Holiness

The astonishment of St. Christina

Have you ever heard the story of St. Christina the Astonishing? She was a twelfth century Belgian woman, and astonishing is a good descriptor. I’m not sure she’d have gotten through the canonization process at a more exacting time, though. St. Christina the Astonishing is primarily known for levitating. And, specifically, she would levitate to get away from other people. I can sympathize with that. But she wasn’t acting out of introversion or a desire to be alone, per se. She purportedly had an experience of dying and seeing Purgatory and Hell, sort of a tour of the afterlife, woke up during her own funeral mass, and then, in the aftermath, said she could smell the sin on people. Literally. They stank with sin. So, she would do crazy things––run into forests, jump into cauldrons, and, yes, miraculously levitate into trees to get away from them.

Did she love those people? She would say she did. She would point to the intense life of penance she was living for all the souls in Purgatory and in Hell. But that love took the form of a particularly, well, astonishing mode of withdrawal. Purportedly. You may have some serious doubts about the historical veracity of this account. I certainly do. But whether it’s factual or not is not really the point. St. Christina the Astonishing may be unique when it comes to levitation, but when human beings commit to holiness, this often looks like withdrawal. From sin, from temptation, from other people who are less committed to the lifestyle, so to speak.

And there’s some biblical precedent for this, especially when read as isolated parts of the story of God with His people. After all, the most common definition for “holy” that you hear means “set apart.” The vessels used in temple worship, for instance, were holy to the Lord––they were “set apart” for worship, and could not be used to cook your family dinner, for instance. Famously, a gentleman named Uzzah reached out to stabilize the ark of the covenant, the locus of God’s presence with Israel, during a particularly ill-conceived transport plan, and died on the spot. Like touching a live electrical current without rubber gloves. Done.

Holy, holy, holy

Just last Sunday, I sang the words “Holy, holy, holy” to the Lord with my congregation. Maybe you did, too. We do it a lot in the Christian church. And maybe we do it too casually. We are consciously joining the angels when we do, and we know it because Isaiah 6 tells us about it.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”

4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. 5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” 8 Then 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!” 9 He said, “Go and tell this people:
“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
10 Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull
and close their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.”

11 Then I said, “For how long, Lord?”
And he answered:
“Until the cities lie ruined
and without inhabitant,
until the houses are left deserted
and the fields ruined and ravaged,
12 until the Lord has sent everyone far away
and the land is utterly forsaken.
13 And though a tenth remains in the land,
it will again be laid waste.
But as the terebinth and oak
leave stumps when they are cut down.”
The holy seed will be the stump in the land.

The angels sing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty,” in a posture not only of modesty but frankly of self-protection. The holiness of the Lord is overwhelming even for the holy angels. It’s overwhelming for material reality––the temple shakes and fills with smoke. And it’s more than overwhelming for Isaiah. It’s downright terrifying. Because Isaiah has a problem that neither the angels nor material reality has. “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips,” he says. And so he recognizes himself to be in mortal danger. “Woe to me, I am ruined.” I was asked to come talk about why holiness is hope for the Kingdom of God, and, specifically, for the PC(USA). But we’ve got to start here. Holiness is not, at first blush, good news to Isaiah. He’s in the presence of the holy Lord, and he despairs of his life.

Why holiness can sound like bad news

I hope, at this point, there’s at least one difference between St. Christina’s experience of holiness and Isaiah’s that is becoming glaringly obvious. St. Christina’s holiness was something that she possessed, and it caused her to flee from people who were less holy than she was––who, in her terms, stank of sin. Isaiah knows that he is one of the people who stink of sin. Isaiah’s experience of holiness is that it is something very external to him, something that is a characteristic of God and very much not of himself or his people, and indeed something that is threatening to him because of his own sin and the sin of those around him. St. Christina possessed holiness. Isaiah is confronted by it.

When we read the sixth chapter of Isaiah in isolation, it is difficult to imagine why the holiness of God is hope to anyone at all, and especially not to those of us whose failures are all too well-known, as individuals and as a denomination. Certainly, Isaiah did not hear it as hope. First and foremost, holiness was a threat. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory.” And, so, “Woe to me, and woe to my people, that we have unclean lips”––means, of course, both unclean hearts and unclean lives. Even after Isaiah experiences the purification of the coal, the news he is sent to proclaim is not what we would call positive and uplift-ing. It isn’t the kind of preaching that most pastors want to preach, nor that most congregations want to hear.

Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes, until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.

Even the promise of a remnant cannot entirely make this “good news” except in retrospect. The creaturely experience of holiness is bound to the experience of judgement. And that’s because to be holy is to be set apart from sin. It’s Israel’s sin that causes the holiness of God to be a threat to them. It’s Isaiah’s sin that makes him recognize himself to be in mortal danger, there in the presence of God.

A warning to would-be reformers

There’s a danger here, specific to those of us who pray to see the PC(USA) reformed; and that is, when we come to speak of holiness, that we will take too much pleasure in the sins of other camps and factions, or even of the denomination as a whole. The danger is that holiness becomes something that we own, something that is intrinsic to us and our behavior, something we can hold in our hands as a club to hit other people with. Famously, after Paul’s long list of sin and judgment in Romans 1, all of which are seductively easy to apply to the mainline church in the United States, he turns around and bites those of us who have perhaps been enjoying hearing it a little bit too much: “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgement on someone else.” That, I think, is the first thing to hear when we come to speak of holiness as hope for the PC(USA). Whatever hope that holiness brings us, it will not be one of partisan vindication.

A discussion of holiness that primarily has to do with what some traditions call “personal holiness”––the practices, habits, and prohibitions that make up the external structure of a life spent following Jesus––is brutally insufficient. Holiness is not primarily something that we possess. We must begin by disclaiming any right to the title. Holiness is always, first and last, an attribute of God’s own character. And it’s an attribute of God that negates our own moral high ground. Holiness is always primarily God’s holiness.

St. Christina had one thing right: holiness is to be set apart, and specifically to be set apart from sin. But St. Christina’s first mistake is not recognizing that to flee sin, she’d need to flee from herself. Holiness was never something we could comfortably possess. Neither the angels nor the temple is what you’d call comfortable in the presence of the Holy Lord. Holiness is always and forever primarily an attribute of the Creator, not creation. An unfallen human being could enter into the overwhelming but basically safe experience of holiness that the angels and temple have. But after the Fall, holiness is not something that we can endure on our own strength. Our natures are too vitiated by sin. It’s dangerous to us. It’s foreign to us.

What the Incarnation changes

But that is not the whole story of holiness. Something happens between Isaiah 6 and the letters of Paul that enables him to pepper his writings with references to “the saints,” literally, to the holy ones. How did we go from Isaiah, prostrate on the floor of the temple in mortal terror at the experience of holiness, to the ability to call human beings, who clearly still have many faults, the “holy ones?”

The thing that happened, of course, is the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The second person of the all-holy trinity, eternally begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, is born in a manger and dies on a cross, rises from the dead on the third day, and ascends with his human flesh and nature ––that’s a vital point––into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father, until, as the psalmist says, all things are subjected at his feet.

The God whom no one and nothing can surprise knew the problem from before the creation of the world. He knew that we would become dominated and all but consumed by sin. He knew that we would become unable to endure the beauty of his holiness, the beauty of his presence. And the God whom no one and nothing can resist willed that it would not remain that way. John the Elder teaches us that God is love. We often hear this profound truth produced in order to defend a lack of standards, or used in a way that sounds trite or even sentimental. It is, of course, neither trite, nor easy, nor sentimental. Trite, easy, sentimental love would not have made Isaiah fear for his life in its presence. It is a holy love––a love that has no mixture of sin in it. God is love within himself, as the community of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he loves the creation he has made outside of himself in the overflow of his love.

God’s being is love, the content of God’s glory is love, the content of God’s holiness is love. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth is particularly illuminating on this point: In the Church Dogmatics, he identifies God’s holiness, like all his actions and characteristics, as an outworking of his love: “God’s being is His loving. He is all that He is as the One who loves. All His perfections are the perfections of His love.”^[1] This explicitly includes his holiness, the thing that Uzzah and Isaiah, to different degrees, experienced as a direct threat to their existence.

And the thing about love is that it seeks the company of the beloved. God’s love is a love that, while maintaining its holiness, invincibly draws near rather than apart. It draws near to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Fully God, fully man. Two natures in one person. It is not only a matter of holiness coming to live among us––although that’s amazing enough. The ark of the covenant is incredible enough. Don’t ever let anyone convince you that the so-called “God of the Old Testament” is not a God of unspeakable grace. But what the ark of the covenant pointed towards, Jesus Christ fulfills. Not just God living among us, but God in his holiness binding himself forever to human nature. Irrevocably. The second person of the Trinity has assumed humanity and he will never take it off. The holiness of God is united forever with a fully human nature in one person.

As God in all his holiness, and as a human being in all his frailty, both at once, in his body Jesus carries human beings through death as he dies on the cross to free us from sin. And he carries us into the fullness of true life with him on the third day as he rises from the dead. And he carries us with him in his human nature to dwell in the presence of God, to sit at the right hand of the Father.

What kind of holiness must the God that we encounter in the crucified Jesus Christ possess? It cannot be the holiness of St Christina the Astonishing. This is her second mistake: a holiness that seeks to remove itself from the presence of the sinful is not God’s holiness. In Jesus Christ, we see the opposite. We see a God who is eager to come among the sinful, to be, as John Knox says in his beautiful communion prayer, like us in all things except for sin. This is a holiness that comes among the sinful, without itself becoming sinful. It is a holiness that intentionally seeks those who are not holy. Isaiah fears for his life, but he finds not death but forgiveness. He is sent back to a people of unclean lips to pronounce judgment, but that judgment ultimately is for the sake of life, not death. In retrospect, from the vantage point of the cross, we can see, with a healthy dose of astonishment, that God's holiness is reconciliation rather than alienation, and creation rather than destruction.

Holiness for sinners

Jesus Christ came to seek and save sinners. Not the perfect, not the theologically correct, not the sheep who have unfortunately and inexplicably found themselves in the midst of a herd of goats. That’s Gnosticism, not Christianity. Because God's holiness is an expression of his love, it is our hope rather than our despair.

There is no need to soften, deny, or defend the ways that we have sinned and the ways that the mainline has sinned in order to affirm that, nevertheless, there is hope for us that is specifically grounded in God’s holiness. For the PC(USA), as well as for us individual sinners, God’s holiness is ultimately good news. Because we know the holiness of God in the cross of Jesus Christ. God's holiness is our hope because it is a holiness that reaches towards us. And because it is God's holiness, the holiness of the God against whom no one can stand, we know that he will succeed in reconciling us to himself. God is love, and love seeks the presence of the beloved. God is God, and so nothing will stand in his way.

And that includes our sinfulness. By the grace and mercy of our God, we will not only survive but also find our fullest rest and joy in the presence of the holy God. But our sin will not. Sin cannot survive exposure to God’s holiness.

Justification and sanctification

When we speak of these things, we often use the terms justification and sanctification. I know we have people of all levels here when it comes to theological education, so just in case, justification is what God does when he declares us righteous through Jesus's blood, and sancti-fication is the life-long process of making us in fact holy as he is holy, of freeing us from our sins and making us resemble him. To sanctify is of course to make holy just in Latin rather than good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon.

Through his death and resurrection, Jesus gives us his own holiness. Or, to say it more carefully, the whole Trinity is explicitly at work here. Through the cross of Jesus, we receive the Father’s holiness through the Holy Spirit. John Calvin puts it particularly beautifully at the start of Book III of the Institutes:

We must now see in what way we become possessed of the blessings which God has bestowed on his only-begotten Son, not for private use, but to enrich the poor and needy [that’s us]. … To communicate to us the blessings which he received from the Father, he must become ours and dwell in us … if the shedding of his sacred blood is not to be in vain, our souls must be washed in it by the secret cleansing of the Holy Spirit. For which reason, also, Paul, speaking of cleansing and purification, says, “but you are washed, but you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). The whole comes to this that the Holy Spirit is the bond by which Christ effectually binds us to himself.^[2]

The Holy Spirit is the bond by which Christ effectually binds us to himself. It’s a good thing to pause here and notice that none of this is our idea, our effort, or our results. To use an old but very helpful phrase, the dead cannot raise themselves. The unholy cannot make themselves holy––they can only mourn with Isaiah, woe is me. It is the Holy Trinity who commands, obeys, and makes effectual. We are, at best, along for the ride. We can only receive, in open-handed astonishment, the holiness of God, given to us in the most unexpected possible way.

Holiness is hope for God’s church because God shares his holiness with us. He declares us to be holy through the work of Jesus Christ and the bond of the Holy Spirit. And then, through that same Spirit, he makes us actually possess his holiness. I’ve recently noticed the unforget-table image in Ezekiel 16––it is the corner of his own garment that God says he covered Jerusalem with. He clothed us when we were naked, with his own clothing. He gives his own holiness to the unholy.

Growing into family resemblance

So now that we’re towards the end of this talk, we can come to the personal or human holiness that I laid aside at the beginning. We couldn’t start with it because we don’t have any to start with. We must receive it as a free gift from the crucified and risen Christ. But it’s undeniably true that immediately afterwards, as soon as the Church becomes the church, the Bible begins to talk about the people of Christ’s kingdom as the hagioi, the holy ones, the saints. The ones who are sharing in a real and robust way the characteristic of holiness that belongs primarily to God. The ones who are beginning to bear a family resemblance to the Father who has adopted them.

The proof that we have truly seen the Lord and are following him is that we bear greater and greater family resemblance to him. None of what I have said before about holiness being God’s own possession, not ours, is intended to get us out of any standards that the Lord has set for us. When we are sanctified, we are becoming more and more holy in fact, growing to become in reality what the Lord declared us to be when he justified us. This is the necessary result of being bound to Christ. We do not earn our salvation through our holiness, but if we see no evidence of holiness in our lives at all, if we cannot see, looking back, that holiness is growing in us through the work of the Spirit, that is cause for grave concern and self-examination.

But if it is growing in family resemblance to the Lord, the holiness that we grow into will also be his holiness. It will be the holiness revealed to us in the cross of Jesus Christ. It will be a holiness that moves towards God’s beloved sinners, not away from them into some perceived place of doctrinal and moral purity. I hate to keep picking on St. Christina the Astonishing. But she’s so emblematic of all the ways that it is so, so tempting to get holiness wrong. It’s a great deal of fun to claim holiness for ourselves on the basis of our own goodness, experience, theological commitments, or personality type. It’s a great deal of fun to notice the stink of sin on other people. And, even with the absolute best intentions in the world, it’s easier and more pleasant to flee that sin. It feels like purity. It feels like being set apart. It feels like a rigorous commitment to God’s truth. It feels like common sense.

Richard Burnett, who will speak directly after me, had what was probably the unpleasant task of teaching me confirmation class as a teenager. And one thing he said I will never forget: God hates common sense.^[3] It is common sense that to impress a holy God, we must make a case that we are at the very least the lesser of the evils. But Isaiah shows us otherwise. It’s in the recog-nition of his own sin that he’s given holiness as a gift. It’s common sense that for the holy to remain holy, for the set apart to remain set apart, it must keep a healthy distance from everything that is not holy. But we see in Jesus Christ that true holiness draws near. It doesn’t stay in heaven, and it doesn’t levitate up into trees. It gives itself away. And it’s common sense that since I am responsible for me and for no one else, it is easier to become a hermit, to be holy without the distractions and complications and mess of other people. But in the Bible, God shows us that isn’t the case either. The holy are holy in the communion of the saints, the community of the holy ones who are holy with God’s holiness.

When the Bible speaks of the holy ones, the saints, I believe it is every single time in the plural. I’m open to being proven wrong here. I’ll be around all week, but I could not think of or find an instance in the New Testament where “holy one” or “saint” was applied to a singular individual. Every time that I could think of or find, it was in the plural. The holy ones in Jesus are holy in community with others.

Holiness as hope

Holiness belongs first and perfectly to God, then to the community that bears His name, and then to the indivi-dual person––but not to the individual person alone. The Trinity is holy in community with himself, the Church is holy in community with the Trinity, and the individual Christian is holy in community with the Church.

The hope for the PC(USA) is not in its own holiness, but specifically in the holiness of God which has as its content his flaming love. The holiness of St. Christina will do nothing for us. Whatever holiness she may have possessed, it is not the holiness of the Lord who descend-ed to us sinners, was willing even to endure a cross, to draw us towards himself rather than permit us to remain far away in our stench of sin. That is the holiness that we grow into as we grow in family resemblance to our Lord. It is a holiness that draws near, both to God and to other people, rather than one that keeps us at a distance for fear of sullying our so-called purity.

Holiness is set apart from sin but not from sinners. It is a characteristic of the God whose whole being is love, and who, in love, chooses to share it with us as well. But it’s never truly ours. It can never be a source of pride. It can never be a reason to stand far off, or it ceases to be holiness and transforms into a demonic imitation of the real thing. Even God himself does not choose to be holy in isolation but in community, first the community of the Holy Trinity and then, through the grace of the Cross, in community with us as well.

That’s why God’s holiness is hope for the kingdom. That’s why God’s holiness can even be hope for the PC(USA.) It’s a holiness that draws near to us, that does not give up on us, and that with divine authority is intent upon bringing us into communion with God and each other forever. Again, from Isaiah:

The LORD of Hosts has purposed,
and who can thwart Him?
His hand is outstretched,
so who can turn it back?

And our part in holiness is not withdrawal. It’s not an overriding focus on the creation of a pure and utopian society. It is to run to other sinners, tell them not to be afraid, and point them towards the Holy One who loves us and will not rest until we not only can adore his holiness like the angels do, but even share it with him, as his beloved sons and daughters.