Something beautiful happened this week. And didn’t we need something beautiful to happen this week?

There’s nothing beautiful about that hole in the floor of the Gulf that keeps spewing oil and destroying the balance of nature and the fortunes of so many for maybe decades to come. There’s nothing beautiful about an economy that continues to sputter and only teases us with spikes now and then that crush our spirits even more when we have to make changes in our company or family budgets. And no one who holds an office—from the president of the United States to the president of British Petroleum to the president of the Federal Reserve Bank—has the power to fix what’s broken.

But this week, Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Armando Galarraga was one out away from achieving something so difficult in baseball that it’s been done only 20 times: we call it pitching a “perfect game.” A perfect game means that the pitcher got 27 consecutive batters out. No one even reaches first base on a walk or hit by pitch. Galarraga—who once pitched poorly for the Texas Rangers, go figure that—got all the way to batter 27. He grounded to the first baseman. Galarraga ran to cover first base, caught the throw and touched the bag ahead of the runner. Perfect game. Put it in the record book, number 21. But wait. First base umpire Jim Joyce, a well-respected umpire who has called plays like these in Major League Baseball for 23 years, signaled safe instead. No perfect game, because the man in blue with the authority to make the call blew the call. Fans booed, and the manager raged.

Galarraga was the real story, though. The moment the umpire called safe, the pitcher looked at him and smiled. It wasn’t a smile of derision; it was maybe more disbelief or resignation. After seeing the videotape later, Joyce was just sick about it. To his credit, about 45 minutes after the game ended, he called Galarraga out of the clubhouse and with tears in his eyes apologized. They hugged. Galarraga said he believes Joyce feels worse about it than he does. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said. “Everybody’s human.”

Exactly. Everybody’s human. Nobody’s perfect. Even those who pretend to be. Even those who sometimes come close. Even those who have the authority that says they get to decide.

The Apostle Paul had an authority problem. Actually, he didn’t so much have authority issues as others had issues of authority with him. And that’s because he was trying to overrule those who were calling balls and strikes for the churches in Galatia, saying who’s safe and who’s out in the salvation game. His fellow Jewish believers in Jesus were still trying to make trying to be perfect the only way to reach home safely. Paul’s point is that nobody’s perfect and that the Christian life is not about being perfect.

But those who grew up following the laws of Judaism were used to trying at least to be perfect, and they couldn’t help but think that if Gentiles were going to join this new movement of Jesus followers, they should at least be trying to be perfect, too. Paul had tried that himself, though, and he realized that making salvation about being perfect means that nobody will ever be saved because nobody’s perfect.

God knows that Paul had tried that. He had learned all the traditions of his ancestors that had been passed on to him. He had mastered the scriptures and interpretations of them. He was scrupulous about keeping kosher and keeping the Sabbath. But all of that trying to be perfect had not led him to understand the truth of the gospel. In fact, he felt that it kept him learning the truth of the gospel. The gospel, the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ, is that God accepts us without regard to our own perfection. And that’s a good thing, again, since everybody’s human and nobody’s perfect.

The more-subtle problem with the perfect-game approach to life is that you do your best and compare yourself to others and feel that you are superior to some and inferior to others. Objectively, anything less than perfect isn’t perfect, so what good is it to measure that way? But subjectively it’s just as bad. When you play that game, you end up feeling better or worse about yourself compared to others, and that can lead to arrogance or humiliation—both of which are dangerous, the one to others and the other to yourself.

Paul once arrogantly thought he possessed the whole truth, because comparing himself to others in keeping the law, he ruled himself safe at home with God. And so he marched down the road to Damascus with the intent to arrest or kill followers of Jesus. What happened next, Paul says, was nothing short of divine intervention. That moment on the road was followed by further revelations in Arabia and Syria for three years. God revealed to him through the voice of the risen Jesus that salvation comes by grace and not by works. The good news that broke into Paul’s heart that day and that would never leave him was that God does not keep score as a means of determining who wins and who loses.

Let’s go back to the baseball game for a minute. In the days following the game, notwithstanding the grace and class shown by the pitcher and the umpire, Michigan politicians—overseers of the state with the country’s highest unemployment rate—got involved, issuing proclamations, resolutions, strongly worded this-and-thats. One, Representative Thaddeus McCotter, wrote a letter to baseball commissioner Bud Selig saying that “only the truth will uphold and honor the integrity of the game; and the truth is that this game was perfect.” He told an ESPN reporter, “When this happened, the feeling here in Detroit was this could only happen to us; this was just one more thing on top of everything else.”[1]

Can we please get politicians to remember what their job is and isn’t? Only the truth will uphold and honor the integrity of the game? Well, that depends upon what the game is? If the game is the game of perfect, then yes. But since nobody’s perfect and everybody’s human, if God made us all play the perfect-game game, we’d all lose every time. How much greater is what we witnessed instead? What Armando Galarraga and Jim Joyce showed us is that there’s something more perfect than a perfect game—there’s perfect grace.

Grace allows you to let go of things and move on. Grace allows you to accept responsibility and forgive yourself and others. This is something we have such a hard time doing when we’re always playing the perfect-game game.

If life is defined only in human terms, then you always end up pointing the finger at someone else for making your life less than perfect, because if you point the finger at yourself, you lose your defense and are guilty as charged. But if the Christian life is divine, so to speak, if God has forgiven your sins so that you don’t have to prove yourself perfect, you can accept responsibility, confess your faults and give grace to others.

Everything for the church hinges on whether we get this right. If the church is only a human institution that passes on good morals that come from Jesus’ clever teaching, we are subject to the same judgments about whether we are doing well or poorly as any other social institution. We might as well subject the church to some sort of TAKS test to see if we’re doing any better at it than the schools. And when it comes to supporting the church’s mission in the world, you might as well consider whether United Way agencies are doing better or worse before you give your time or money. I mean, the church just becomes one more do-gooder organization in the world. We can use all the do-gooder organizations we can get, don’t you know?! But the church, Paul is trying to tell us, is unique, because the gospel is of divine origin. And therefore, even though the church is made up of human beings who aren’t perfect, the perfect church is the church that always and only holds fast to perfect grace.

But Paul doesn’t just claim that the gospel is divine and therefore the Christian life is divine, he claims that his calling is divine too. Paul defends his taking the gospel to the Gentile sinners as something that God called him to. He didn’t get his calling from the church per se; he got it from God.

Now let’s step back a moment here for perspective. Most of the time, when God calls us to be saved or God calls us to serve, God calls us through the church. God speaks to us through human voices. God uses the church and its leaders across time to form into us the ways of Christ and purposes of God. But what Paul reminds us of all the time is that even if God uses the church, the pastor, the youth minister, the Sunday school teacher, the grandmother, the godfather, whatever—none of that matters unless it’s God doing the using and these humans being used. If all of this comes from human authority, it amounts to nothing. But if it comes from God, it amounts to everything.

So the question I would ask you today is this: have you ever felt deep in your bones that God has made clear to you the grace of Jesus Christ that alone can save you eternally and steer you through time?

The writer Frederick Buechner is loved by all who love words and the Word. He tells in his autobiography about growing up in a family that easily hobnobbed with the cultural elite. His father seemed to have it all together on a human level, but when Fred was ten years old, his father committed suicide, and all that social sophistication turned out to be too shallow to save him. He used to tell people that his dad died of heart trouble, which was true in a way. He had a kind but troubled heart. Buechner graduated from Princeton and was living in New York, having written a highly successful first novel. But he felt that somehow he was repeating the same history of his father. He knew that all his literary friends and cultural standing couldn’t provide for him the depth and strength to endure the things of life that would come. And so he started walking down the street to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and listening to the preacher there, George Buttrick. It was there that he encountered God or, as he says it, “the World beyond the worlds.” Turning to Christ filled up his emptiness and gave him a joy that had always eluded him.[2]

This is Paul’s point. The only authority that can call us safe with God is God. No human authority can validate us. No human achievement can vindicate us. Only the divine gift of God’s grace can deliver us to the freedom and joy we all of us crave.

You didn’t give birth to yourself; it was a gift from parents whose love made you. And neither can you give new birth to your soul; that too is a gift—a gift from the God whose perfect love is all the perfection you’ll ever need.