letting go of perfection.
I’m really quite sure that our self-judgments don’t happen in vacuums
like we think – most
of us believe that it is OK to be harsher with ourselves than we’d be
with others, but the truth is that judgement itself slips out
unaware, and the only way to be truly kind to other people in their
vulnerability is to become more gentle with ourselves in ours.  

Perfectionism
is choosing death.  Compassion is choosing life.  May God help us all
as we strive to choose life.  Amen

1Susie
Steiner, “The 5 Things People Regret Most on Their Deathbeds”
https://www.businessinsider.com/5-things-people-regret-on-their-deathbed-2013-12,
Published December 5, 2013. Accessed February 13, 2020.

2Brené
Brown, “The Gifts of
Imperfection” (Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden, 2010), p. 55.

3Brown,
56.

4Brown,
59.

5Brown,
59-60.  Please note, the same researcher offers other great stuff at
www.self-compassion.org

February 16, 2020