Gentle Reader,
Part of my role as a pastor for discipleship is to bounce around to different Bible studies and groups just to check in and be a supportive presence. Some people in our congregation (good naturedly) label this “spying.” Whatever you want to call it, I’ve gotten to be part of some really interesting discussions.
Last Wednesday night, the topic of holiness came up. As it does. Because we are the Church of the Nazarene, and we are very into holiness. We know that God is faithful to work in us in such a way that we are freed up to live as God wants us to live. To my eyes, we’ve got a lot of Scriptural and Church history support for that. What we don’t have support for is our struggle to understand that holiness is more than behavior modification. If you find following the rules to be fairly easy, you can look quite holy from the outside and yet be quite far from actual holiness. Therefore, holiness encompasses our behaviors, but it extends far beyond them.
I know I’ve written about holiness here before. But let’s go there again. For me at least, holiness is a topic I have to keep coming back to. I have to keep holding it up to the light and twisting it this way and that. I want to see all of its angles. I want to contemplate its beauty.
Below is a short essay I wrote for my “Doctrine of Christian Holiness” class my second year of seminary. I pray you find some encouragement in these words.
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The Beatles’ 1966 song “Rain” showcases some of the best drumming Ringo Starr ever recorded. The first second of the piece – a beat dropped insistently on the snare drum – sets the mood. This song, recorded during the sessions for the Revolver album, marks the band’s transition from a bubble-gum pop and folk influenced sound to something experimental: psychedelic rock. Ringo’s beat ushers in this new sound. It also drives the composition forward, moving steadily toward denouement, never drowned out by the twang of the electric guitars or the mildly unsettling harmonies of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. For all of its technical innovation and lyrical artistry, “Rain” belongs to Ringo and his drum kit.
Holiness is the steady beat that drives the narrative arc of Scripture. Though the various books contain many stories, and address many issues, consistent questions confront the reader again and again: Who is God? Why does God define Godself as holy? What is holiness? Can humans be holy? Why does holiness matter? These questions haunt the reader as surely as the echo of a tom-tom at the end of a musical line sticks in the mind’s ear. In attempting to resolve them, the person of faith reads the stories, searching for the answers, and comes to encounter the bush on the mountaintop, aflame but not burned up, that beckons across centuries and continents. The reader hears, as Moses did, the command to “come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” [1]
There is something “uniquely attractive and fascinating” in this encounter. [2]The creation accounts of Genesis, positioned as they are before Moses comes upon the scene, take great pains to point out that God is master of all creation. God is outside of creation, bound by none of its limitations, and humanity is directed to center the fullness of its affection and attention upon God, not on what God has made. What God has made is good, but it is not God. To shift back to the scene on the mountain, the ground is not holy in and of itself. The ground becomes holy because God is present. It is transformed into the fullness of “groundliness,” the most complete expression of what dirt and stone were meant to be. Holiness, then, is intimately, and inextricably linked to the presence of God.
God tasks Moses with leading his people out of slavery. Israel, the nation God promised to create from the lone son of ancient Abraham and Sarah, [3] had suffered under Egyptian oppression for centuries – but God had not forgotten them. They would leave, travel through the wildness, and come to the land where their ancestors had dwelled long before. This new land would be their home, the context in which they would live in holiness, marked by the presence of God and joyful submission to God’s law.
If only it had been that simple. The rest of the Old Testament traces the deterioration of God’s people. There are moments of triumph. Long stretches when they devote themselves to God and to living as God wants them to live. The beat goes on, calling them upward and onward, but there are new sounds. New rhythms, or perhaps ones first began in a Garden, that threaten to overtake God’s beat. While they never do, God’s people do choose to listen to songs composed by someone other than God, and then end in destruction and exile. Still, God is faithful. God sends them prophets, to call them back to moving to God’s music. They walk in darkness; God gives them light. They are burdened; God breaks their chains. Eventually, God promises the coming of one
named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. [4]
The promised one arrives in the form of a baby, born to poor parents living on the edges of an oppressive empire. It is Jesus, Immanuel, God With Us. “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” [5] in order to disconnect the amplifiers blasting the world’s music and attune the ears of humanity to the song of God, which beat had continued on unabated and culminated in the hi-hat clash of Jesus’ arrival, as one who would live the “wholesome life in God poured out, of moral necessity, into the lives of those around [Him].” [6] The God-Man would remind His people that holiness is not something they do (or do not do), first and foremost, but something they are; not in and of themselves, but a state of being arising out of their deep, cleansing connection to God.
A difficult message to preach in a culture heavily marked by legalism. Long lists of rules and regulations developed in the centuries between exile and the arrival of Jesus. Understandable fear was ingrained in the culture; they did not want to displease God again and suffer more trauma. Rather than live in the fluid area between the hi-hat and the snare drum, where God moves, a space marked by dynamism, they thought it better to remain stationary. They attempted to get a handle on the beat, but without moving themselves, as God would have them move. Behavioral change became the focus, rather than the radical orientation of the whole self toward God.
Just as the people of Jesus’ day felt safer in their legalism, so, too, does the Church. It is difficult for God’s people to remember that there is a proper sequence of movement to holiness, and it both begins and ends with God. “Christian sanctification can be expressed then as an inner revolution in our motivation as a consequence of new relationship.” [7] The fullness of God’s spirit lives within a believer, transforming them into the fullest human being they can be. This fullness is then expressed in behavior. “The consequence of this inner revolution is a change in behavior, that is, in outward action.” [8] If it is going to be termed “holiness,” then it must be this. Any other order is not an order received from God.
Just as “Rain” would be incomplete without Ringo’s drumming, so the concept of holiness is incomplete when focused solely on behavior. God is the foundation, the motivation, and the point of holiness. All the good behavior in the world is nothing if not coming out of the overflow of God filling the soul. Further, simple good behavior is not the end goal of the Christian life. The aim of a life lived in the presence of God is to continue living life in the presence of God. To be holy is to hear the beat, and to move with it.
[1] Ex. 3:4b-5.
[2] Rudolf Otto and John W. Harvey, The Idea of the Holy: an Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2010), 31.
[3] Gen. 12:2.
[4] Is. 9:6b-7.
[5] John 1:4a, MSG.
[6] Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, A Theology of Love: the Dynamic of Wesleyanism (Kansas City, MO: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2015), 57.
[7] T. A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: the Historic Doctrine of Christian Perfecting (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 111, Kindle.
[8] Ibid.
GRACE AND PEACE ALONG THE WAY,
MARIE
Image Courtesy of David Clarke
Obviously I have to include the song here. 1966 John, Paul, George, and Ringo. There’s never been a better band.