Text of the sermon preached on a chapter of Rowan Williams, Being Disciples.
Opening prayer
Dangerous God,
Rescue us from any domesticated, benign, anodyne pictures of you. Show us your disturbing glory in Jesus, crucified and risen. Fill us with your Holy Spirit, upend our false comforts, banish our self-accusations, and draw us into the world you love in acts of dangerous service. In Jesus’ holy name, Amen.
Holiness[1] – Introduction
I’m going to say a phrase and I want you to picture it. Ready?
Nazis with faces melting. [pause]
Which movie springs to mind?
Even though the reference is to a film that came out in 1981, I bet the majority of you knew instantly what I was talking about. Namely, the scene at the climax of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis get their hands on the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, the sacred gold-covered box Moses had constructed to contain the stone tablets engraved by the hand of God with the ten commandments. Within the narrative of the film, it is 1936 and the Nazis believe possessing the Lost Ark will make Hitler’s armies invincible. However, when they open it, the immense power of this sacred artefact turns against them. They all die in an impressive act of divine judgement involving state-of-the-art Oscar-winning early 80s special effects far too disturbing to be in a PG-rated film. In particular, the lead Nazis have their faces melt off while they still gaze upon the Ark they have just opened.
It’s an iconic scene from an iconic film that, thirty-six years later, many of you can probably still picture with little effort. I remember watching it at a friend’s house when I was no older than my daughter [who is 7] – and having nightmares for weeks.
We’re up to our fourth week in this series on discipleship with Rowan Williams as our companion. And this week our topic is holiness. It’s not a word or a concept that excites most of us. At best it’s quaint or arcane; at worst, off-putting or down-right scary.
I suspect that the Indiana Jones face-melting scene presents a fairly widespread conception of holiness – holiness as danger, as threat, as special places or objects that are in some sense closer to the raw power of the divine. And there are indeed parts of the Bible where we can get that impression of holiness.
Old Testament holiness – holiness as danger
In Exodus, when the Israelites were gathered at Mount Sinai and God turned up to meet Moses, the mountain was enveloped in a cloud (Ex 19.16), it quaked and was filled with smoke (Ex 19.18), lightning-flashes shot forth, the roar of thunder mingled with the blasts of a trumpet and fire burned at the summit of the mountain (Ex 24.17). The presence of a holy God was terrifying.
Other parts of Exodus and much of the book of Leviticus outline a complex holiness code: an intricate (and to us quite baffling) system of rituals, festivals, sacred objects and structures. Taken in sum, this code is based on people and objects moving between three possible states: unclean, clean and holy. The default state was for people and things to be clean and able to go about their daily business. However, things associated with or symbolising death lead to uncleanness, rendering the object or person excluded from normal communal life. Before an unclean object can be used again, or before an unclean person can re-join normal communal life, a ritual cleansing is required. Yet things and people can go the other way and shift from clean to holy. For something that is clean to be sanctified, made holy, generally some kind of ritual sacrifice is required. And in this Levitical holiness code, only holy people or objects are welcome in the presence of God. To be holy in this system is to be set apart from ordinary everyday use or roles, to be dedicated purely to God. A holy God served by holy people with holy objects, always threatened with desecration by the contamination of death, and requiring further sacrificial death to return to holiness. Anything not holy that approached God was to be destroyed or put to death. Human holiness in the old covenant was exacting, fragile and yet vital in the face of hazardous divine holiness.
According to the second part of Samuel, when the Ark of the Covenant was being moved and one of the drivers of the cart that carried the Ark put out his hand to steady it, he was struck dead there on the spot by God for touching it. (2 Sam 6.1-11)
Isaiah 6.1-8
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.’
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’ 8Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’
In our Old Testament reading from Isaiah 6, the prophet has a vision of “the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty” with angels in attendance singing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The threefold angelic repetition emphasises the perfection and completeness of divine holiness.
And Isaiah’s response is terror. “I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’” He knows his Levitical code: uncleanness in the presence of a holy God is a deadly combination. Yet already the concepts are shifting. Because if you read Isaiah 1-5, the uncleanness of the prophet and his community was not through a shortcoming in their ritual observance and cultic practice, but because they have embraced idolatry and it has resulted in serious social injustices. They might not be neglecting the requisite festivals and sacrifices, but they have neglected the orphan and the widow, the vulnerable and oppressed. Their lips are unclean because the powerful have been amassing wealth, indulging themselves with luxuries and stuffing their faces while their neighbours go hungry and get squeezed out. Holiness and uncleanness have thus shifted in emphasis from a cultic to an ethical concept.
Expecting this uncleanness of injustice to be burned up in God’s fiery holiness, Isaiah is surprised when the burning coal brought by the angel turns out to be a symbol of forgiveness and recommissioning rather than of destruction.
Rowan Williams sums up the impression we can get from the Old Testament: “quite a lot of people have a feeling that ‘holy’ is a scary word for scary realities – that ‘holy’ is dangerous and weird.” To this he adds another common conception – that holiness is “something less robust or three-dimensional than ordinary life: ‘holy’ is to do with a particular kind of religious building, with dimmed religious light, or with people a bit drained of blood”. So whether holiness is “dangerously weird or ghostly or vague, what these views have in common is the assumption that ‘holy’ is – well, in a nutshell, not like us.”[2]
New Testament holiness: contagious holiness
Yet when we get to Jesus, a new depth and twist is added to the concept. On the one hand, Jesus affirms the prophetic reading of human holiness as having far more to do with ethics and justice than ritualistic precision. Jesus taught that it’s not what goes into our stomach that makes us unclean, but what comes out of our heart. But on the other hand, Jesus also demonstrated a radical reversal of the fragility associated with ritualistic holiness in the Levitical code. Whereas a righteous Jew would vigilantly avoid contact with people, objects or situations that might render them unclean, for Jesus, it was the other way around. Rather than being contaminated by the pollution of everyday life and death, Jesus demonstrated a contagious holiness. He went out of his way to touch those who would make him ritually unclean: the sick, the bleeding, those with skin conditions, even the dead. Rather than being infected by their outcast status, he willingly joined them and so restored them to human community.
John 17.1-5, 15-21
After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. […] I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.
‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
In our Gospel passage from John 17, Jesus speaks of sanctification not as being taken out of the world, but of being grounded in truth and sent into the world to do God’s work. That is what he prayed for his disciples, including those like us who are far off. It is also what he prayed for himself as he prepared for his own betrayal, suffering and execution.
So our passage is one of many in the New Testament to suggests that the infectious holiness of Christ reached its climax in his passion and crucifixion, where he so identified with the broken, the polluted, the sinful that he voluntarily walked into a place of great shame, pain, god-forsakenness and cursedness – and even travelled into death. But rather than his thereby being rendered untouchable or erased or irrevocably cast out from the presence of a holy God, in the light of the resurrection we see that his passion and death brought the presence and healing light of that very God into the darkest of places and to the most broken and forsaken of people.
“the New Testament makes it very clear in a number of passages that the crucifixion is in one sense the supremely holy thing – the holiest event that ever happens – and yet it’s found outside conventional holy places and a long way from conventionally holy people. It’s an execution machine on a rubbish dump outside the city wall. Holiness in the New Testament is a matter of Jesus going right into the middle of the mess and suffering of human nature. For him, being holy is being absolutely involved, not being absolutely separated.”[3]
And so in light of this transformation of the concept by Jesus, we find that “the Christian idea of holiness is to do with going where it’s most difficult, in the name of Jesus who went where it most difficult. He wants us to be holy like that. That is why there is no contrast, no tension really, between holiness and involvement in the world.”[4]
Nonetheless, it’s worth noting something that Williams skims past. Even with Jesus, holiness still involves a separation. Not a separation from the world or from the everyday, or even from the dirty and the dying. Instead, it is a separation from selfishness, from self-protection, from the normal rules of human engagement, from the typical logic of empire and power. It is a separation from the ways of being human that dehumanise, the ways of being a creature that ignore the Creator, separation from the acts and attitudes that destroy and degrade.
Holiness as becoming more yourself
Williams goes on: “we really misunderstand the whole thing very seriously if we think that holiness means being defended from our own humanity or other people’s humanity: quite the opposite”. Williams draws a distinction here between being holy and simply being good. There is a kind of saintliness that consists of being “strict, devout and intense” but the effect on others is to “make them feel guilty, frustrated and unhappy. They feel inadequate”.[5] Perhaps you know people like this. People whose commitment to God is forefront of their minds, but whose presence sucks the life out of a room.
And here I’d like to share a longer quote that also been re-printed on the front of the bulletin for further reflection:
“The pursuit of goodness can be experienced as if you are taking part in a competitive examination in which some people are scoring very well, others are on the borderline, and some are sinking below the line. But the holy person somehow enlarges your world, makes you feel more yourself, opens you up, affirms you. They are not in competition; they are not saying, ‘I’ve got something you haven’t’. They are showing something that it’s wonderful simply to have in the world.
“When I think of the people in my own life that I call holy, who have really made an impact, it’s this that comes across most deeply in them all. These people have made me feel better rather than worse about myself. Or rather, not quite that: these are never people who make me feel complacent about myself, far from it; they make me feel that there is hope for my confused and compromised humanity. God is big enough to deal with and work with actual compromised and imperfect people. Look! Here is a life in which he has come alive. Real holiness somehow brings into my life that sense of opening up opportunity, changing things. It’s not about my being made to feel inadequate, or looked down on. On the contrary, somehow I feel a little bit more myself: not in any way that suggests I don’t need to change, to ‘repent and believe’, but simply through recognizing God active in the world.”[6]
“A holy person is somebody who is not afraid to be at the tough points in the centre of what it’s like to be a human being: someone who, in the middle of all that, actually makes you see things and people afresh.”[7] And this is because they may enjoy being themselves, but you don’t look at them and think “what a wonderful life they have”, but “what a wondrous, surprising and colourful world we live in”, “what a wondrous, faithful and creative God we serve” or even “what a wonder-filled, grace-soaked, mysterious and curious person I am too”.
And because of this dynamic, becoming holy isn’t a matter of simply trying harder. It isn’t a project to complete. There’s no twelve-step program to holiness, no self-help manual, no daily meditation technique that can deliver holiness. Williams says: “Becoming holy is being so taken over by the extraordinariness of God that that is what you are really interested in, and that is what radiates from you to reflect on other people. […] If you want to be holy, stop thinking about it. If you want to be holy, look at God. If you want to be holy, enjoy God’s world, enter into it as much as you can in love and service. And who knows, maybe one day someone will say of you, ‘You know, when I met them, the landscape looked different’.”[8]
Something similar is true for us as a church. A church isn’t holy because of running the right programs, having the right stance on the hot-button issues of the day or belonging to the correct denomination. Holiness isn’t a matter of getting the liturgy just right, reading the Bible enough, praying with sufficient earnestness and piety. Sometimes it can be tempting to think that the church would be doing ok as long as everyone were a bit more like me at my best. But no, whenever we begin thinking of holiness as something we do, we create an anxious, exclusive, self-conscious mess. The church is holy because we have a holy God, who by grace unites us with Christ in his death and resurrection by the power of the Holy Spirit. Our holiness is derivative, reflective, responsive. We don’t achieve it by trying harder; we receive it insofar as we turn our faces away from the idols of self, money, power, sex, fame, success and turn towards the true and living God. Our holiness as individuals and as a church is completely reflective. Which brings us to our epistle reading.
2 Corinthians 3:17-4:6
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practise cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
In the complex imagery Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 3 just before the bit that was read for us, Paul is talking about the contrast between life under the law of Moses and life in Christ. He recalls the story from the Exodus where Moses met with God, received the stone tablets of the covenant and when he returned to the Israelites, his face shone. The glory of God was reflected in the face of Moses. But this glory was too threatening to the other Israelites, so Moses put a veil over his face.
In the passage we read, Paul goes on to argue that as believers come to see the glory of God in Jesus, we too begin to reflect it, so that others might catch a glimpse in our own lives as the Spirit does its work “peeling off the layers of illusion and defensiveness”[9] so that we can see more clearly. Paul’s point is that if we wish to reflect God’s glory we are to turn to face Jesus. As we face Jesus and discover God’s delight in him is extended also to us, we are set free to enter into that love and share it with others. The result is that as we follow Jesus more closely, we become more ourselves at the same time.
Óscar Romero – d. 24th March 1980
I began this morning/evening by referencing a thirty-six year old film that depicts one influential and widespread understanding of holiness. This week was the thirty-seventh anniversary of another iconic event that presents a different picture of holiness.
Óscar Romero was a Catholic priest in El Salvador, a nation increasingly scarred by deep poverty, injustice, politically motivated violence, human rights abuses and torture. When he was appointed Archbishop in 1977, he was considered a man of deep piety, but unlikely to rock any political boats. Within a month, a local priest and good friend of Romero called Rutilio Grande, who had been helping to organise self-reliance groups amongst the poor, was assassinated. It was a watershed moment for Romero, who later said, “When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, ‘If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.’” He realised God’s call to holiness was not a call to the relative safety of private faith but to a wholehearted discipleship that took him increasingly into solidarity with those who suffer.
Over the next three years, he increasingly spoke out about abuses of power on behalf of the oppressed and against his own government’s complicity in murder and terror, which included the assassination or disappearance of fifty priests by US-backed military and paramilitary forces.
In sermons and radio broadcasts, Romero proclaimed Christ while condemning the crimes of the regime and listing the names of the disappeared. He not only provided information unavailable to most citizens under a repressive government, but – just as crucially – he also lived and spoke of a more just and compassionate path, one based not in violence and lies, but following Jesus in forgiveness, grace and truth. When a coup in 1979 brought a new and even more oppressive regime, he wrote to US President Jimmy Carter to ask him to withdraw support from the new government.
On 23rd March 1980, he preached a sermon urging Christian soldiers to obey God first and so to disobey any order to kill citizens or violate basic human rights. The next day, he had just finished preaching again in a small chapel and was about to begin the celebration of the sacrament when a gunman walked in and shot him in the heart.
The danger of putting forward Romero as a picture of holiness is that we may be tempted to think a holy life is only found in those intense moments of high-stakes drama by figures whose actions affect the lives of thousands.
But I think it is right that we remember Romero this week, not just because of the anniversary, but because his life and death bring together a alternative picture of holiness to that found in Indiana Jones (and much of our culture). For Romero, holiness wasn’t about the otherworldly mysterious object with the power to melt your face if you abused it. It wasn’t only the pursuit of a private piety or personal purity. It was a wholehearted dedication to Jesus, an attentiveness to the good news of Jesus, a receptivity to the grace of God in Christ. This led Romero into deep engagement with his context, risky solidarity with the poor and vulnerable, a bold speaking and living of truth whatever the consequences. It was a life responsive to a holy God, a life that echoed Jesus’ prayer for sanctification in the truth, a life that did not belong to the world but which was sent into it. For Romero, such holiness proved dangerous, even deadly.
We may not face a government disappearing priests, though today an Iraqi man in Villawood faces sudden deportation back to a situation of serious persecution. We may not risk a bullet to the heart, or be on the brink of civil war, but there are real and pressing needs all around us: seas are rising; corals are bleaching; children choke on unbreathable air; rainforests fall while inequality rises; displaced people multiply to levels unseen in seventy years; lives and families are fractured by addiction, abuse and apathy; the different are suspected and original custodians neglected; the weapons of war multiply while arable soils are washed away; the church has put more energy into protecting criminal leaders than the children they targeted; Big Brother gains more eyes while too many sisters are kept invisible and inaudible; and every single day more species hasten into the endless night of extinction.
What might Christian contagious holiness look like in each of these contexts? (Let’s take each in turn… only kidding) But the question I want to leave us with is: What difference does it make in your life to follow a God of holy and healing love? Let’s pray.
Dangerous God,
Rescue us from any domesticated, benign, anodyne pictures of you. Show us your disturbing glory in Jesus, crucified and risen. Fill us with your Holy Spirit, upend our false comforts, banish our self-accusations, and draw us into the world you love in acts of dangerous service. In Jesus’ holy name, Amen.
[1] Part of a series structured around the chapters of Rowan Williams’ Being Disciples: Essentials of Christian Life (SPCK, 2016) and taking Williams’ text as a guide and conversation partner.
[2] Rowan Williams, Being Disciples, 48.
[3] RW, 48.
[4] RW, 49
[5] RW, 49.
[6] RW, 50.
[7] RW, 52.
[8] RW, 53-54.
[9] RW, 55.