I had a few minutes to wait at the store the other day for a prescription and so I thought I would look over the magazine section. There is a magazine for every conceivable interest from crocheting to model railroads and everything in between. One thing you do notice, though, is how many magazines there are having to do with somehow trying to perfect this or that thing about us. There are diet magazines, spirituality magazines and of course, body building etc. etc. There is a kind of obsession with getting things right, whether or not it is our diet, or our exercise or our health. Perhaps we think that if we work harder we can somehow perfect ourselves and, who knows, maybe if we perfect ourselves we can live forever.

As well as seeking to be in the best shape, we also tell ourselves that, there is nothing we can't do, if only we put our mind to it. Sixty and more years ago, The Rev.Norman Vincent Peale wrote "The Power of Positive Thinking" and this book was a best seller. There have been thousands of other "self help" books since and all of them try and convince us that we can more or less control most of what comes our way. Now there is some truth to these claims, I know. We can do certain things that will affect the outcome and most of us don't just want to sit around and let life happen to us. But we need to be careful, lest we assume that in order to make ourselves acceptable we need to make sure we engage in certain behaviors. This temptation is particularly sharp in the world of faith.

There is a strain in all religion of perfectionism, the idea that we can be perfect, or perhaps that we need to be perfect. We are somewhat impatient with people who "don't get it right." I've been reading Marilynne Robinson's book "Home" recently. It is her second novel about the same people. It is set in Iowa in the late 1950's and has two elderly ministers as the center pieces of the book. One, Ames, is a Congregational minister, still preaching and the other Boughton, a Presbyterian, retired(not voluntarily) and sick, probably dying. Boughton's daughter, Glory, comes home to care for her widowed father. There is a successful, physician brother, who makes a brief appearance, but the real centerpiece is Jack, her alcoholic brother, who never made anything of himself, and who now comes home. All of these characters are what we would today call "dysfunctional". They are all tainted by this or that, creatures of their time and place and yet all, in their own ways, seeking to make it home.

Home here might mean home as in the sense of a place or it might mean eternity, or perhaps it means both. These characters are often irritating and you get angry at them. Why, you wonder, can't they get their lives in order? Why can't they understand how things have changed? A number of folks are reading this book and then commentating on it on line.One of the commentators just the other day had some enlightening things to say. Let me share them with you.

"All the characters in "Home" are losers. Dying, old preachers, son who is drunk, daughter who is a failure in her profession and her love affair. Yet they are all baptized, all struggle with Jesus, and maybe in the light of the doctrine of predestination are saints. We have become so accustomed to believing that behavior identifies a Christian rather than election. We have become so accustomed to believing that being born anew in Christ is to be a good responsible, caring, sensitive, justice seeking, peace loving person that it is hard for us to see Christ in Gloria who can't save anyone but who feeds the dying, bathes the weak, refuses to abandon the sinner,or it is hard for us to see Christ in the old preacher, who is not a peace, justice person, but a good 1950's racist, yet in his fumbling, bumbling way cares for his son and it is hard for us to see Christ in Jack who is an irresponsible drunk but had tried to bridge the racial gap" by marrying a Black woman. ....I wonder if we can see ourselves in Jack, Rev. A and B, Gloria? All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.This book is not about can do people. Can do people don't need Jesus."

Maybe we need to spend more time thanking God for all his grace to us than making sure we are "can do" people.Anyway its a thought.

If we are honest,most of us like yes or no answers. Life is so much easier that way. We know, though, that things never are as easy as we might like them to be; that life is much more nuanced than we may think it is. This is true in our political life and it is true in our religious life too.

Walter Brueggemann is a prominent Old Testament scholar,now retired, and is also an ordained United Church of Christ minister. He comes from a famous family in the old Evangelical Synod, the same from which another famous theological family, the Niebuhr's also came.

In a recent speech to some Presbyterians which Martin Marty speaks of in his publication "Context", Brueggmann speaks of two "escape hatches". The first one is a flight into absolutism which he calls "the conservative alternative". When we take this path, we make our systems into God and it is idolatry.

There is also another side which Brueggemann calls "the liberal temptation". This is the movement toward autonomy. You can see this in folks who speak of being spiritual but not being religious. "It enacts the self-contained self, unconnected to tradition or any other reality,unrestrained,uninformed,not related to anybody or accountable to anybody. It is in fact, atheism."

Both of these alternatives, according to Brueggemann, draw us into "a common life filled with anxiety and always as the edge of violence and brutality." The alternative is to embrace the biblical faith which is always dialogical from beginning to end and to embrace a God who always reaches out to people and calls them to reach out to each other.

The faith which we share is always more messy than the extremes of either end want to make it; it is a faith which is about relationships, our relationship with God through Christ and our relationships one with another in the family of faith which we call the church.

As we begin this new year, let us resolve to life in the midst of the "mess" which is both life in the world and life together in the church, relying on the God who is personified in Jesus Christ and whose love will never let us go.