When Jesus commands his followers to be perfect as he is perfect he is challenging us to live up to our potential as lovers who are divinely equipped to answer aggression with restraint, insult with grace, injury with forgiveness, and anxiety with peace and calm. Dr. King famously said that the only thing that turn an enemy into a friend is love.

The modern definition of persecution in the West is what pushes us in another direction.
Today's persecution is not physical torture or even social ostracism, rather it is an oppressive cultural bias toward things like selfish accumulation, anti-communalism, grudge-holding, and a propensity to answer offense with harm.

These are forces that come against us strong and hard at nearly every moment of our lives and we can all name instances in which we have faced them.

Our work of being perfect, then, is to move toward our deepest, authentic selves discovering and re-discovering that source of love inside us - a well so deep and so perfect - and a work so critical and so crucial - that we do well to drop everything and simply focus our efforts on how to love better.

How might we do this today?