In this episode, Brandi talks with Jazzy Johnson about perfectionism and how to develop a theology that makes us all more free. We talk about messying our orthodoxy and orthopraxy, making mistakes, and seeing ourselves as more human in a way that helps us see God as God.
You can find Jazzy on social media @jazzy_symone!
Continuing sending your questions to reclaimingmytheology@gmail.com
If you like what you hear, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. You can also join along on pattern at patreon.com/brandinico to help sustain the work and life of the podcast.
Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
@reclaimingmytheology
In this episode, Brandi talks with Jazzy Johnson about perfectionism and how to develop a theology that makes us all more free. We talk about messying our orthodoxy and orthopraxy, making mistakes, and seeing ourselves as more human in a way that helps us see God as God.
You can find Jazzy on social media @jazzy_symone!
Continuing sending your questions to reclaimingmytheology@gmail.com
If you like what you hear, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. You can also join along on pattern at patreon.com/brandinico to help sustain the work and life of the podcast.
Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
@reclaimingmytheology
Reclaiming My Theology, Episode 4: Perfectionism
Brandi: Hello and welcome to another episode of Reclaiming My Theology, a podcast seeking to take our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress. My name is Brandi Miller, and I am your host, and I just wanted to say another thank you for those of you who have supported in word, reviews, and through Patreon. It’s been an amazing journey, and I’m really, really grateful for you all.
Once again, as questions arise, we want to be people who are sensitive to questions and encourage them. So please send questions that you have about our content to reclaimingmytheology@gmail.com to potentially have them featured in our question-and-answer time called Make It Make Sense.
Today, I’m joined by my friend Jazzy Johnson to talk about perfectionism. In this conversation, we use some pretty strong language, so I just wanted to give you some warning on the front end to make sure that you’re in a situation where that is appropriate for you.
And with that, enjoy this interview with Jazzy Johnson.
***
Brandi: Well, Jazzy, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Love to have you on as my friend and colleague and co-conspirator for a better world.
Jazzy: Yesss.
Brandi: I’m excited for guests to get to know you, so I would love, as I ask every guest, for you to express for us, in some way, what does it mean to be you?
Jazzy: Mmm. What does it mean to be me?
Right now, it means I am tired, I am tired, I am tired. I am weary, because, as a Black woman in a world that does not love Blackness, as a Black woman who carries a lot—not just my own feelings, my own issues in life, but carries a lot for other people—my back is weary. And I’m also someone who laughs really big, I am – when I laugh, I often, like, knock things over, and—[Brandi laughs]—hit my head on stuff. I’m pretty sure you have witnessed this before.
[Jazzy laughs]
I laugh really big; I love to laugh; I love music; I love to kickbox; I love to be in my body; I love to be with people for just amounts of time that cannot be measured and just being present and practicing joy, and I know that joy is a part of existing.
So those are all me, I’m joyful, but I care too much. And I’m – one of the things that I fight against all the time and—I am going to curse for a moment—is fighting against the allure of getting to a place where we say, “I don’t give a fuck.” And the truth is that I give too many fucks. And I’m carrying too many fucks, and—[Brandi laughs]—the Lord knows this about me, and I’m grateful for my community that carries all the fucks with me, but it’s heavy. [Jazzy laughs] And I wouldn’t change who I am, and so I am tired, but I’m me. I am who I am, and I love very deeply and very big.
Brandi: I love that. I love that. I love that you can say, “I’m tired but at least I’m me.” I think a lot of us are tired, trying to be other people, so I love that, even in the pain and the tiredness of all that, that you are tired, but you are you.
Jazzy: Yes. Can’t take that from me. I think it’s taken a lot of work to fully embrace that I really love who I am, and I like who I am, and I know that who I am is what the world really needs, not me trying to be someone else.
Brandi: Yes! I love it.
Jazzy: Which I’m excited to talk about in this episode, because I think that has a lot to do with perfectionism, but I’m so grateful to have come to a place where I love and I like who I am as a short, Black woman from Texas, adopted by Chicago, and now somehow found myself in Atlanta. I love it.
Brandi: That’s so good. I think I’m feeling that way for the first time in my life, too, where I feel like I like and love who I am and see that that is what is good for the world.
So, I’m hoping that through this podcast together, that other people will get that sense, which I don’t think is what people think of when they think about reclaiming their theology from white supremacy. But I think that’s kind of the goal of a lot of it, unlearning perfectionism, is to find ourselves in a place where we know who we are and that it is good.
Jazzy: Yes! That it is good! That it is blessed fully and wholly as good. Ugh.
Brandi: I also love that when you described what it means to be you that the first thing that you did not say was what you do. It was who you are. But I would love to hear a little bit about your sense of vocation, or what you do with your time. So could you tell us a little bit about your sense of vocation or work?
Jazzy: Yes. As a being, that is what you heard first, that’s also taken a lot of work. But what I love to do—I’m a recovering workaholic, and I don’t think I’m that well into my recovery, definitely think I’ve had some relapses, but it’s also because I love what I do.
So I work with college students, and I’ve done a varying amount of things with students over the years, as well as working with young adults. But to not put it as plainly as, like, “What is my job description?”, I think the work that I do really is to walk with other people, especially young people—and by young people I mean college-age, maybe, to like thirty-five, right, so that young adult age—of just walking with people in their journeys of liberation, especially in the areas in which oppressive systems have distorted our understanding and our views of ourselves, and our view of other people, and our view of God, and our view of systems and what they could look like.
I think my work as a facilitator and as a social justice educator and a theological educator is to really materialize the things—the beast, I like to say, materialize the beasts—that are gnawing at us, that are slowly killing us and our inner selves and our communities and our institutions, for the purpose of identifying the things that are hurting us and harming us, and exposing them so that we can either defeat them or destroy them or learn what is their role actually in our lives.
That’s a weird way of saying that I am a facilitator, I’m an educator, I create resources, I mentor, I disciple; I do a lot of those things.
Brandi: I love that. Again, I keep saying that “I love that”—but I just really love so much of who you are, and it’s just a joy for me to have you on, talking about who you are. And even just who you are and how you talk about your journey to becoming who you are is just a gift to listeners, and so I just want to honor you and honor God’s work in you and honor your community’s work in you, because a lot of people can only dream of the kind of freedom that I think you express as you talk about yourself.
Yeah – when I asked you what you wanted to talk about, perfectionism, you were like, “Yeah, that’s the one.” [Jazzy laughs.] And I love when we get enthusiasm behind an invitation.
And so I would love if you could share with folks as we enter in, how would you define perfectionism, what does that look like in normal, non-theological life, and then we’ll talk about how we see that play out in theology? If those aren’t separated, that’s totally fine. [Brandi laughs]
Jazzy: Oh, there’s so much! Where do we start? Ah! [Jazzy laughs] Well, I – I just wanna say, I was excited about this topic because, first and foremost, I just want to make my therapist in Chicago proud. Like, I just—[Jazzy laughs]—Keisha and I did so much work around perfectionism. And so, my Black woman therapist—yes, Lord, thank you for my Black woman therapist!—when I started my therapy journey, I wouldn’t even use the word perfectionism. I had no idea that this was something that was impacting me in a way that was altering my whole life and way of being and sense of self and theology and health. My health, my bodily health, right? Anxiety, depression, all these different things, a lot of it was being impacted by the thing of perfectionism.
And I think very simply – I think of perfectionism as this set image that we’re all made to believe we should work toward that is actually impossible to ever reach. And it is a mark that is continuously moving, that we’re all told that we’re supposed to work our whole lives to reach after it, and no one can actually grasp this thing. It’s an invisible thing that’s not real, and that exhausts all of us, every single one of us, and it somehow impacts the way that we do our jobs, the way that we are in relationship with other humans, the way that we understand who God is, the way that we look at ourselves in the mirror, right?
There’s this image that has been placed before us that we’re supposed to be reaching after, this carrot that we’re chasing that is impossible to actually reach.
Brandi: And it feels like, to me, that perfectionism dovetails with other attributes of – we’re gonna call perfectionism an attribute of white supremacy culture, but I see perfectionism dovetailing with all of these other values of white supremacy, like hierarchy and competition, progress being bigger and more, having one charismatic leader who leads a movement. Like, it seems like all of these things kind of dovetail with perfectionism.
So, I just want to name that we will be talking about a lot of things that seem like they’re hovering in the same thing, but that’s what culture is: it’s a conglomeration of ideas that shape us without us knowing it.
Yeah, and as we talk about perfectionism, I want to talk for a moment before we go into the theology about what the consequences of imperfection are for us—or of living in a perfectionistic culture. Because I think about, um, even the idea of mistakes. I know that, when I was growing up, I was terrified to make mistakes because I thought I needed to be perfect, and so one of the consequences of perfectionism was I sought to never make mistakes, so there were lots of ways I didn’t grow.
So, are there things that you can think of that feel like consequences of perfectionism so that we can just help to set the picture of what this is for folks?
Jazzy: Yes. I mean, we’re talking about this in the context of white supremacy culture. I – I think there are ways I would love to talk about it, how this impacts white folks, right, within whiteness and white supremacy, and then how this impacts people of color.
When I think about mistakes with folks who identify as white, and even just doing the work of anti-racism and racial justice, so many white folks get stuck. They freeze because they fear making mistakes. And, most of the time, people of color – we’re like, “You’re going to make mistakes. Just jump in. Just come. We can’t keep waiting on you to do it perfectly.”
And there is this pressure on white folks themselves that they need to be the good white person, the perfect white person, the perfect ally, the perfect accomplice, or whatever, to even be able to enter into the fight. We don’t have time for you to become something that doesn’t exist. We don’t have time for you to try to become perfect when our bodies are laying in the street, right?
But so many people stay on the sidelines because they fear being imperfect as someone entering into this conversation where they’re going to make mistakes or the work where they’re going to make mistakes. And I have seen that, time and time and time again.
For people of color—and there’s so much more we can say about white folks, honestly, I will come back to that, because I have many thoughts on that. That was my first thought when you said mistakes.
For people of color, I – you know, I hear you in the making mistakes, like that fear. And part of it is because if we are people of color, brown bodies living in this white world, our mistakes are much more costly. If we make mistakes—hell, if we – if I forget to turn on my signal when I’m trying to switch lanes, like Sandra Bland, it could end up in my death. And so our mistakes, when we are people of color, it could be that grave, it could be that intense, or it could just be when I’m working professionally in an organization, if I mess up, then I feel like I’m representing all Black women, all Black people, and no one is going to give us a chance again. Right?
And so I think that one of the things that it leads in to—and I appreciate that you named, like, we’re talking about specifically perfectionism but it touches so much—is something for me that really impacted my life throughout however long I’ve been alive, almost twenty-nine years, is the concept of exceptionalism. For Black folks, I’ve experienced Black exceptionalism ties into perfectionism. “Oh, if Obama did it this way, why can’t y’all do it?” Or, “If Oprah is this way and made it, why can’t y’all figure it out?”
And I’ve found that, in my own life, that I was made to have to be the exception of all the other Black people, right? Like, do I have the highest grades? And if I have the highest grades, and I’m in the top 5% or whatever, then I’m an okay Black person, right? Am I leading all these other organizations publicly and doing it well? I’m an okay Black person. Did I speak politely to you enough when I was bringing up something that actually caused a lot of pain, but I had to figure out a way to say it that you would hear?
Brandon and I have experienced this together in our own organization, where it has been said to us, like, “Oh, thank you for bringing it to us in this way where we could hear you.” Which is an unspoken thing of, “Oh, you’re not talking like those Black folks over there” or “You’re not the angry one over there,” right?
And there’s this perfect way that we’re supposed show up to even be acceptable as Black folks, and that is a form of exceptionalism that – it gives you a ticket into whiteness in some ways. So for – for a long time, I had to start doing work around how do I unlearn even Black exceptionalism of not – of not reaching for whiteness, of not reaching for this perfection that I’ve been told I have to grab ahold of to be permitted into their spaces, to have a voice that matters and is heard.
Brandi: Ugh, it’s so awful.
Jazzy: Right? For people to – to follow me when I lead.
Brandi: Yeah, because then that equates Black excellence with proximity to whiteness. Which says that the best Black person is the closest to a white person, or a white cultural identity that one can get, and that is wild.
And, even as you were talking, I was thinking about – even the concepts of internalized racial inferiority and superiority. And internalized racial superiority is the idea that white folks were given the message that whiteness is supreme and perfect and a thing that everyone else should aspire to be. And, therefore, when white people do things that are connected to that image of what a perfect white person is or does, or the American dream or any of those things, that it creates a sense of superiority over folks of color.
But if folks of color internalize inferiority, because we cannot reach the impossibly high standard of whiteness, and then we start to live out perfectionistic ideas inside of white organizations and in our own communities to try to do what we think is going to be perfect.
Again, this is a podcast about reclaiming theology, and so I want to talk specifically about how Christians do this, because I think Christians are uniquely responsible for some of the perfectionistic standards that we have, because not only do perfectionistic standards operate in our cultures, they’re buttressed by our theology.
So when I think about what it means to make a mistake or when I think about how little appreciation is expressed in church spaces or when we are more – we tend more toward being critical than we do toward being affirming—those are all things that play out in perfectionistic cultures, and they affect both of us. I would love for you to talk about how you see perfection weaponized by Christianity toward white supremacy.
Jazzy: Actually, can I – can I speak a little bit more to culture at large, too, like before I do that?
Brandi: Yes, absolutely.
Jazzy: So, this is – it’s connected to theology a little bit, but I’m thinking about, ah, one of my favorite theologians and thinkers and historians, Dr. Willie James Jennings, who is at Yale Divinity School. And he talks about whiteness as a form of maturity, right, which connects with what you’re saying. It’s this movement toward what is supreme, what is superior, and what’s so important and what made me think about this and what you just said is this mark of perfectionism is not even possible for white people.
Brandi: Yes!
Jazzy: Right? Like, this perfectionism is killing white folks. Like, if you consider some of the realities of even just like suicidality for middle-aged white men and some of the just, like, pain and depression of a lot of white women—there – it’s killing white folks also.
And one of the things that I love that Jennings said in a seminar I was doing with him once is he – he would say to his white students that even these white male students are trying to become white men. That whiteness creates – white supremacy creates a form of maturity that is trying to move everyone toward becoming a self-sufficient white man. And that that is even detrimental, that is even dangerous, to a white man himself because of the way that that mark is set before us.
And, so, there are things like education, there are things like western education, there are things like western Christianity, that are used to move us toward this unreachable form of maturity, of perfection, that is seated in white supremacy. And so I just – I want to name that the perfectionism that comes from white supremacy is also killing you all—well, killing white folks, to the white listeners. [Jazzy laughs] It’s – we know it’s killing people of color. We know the names, and it’s also harming white folks. So it’s not good for any of us.
What I think about it theologically, I think one of the things that’s interesting to me about the, like, bifurcation of theology and sociology and anthropology is that people forget that the racialized hierarchy that was created centuries ago was also a profoundly Christian phenomenon.
Explorers, we’ll call them, quote—[Brandi laughs]—who found themselves going to other continents, let’s say Africa, and encountering Indigenous people there and then making certain decisions, certain hierarchy of whiteness, European whiteness, an Aryan look of sorts that came about later, that is the top. This white beauty standard that’s at the top of this hierarchy, and then the beautiful luscious blackness of folks that they may have encountered on the African continent as bad, whiteness at the top as good. This hierarchy that was created was a profoundly Christian reality. And it was a profoundly Christian reality that also made its way and was already happening in even the aesthetic of who Jesus was to some of these Europeans.
One of the things that’s interesting about Christianity of, like, when we talk about perfectionism is I think it’s actually important for us to think about bodies, it’s important for us to think about an aesthetic. Because the aesthetic of beauty, and what was perfection of beauty, started racial hierarchy. And then it went into all of our policies and behavior and all these different things, but it started with this picture of what is beautiful, what is good, what is divinely created by God that is seen as what is closest to the heavenly realm. How did we get white angels? How did we get white Jesus? And how did we get images of Satan as black and darkness and all of these bad things, right?
Brandi: Yes.
Jazzy: Those are things that influence our theology and have to do with an image of perfection that was projected early in Christianity. What happens when white Jesus must go away, and you have a brown Jesus who is physically weak, who was pierced, who is bleeding, who is walking the streets of Nazareth, who’s walking the streets of areas that, like, people didn’t want to go? What do you do with that Jesus? Can we follow that Jesus? What does that mean for us?
And so I think that there – that’s an interesting way that we don’t think about when we say the word “perfectionism.” But it’s like perfectionism is also grounded in – in beauty and aesthetic, right? When you think of a word like a “standard”, that comes from an – a standard of perfection. We don’t always think – it’s so funny because, like, another part of white supremacy is worship of the written word, and so like we think about, “What can I read that tells me about this god, this theology?” But what have we seen over time that – that influences what we think about our theology and who God is? And I think that that really matters, too.
Brandi: The thing with perfectionism, for me, the image I get is, um, like, a coloring page that someone drew of white Jesus, and then they put these values of white supremacy culture, like colored them in; like this spot where his hair is, that’s perfectionism, there’s a spot that’s worship of the written word. And then that becomes our image of what perfection is, and then perfectionism then, in and of itself, becomes adjacent to white supremacy, because we set up a picture of Jesus that is fully perfected in our most fully embodied version of our culture, not the fully embodied version of Jesus of Nazareth that we see in scripture.
Jazzy: Right.
Brandi: And that is pretty wild. And – ’cause I think about even how the interpretation of the word in the Sermon on the Mount, where it becomes, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Jesus is talking to this group of people who are, by all standards, not perfect, and what makes us think that word is the best translation of what’s happening there?
So, I can think about perfectionism in translation and culture in translation, because other communities have translated that word “perfect” as “whole” or “complete” or “without want.” So I’m like, what happens when you have the word – the phrase, “Be whole as your heavenly Father is whole”? How does “wholeness” change our view of what perfection needs to look like?
Because perfection isn’t about not making mistakes; it’s about making mistakes that lead us to becoming more whole or rectifying the things that make us – yeah, that are broken, or that are harmed by others, or that are laid bare. It’s such a different kind of thing. And we hear those kinds of things, and then people then go into Pauline literature that elevates Christ in such a beautiful way but then says, “You need to be like that. And if you aren’t like that, then you’re a sinner, then you’re less than, that your sin – ”
Even I think – I – I don’t know, this stuff makes me crazy! Because I think about how we tell the gospel. The bridge diagram in and of itself starts with the reality that if you were to try to throw a rock across a chasm to get to God, you could never do it because your sin separates you from a perfect God who could not possibly look on sin. That is a modern interpretation of scripture, because how do you justify the person of Jesus walking among humans if God cannot be with sinners?
We do some weird stuff with the scriptures to embody the need to be sinless and perfect, and then we back it up with paternalism, like we talked about in the other podcast.
Jazzy: I’ve never used the bridge diagram. [Jazzy laughs]
Brandi: That’s – girl, bless you. I’ve repented of that for my whole life.
Jazzy: [Jazzy laughs] Even the way that we so often talk about sin, and – and – and I’ll say this, too. It’s interesting to consider how this next generation of Christians so rarely can even utter the word “sin” because of how it’s been weaponized against them. And one of the things that’s interesting to me about that is, like, I’m like, okay, sin has a certain connotation of, like, language often translated around, like, missing the mark or what have you.
I, you know, I don’t even know if I’ve been far enough into my seminary journey to know if that’s accurate. A lot of people use that—I don’t know. What bothers me about the way that sin is discussed is as if you actually ever get rid of the capacity to do great good and to do great harm in the world, ever. Like, everyone holds both of those things within themselves, and creating this sinless picture of what you should become doesn’t even make sense in the first place if we’re going to talk about sin.
Outside of the text that says, like, “You must be perfect like your heavenly – ” there’s – there’s, like, almost nowhere else where it is putting the onus onto humans to be perfect. And that doesn’t mean that you get rid of that text, right. But it is, like, how do you see that different interpretation, as far as you speaking about wholeness.
I think you see much more around people – like, I think about the text of – of Jesus saying, “My power is made perfect in your weakness.” Like, how much more of what we actually see in scripture is for humans to fully embrace their humanity and the fact that there is great good in who we are as humans and there is great weakness in who we are as humans?
There – there is no weird image that Jesus ever says of like, “This is the mark that you’re supposed to be at; get there.” Instead, like, Jesus is fully aware of our humanity and walks with the disciples in their, like, the times when they are doing great and the times when they are not doing so great, and where did we get this image of what perfection should be as humans, right? Because, unless we really think that we ourselves can become God, which is what white supremacy is, then why are we reaching after something that does not exist? Right? Why would we need grace? Why would we need – ?
You know, like, white supremacy is that very nature of – it’s a false promise that you can become God. That’s where the scripture has been, like, twisted or distorted, even if it comes from one place that says, “Become perfect like your heavenly Father is perfect.” We also forget how Jesus is walking through his own ministry in his – in his constant conversations with God the father and becoming more like the Father. To us as humans, Jesus does not say, “You should be exactly like me.” He says, “Try – go and do likewise.” He says, “You pray towards being this way, the Holy Spirit, the helper, will help you become this way, you will be able to live out what I have shown you in the time that I have been with you.” But if we were able to be God, why would we need God?
And, so, white supremacy is that false lie that we can become God. And I always remember hearing Lisa Sharon Harper speaking on The Very Good Gospel, her book—which is great, everyone should read it—and her speaking at a CCDA, a Christian Community Development Association, conference a couple of years ago, and she said, “One of the good things about the gospel for white folks is that you just get to be human.”
Like, you just get to be human. And it’s why I think we really need to throw off our, like, false understandings of what perfectionism is, even as we see it in scripture. I love your interpretation of what does “whole” mean, what does “a movement to shalom” mean, versus perfection, which is a word that I feel like we have given a certain connotation to that doesn’t even exist in scripture. It’s just not there.
Brandi: Yeah, and what it feels like to me is that we take a very narrow—and not in a good way—road where we say, “We want to be like Jesus.” And the two things that we highlight or put unequal weight to is “Jesus is perfect” and “Jesus is sinless.” And so that becomes the standard that we put ourselves up against when Jesus doesn’t seem to have the assumption that we can do that; Jesus doesn’t seem to be driving that train anywhere.
That’s why – that’s how we know that things are culture or cultural values, is because something – like, a community of color might emphasize Jesus’s humanity, like to be the most full version of human that we can, where whiteness and a lot of white theology tends to embrace Jesus’s sinlessness or a need for salvation or this other reality later, when Jesus seems to be talking a lot about the here and now.
So I wonder even how perfectionism disembodies us, because we try to become perfect in our minds or in our doctrine, right. Even the idea of systematic theology creates, like, these perfectionistic categories for what to and how to believe about God, and that doesn’t do anybody any favors in trying to learn and grow and mature. Because almost none of us grow without mistakes or error.
And, so, as we’re talking about scripture, I want us to also talk about the church and Christian organizations, because Christians manifest white supremacy in distinctly Christian ways even though we ourselves are, as you said, at the origins of white supremacy. So how do you see perfectionism manifesting in church or in Christian organizations?
Jazzy: How do I not see perfectionism manifesting itself in church and Christian organizations? I – you know – and – and people can say all they want to me about this, but I also am just – I don’t understand – I get it, theologically, I do. But I don’t understand why people are so obsessed with Jesus being perfect. Like, I actually don’t know what that does for folks. Is it supposed to be this weird, like, someone we can measure ourselves up to and just know that we’ll never make it and so we’ll always keep striving? Is that helpful to us? I don’t know why that’s something that folks like to focus in on, and I think that we project our own definitions of what perfect is onto saying that Jesus is perfect.
Sinless, sure, we can maybe understand that a certain way. But when we say that Jesus is perfect, I think of scripture like Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, which nobody likes to touch, because they’re like, “Surely Jesus didn’t agree that this woman is a dog, or call this woman a dog, or say something that’s more like a racial slur to this woman. Surely not our God, who is perfect and who is sinless.”
What do we do with a scripture like this, right? And could Jesus have been tired? [Jazzy laughs] Could Jesus have – have also been experiencing the Holy Spirit and this woman herself continuing to show her divinity to him, right, in a way that was significant for Jesus to continue his discipleship? And if that’s true, does that mean then that Jesus sins or was imperfect, or does it mean that Jesus was also human, right?
I think we need to problematize even our categories and definitions, even in the way that we engage with a scripture like that, and ask ourselves why is it so important that Jesus be perfect? And what do we mean when we say that?
Brandi: Yes, totally. And I think that that relies heavily on penal substitutionary atonement theories—
Jazzy: Ooh, she said it! She said the words!
Brandi: —that would say God has to punish your sin, and the only way that there can be a perfect atonement or sacrifice is that if someone who is sinless or perfect takes your imperfect place. And so I think even our sense of penal substitutionary atonement in our sense of the gospel requires – so, I don’t even know that perfectionism does something for people as much as it keeps us from being as afraid of what our imperfection might do to other people.
Jazzy: It gets really messy.
Brandi: Well, the scripture that keeps coming to mind is 1 John 4, where it talks about perfect love casts out fear. And I’m like, well, if that was the perfection we were striving for, our church spaces and our Christian organizations would look really different than, “Just be perfect.” If it was, “Hey, does what we’re doing right now cast out fear in people, does it create inclusion, does it create belonging, does it dispel fear?”
That’s the kind of perfection I see Jesus doing. He creates spaces for people to not have to fear for their lives or for their bodies or for their theological ideas or for their process or for their followingness, right? Jesus doesn’t do that. And it seems like we would prefer a perfect Jesus who has to be punished for our sin because he’s perfect than the Jesus that brings a type of perfection that casts out fear instead of instilling it, so that we would believe in God, so that we think we could go to heaven when we die? It’s all over the place.
Jazzy: [Jazzy laughs] Instead of this perfect love that you’re naming, which is totally connected to shalom, which is totally connected to wholeness, as you’ve named already, right? And when you name the things that you named, as far as what would it look like instead if we had this perfect love that casts out all these other things. The way that perfectionism draws this line around the church that keeps people out, this perfectionism that has only caused harm, caused rigidity, caused war.
I think I – it’s interesting because I’m just sitting – I feel like I talk about this a lot but I’m sitting with it right now, and I’m just like, what is it all for? [Jazzy laughs] And I feel like perfectionism is that type of insidious thing that is within you that tells you to keep going towards something that you cannot see. And it’s not the good – it’s not a good impetus, right, it’s not like hope, it’s not like love, it’s like a – it’s something that screams inside your head that you’re never going to be enough, it’s something that screams inside your head that, like, you have to keep reaching even if it kills you. And – and so as I think about, like, what is it all for, it – it makes me really just wonder if – if we sat back and thought about all of the categories that we have created that fit inside this perfectionism and how much, like – to – to wonder about if it’s done any good or what good it has done over the years.
I think our perfectionism, and even the idea that there is, like, a right or perfect theology, has caused so much harm in us creating this, like, arrogant orthodoxy where you are supposed to reach this right place of belief, and if you cannot reach it, then you cannot be a part of our community, which we have seen in multiple spaces, right, multiple Christian spaces around race, around gender, around sexuality. It’s arrogant that we even get to decide what is perfect and what is right.
And I honestly just feel like most people are exhausted. I’ve seen so many friends leave, particularly protestant evangelical spaces, just exhausted, because they keep trying to reach some mark that doesn’t exist. And they keep being told that they’re not good enough, whether implicitly or explicitly, keep being told that they don’t belong because of who they are, what they wear, who they love, how they dress, certain beliefs that they have—these things that they’re supposed to be reaching to. They’re exhausted!
Brandi: Yes, yes!
Jazzy: Because every time that they become something that they’re not to try to reach this mark that you’ve set for them of perfection, they reach that, they lose a part of themselves, and then you tell them that something else is wrong. And then they keep trying, and they’re exhausted. [Jazzy laughs] So when people talk about millennials and why we’re not in the church, that – just one among many reasons is that you keep giving us a moving goalpost of what is means to be a Christian, or to be a good Christian, and it has nothing to do with Jesus. But it has everything to do with certain categories of perfection that have been created over time. And you know, I think, especially white Christians, should learn that creating categories is what got us here in the first place of having all these issues.
Brandi: Well, and on the flip side of that, there’s folks who – we’ve – the goalpost has moved every time, or there’s those of us—or folks who are listening—who’ve never missed the goal. Who hit every standard that the church said to do, and it’s never been enough.
Jazzy: Still not enough!
Brandi: Or, you’re unlearning the trauma of—I feel like I bring up purity culture in, like, every episode—people who hit the goal of not having sex until they were married, or whatever, and then realize that they still have all of these traumatic things going on in their lives—“But you said that if I did this thing, then I would be perfect or pure and that God would do something for me.” And we create this kind of transactional Christianity where my goodness gets me God’s love and blessing, when God’s blessing or God’s love for humanity is not up for debate nor for competition at all.
And, so, I just wonder if there are a lot of folks who feel like they did everything right and that God is the problem for them now, where it’s like, “God why didn’t you, why didn’t you, why didn’t you?” When it was never God who put those rigid standards on people, it was people, and usually people in leadership and authority, that always told them that they were not enough.
Because I think in a lot of—a lot of my church spaces at least—controlling people’s beliefs and controlling their actions were always more important than giving people space to explore who they were for themselves. That we were supposed to just become like Jesus in this abstract sense, and the more that people individuated away from what people thought was a perfect version of Christianity—or an acceptable or polite version of Christianity, because those were all a part of it—that they no longer got to have a place in it. You know that we have a perfectionism problem in the church when we can kick people out for not meeting our standards. And I don’t mean that in a criminal way, like if people commit crimes and are, like, harming people in the community, there’s ways to engage with that, but if just who we are and a mistake that we made – like – even the shirt that you’re wearing right now, can you read the shirt that you’re wearing right now?
Jazzy: Oh, yeah, that’s true! [Jazzy laughs] Yes. “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done” – Bryan Stevenson.
Brandi: Yes! And if feels like if that were – if we actually believed that in the church, we would have much more of the thing that we profess we say is the highest – one of the highest things, it’s grace.
Jazzy: Grace, right.
Brandi: And instead grace becomes the, “Oh, thank god you have grace because you fucked up, and God’s mad at you” instead of being like, “No, it is God’s grace that draws us to a different and to a better way.”
I think I see this playing out in so many different ways, even in my work. And in the organization I work for, there’s like – there’s perfect ways to evangelize, there’s perfect ways to study the Bible that gets you closer to God, there’s perfect ways to raise support, there’s perfect ways to do all these things. But a lot of those perfectionistic standards don’t take any kind of cultural expression outside of whiteness into account and then imposes those standards on people and then penalizes for not being able to reach those standards, or when those standards don’t work well for them in their own personal ministry contexts.
And what does that do to the psyche of a person who feels called by God to help other people know God or to serve students or to be present in college spaces, right? Like, what does that do to people?
Jazzy: And how does that connect to theology that we might draw from even things like being the body of Christ. And if one part gets to decide that this is how you all should be, how will we ever function as the body? How can we ever empower folks to live fully into who they were created to be, as who they are, if we’re trying to make them all like one part? Which is the problem of white supremacy. White supremacy is the nose being like, “All y’all gotta be a nose.”
Brandi: Yes. Yes.
Jazzy: “And if you’re not a nose, you gots to go.” That’s basically what it is! [Jazzy laughs]
That – that is – that is what white supremacy did, right. Like, that is western European explorers did when they went to new spaces. They said, “If you are not like me, which clearly I’m made in the image of God, if you can’t become like me, then either I must kill you, or I must subjugate you, because you are unable to be saved. And you must be from the enemy, you must be from Satan, and so we must destroy this.”
Where does that come from? I know where it comes from; there’s some problematic theology where that comes from, I think especially coming from the book of Judges. Y’all don’t have time for me to get into that.
As we think about it within the context of white supremacy, the context of Europeans creating – like – seeing themselves in the image of God as the image of perfection and then deciding everyone else is not that; and the way that you become that, the way you become one who I can actually see as being made in the image of God, is for you to become like me. Which, literally, is the cause of genocide. Which, literally, is the cause of violence toward people—if they weren’t killed straight off, their culture was completely killed and taken off and made ----- indigenous folks. It is the very nature of making people lose their language so that they will fully assimilate to English as the language that should be spoken by all, because it is the language of perfection, which – or – or the classics, like German or whatever, those are also a part of that, right.
And as a seminarian, how in academia, you must learn these certain languages to be listened to or to be understood in your studies. And I’m not talking about the languages that the Bible are in—classic languages who they decided are at the peak of civilization. These are – this is the same thing that happens to us and to Christian organizations as you’re naming, that says, “If you can’t become like me, if you can’t lead like I do, if you can’t share the gospel like I do, if your students don’t become like me, then it is wrong, and it is not valuable, and it is worthy of punishment or worthy of demotion or not being promoted, and it is not seen as you being worthy of leadership, right, or you being worthy of leading the rest of us,” you know? So, it has manifested in so many ways, but part of the problem is that white supremacy created one image of God, and everyone is supposed to become like that.
Brandi: Yes. And it feels like, in even the examples that you’re saying, that when we try to use our own cultural lenses to do ministry or leadership, that those, by dominant culture, are seen as elective, or focus groups, or focus departments, instead of being things that are central to everything that we do. And so when those things go well, we love to celebrate them and tout them, but when they don’t go well, we’re like, “Well, you can just go back to whatever method or whatever thing.” And I think that there’s lots of ways that that plays out but I know that we both have many thoughts and feelings about—
Jazzy: [Jazzy laughs] Many thoughts and feelings!
Brandi: May be too close to home, we’ll just – uh—[Brandi and Jazzy laugh]. But I want to talk about perfectionism and the church in this given moment now. We are in the midst of a pandemic, and a racial uprising and revolution, and one of the ways that I’ve seen it play out, just to give an example, is that a lot of churches are willing to say the phrase now that they weren’t willing to say years ago—“Black lives matter”—but whenever they talk—[Jazzy coughs]—I know, and they want awards and applause for it—so people will say, “Black lives matter,” but they will always use this word after: “Black lives matter, but I don’t agree with [blank].”
And so it’s that there – there’s a perfect way to protest, there’s a perfect way to – to pursue change, and if those people don’t do it the way that we would do it, then it needs to be said – it needs to be named that they are imperfect; that we have a perfect standard that we are not willing to violate to go be with those people. And, so, I’m seeing that even those perfectionistic standards play out in our willingness or unwillingness to fight grave and evil oppression in our midst, because we cannot somehow be perfect if we are following the lead of Black queer femmes.
I just think there’s a lot of ways that it’s playing out in this given moment that are really, really telling.
Jazzy: Yes. And I still – I know I keep coming back to this, but it’s – who gets to decide what is the right way to protest? Who gets to decide what is the right way to fight for liberation, who gets to decide what is the right way to get free? And the folks who you are referencing, right, often I’ve experienced it now, is either they’re white male preachers, they’re – especially like the hipster white male preachers who is like the V-neck going or like – or like their shirt is like open, like, you can see some of chest, I don’t know why that’s a thing—
Brandi: [Brandi laughs] The deeper the v, the closer to God.
Jazzy: Pretty much! And getting on stage now and saying, “Black lives matter” with all of this hoopla and enthusiasm, and then the “but” comes, right. And, as you named it, for those folks to be able to get to decide how this should look is a continuation of who gets to, like, speak on what is perfect, what is right, what is of God.
I think what’s interesting is, like, I’m like, “Nah.” I feel like I can say with so much almost-certainty that, like, I feel like Jesus is not in your megachurch right now; I feel like Jesus is on the street with these Black queer femmes. [Jazzy laughs] Like – and – and inviting you to come there and complicate and messy up what you think it means to follow Jesus is right now, you know?
And – and – and I do think not only do you see it in rhetoric, right, this thing of perfectionism, but I – referencing back to, you know, what we were saying as far as people getting stuck, or the freezing—we don’t have time to decide even what is the perfect way to get free right now. And if you all think that you know, tell me how it’s been working out for the past however many years.
So to be able to like – I think this is when a perfectionist idea around theology of there being “there’s only one way to do this,” what have you, is so harmful to us. Because what would it look like if we were already embracing a more, like, a messier theology, right? Like a messier orthodoxy and orthopraxy, where we embrace mistakes fully, and we embrace that things are going to – may look differently from what we know, but we’re trying to trust the spirit of God and people who were created in the image of God to know what it looks like for them to get free.
So what if we already had room, spaciousness within our theology and our orthopraxy, to say yes and to move into places that we don’t already know we can do perfectly so that we can actually move toward people being free and living free, so that we can move toward what it might look like, life abundantly could look like, right? But because we’re so stuck, we won’t even get to experience how the Spirit is moving. I mean about Acts, the book of Acts, and how often if each of the apostles had to like pause, to be like, “Oh, can I do this exactly this one way and make sure that I’m going to succeed?” How many moves of the church would not have happened?
[Brandi and Jazzy laugh]
I think about Acts 10, and the way that like Jesus is, or the way that the Spirit is talking to Peter and has to tell Peter three times to do something, but that’s coming from Peter being a perfect Jewish boy. Peter was a perfect Jewish boy; he knew his customs, he knew the law, he knew what he was supposed to eat and what he was not supposed to eat, he knew what was kosher, he knew what was not; and he was like, “Surely not Lord, you are not leading me in a new direction.” And the Lord is like, “Yes I am. Yes I am. Yes I am.”
Brandi: “Truly I am.”
Jazzy: “Go do the thing!” And that move in itself is one of the most significant moments of conversion in the whole history of the early church.
Brandi: Yes.
Jazzy: Between Peter and Cornelius and the inclusion of Gentile Christians, right?
Brandi: Yes.
Jazzy: But if Peter needed more than three times, if Peter had gotten stuck and been like, “Yo, but that ain’t the way we’re supposed to do it, God, and you know I know all the rules, I know how it goes, I have been the perfect Jewish boy all my life”—even though Peter made lots of mistakes, we know that—
Brandi: Truly. [Brandi laughs]
Jazzy: But most of the time it was because he was stuck in what he thought was the right thing to do. He was stuck in what he had been taught, like, “If you do these things, you will get all the rewards because you are a good Jewish boy.” And so, in this moment, God is like, “We’re doing something else, Peter. Are you riding or not?”
Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Yes.
Jazzy: And Peter has to decide, “Alright, I’m riding, you told me three times and sent someone – sent people to get me,” you know? Like, and so, this is a moment in the church where the Spirit is like, “Look, pastors; look, clergyfolk; look, bishops; look, everybody, whatever your name is in the church, whatever role you play: I am doing a new thing. Are you riding or nah? Will you get stuck here trying to reach after the thing that you thought was the thing, but it’s not, because I God myself am telling you that it’s not the thing anymore.” [Jazzy laughs]
Brandi: Yes! I feel like one of the easiest ways to counter perfectionism is to go to the words of Jesus where he says, “You have heard it said”—
Jazzy: [Jazzy laughs] “You have heard it said!”
Brandi: “But I say to you!” That Jesus says, “Even your – what you think is the perfect interpretation of the law, I get to say that, because I’m Jesus. I get to interpret that. The law is mine. It revolves around me. So, I get to say what that law means. And it may have meant something before, but it means something different right now.”
Jazzy: Yes.
Brandi: I wonder what it would look like if we embraced scriptures about finding God in the wrong places. I even think about Jesus’s ministry strategy. He says a lot of nice things, he does a lot of healing, he gathers a giant crowd of people, and then his messages get harder and harder and harder. And people have to decide, as you’re saying, “Are you riding or nah?”
And it’s not about whether they’re perfect. It’s about whether they’re willing to bear their cross in suffering love for others, to go to the margins, to find where people are, to go to the wrong places, to go to the woman at the well, where he looks like a sexual deviant, and to find her and a whole town that encounters Jesus because he goes to the wrong place. She finds God in the wrong place, and so I wonder if we went to the wrong places—and now I’m preaching at this point—
Jazzy: Go on, preach!
Brandi: But I wonder if we went to the wrong places that we would actually find the incarnate God already there and find that our churches look far less appealing and far less spiritual because the move of God cannot happen when we constrain God to a perfect box of who we think that God should be. I just wonder what it would look like if we did something a little bit different there.
Jazzy: Brandi! I – you know, I love that you took us to the Sermon on the Mount because in all of these conversations around defunding the police and everything, that has been where I feel like God keeps taking me.
Brandi: Me too.
Jazzy: Of, “You have heard it said this way, but I’m saying something else now.” And what I think is important about that—and this is why it is important to know the whole Bible, right, not know it in the sense that you can perfect your knowledge, that’s not what I’m saying, but to read the whole love letter, right, to read all the complexities of it—is because what – what Jesus is saying in the Sermon on the Mount is not that the things that were said before are meaningless, right? Jesus isn’t saying that. Jesus is saying, “The Spirit is moving, and we’re doing something else now, people of God.”
Brandi: Yes.
Jazzy: And follow—
Brandi: Will you follow me?
Jazzy: Will you follow me! And what I love about, like, if you look at scripture in its entirety is that you actually do – across the Old Testament, if you look at different laws and different legal codes—now I’m getting into my seminary nerdiness—but, like, if you look at different legal codes versus like, if you look at the Holiness codes or the Deuteronomistic codes, if you look at these different codes, you’ll see that throughout Israel’s history, their laws will change a little bit, right?
So there are different – like, when the community has changed, when the time has changed, when there’s something different going on in the world at that time, even the god – like, God will speak through messengers and say, “Here is how you live together in this time. That doesn’t mean that those codes that you had before were wrong. You needed those codes when you were living in that time. And now, I have given you new covenant, new codes to live in a different time.”
And so we see a similar thing in Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus is like, “You heard it said this way. That was important; that was good. I’m saying another thing. Do you perceive – ” Jesus is doing a new thing; do you perceive it? “I’m right here.” Jesus was like, “I’m right here, y’all. I know y’all don’t see it yet, but it’s me, and we’re going a different direction. We’re going to the wrong places.” I love that you said that. “We’re going to the wrong places; will you go with me?”
And what’s so cool about the Sermon on the Mount, that makes me geek out, is that like Jesus says all this, and, also, he starts with, like, the beatitudes. So he’s like, “All these people that y’all think is wrong, all these people that y’all don’t be paying attention to, who you don’t think should be leading you, those are the people who are the inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, those are the people who are the inheritors of the earth, these Black queer femmes are the inheritors of the earth. You don’t think that they are the ones you should follow, but they are the ones that will see God. Now hear me when I say to you, see them? I see them; I’m with them; and now I’m going to address you in a way where you can hear me, and I’m going to say, ‘Hey here’s your law: I know this law backwards and forwards.’”
Because Jesus was a good Jewish boy! And he’s like, “And the Spirit is doing something new.” Not but! Like he’s not “but,” but he’s like, “And!”
Brandi: And!
Jazzy: “This is what you’ve heard and I’m doing something new. Follow me and the new thing that I’m doing.” Which is what the Spirit of God is doing for us right now as the church. Can we perceive it? Right?
And not get stuck because of the image that we have been shown before us that this is the way that you go—when God, God’s self is speaking to us in new ways and saying, “Here is a new way, come with me to the wrong places. Here is the – here is the beatitudes that are different for you, like, see that these people really matter to me, even in the society that you’re living in, you don’t see them? I see them. I’m bringing them to your attention right now. These people matter; they’re the ones who see me as God, they’re the ones who are the inheritors of the earth, and now I’m doing a new thing, follow me.” And when you do that, trouble gon’ come.
Brandi: Of course.
Jazzy: Because – because I think the thing about – the thing – you know what? I was saying earlier, I don’t get why people are so obsessed with perfectionism, but I get it. If I could have a cookie cutter of the direction I’m supposed to go, right? It’s, like, I’m looking through my little star cookie cutter, this is it, this is how you’re a Christian. Then all that messy stuff around it, I think I don’t have to deal with it. And even though it’s exhausting to try to squeeze myself through this tiny little cookie cutter Christianity, it – it’s something that I can, like, think I can see and I’m like, “Okay, I’m gonna squeeze through that, because all the stuff outside of it feels too complex, and it’s too messy, and I don’t want to do anything with it.”
Brandi: Yes. We would prefer certainty to complexity and beauty.
Jazzy: Yesss! To complexity and beauty. What does it mean to embrace messy theology and a messy church? Because literally all that God – the Bible is so messy!
Brandi: Yes, oh my gosh!
Jazzy: The whole thing is messy!
Brandi: And what is so interesting about perfectionism, and we’ll close up here in a second, but what is so interesting about perfectionism is it inherently renders us incapable of reading the scriptures in any kind of complexity.
I’m thinking about the stories where it said that God changes God’s own mind. That, instead of being able to say, “Hey, maybe when Moses talked to God or when Abraham talked to God and asked God to relent and be merciful from a thing that God said God was going to do, maybe the first question we need to ask is not, ‘Did God have a perfect will that God knew that Moses and Abraham would say the thing so that they would – ’”
Instead, can we just go, “Maybe it’s more complex than that. Maybe I don’t need to shove God into a perfectionistic box that, in the scriptures, God does not care to really sit in.”
And so you can say, “Yes, be perfect as your heavenly father or mother or being is perfect,” but you can also go, “Yeah that doesn’t make a lot of sense in that story.” And that should lead me to more questions instead of more flat, half-assed explanations of why God needs to fit in the version of God that you’ve made God to be.
And, so, as people are attempting to reclaim their theology from perfectionism, what is one piece of advice that you would give or one tool or metric or thing that would help people to unlearn the tools and metrics and all those things of perfectionism? I realize I’m using, like, a tool of perfectionism in some ways to do it, but I think we can only start where we are. So what is one tool that you would give folks to unlearning perfectionism or one idea?
Jazzy: Well, I remember the day—well, also okay, for people of color, especially for women of color—I remember the day that Keisha, my therapist, said to me, “What would it be like for you to just be ordinary?” I was like, “Nah, Keisha. This is not a thing. I have never pursued being ordinary in my whole life. I have never, ever been given the option to be ordinary in my whole life.” And—[Jazzy laughs]—then she’s like, “Cool. Now we know where we’re going to do most of our work.”
Um, but—[Jazzy laughs]—I would say, for women of color, what does it mean for us to – well, as one of our shared mentors says, “Embrace the limits of our own skin,” right? What does it mean for us to be fully human, to simply be human? Not only be okay with that, but to know that it’s good. To embrace limitations, to embrace being human, and to know that the ways in which we have been told that we must exceed all expectations is – comes from a lie. It comes from a lie from the pit of hell that just wants to keep us tired and make us develop all these pre-existing conditions in our health, as far as like diabetes, all that shit. Like, all these things that just want to kill us! That have killed our mothers and aunties and grandmothers before us. How do we embrace being human and loving ourselves and our bodies and embracing joy?
I think that’s actually a really big point of resistance, not only from white supremacy but that specific thing of perfectionism within white supremacy, because it’s saying, “No, I will not be perfect; I will not fit into the image that you have decided that I must be to be palatable and useful for you. I will no longer be your furniture that you can sit on in your comfortable space of whiteness and white supremacy as you reign supreme. I’m not going to be those things.”
And I think for – for white folks, I wonder what it looks like for you—maybe not within the realm of anti-racist work, first, right, like, you can learn this later—but just in your everyday life, what would it look like for you to celebrate making mistakes? I did a training last year on whiteness and white supremacy culture with a group of white folks at a church in Chicago, and the first thing that we did was stood in a circle and sang out loud. And just made people who normally would be, like, “I don’t sing,” like, you know, just sing and dance and look a fool a little bit and embrace mistakes and imperfection. And, day to day, as you make mistakes, just in normal life, celebrate that, so that you can get used to the reality that mistakes are not inherently bad. And that they are actually necessary, and they are part of this journey that we’re all on together.
Brandi: Yes. That is so good. And my hope for folks who are coming to reclaim their theology, and in some ways reclaim a more beautiful picture or claiming maybe for the first time a more beautiful picture of God, that as we do those things, that we would find a tender and gracious and kind God who doesn’t need us, who doesn’t need anything from us, but who has things for our good and for the good of our common humanity in a way that perfectionism would never allow.
Because perfectionism births gatekeeping. Really, the thing for me is hierarchy, as you said, births perfectionism, and, as a standard that is unreachable, perfectionism births paternalism; paternalism births the idea that there’s one right way; and Christianity has so often sat in that one right way that we’ve missed so much of what the Spirit is doing and so much of the goodness of God that doesn’t need us to try to ascend to a higher place but rather to take the method of Jesus and to lower ourselves to embrace our imperfections, to find our vulnerable selves, and underneath it, find that God still says that it is good and that we are good.
And I think that’s like my heart for folks, that we would be able to unlearn some of the toxicity of white supremacy, for white folks and for folks of color, to be able to find a more beautiful and good picture of God.
Jazzy: Yes. Amen. I have found in my own journey as a follower of Jesus that the invitation to fail well is one of the best gifts that I have been given. And, even as someone who’s like a seminarian now and has been a minister for some years now, the thing I’ve started saying is that I’m a really human human trying to embrace becoming more human and re-becoming human and trying to follow a very God God.
God being God gives me permission to be human and fully human, and so I also just invite people to like – in that invitation of failing to fail well, and when we learn to fail well, fail in ways that are repentant and ways that are full of grace towards ourselves, ways that are full of love and repair toward others. It’s not easy but it’s – it’s so beautiful to learn to fail well. Because it comes with embracing that we all will fail. And it’s just a part of being human, being beloved, is that we will fail, and the ways that we learn to be community with one another, the ways that we learn to be family to one another, is to fail well and be committed to repentance and repair along the way.
Brandi: Ugh, I love that image of – really what you’re inviting us to is a better picture of family.
Jazzy: Yes!
Brandi: Where who we get to be together isn’t determined by one of us meeting another person’s standard but rather embracing each other’s humanity and saying what Christena Cleveland says all the time, like, that the image of God in me meets the image of God in you—
Jazzy: Yesss!
Brandi: —and that’s a messy concept, but in the messiness of it, no one gets kicked out of the family because they made a mistake, no one gets kicked out of the church because they make a mistake, no one gets kicked out of the family or the church because someone thinks they made a mistake based on an arbitrary sense of theological realities about their identities. That’s not what we do. And so I think that you’re inviting us actually to a better picture of family.
Jazzy: Yes. Which, to me, I mean, when I give calls to faith now, I don’t do the whole sin thing. Like, I get it, I get why people say it, but my invitation to people is to say yes to the family of God, is to say yes to a family and yes to a god who, like the father in the return of the prodigal son, right, is standing there with arms wide open, even though his son had been acting a straight fool! We all know that he was acting a fool. And both sons were acting a fool, and the father embraced both of them and, you know, maybe not in the way that the older one wanted to be embraced, but he was still welcomed to dinner, right? [Jazzy laughs] But there’s this embrace that you see, of no matter what this younger son had done, it was an invitation into the family of God.
So I tell people, and I make an invitation that if you say yes to Jesus, you are saying yes to a new family who is gonna hold you and embrace you along the way in the fullness of who you are, whomever that is. Because God created you, and because we love you, and we know that we need you, that I am because we are, we know that we’re interconnected. So, it is an invitation into the family of God: Come fully as you are. We have no picture and no carrot that you must chase, but just come be you.
Brandi: And what a better image that is than just inviting people to flee and run from an abstraction of hell. What if we didn’t just ask people to flee from something but to run—
Jazzy: Towards something!
Brandi: —like that father does towards something and into something more beautiful.
Jazzy: Agh, yes!
Brandi: And I don’t think perfectionism allows us to do that in our theology or in our lives or in our communities.
Thank you so much for being on, Jazzy. Where can people find your work? Is there anything that you want to plug today?
Jazzy: Um, I sometimes use my social media these days, I sometimes don’t, but on Instagram and Twitter, you can find me at Jazzy_symone, Symone spelled S-Y-M-O-N-E. I’ll be around. [Jazzy laughs]
Brandi: Great. Well, Jazzy, thank you so much. You’ve given people a wealth of insight and knowledge and pastoral care and stories and frameworks that are totally priceless and beautiful. So thank you so much for being on.
Jazzy: Yesss! I love this! This is great, it’s just like we’re just talking.
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Brandi: Thanks for joining us for another episode of Reclaiming My Theology. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jazzy Johnson.
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