Author: Jengie

Towards an Anatomy of Belief

This is not about the meaning of word belief in the English language, or Western Christendom either. Nor is it about the relationship between belief and belonging that has characterised so much of sociology of religion since Grace Davy’s book in 1996. What I am going to do is simpler and that is try to pull out for me three elements that twisted together form my understanding of what it means to believe as a Christian today. They do not stay tidily in neat strands but branch out and they are not totally separate from belonging but they do not encompass the full scale of it. So what are they: Content, Piety and Obedience but each will need spelling out in much more detail because each take their meaning within the context of the Christian faith.

Content is perhaps the easy one. To proclaim Jesus is Lord, the accept as true the Historic Creeds of the Church, to hold that God is Love. However, it is more than that, it is the claim to “believe the Bible”, to accept quite secondary doctrine whether that is speaking in tongues as evidence of Baptism of the Holy Spirit, praying the sinners prayer is necessary to be saved or the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. This secondary layer is not normally seen as central but if forms the context within which the central core is held.

Then there is Piety, at its simplest to Love God and to Love your neighbour. However it too has a whole range of behaviour around it, from keeping the ten commandments, participating in worship and the sacraments, prayer, almsgiving, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, the teaching of Christ in the beatitudes. Add onto it all the moral and spiritual teaching of various branches of the church and you will see that there is plethora of secondary practices that also come under piety whether it is tea-totalism, walking the camino or snake handling.

Then I have put obedience except I do not mean normal obedience. Rather I am taking it from its latin root “ob+audire” which means “in the direction of” + “to listen”. So the question is “Who do you listen to?” and to recall James 1:22 “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” it is easy to see how this links to more modern ideas of obedience. However who do you listen to when it comes to making sense of Christian faith? God? well yes but he tends not to speak directly. The Bible? but any reading of a two thousand year old text requires us to read through a lens and if we claim we have no lens then that usually means our lense is our own prejudices and blindspots. However, there is at least your priest, minister, pastor, elder or other leader of your fellowship who gives the teaching, preaching, word, sermon, or homily during your time of worship. You listen to her or him, maybe no very carefully and if it is the same person quite often you will feel that you have heard it all before but you do listen. Then there are places where that person changes every week, and even in churches where there is a single leader so often someone else will will be invited to give a Word or testimony. Then there are others who hold influence. In hierarchical churches these may be people with institutional authority such as Popes or Bishops. In other churches these may have celebrities because of their learning, because of the congregation they founded, because of the media presence or their ability to heal. Then there are the books and other resources we read about Christianity, the friends we talk with who share our faith. We are all the time making choices about which voices we listen to and about which voices we ignore. This community of voices creates the context in which we make our faith decisions even down to our understanding of what we understand ourselves as doing when we say “I believe”

The One Change the Church could make to reduce Future Scandals

Like many Christians who are still loyal to the institutional church, I am tired and fed up with the number of scandals that are coming out into public knowledge. This Webpage on scandals across denominations is out of date but at least covers several denominations in the UK. That is just safeguarding, it does not deal with financial fraud, bullying (but clergy can bully laity as well) or false advertising. Do not even get me started on discrimination. Let me be honest the dark side of church is very dark and I know it.

I will say what will not fix it. A new institutional structure will not sort it. This is often what is proposed by people who have been caught up in these scandals. If it is a structured denomination then they go onto set up an independent church that freed from the damages of the institutional church can go back to ‘Biblical’ basics. If they have been damaged by an independent church then they say the Church should have more accountability and structure to avoid this happening and tend to seek out the more formal structured forms.

The only real difference structure makes is whether you want a lot of small scandals or a few large ones. A small independent chapel that has acted with impropriety is not news. It is simply an everyday occurrence. The rest of the independent churches are unaffected and go on living their lives as normal. The lack of accountability means that it only takes one or two bad people in the congregation to be not on the straight and narrow and the whole chapel is in scandal.

Now compare with a big denomination such as the Roman Catholic Church or the CofE and there you have the accountability. The problem is that when the accountability system becomes on the side of the corrupt then the evil uses the accountability structure to spread itself through the institution. Harder to get started but when it does catch it spreads. Each member of the covering for others who are implicated in the scandal and thus becoming participants themselves. To talk in terms of disease, evil in these churches is not endemic, the accountability keeps it in check. However, when it manages to infect the accountability system then the accountability system actually becomes a means of spreading the infection and then you get a pandemic.

To continue with the viruse metaphor then you go from endemic version in independent churches rather than the pandemics of the more structured churches. That is you will find if you listen closely an almost continual stream of allegations about what is happening in specific independent churches. Some of these churches may be large with thousands of members but the evil is to a certain extent contained within the church. There is no accountability system to spread it to other churches. It is also easy for other independent churches to think because it is happening in another congregation it has nothing to do with them

Neither form is good. Those with in-between structures such as small denominations or ones with looser forms of connections between churches seem to follow something like flu with ‘seasonal’ spates of scandals happening every few years. Basically, there is a negative correlation between frequency of outbreak and severity. I am indebted to St Thomas Aquinas for this observation for without his theory of governance I would have struggled to it but I am also grateful to Mark Buchanan book Ubiquity for making me aware the that many social aspect seem to organise on a power law and the more structure the stronger the bigger the power is.

So if it is not structure, what is it that the Church has wrong? My answer is that it is actually its belief in its Ecclesiology. The church is very good at promoting itself as a heavenly ordained, the people of God and the bride of Christ. It forgets to mention that it is also a human institution, a company of sinners and the great whore of Babylon. The best you get is an admittance that there is both a heavenly church and an earthly church. What I want to suggest is for us on earth a better Ecclesiology that looks at both elements is important.

There are however some important provisos about what I am saying. I am not saying that the Church is mediocre, it isn’t. Mediocracy is something the church rarely is. It is like the little girl in the nursery rhyme who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good it is very very good and when it is bad it is horrid. To look at it another way, the Church’s capacity for evil is created by its capacity for good. I am also not saying that there are good and bad churches. There undoubtedly are better and worse churches but the close dance between good and evil is intrinsic to the nature of the Earthly church. The church can be so thoroughly nasty precisely because she has the capacity to be some beatifically good.

What I am saying is the Earthly church as humans experience her is actually a battleground with hand to hand combat between the forces of Good and Evil. We all love the illusion that we have joined up on the good side and the other is bad. The illusion is to misunderstand the analogy. We are not the foot soldiers fighting the battle; we are the ground on which they are treading. What is more, the two sides have not fought themselves to a standstill but there are real victories and real defeats happening all around us. Sometimes we are going to be on the good side and sometimes we are going to be on the bad, and we are going to have to choose over and over again.

This is why stories that enable us to ask questions of why there are those who are so opposed to the church out there are important. We, the Church, including me, need to learn a humility, for the Church has betrayed and been betrayed a thousand times in this battle and we so often by our assuming that we are on the right side only add to the problem for so often in that assuming we are party to the betrayal. Too often we are the elder son, not really sure why the father wants to welcome back the younger son, maybe unaware how our bullying contributed to his leaving in the first place.

Thus cultivation of humility by all within the church, this willingness to listen to those who are hurting, yes, but also a willingness to admit we did not have it right in the past and we do not have it right now but are working at it. A willingness to admit that abuse happens, that we sometimes overlook abuse and we know that is wrong, but we are working on it. That we fail to act on the command to love, we fail to protect the weak and the vulnerable and often we ignore the violence in the use of power within our structures but we are working on it. We will not get it perfectly right this side of the parousia, we strive to live up to being the Bride of Christ but being human too often succumb to being the Whore of Babylon. Until Christ restores everything we will unfortunately not be one without the other and though we will work at defeating the Whore of Babylon within us, the final victory is Christ’s and Christ’s alone.

“All plastic evermade still exists”?

Nope!

Wider View of Grenfell Tower Burning courtesy of Wikipedia

That is Grenfell Tower burning courtesy of Wikipedia. What is important is the pannelling that was so disasterous was Aluminium coated with a polyethylene core (i.e. plastic core). The image therefore includes plastic burning. Plastic that burns is no longer in existence. We burn plastic regularly! Yes this is a cause of green house gases and I would never trumpet it as a solution but we need to note that we do destroy plastic as well as create it.

When you are going to make claims about plastic please make genuine ones, not ones that are so easy to disprove.

The human need for embodied virtue

“As humans, we have to see the ways of God through others. We can’t really comprehend virtues like forgiveness or love or compassion in the abstract; we have to have experienced them through other human beings.”

from “St. Benedict’s Rule: An Inclusive Translation and Daily Commentary” by Judith Sutera

The quote above may well remind you of

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

St Theresa Avila (Attributed)

But I want to make a different couple of points, the second following from the first.

Firstly the fact is that at its core language has analogy. When we say that something is a dog we mean that in some sense it is like other being that we know to be dogs. So the meaning comes to language from the use we put it too and that we learn it from the use other people put it to. It also means with abstract ideas such as virtues we understand them as we see them performed. If someone says “they love you” then the way they treat you alters your understanding of love. It is one of the big problems of talking about God in language at all. The analogies are far more tenuous than when applied to other creatures either human or animals. God in this sense does not exist within human parameters and to talk of God is to mislead as much as it is to make clear. However, we need some manner of talking about God, so we use human words. As Christians we are therefore faced with a duty that when we want people to know about God’s attributes that we should share, e.g. loving, forgiving, wise then we need to try to bring our human attribute in line with God’s. To seek to be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect, is not to get everything right but to seek to reflect out to the world the characteristics of God. That is to make them flesh.

The second is that we need to take seriously the fact that the Bible is a material book. There is no language that is not human language. We thus see in the Bible is not a pure output of the divine brain but the struggle of the divine to communicate through human experience. It is not that through reading the Bible we can get a perfect transplant of the knowledge God intend to leave to humans. There is if you like a treble embodiement of the Word in the Bible. The first is the embodiement that comes through the experience of the divine. There is the the second embodiement which is that of those who are inspired by the divine to record the priors engagement. They are not necessarily the same people. The third is the fact that the person reading the Bible is a body and part of human society. In all situation we have to take seriously the humanity of all three groups of people engaged. Divine inspiration is therefore not simply a matter of divine dictation but a matter of living in contact with the divine. We therefore need to struggle with those texts where others have found the divine until they yield their light. That light will take time and effort.

FAQ on Anxiety Disorders

This is basic, comes from my understanding and is really here to help people who have never considered that Anxiety can be a mental health diagnosis. This is a UK based attempt to just pull some information together. It is not comprehensive and I am a sufferer, not a doctor. Therefore, there are two questions I am not going to try and answer:

  • What are the diagnostic criteria for specific anxiety disorders?
  • What treatments are there available for anxiety disorders?

What is an Anxiety Disorder?

Anxiety is perfectly natural part of life which often occurs when faced with a stressful situation. There is nothing wrong with being anxious before an exam. Anxiety disorders occur when the anxiety is out of proportion to the stressful situation or does not dissipate normally after the event. Anxiety disorders are likely to be diagnosed when the anxiety is interfering with everyday life.

What are the symptoms of anxiety disorders?

symptoms include:

  • Excessive worrying
  • Rapid heartbeat
  • Sweating
  • Shivering or shaking
  • Dry mouth
  • Restlessness
  • Fatigue
  • Difficulty concentrating
  • Muscle tension
  • Insomnia
  • Panic Attacks
  • An overarching sense of doom
  • Avoiding Social Situation
  • Irrational Fears
  • gastrointestinal (GI) problems
  • nausea and vomiting
  • heightened alertness
  • disassociation
  • wanting to escape
  • overthinking
  • headaches and pain
  • seeking reassurance
  • pins and needles
  • grinding teeth particularly at night

This is not a comprehensive list. I could add forgetfulness, which is actually an inability to lay down memory due to being anxious. Equally, it should be said that nobody suffers from all symptoms. I should also stress that I have not listed some symptoms associated with very specific anxiety disorders such as flashbacks.

What types of Anxiety disorder are there?

There are a huge variety of disorders that are classed as Anxiety disorders including:

  • Generalised Anxiety Disorder
  • Panic Disorder
  • Phobias
  • Social Anxiety Disorder
  • Separation Anxiety Disorder
  • Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
  • Health Anxiety Disorder
  • Perinatal Anxiety Disorder or Perinatal OCD
  • Unspecified Anxiety Disorder (a catch-all terms for forms that do not fit elsewhere)

Again this is not a complete list, there is a longer and fuller list on the Anxiety UK Website.

How Common are Anxiety Disorders?

There are not figures overall for the UK although there is some data on individual specific disorders. In the US it is calculated as 30% of the population sometime in their lives suffers from an anxiety disorder (See America Psychiatric Association article “What are anxiety disorders?“). If this held in the UK then this would make them more prevalent that Depressive disorders, with approximately lifetime prevalence of 25%. Oddly enough statistics for children are available in the UK. Comparing depression with Anxiety in children gives the following table:

Age GroupDepressionAnxiety
5-100.3%3.9%
11-162.7%7.5%
17-194.8%13.1%
According to statistics quoted on Mental Health First Aid Website.

There seems to be a case that even without the pandemic the splitting of anxiety disorders has led to the overlooking of what an impact they are having on society.

What causes an Anxiety Disorder?

First off there is usually not a single cause that alone produces an Anxiety Disorder. According to NICE risk factors include:

  • Female sex.
  • Family history of psychiatric disorders.
  • Childhood adversity such as:
    • Maltreatment (for example, sexual or physical abuse).
    • Parental problems with intimate partner violence, alcoholism, drug use, and/or mental illness.
    • Exposure to an overprotective or overly harsh parenting style.
    • Bullying or peer victimization among youths.
  • Environmental stressors such as:
    • Physical or emotional trauma.
    • Domestic violence.
    • Unemployment.
    • Low socioeconomic status.
  • Substance dependence or exposure to organic solvents — these can exacerbate the development of anxiety disorders [Morrow et al, 2000].
  • Chronic and/or painful illness such as arthritis

One thing that is important to say is that there is an absence of personal experience of depression. Depression is definitely connected with anxiety but it is not clear what the relationship is. In my case, my anxiety disorder contributed hugely to my experience of depression. However, depression shares many risk factors with anxiety disorders and it also is sometimes listed as a risk factor itself.

Do people get better from an Anxiety Disorder?

The answer is that some do and some don’t. GAD seems to have between a 40% and 60% cure rate with CBT and PTSD seems to be somewhere similar. So really not something that is clear cut. What I think can be said is treatment helps people cope.

Where can I find out more?

This is UK based. There are many good US websites out there but I needed to restrict my listing. This also focuses on those that deal with the big umbrella term of Anxiety Disorder and do not go into the specific diagnoses. This is simply because I do not have the time to check all the websites.

Seven Elements of Fellowship in Worship?

This is a reflection comes from a discussion on a URC Facebook page about what amounts to the Fellowship necessary for worship. I am not answering that question directly here but looking at the forms of fellowship that happen during Christian worship. This is a personal piece reflecting on my experience.

Firstly in the two years before Covid I was regularly going over to Manchester monthly and quite often in an emergency at short notice to. I had just changed from a URC to the local parish Anglican Church that was very definitely Anglo-Catholic. Its prayer meeting was a rosary group and I got drawn into that. The group often met on the day I was visiting Manchester and I started saying the rosary while I travelled (by train). It became natural for me to pray the rosary on emergency visits as well despite the fact the group were not praying then. One thing it did was give me a strong sense of being connected to a spiritual fellowship of prayers. I was with others in prayer.

Secondly, I want to juxtapose that with my experience of watching the mass during the lockdowns. I did this with the parish church as it was streaming daily through the first and second lockdown. I did it daily usually as well. When I was able I did it at the time of the streaming and would then use an act of Spiritual Communion at the distribution of the elements. If I was not able to do it at the exact time due to work commitment or other (I have worked from home since just before the first lockdown) I would watch later but I would not then make an act of Spiritual Communion. I was blessed during the second to be able to receive communion weekly because I helped with the broadcast of the service on a Saturday. This highlighted for me how much was missing even from a Spiritual Communion online.

Right I think there are at least seven ways of keeping fellowship with others in the act of worship:

  1. Fellowship of the Church – All worship from a hermit in isolation to that of community living together in the same building is an act of fellowship. We are always surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses of which we are members as part of the church.
  2. Fellowship of place – where we use the same space where others have or are worshiping. This is one of the reasons why places of pilgrimage are so special
  3. Fellowship of time – where we are aware of worshiping at the same time as other people whether or not they are present.
  4. Fellowship of form – when we use the same form of worship as others. So following a recorded online service does this but so does my praying the rosary on the train.
  5. Fellowship of the table – when we share the same meal during worship with others. The fifth came late but I think it is important to acknowledge the sociological insight that humans, as are all animals, are careful who they share food with and there is an assumed bond between those who share a table that goes beyond the table.
  6. Fellowship of touch – The fellowship of touching and being touched by fellow human beings. Think of its use in sharing the Peace or greeting someone with a hug. I am going to admit that when I originally posted this did not occur to me. It did not occur to me simply because for me it is fractured and what I experience when used is no longer fellowship.
  7. Fellowship of silence – I talk of the place where I meet internally with God as a silence. Like many people who use contemplative prayer I have found it a place where I am profoundly met. It also seems to echo through many of the other silences in my life. When I am with someone in silence the echoes from my silence create a harmony with the echoes of their silence and this deepens the worship that is happening around it.

Hope

A friend posted that she did not have much hope but somehow had to get through the night next Tuesday which is the date of the Presidential election in the United States of America. It has to be seen what will happen and this is not about politics but about hope.

It seems to me that there are two meanings of the word ‘hope’ the first is as defined in the Merriam Webster dictionary

to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or be true

Merriam Webster

Which is all very well but I am not good at it. I am not whether it was my father’s cultivated cynicism, my lousy experience in my first high school or the fact that I am drawn to Urban Mission but somewhere along the way I stopped building up for events. I look forward to things in the sense I am not looking back at them. Yes somethings are good and something are bad but they all need meeting.

If you can meet with Triumph or Disaster
and treat those two imposters just the same

If by Rudyard Kipling

In other words, my attitude is what happens on Tuesday will happen and some how I need to get out of bed the next morning and get on with life whether the outcome is the one I would like or the other. Now that brings me to a second type of hope.

Hope can also be a discipline. Regardless of the outcome I will get out of bed and I will need to act to make the world a better place. I believe that humanity can make the world a better place and the more who work towards it, the better the world will be. Sounds idealistic, but I also acknowledge that I cannot make anyone do this except myself. Mother Theresa is right when she says:


However, my reasoning is not about me being accountable to God, I am but that is not the short term reason for doing them. Rather that my positive choices help others to make positive choices and that God’s intention is in the end for Dame Julian is right.

All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well

Julian of Norwich 1342-1416

So about making positive choices for myself and others and aligning with God’s will. With that in view, hope is that me trying to help build a better world for everyone. Hope is not a feeling but an active discipline.

There are some codicils, my attempts to build a better world rarely work out but somewhere on the way things do happen, quite often by completely other agencies than I would expect that make good things happen. If you had told me or anyone else in 1985 that by 1995 both the Berlin Wall would have fallen and Apartheid been confined to the history books, we would not have believed you. I did not bring that about

Then there is the long view. There is not a single tyrant in history who has not passed on eventually. I am not sure how the present crop will fall but fall they will. The Transatlantic Slave no longer exists. There are many inequalities that result from it but it no longer exists. Far more children are in education than a century ago and the average person on the planet has a longer life span. Yes, we have challenges including finding ways to level the playing field in international trade, sorting out wealth distribution more fairly and tackling climate change. Yes, the poor will be with us always not least because being poor is often a relative calculation. That does not diminish the gains that have been made.

In this sense Hope is what drives Puddleglum when he says:

One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing when you come to think of it. We’re just babies playing a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world that licks your world hollow

C.S. Lewis The Silver Chair

He is choosing to hang onto the greater story of life in the face of the bleakness of the present.

Christmas Chocolate Poll

Chocolates

This is mainly for people who get chocolates from me at Christmas. I am thinking I need to make a smaller selection this year as the normal gannet feeding grounds (IT Services Buildings) are closed due to Coronavirus. This means I actually need to be careful over quantities. Also, I expect to be sending out fewer boxes. I would therefore like to do some recipient feedback. The poll covers those I made last year

This poll is no longer accepting votes

Which cholates should go in the boxes this year (you can vote for upto 6)
Vote
×

Jesus Falls and the Magic of Mastery

Jesus Falls by Dorothy Riley

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Matthew 5:48 (NRSVA)

Confession time; I am a perfectionist. For those that know me and know how hard I drive myself this will come as no surprise. For me, a task is never finished only every abandoned and I have got really good at abandoning tasks when they will do. Few people realise I have to abandon them or I will continue to adapt them in attempts to reach perfection. Actually, I acknowledged it about a year ago when I read Perfectionism is a Spectrum Disorder by the Thesis Whisperer. Like most perfectionists, I have a tendency towards scrupulosity, unlike many Catholics, I seem to get that these sins are not deal breakers with God. That does NOT stop be noticing them.

The problem is that being a perfectionist means that the above Bible verse just plays to all my scrupulous tendencies. Articles such as this one from Ligonier Ministries do nothing to reduce the angst, the stretching, the overdrive. I want to be perfect because God wants me to be perfect and I will bust a gut trying to do so.

Let me take as read God is as in Jesus. We can argue the niceties of that statement elsewhere if we like. Among Catholic devotions are the Stations of the Cross which focuses on Jesus carrying the Cross to his crucifixion. It is a moving practice to carry out particularly in Lent but here I want to focus on one question. Does Jesus do this perfectly? Well, the answer is simply, No. As in the picture above Jesus falls on route. Indeed he does not fall once, he falls three times. This is not the perfection in the normal sense of the word.

I had already done the switch that ‘to be perfect’ is to be like God not some earthly idea of perfectionism but what I am finding is there is more. The first hint I got of this was Paula Gooder’s article What does Jesus mean when he says ‘be perfect‘. In it she argues that ‘perfect’ is not a good translation but is the best translation we have. Elsewhere in the Bible, the word translated ‘perfect’ is translated ‘mature’ but God being mature is not something that makes any sense.

Then I went and looked at translations of the verse on Biblehub and I noticed something interesting. A number of the more literal translations (NKJV, ERV, YLT) tended to translate it with a future conditional. So now I needed to go back to the Interlinear Bible and an analytic Lexicon, my Greek is limited and rusty). The thing is they are right. This is how we shall be. So it is what we are becoming not what we are to be. Not only that it has the sense of arriving at fullness. Not an easy concept to translate into English.

So we have something somewhere like perfection, completeness, accomplished maturity, ripeness, holiness (thank you St Luke) mayby wholiness and this is not something we are but something we will be. Let me therefore tell you about magic.

Alright, I do not mean magic in the usual sense. When I staying with my Goddaughter’s I once said that magic is real it is just not easy to access. You see magic is what gives the competent the WOW factor. You know the factor, the thing that takes a dance routine from being technically good and makes it spectacular, the thing that makes a professors lecture not just the good giving of information but pulls the students in. The difference between being able to work out what is wrong in a spreadsheet and looking at it for six seconds and knowing where the error is. The ability of someone doing parkour not just to clear a fantastic jump but to make it look easy. The thing is that the difference between the competent and these experts is that the experts have practised until it has become part of who they are! In many cases, the difference is the person has failed more often than the merely competent.

So lets go back to the Bible passage and look slightly wider:

43 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,[a] what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5:43-48 (NRSVA)

Now I think Jesus is saying is keep on loving your enemies, pray for those who persecute you and greet strangers for in practicing doing these you shall become perfect as your father is perfect. In other words, the road to perfection are in the paragraph above. It is not about getting everything absolutely right, but about practicing the love of God in practical ways. Of course we will fail even at that. Humans in a world such as this are bound to fail. There will be the times when we get loving our enemies wrong because we do the wrong thing or the times when our greeting is not heard by the stranger because of the noise of traffic. Even Christ fell carrying the cross. As we are sinful then we will fail because of that, but if we keep on practicing then God has promised that we shall be perfect just like him.