Spirit of Holiness
We are in week 49 of this year-long tour with Brian McLaren in the book We Make the Road by Walking. And these last four weeks pivot toward questions of ultimate meaning, questions about what life is all about in light of our mortality.
How is it that God is working on us to mold and shape us?
What is it that happens when our bodily life ends?
What does it mean for Christ to return?
Where and Who and How is God in the end?
We have built up 48 weeks of muscle traveling this road together. If you are new with us on the journey, there are many among us who can help you catch up and travel alongside you. We are nearing the summit. The steps get more complicated, more rocky, perhaps less stable. The air might feel thin. But we press on together, helping one another along the way.
Today, we are exploring how the Spirit of God is working on us, reshaping us, remolding us into something new and better. We’re talking about holiness.
Holiness is a funny word. It is a big word. Or at least a big idea.
Take just a moment now and ponder:
What does this word, this idea of “holiness” mean to you?
Evoke in you?
Do you like the word?
Holiness.
Holiness.
Holiness.
Do you think of yourself developing “holiness?” Does “holy” describe you? Would you want to be holy?
Maybe for you the idea has to do with goodness, with righteousness, with being devoted or pious or perfect.
And for some holiness is understood as a process, as a path, as an ideal for which we strive, a direction we are headed, something we become.
John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, would lean into this latter understanding. He would name holiness as a goal. But not one we achieve by our own effort. One we achieve by the power of the Holy Spirit working in us.
He would link holiness to the term Christian perfection.
Perfection. Now there is a loaded term in our society.
As Methodists, we can’t talk about holiness without talking about perfection. It is from the word perfection as it is found in the King James translation of the epistles that Wesley draws his teaching about holiness.
Perfection was who God was and who Jesus was. John Wesley believed it was what we were striving toward, and what we couldn’t achieve on our own.
So we can’t talk about perfection and holiness without also talking about sanctifying grace – God’s grace that John Wesley believed was working on us and in partnership with us to make us more holy in this life.
And without using the words “perfection” or sanctification, THIS is really what McLaren is talking about when he talks about the spirit of holiness.
He’s talking about how God is working on us day in and day out, and how when we are aware of that work, when we choose to join in that work, we are becoming a new thing.
McLaren begins this exploration of holiness by asking us to consider and possibly reframe our understanding of God’s judgement.
The Psalm you heard today is a praise psalm – a psalm celebrating God’s work. And it is specifically a praise psalm that celebrates the work of God’s judgement, ending with these lines:
Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who live in it.
Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.
In modern usage, we often interpret God’s judgment as divine retribution and divine punishment or divine reward and divine favor. It is certainly easiest in our human tendencies to believe that there must be losers and winners, outsiders and insiders, the damned and the blessed.
But time and again throughout the scriptures, we see God show up to redeem, not to destroy. It is the story of David. It is the story of Nineveh. It is the story of the woman caught in adultery. It is the story of Zacchaeus.
McLaren suggests that God’s judgement, in the biblical sense, is really the work of setting thing right, restoring balance, reshaping things to be better. In that case, it is the work of Shalom, where shalom is about a return to wholeness, completeness, welfare.
God’s judgement then is justice that is restorative and not punitive. Building up and not decimating.
Perhaps you have worked before with the metaphor of refining fire – of metal heated to high temperatures so that the impurities burn away, leaving the purest, finest precious metal.
Or, think about the natural work of forest fires (not the crazy huge and horribly frequent once brought on by climate change, but the average, expected forest fire) – these fires consume the overgrowth of dying underbrush as fuel and in the process make way for new growth and healthy root systems.
What are the forces of God’s judgment that might be at work on us?
I wonder. How many of us have had the experience of going astray and finding ourselves improved for the work of that journey?
Let me say that another way: who among us has messed up badly, survived, and come out the other side better for it? Wiser? More whole? More in love with God?
And who among us has watched that happen to someone we love dearly?
I wonder how such an experience has changed you and your decisions going forward?
I know that I have been deeply changed by such experiences.
THIS….this refining work is the work of sanctification. The work of being made more holy in this life. Of going through hard processes and coming out the other side whole, beloved.
God works to restore us in our brokenness, and in return, if we are paying attention, we live differently going forward. For some of us, it takes more than one or two or three or four hard failures or falters to really begin to see the problems that need fixed and to see the changes that are happening in our lives.
But when we do see the restoration, when we do see how God is calling us to something more and bigger and better, we oftentimes join the work, share the good news, and subsequently choose new and different ways of being in the world.
Today, you also heard in John’s gospel some of the words Jesus speaks to the disciples as he knows that he is about to die, but before they know what is happening. He’s promising that they will not be alone. That by God’s power, the Spirit will be with them, and by that Spirit they will know that God and Christ are with them still.
And I believe that it is God’s presence with us as Jesus describes that is often nudging us. Cajoling us. Prodding us. Reminding us. Calling us. Shaping us.
Reminding us of past mistakes, showing us how we have been restored, and calling us toward being our very best selves. Calling us to share that good news of restoration with those around us who may be so terrified of the rumor of God’s punishment, that they haven’t yet begun to understand the truth of God’s restoration.
God’s judgement is not about divine punishment or divine reward, but it is about God’s refinement of who we are, about God’s sanctifying grace that reshapes us.
In the midst of that, the Holy Spirit is with us, working on us, restoring us into a fuller version of all that God created us to be in God’s image, burning off the selfishness and idolatry of our human nature. And when we are attuned to the Holy Spirit and seeking God, our choices become more God-centered, more holy in nature. And we keep moving forward.
There is a song by the Newsboys whose refrain goes a little bit like this (and I admit I’ve taken liberties to improve the theology, but that probably ruins the poetry): God doesn’t love us because of what we do or do not do. God loves us because of who God is.
Because of that love, God is working in us and on us and through us. And when we are willing to receive that love, willing to embrace it, willing to let it build us up and strengthen us, we are also able to share that love and to tell others about that love.
May it be so.
Amen.
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