 Rev. Jeff Nelson |
Holiness Remixed
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Do you remember the Church Lady? The Church Lady was a running character on Saturday Night Live created by the very funny Dana Carvey. Each week on her fictional talk show, Church Chat, the Church Lady, in her proper and discreet dress, was always on the lookout for Satan. One time she even noted that if you rearrange the letters of Santa, what do you get? Could it be—Satan? She would look down her nose at the woman with four kids who brought the little Jell-O mold to the church potluck dinner when she herself had brought the 34-quart turkey hot dish. And she would revel in the pain and despair of fallen sinners, and just have to do a little “Superior Dance” around the likes of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. “Hit it, Pearl!” she would say to cue her organist that she was about to proudly strut her stuff in front of the mighty who had fallen. “Well, isn’t that special?” There is no doubt about it, the Church Lady was the walking definition of what it means to be “holier than thou.” Unfortunately, the Church Lady, with her sickening sanctimonious smile, is the stereotype too many hold of Christians. They too often see Christians as “holy rollers” with a “holier than thou” attitude. Today our continued journey through the Lord’s Prayer brings us to the phrase: “Hallowed be Thy name…” and the concept of holiness. To talk about holiness can conjure up visions of lists of rules and regulations or a sternly-pointing finger preaching all kinds of dos and don’ts. It is that uneasy picture of the all-too-real Church Lady types—the self-righteous “holy rollers”—that can make it hard for us to dig into this phrase of the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray. But we can’t go any further without considering it: “Our Father, who art in heaven…hallowed be Thy name…” So what is holiness? What does it mean to make God’s name holy? What does it mean to be a holy people, a holy church or even a holy nation? These are the questions this second line of the Lord’s Prayer asks us to consider. When I started to think about what it means to make God’s name holy, the very first thing that came to mind was the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” This commandment was taken very seriously in my house. Growing up, my brother and I were taught that to make God’s name holy meant watching our mouths. If my mother ever caught one of us (and she always did—how do mothers do that?) using the name of God or Jesus Christ in a less-than-reverent way, you can bet that we would get the good old bar of Ivory soap in our mouth. Growing up, I think I equated making God’s name holy simply with making sure I didn’t swear. But I think it was while I was in high school that I started to understand that making God’s name holy, or honoring God’s name, was far more sweeping than simply keeping my language clean. It was while in a U.S. history class that I was confronted for the first time with the number of times God’s name was used for violence and oppression. Taking God’s name in vain took on a whole other meaning as I read about how people used God’s name to justify slavery. The misuse of holiness was employed to keep hundreds of thousands of Africans enslaved on this continent—they weren’t holy enough to have their own freedom. God’s name was taken in vain, it was made unholy, when people quoted their Bibles to oppress women or to defend violence against Jews or Muslims. My heart was absolutely broken with the way the Christian gospel and the name of God and Jesus were used after the murder of Matthew Shepard, the twenty-year-old gay college student who was brutally beaten. Some Christians picketed the funeral, carrying signs that read, “God Hates Fags.” Now, I think we can disagree about homosexuality on both moral and theological grounds, but I hope that all of us would agree that when God’s name is used in a manner like that, it violates the second commandment and does nothing to bring honor to the name of God or Christ. Hallowing God’s name has as much to do with resisting injustice done in the name of God as it does with watching our language. You know, in the weeks and months after Terry Schiavo’s death, more Americans made living wills than ever before. If there was anything the tragedy of that situation taught us, it was the importance of having conversations about how we want to live and die with the people we love and trust. We all learned about the importance of giving someone power of attorney—the right to speak on our behalf and to act in our best interest. In this phrase of our prayer, “Hallowed be Thy name…”, we must recognize that God has given us the power of attorney. We have been given the awesome responsibility to use God’s name in the world. Every time we pray “Hallowed be Thy name,” we are asking God to work in us and through us so that the lives we lead give honor to “Our Father, who art in heaven.” To pray “Hallowed be Thy name” says more about the task demanded of the one praying this petition than about the one being addressed. The prophet Ezekiel captures what it means to have this “power of attorney” when it comes to making God’s name holy. In the thirty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel, the prophet writes: Therefore say to the house of Israel, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I show myself holy through you before their eyes.” “When I show myself holy through you…” We begin to see that hallowing God’s name means both living in a manner that gives witness to the nature of God and challenging the times when the name of God is being used to justify injustice, oppression, suffering or violence. When it comes to understanding the true essence of holiness, we need not look any further than Jesus. In his life and teachings, Jesus showed the true meaning of holiness. Jesus transformed the meaning of what it meant to be holy for the world he lived in, and his example can, and must, do the same for us today. In at least three different ways—around the issues of territory, table and touch—Jesus changed the very meaning of holiness. Jesus challenged the understanding of holiness when it came to territory. In Jesus’ time, holiness was not just personal, it was geographical. Holiness was determined by territory and boundaries. The place where one lived and the nationality to which one was born determined whether one was clean or unclean, whether one was holy or not. Many believed that God simply was not present in the territories outside of Israel proper and that the gentiles who lived on the other side of the line did not, and could not, know God. Gentiles were, by virtue of geography, unclean, ungodly and unholy. However, Jesus crossed these boundaries of his day freely and without hesitation. He went to these “unholy” places and commingled with the “unholy” who resided there. There is a great story in the fifteenth chapter of Matthew about Jesus’ encounter with a foreign woman whose daughter is deathly ill. The story is set in the region of Tyre and Sidon. The names of those cities mean nothing to us, but to the people of the first century, Jesus’ presence in those cities would have been shocking. You see, by going to Tyre and Sidon, Jesus had just crossed Eight Mile Road. He was in gentile country, and if there was ever a place that was unholy, this was it. What was Jesus, a good Jewish boy, doing “there” among “them”? This story has an amazing ending. As the story comes to a close, Jesus declares to this woman (to the shock of the disciples) that she—this outsider, this “unholy” woman—has great faith and is worthy of God’s healing and blessing. Jesus redefines holiness. He makes God’s name holy by not respecting the territorial line that separated the “holy” from the “unholy.” He crossed the line so that all might discover that God’s grace knows no boundaries. So the question for us is: Where are the territorial lines God is asking us to cross? Where are the places in our world that have been deemed unclean, ungodly and unholy? Where are the Eight Mile Roads that separate us from one another? Where are we being called to go so that, in going, we declare that God has not written off the place, or the people there? That is the thing about making holiness an issue of territory. People on both sides of a line can justify their disconnection by evoking the name of God. It might surprise you to know that when we told the people we lived with and worked with in Detroit that we were coming to Birmingham, some thought we were crossing such a line. “You’re going there…to live with them? They don’t know anything about God!” But in crossing this line, we discovered (and hopefully have helped some of our skeptical friends discover) that God is as present here as God was in the city. Where others had used holiness to draw a line in the sand, Jesus crossed that line and showed the deeper essence of holiness. Jesus also changed the way people understood what made for holy table fellowship. At the time of Jesus, the table had become a tool of separation and division. Who you ate with and who you welcomed at your table told the world who you were, what your standing was with God, and what was of value in your life. There were sects within the religious culture of ancient Israel that refused to sit at the table with outsiders, claiming that to do so was to protect the holiness of their fellowship and the holiness of their God. One thing we know about Jesus is that he ate with everyone…rich, poor, prostitute and Pharisee. He opened up the table as a place where all of God’s children could experience the true holiness of God, united together as family around the table. Who we eat with and who we invite to eat at our table says a lot about us. It says who is important and what is important. Don’t believe me? Ask any middle schooler or high schooler about the politics of the table in the lunchrooms of their schools. I remember a time when I used the table to tell the world what was important to me. I had a friend named Chris. He had been my friend since the second grade. We hung out together. We traded baseball cards together. We played together and shared birthdays together. We were part of the same crowd. That is, until the ninth grade. Freshman year. First year of high school. Social arrangements can change in high school, and for some reason my social stock was on the rise and Chris’ wasn’t. That’s when the fateful day in the lunchroom happened. Chris and I were sitting with a group of guys, and when Chris got up to take his tray back, one guy, a guy I guess I wanted to impress, took Chris’s chair away. When Chris returned to the table, his chair was gone and so was his seat in the community. He stood there. You could sense his desperation. You could see the tears welling up in his eyes. And he looked right at me, expecting his friend since second grade to do something. I just shrugged my shoulders and he walked away. In that moment, I told Chris. I told the guys at that table. I told my high school. And yes, I told God what was and who was important to me. A moment to reveal the holiness of God was lost. I pray that Chris does not remember that day in the lunchroom, but I tell you, that is a day I will never forget. Who do we sit with and who sits with us? Who gets invited to eat in our homes? Do the folks of different racial or ethnic backgrounds that we work with or worship with ever get invited to sit at the tables where we break bread? When we work in the soup kitchen, where are we sitting to eat—in the kitchen with the other workers or at the tables with those who stand in line? How we answer those questions tells us how God’s name is being hallowed. There is one more area of holiness that Jesus dared to redefine, and it had to do with the issue of touch. In the first-century world, human sickness and disability was as much a social problem as it was a problem of individual illness. Religious leaders probed one’s family dynamics when confronting an illness. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” the disciples once asked Jesus. One’s illness made society sick, so depending on a person’s sickness or disability, this person could be defined as “unclean,” “untouchable” and “unholy.” If God is perfect, then illness must be a sign of sin. They must have done something to deserve this. Being designated as unclean, untouchable and unholy made the person unable to participate in society, leaving them to fend for themselves on the margins of the community. To touch a person with a disease or disability was not just touching the illness, it was touching a sick system as well. And so when Jesus healed the sick, cured the lepers, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, mobility to the lame and life to the dead, he was not just healing an individual illness, he was making a sick system whole. By “reaching out” and touching the leper or the lame, Jesus would become untouchable himself. And by touching the untouchable, he would restore them to their family and their community, thus challenging an out-of-touch system of holiness with his messianic mercy. Fred Craddock tells a story about a young man in his twenties, dying of AIDS in an Atlanta hospital, that makes the stakes of the untouchable in our context very real: He had no church connection, but someone said he had relatives who had been in the church, so they called the minister of that church, and the minister went to the hospital. The young man was almost dead, just gasping there, and the minister came to the hospital, stood out in the hall, and asked them to open the door. When they opened the door, he yelled in a prayer. Another minister there in south Atlanta heard about it and rushed to the hospital, hoping that he was still alive. She got to the hospital, went into the room, went over by the bed, and pulled the chair by the bed. This minister lifted his head and cradled it in her arm. She sang. She quoted scripture. She prayed. And he died. Some of the seminarians said, “Weren’t you scared? He had AIDS!” She said, “Of course I was scared. I bet I bathed sixty times.” “Well, then, why did you do it?” And she said, “I just imagined if Jesus had gotten the call, what would he have done? I had to go.” A holy moment indeed. A moment when the name of God was truly honored. Jesus changes the notion of holiness forever. He changes what it means to be a holy people, a holy church and a holy nation. Where people once thought of holiness as exclusionary and segregated, Jesus shows through his ministry that mercy and justice will define what is holy. He set his disciples and his church apart, not so they would be a blessing unto themselves—to be a blessing to those who look like them, think like them, dress like them, talk, walk and eat like them—but so they would be a blessing to others. So how is God’s name hallowed? God’s name is hallowed whenever justice is done. God’s name is hallowed whenever people do good to each other. God’s name is hallowed when people follow the example of reclaiming territory, opening up the table and touching those who long to be touched. “Our Father, who art in heaven…hallowed be thy name…” Friends, the church isn’t in need of folks who are holier than Thou. It is in desperate need of folks who are holier for Thou. Note: Once again I have drawn heavily on the work of Michael Crosby and his book, The Prayer that Jesus Taught Us. Crosby dedicated an entire chapter to looking at what the meaning of holiness might have been to first prayers of the Lord’s Prayer. He demonstrated that Jesus challenged conventional understandings of holiness in at least five different ways. Three of them (territory, table and touch) were explored in this sermon. Crosby’s other two categories where Jesus challenged conventional understandings of holiness are torah (the use of religious law to separate the weak and the strong) and temple (the use of religious authority to deem some ritually unclean or untouchable). The Craddock story comes from the collection of sermon illustrations called Craddock Stories.
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