Tagged: Holiness

Making God’s Name Holy

Delivered at Billtown Baptist Church, Feb. 23, 2025.

So, we are going through the Lord’s Prayer. Pastor Angela has covered “Our Father in Heaven.” She’s been taking her time. She began with “Our,” then “Father,” then last week, we were away in Halifax for family day, but she tackled “in Heaven.” I got a whopping four words to cover this morning. At this rate, we may be done this series sometime next year. I am only teasing.

I tease but I feel like doing this reminded me to slow down. I am the kind of person who reads and reads and wants to get things done and move on to the next thing. That is how we live our lives. Our lives can so often be the rat race of getting things done on to the next thing to get done.

I remember one time at Laurentian University, where I used to teach; my day would also be so filled with things I needed to get done and events I had to plan that I would make a to-do list in my head and motor through them. One of those, often, was getting books from the library, which was several buildings away from my office, so I would quickly walk there and try to get back as fast as I could. One day, I remember I was just feeling a bit tired so I got a cup of coffee in the Starbucks in the lobby just before going into the library. I remember pausing for a second to sip the coffee, and then I looked up and realized there was a massive art piece on the wall coming into the library. It was of several blue orchids painted in that impressionist style that was simply stunning, and I had this moment of realizing that I had passed by this art piece many times and just never bothered to notice because I was too busy.

We can do the same thing about God, and we can do the same thing with the Scriptures, too, if we don’t slow down.

And this is particularly important with words that often are so familiar to us like these ones. We can say them and not stop to think about them. I remember talking to a pastor one time, and he talked about how growing up, his dad would always pray the same prayer at dinner time (I am totally guilty of this—by 5:30, I’m tired and but hangry, originality or anything profound is just not coming out of my mouth as my kids bicker—often my prayers just end up sounding like parental auto-suggestion: “God help us all to be nice and be grateful for our food. Amen!”). Nevertheless, this guy’s dad would pray the same puzzling words every day: “God bless this food and antenna juice.” And for years, he said to me, he was always puzzled about why his dad prayed for the “antenna juice.” Finally, he could not hold it in any longer and he asked his dad one day, “What is going on with the antenna juice?” And did you figure out what it is? His dad, puzzled, said, “I pray ‘God bless this food for its intended use.’” Ohhhh! (The other moral of the story is that a little annunciation goes a long way.)

“Hallowed be your name”…?

Words we recite day in and day out can end up becoming routine. We can say them without thinking about what they mean, and I particularly feel that with this line in the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by your name” (as I learned it in King James English). I remember thinking as a kid, “Why is God’s name hollow?” that does not make a lot of sense. Of course, eventually, I figured out that it is actually “hallowed” or “to be made holy,” but that didn’t really clear things up either: Why is God’s name need to be made holy? Isn’t God already holy? How do you “hallow” something, especially when that something is God’s name?

There is something really important and nourishing about slowing down and thinking about the Scriptures little by little, word by word. That is what I am going to do this morning. Let’s re-ask those questions: What is God’s name? Why is God’s name being brought up here rather than just God? What does it mean to be holy? And why does this line of the prayer petition God to make God’s name holy?

So, first, what is God’s name? Some folks think “Father” is the name of God in this prayer, and that is not actually accurate. Father is a title of God with its own particular history that Jesus used to talk about how he is the Son of God, the Messiah.

What is God’s name then? We see what it is back in the book of Exodus. Moses comes to the burning bush, and God says he has heard the cries of his people. He says he is going to send Moses to liberate the people from slavery, and after that, Moses asks, “That’s great, but, by the way, what do I call you if anyone asks?” And God gives this strange answer, “I am who I am.”

Ancient names meant something. At some point when Meagan and I were dating, we would chat about whether we were to have kids and how many (the answer at the time was three, by the way). But we also talked about hypothetical names for our kids, and we could never agree on one. I remember one time at the church we attended in Cambridge, Ontario, this couple introduced themselves to us, and then they turned and said, “This is our boy, Rowan.” I remember thinking to myself, “I really like that name.” Then I turned to Meagan, who had a look on her face like she was thinking the exact same thing. Then I realized in my heart what we had to do: We could not be friends with these people because we needed to steal this name and claim we creatively thought of it ourselves as good millennials.

Admittedly, we have really only chosen names that have a nice sound to them. That is really subjective. There really wasn’t any deeper meaning to why we chose our kids’ names. Rowan means “from the Ashberry tree.” I still, to this day,don’tt know what an Ashberry tree looks like.

Well, the ancient people took the meaning of names a bit more seriously than Meagan, and I have, and God gives his name to Moses, and not “Bill” or “Dave” or anything you can just casually write on a name sticker with a sharpie during an ice breaker event. It is this mysterious, perplexing name: “I Am who I Am.” What does that mean?

That is kind of a strange name. It almost feels comical, like something out of an Abbot and Costello routine: Who is on first base? Who is. The man’s name is Who. That’s who.

Moses asks, “Who are you?” and God says, “I Am. I Just Am.” That is the name God chooses. Why? Well, in ancient culture, if you knew the true name of a god, you could control and invoke the power of that god as a magical incantation, or so the priests of Egypt thought. For God to reply, “I Am who I Am,” is saying who God is goes beyond this whole exercise of naming and controlling.

I am beyond your concept of what God is;

I am not one god amongst others.

I am beyond all beings;

I am the source of all being itself;

All other gods are nothing compared to me; I am the one who simply is.

God gives Moses this name, which writers in church history have sometimes called the “Nameless Name” (cf. Ps. Dionysius) as a way of reminding people that God cannot be thought of or controlled like other gods. God is simply the one who is.

Salvation in God’s Name

And yet, God also says to Moses, “I am with you.” This God whose name suggests God is the absolute purity of existence, something infinite and incomparable, this God is not far off, aloof and unconcerned with the world; this God chooses to come alongside this small, insignificant, enslaved nation, to walk with people in the midst of everyday life and their struggles. This God chooses to make promises of liberation. And what God does with Israel is a sign of what God is about for all humanity.

This God is the one who is.

This God is the real God.

This God has real power.

This God is truly just.

This God is compassionate and gracious.

This God is on the side of the forgotten and unworthy of the earth.

This God can be trusted.

So, beginning with Exodus, God sets out to, we might say, make a name for himself, and Israel is called to testify of what God does to the surrounding nations. Their history is to be like a living resume to the rest of humanity, showing that God is trustworthy and up for the task of redemption. God sets out to act in such a way that when people hear about the God of Israel, this God who is the I Am, the one who is (or in Hebrew, Yahweh), this God is different.

That is what holiness means, by the way. The Hebrew word kadosh means to be set apart. Something that is holy is different. This God is a holy God. God is different from the rest.

Throughout the Old Testament, you have God’s people invoking God’s name to say, “Come and save us. We know that you are the God who will.” Psalm 53 does this.

1 Save me, O God, by your name,
    and vindicate me by your might…

3 For the insolent have risen against me,
    the ruthless seek my life;
    they do not set God before them.

4 But surely, God is my helper;
    the Lord is the upholder of my life.
5 He will repay my enemies for their evil.

So, the people call on the name of God in prayer and worship by name.

In college, I had a friend who was a part of AA, alcoholics anonymous. He joined AA to clean up his life, and at the same time he found faith in Jesus and eventually felt called to be a missionary, and that is what he was studying for. I remember one time he took me to one of those meetings where visitors were allowed, and it was a humbling time for me to hear his testimony and others.

One part of all the testimonies mentioned one of the steps in the program, namely, trusting in a higher power. I remember talking about that with him one time. He said, you know, in AA, we are told to trust in a higher power, and for most, this could be anything: it could be Allah, Buddha, or some other deity from the great religions; it could be an angel, or the oneness of the universe, or the force from Star Wars for that matter—it really could be anything as long as you believe in something more than yourself since one of the qualities of the steps is realizing one’s enslavement to addiction.  

Well, he said, that is all fine and good, but he said, I don’t know how you can believe in those other things and have any assurance you are going to be okay through all this. Of course, he did not mean it like Christians are better or that if you are a Christian in AA, you are obviously never going to struggle or fail at your addiction or any of that. What he meant is that lots of people believe in God or believe in a higher power, and that often helps make people better people. But the question becomes, what is God like, and how do you know this? If there is a higher power, that’s great, but is this higher power merciful? That is where the God of the Bible made a difference for him.

For him, it simply meant his higher power, the one he looked to for strength to succeed in sobriety and forgiveness when he failed, had a name. His higher power, whom he trusted, has a track record of being there for sinners. In fact, his higher power loves sinners so much that he died for them as one of them and rose from the grave to give them hope.

The name of his higher power that he trusted was Jesus, whose name means “God saves.” Jesus is the ultimate display of this “I Am” God capable of being with us.

This does not mean that we pray in “Jesus’ name” like it is a magic formula to make God do things or the secret ingredient in a recipe. Surely, God hears the cries of anyone, anywhere, regardless of how they pray. But we pray, invoking the name of God, the identity of Jesus, God’s Son, to remind ourselves and others that it is this particular God who answers prayer, who has shown himself to be faithful.

God’s Name is Being Profaned

Well, that still does not answer why Jesus tells us to pray, “Make your name holy.” In fact, that really makes things more confusing: Isn’t it already holy, isn’t that why we are praying to it?

Well, to answer that, we need to remember that things did not always go rosy for Israel, and things are not the way they should be in the world. Israel disobeys; they are unfaithful to God; they commit idolatry; they neglect the poor and engage in dirty politics with the empires of the world, and so, they get conquered and carried off into exile.

The people disobey God and feel the consequences, but God does not stop being their God. God has made promises of faithfulness and restoration that God has said he will keep despite their unfaithfulness. And so you have these prayers then in the later parts of the Old Testament, longing for God to come.

Ezekiel 39 gives a vision that one day, God will come, and he will make his name holy. Let me read the ten verses:  

And you, mortal, prophesy against Gog, and say: Thus says the Lord God: I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal! 2 I will turn you round and drive you forwards, and bring you up from the remotest parts of the north, and lead you against the mountains of Israel. 3 I will strike your bow from your left hand, and will make your arrows drop out of your right hand. 4 You shall fall on the mountains of Israel, you and all your troops and the peoples that are with you; I will give you to birds of prey of every kind and to the wild animals to be devoured. 5 You shall fall in the open field; for I have spoken, says the Lord God. 6 I will send fire on Magog and on those who live securely in the coastlands; and they shall know that I am the Lord. 7 My holy name I will make known among my people Israel; and I will not let my holy name be profaned anymore; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, the Holy One in Israel. 8 It has come! It has happened, says the Lord God. This is the day of which I have spoken. 9 Then those who live in the towns of Israel will go out and make fires of the weapons and burn them—bucklers and shields, bows and arrows, hand-pikes and spears—and they will make fires of them for seven years. 10 They will not need to take wood out of the field or cut down any trees in the forests, for they will make their fires of the weapons; they will despoil those who despoiled them, and plunder those who plundered them, says the Lord God.

Gog and Magog are nicknames of the areas where the brutal Babylonians and Assyrians came from. Meschech and Tubal are in the northern mountain region of modern-day Iraq and Turkey. The Bible geeks in the room might know the phrase “Gog and Magog” from the book of Revelation, which re-uses the phrase as an archetype for any brutal military power, which, for the writer of Revelation, was the empire of Rome.

Ezekiel’s vision, which if you found it bizarre and jarring that is exactly what apocalyptic visions do to get us to think differently, is that these arrogant and violent nations oppressing people will come to an end, as all empires will, whether that is Assyria, Babylon, or Rome, or whether that is Russia, China, or the British empire, or the America empire. Their armies will be destroyed, but not only that, their weapons will be gathered up and burned for firewood, so much so that the people of God will be warmed by its heat for years to come, and they will live in safety, no longer needing weapons of war anymore.

Most importantly, (did you hear the line?), it says, “My holy name I will make known among my people; and I will not let my holy name be profaned anymore.”

God’s name was in a state of being profaned: insulted, tarnished, desecrated. Why? Because oppression is rampant on the earth and the innocent suffer.

God looks at the state of the world, the state of his people, the cries of the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed. God sees the rampant war. God sees hard-heartedness in God’s people, and God sees his name profaned.

Boy, I am sure glad we solved all those problems in the Old Testament, and that stuff never happens today!

Notice God’s response: God doesn’t just turn to us and say, “Well, I gave you a choice, and you really messed that up, so too bad, not my problem.” Although we certainly have made choices that have messed things up.

God doesn’t just turn to us and say, “See, you might think all this evil is bad, but I am actually all-powerful; I am in control; I can do whatever I want, even if that means causing or allowing terrible things to happen. So be it. So, how dare you question me?!” He doesn’t do that either, even though that is what many of us were taught growing up.

I remember talking to an atheist one time, and I asked him why he believed what he believed (there are, of course, many reasons for why someone is an atheist). The person said how he looks at the world and the evil in it, and he sees this as a contradiction to the existence of a good God.

I had to say, “I agree. But that is why I believe in God. Evil does not belong here.” Thankfully, I think God agrees too: God sees the evil of the earth, and God sees this as a contradiction to who he is. God takes the evil and tragedy of this world personally.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book, The Prophets, writes about this:

“Why does religion, the essence of which is worship of God, put such stress on justice for humanity?… Perhaps the answer lies here: righteousness is not just a value; it is God’s part of human life, God’s stake in human history. Perhaps it is because the suffering of man is a blot upon God’s conscience; because it is in relations between man and man that God is at stake. Or is it simply because the infamy of a wicked act is infinitely greater than we are able to imagine? People act as they please, doing what is vile, abusing the weak, not realizing that they are fighting God, affronting the divine, or that the oppression of man is a humiliation of God.”

God looks at this world, broken and corrupted, this world he created, this world that belongs to him, this world he loves, and his people in his image, all humanity as God’s children, whether we have acknowledged him or not, us who are hurt and hurting others, and he makes promises to us:  I am going to do something about his. It is an affront to who I am.

Do We Dare Pray this Prayer?

And so, Jesus, the one who is God Immanuel, gives a prayer to his disciples.

Pray this way: Our Father in heaven—Father of all creation, all humanity, a father to the oppressed and forgotten, the unworthy and unforgiven—our Father.

May your name be holy—God may you do something about how the state of this world is an insult to your justice and goodness, your reputation of the true and perfect God.

Look what it says after this: May your kingdom come and you will be done, on earth as it is in heaven—May your perfect goodness come to reside, be made manifest, break-in, shine through, restore and reorder every square inch of reality back to the way things ought to be, the way you desire them to be. So much so that when we look at heaven and we look at the earth, we won’t be able to tell the difference.

This is what this prayer is telling us to pray. There will be a day when what God desires for things and the way things are will be one and the same. One day, God’s name will be fully, unreservedly holy without exception or remainder.

This leads us to admit a kind of sad irony to how we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We recite the Lord’s Prayer, and it is so commonplace for many of us—so much for me, that I have caught myself yawning. Have you (no judgment)?

And I will be honest: Part of me would have been much more content if I just carried on reciting this prayer in the same thoughtless, boring, safe way. Why? Because thoughtless faith easily becomes selfish faith. And thoughtless faith does not bother to notice. Deep down, it does not want to.

I can recite this prayer, as I so often have, and my big takeaway from the prayer, if I think about it at all, is that God is in heaven. This world is awful and hopeless, so God wants me to go to heaven. So, God forgives me of my sins and promises to provide for all my needs, which is really convenient because, you know, have you seen the price of gas and groceries lately?! And that’s it. Amen.

And so, for many of us Christians, we can sing worship, delighted with how we get to escape earth and go to heaven, missing our calling that we are invited to bring heaven to earth, to live in such a way on earth as it is in heaven. We are called to make God’s name holy.

If this is what this prayer is saying, I’ll be honest with you: far from yawning at this prayer, we should ask ourselves: do we dare say this prayer?

One of the Ten Commandments is “You shall not take God’s name in vain,” and that is not referring to the words that come out of our mouths when we hit our thumbs with a hammer. It is whether we who know of God, who confess God, take seriously what that means with the way we live our lives. Have we taken God’s name in vain by reciting this prayer and refusing to live it?

The fact is sometimes we pray for God to answer our prayers, and the answer he gives is us. Be the answer to this prayer. Brothers and Sisters, will we make God’s name holy?

Do we dare to live this prayer?

Let’s pray.

A Surprising Holiness

Preached at Valleygate Vineyard, Sunday, June 9, 2024.

Well, I am so glad to be with you again. It has been a busy week for me. It was my birthday on Friday. Last weekend, I flew out to Denver, and I presented a paper at a conference there (that is what we theology nerds do when we are not teaching classes, by the way, among other things). I presented at a society that is mostly a Catholic theology society, with a few of us who were Baptists. So, that means around this time last week, I was attending a Catholic mass that the organizers of the society put on, trying rather hopelessly to flip through the booklet of what prayers to recite and things like that. Now I am here, at a vineyard church. So, I feel like I have experienced the spectrum of worship styles in Christianity this week, from high church to charismatic.

The weekend was a good time connecting with colleagues and friends in Denver, but I must admit that I don’t like traveling. Specifically, I don’t like airports. This time, yet again, proved my point. The only time Meagan would be off and be able to come get me involved in a long layover in the middle of the night in Toronto for me. So, I tried to sit there in the concourse and rest. I ended up reading all the books I had purchased at the book vendors at the conference, which was not so bad, but when my flight finally arrived, I felt completely done and tired. Then, of course, they announce that there is something wrong with the airplane and we have to switch flights; the next available plane will be here in a few hours. After spending some 24 hours in transit, I was picked up by Meagan in Halifax, and I was a vegetable—a hungry, smelly, tired, incoherent vegetable.

On the plane, while I was wired awake from too much coffee, I thought about what I wanted to speak with you about, and one passage kept coming to me. It is one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament, and I have never had the chance to preach on just this text. So, I am excited to share it with you today. It comes from the Prophet Hosea.

Hosea is part of 12 books at the end of the Old Testament called the “Minor Prophets,” 12 short books, although calling them “minor” feels like that does not do them justice.

Hosea was a prophet who started his ministry of preaching around the mid-700s BC, so 700 years before Christ.

Hosea is also one of the most fascinating prophets because he had possibly the most bizarre calling. Hosea was called by God to marry a prostitute named Gomer, have children with her, and then when she left him to be with another man, God called Hosea to pursue her. God did this to use his life as an illustration for how God’s people had acted unfaithfully to him and that Hosea could now understand the hurt in God over Israel’s infidelity because he felt it with his wife. But also, despite all the unfaithfulness, God continued to pursue Israel out of God’s rich love, and so also, Hosea had to do this, learning and exemplifying what this striving kind of love is like.

Now, there is a whole sermon on just that right there—there are so many truths there that are as bewildering as they are beautiful—but what I really want to talk to you today about is in a passage 11 chapters into the book. You see in this travail of the people being unfaithful to God, and God warning that if the people go their own way, they will face the consequences, there is an astonishing passage. After the prophet blasts the people for their sins, God, quite surprisingly, tells Hosea to say this to the people:  

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
    and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
    the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals
    and offering incense to idols.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
    I took them up in my arms,
    but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
    with bands of love.
I was to them like those
    who lift infants to their cheeks.
    I bent down to them and fed them.

They shall return to the land of Egypt,
    and Assyria shall be their king,
    because they have refused to return to me.
The sword rages in their cities;
    it consumes their oracle priests
    and devours because of their schemes.
My people are bent on turning away from me.
    To the Most High they call,
    but he does not raise them up at all.

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
    How can I hand you over, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
    How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart recoils within me;
    my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
    I will not again destroy Ephraim,
for I am God and no mortal,
    the Holy One in your midst,
    and I will not come in wrath.

Hosea 11:1-9, (NRSV)

I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.

What is Holiness?

What is holiness? Any bible scholar or even a Google search will give you the standard definition of holy, which comes from the Hebrew word, “kodesh,” which means to be “set apart.” When we look at some of the early foundational stories of the Bible where God is talked about as holy, we get a sense that the holiness of God is potentially quite frightening. God is so perfect and pure and transcendent that to come in contact with this is as beautiful as it is terrifying.

The Prophet Isaiah had a vision of God in his heavenly temple, where he saw the angelic Seraphim flying around chanting, “Holy, Holy, Holy!” and Isaiah describes this experience as ruining him. Seeing the holiness of God makes him feel unclean as all the goodness in him, the righteousness he thought he had compared to the people that he spends several chapters chastising, pales in comparison to the pure holiness of God. Isaiah exclaims, “Woe is me, for I am ruined.”

Even more severe, there are stories that speak about people coming into contact with something holy, whether it is the temple, touching the ark of the covenant, or stepping onto the foot of Mount Sinai; if they did this unprepared or even if they did this unintentionally, there are narratives that speak about how they risked death. The holiness of God is so pure it’s dangerous.

Growing up, I often felt like the holiness of God was portrayed as something like radioactive plutonium or something. Moses came down from the mountain, and he was always pulsating in all the children’s bibles. I admit, I may have had an overactive imagination.

Well, there is something certainly important about these stories. The holiness of an infinite God is an awesome thing. These stories help us see that God’s holiness has to be taken seriously. Things that are holy—the temple, the ark, the Sabbath—in the ancient mindset are the things that have been set apart, that possess the power and presence of purity and thus orient life properly, and so, must be respected. To violate these things is to invite defilement, disorder, and destruction.

In a way, the plutonium analogy is not too far off: plutonium can be used to produce awesome energy to power whole cities but is also not something you would want to fool around with. You have to handle it with care, knowing what it is capable of.  

Well, all of this is true, but to just say that is to miss quite a lot. In fact, you have actually profoundly missed the point with its own dangerous consequences if holiness only means this.

What are those consequences?: A few years ago, I met for coffee with a person who faced addictions. I remember one particular morning we sat there for coffee and this person shared her story of going through some really dark times, some rock bottoms that I just cannot even fathom.

Out of my pastoral training, I felt obliged to ask her after she gave her story, “Where do you think God was in all of this?” I was hoping for some obvious Sunday School answer: “I know that Jesus was with me and that he loves me”—something like that.

My heart sank as she confessed that she did not know where God was in all this in her life. In fact, she insisted God could not have been with her. She had rebelled against God and was unfaithful. God is not with people like that. She had sinned again and again, and there is one thing she knew from growing up in church is that God cannot stand the presence of sin. God is holy.

God is holy, and that is why she was certain God could not have been with her, a sinner. Is that what that means? God can’t be with us because of who he is?

How many of us have heard messages like that?

You see if your notion of holiness is about being morally perfect and how God cannot stand the presence of anything that cannot measure up to this kind of moral perfection, you, like many Christians, probably have an idea of God in your head where God actually is not with sinners at all. God really just tolerates us.

Now, to say it like that, many of us would immediately know that to be untrue. However, as I had illustrated to me on that day, in the ups and downs of life, certain convictions we are taught growing up have a way of staying deep in us, lying dormant, festering, waiting to come out one day when life has you down: You mess up, people desert you, the ones you love hurt you, or you hurt them, you get caught in sin’s vortex of lies and bad choices and more lies—whatever those dark moments could be, and all of a sudden it occurs to you, that if God is holy, God probably wants nothing to do with a sinner like you.

Perhaps you were raised with a strong perfectionism like I was, where you may have been taught, “With enough faith, you should be able to stop sinning. If faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, surely a little bit of faith is all you need to stop committing this sin or that sin.”

And so you say, “If God can do miracles, why can’t he take away this sin in my life?” And you are left wondering, “Maybe it is just because I don’t believe enough.”

Perhaps some of you have come to those dark moments—like I did one day, and you said to yourself, “If I am saved by faith, but I don’t have enough faith to stop sinning, maybe I don’t have enough faith to be saved at all. Maybe I’ve committed that unforgivable sin that one scripture talks about. Perhaps, somewhere down the line, I took God for granted one too many times, and I filled up my quota; and that was it; God cut me loose.” After all, as people are fond of saying, God is loving, but he is also holy.

The “but” there suggests love and holiness in most people’s heads is a zero-sum game, one limited by the other.

Many of us have heard messages like that, whether we were taught it growing up or it is just the voice of our inadequacies trying to get the better of us.

Holiness as Surprising Mercy

As I said, while God is perfect and pure and holy, yes, and God wants us to live in the right relationship with God and others, yes, if we leave it there, we shortchange the discussion because effectively this says that God loves us only when we perform best, when we get things right, and when we don’t mess up. And if not, God is done with us. Is that what holiness means?

The people of Hosea’s day were stuck in their sins. They had gone after idols and were unfaithful to God. They had forgotten all that God had done for them, and they had been doing this for hundreds of years.

And so, God sends the Prophet Hosea to warn them. If you keep worshiping idols, you’re going to keep getting hurt. If you keep making dirty political alliances, your luck will run out, and the empire of Assyria is going to come and conquer you. If you keep oppressing the poor, you are going to have more and more problems in your society. Wrongdoing has real consequences, and the Prophet keeps warning them: “Stop acting this way.”

Hosea condemns the people for their apathy and corruption, but then something unexpected happens. The people had not repented, and yet God out of the blue in Chapter 11, confesses God simply cannot bring himself to give up on the people. God looks at the people as God’s precious child and says:

How can I give you up? You are my child. I fed you. I taught you to walk. I led you as you took your first steps. Even though you rebelled against me and ran away, even though you hurt me, I simply can’t go through with punishing you. My heart recoils, and I feel my compassion growing warm and tender. I love you too much.

How can this be? Why is God doing this? God simply says: I am God and not like a mortal. I am the Holy One. I choose to be in your midst, not far away. And I have chosen not to come in wrath.

The logic of this passage goes in an unexpected direction from all the other passages before it on holiness. Indeed, God is holy—pure, unpolluted, and perfect—but there is something about God, the living God, where God is always surprising us.

When we are tempted to think our worth is found in our own moral performances…

When we are tempted to think God’s grace has limits…

When we are tempted to think that God simply is not there…  

God says, I am holy; I am completely different from the god you have expected me to be.

I am holy, and therefore, I am uncontrollable and have unlimited compassion.

I am holy, and therefore, I will not use fierce anger.

I am holy; therefore, I will not punish.

My holiness is my limitless, unimaginable, incomparable love, love unlike anything else out there.

When you run from me, I still choose to be with you. That is who I am.

If you have a child who did something terrible, and yet you simply cannot bring yourself to punish them, you may have a sense of what the Prophet is trying to communicate.

In our very worst moments, God simply looks at us and seeks not the sinner, the screw-up—God does not see all the damage we have caused or all the disappointment—God simply sees you, his child.

God made you, sustained you, and simply is not going to give up on you.

When we look at the story of Scripture, from Genesis to the Gospels, we see a God whose holiness is full of surprises, constantly amazing us with how much deeper his love is.

How Jesus Shows Us Holiness

Indeed, we keep reading, and we learn that God so loved the world that he came in the form of a baby, the Holy One of Israel, God Immanuel, God with us, as Matthew says. And Jesus continued this work of surprising people with the holy-different love of God.

Jesus did things like touch an unclean woman, but in doing so, he healed her.

Jesus did things like invite the riff-raff of society, the folks the religious leaders saw as disgusting and degenerate—Jesus invited these people over for dinner and ate with them.

And while these things got Jesus in a lot of trouble, we have to look at these stories and ask, if Jesus truly is the holy one, God himself, how are these actions showing us the true meaning of holiness? It is a holiness that is radical compassion. It is a holiness that says, “I am not afraid to get my hands dirty to show you that you are loved.”

And in the most surprising act, Jesus goes to the cross. God incarnate, who came as the messiah of God’s people, chose to come and die on an executioner’s cross.

At the cross, we know God is with us because, God became a godforsaken corpse. The holiness of God was found in the place viewed as the very opposite of God. Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree, one scripture says. God chose to be there in order to say that there is no place God is not with us.

God died in the place of a sinner to say nothing separates us from God.

God’s love binds Godself to our fate, saying, “I love you so much that if you are lost in the death of sin, I will be with you there.” What happens to you happens to me, and that is how I will prove to you what love I have for you. Through this I will show you the hope of resurrection.

Why? Because God is a holy God, different from all our expectations of what God should be.

When we are lost in sin, when we expect God to condemn us, when we deserve nothing less, the holiness of God appears.

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you have heard it before. There once was a woman who said she had visions of Jesus. The bishop of the area heard that one of his older parishioners was claiming to have had visions of Jesus, and so he, quite skeptically, goes to investigate. He tells this woman, “This is how I will know that your visions are authentic: ask Jesus, ‘What were the sins I confessed in my last confession?’” The woman agreed to ask Jesus this.

Sometime later, the woman claimed to have another vision of Jesus, and so the bishop went to investigate. The bishop stepped into her house and said, “Well, did you ask Jesus my question?”

The woman answered, “Oh yes. Come sit.” At this, the bishop grew afraid and sat down trembling. The woman took the bishop’s hand in hers, and said, “I asked Jesus what were your last sins you confessed. And he told me, ‘Tell him that I don’t remember.’”

That is the holiness of Jesus.

In our worst moments, God shows us his best. When we are farthest from God, that is when God chooses to be nearest to us.

Living as a Holy People

And this causes us to ask ourselves: how are we to live out this kind of holiness? God says to be holy as I am holy. How do we do that?

We all know that other version of holiness. Baptists had a rhythm I heard growing up: “We don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, and we don’t date girls who do.” That list of no’s was considered what holiness was, and certainly, there is truth to some of that. There are things that are not good for us. Sure, but if that is all holiness means, we have missed the point.

However, holiness in the way that Hosea witnessed and Jesus modeled has a whole lot more to do with what we are willing to do so that others can know that they are loved by God in the way we have seen in our own lives.

A life of holiness says I have encountered a God who is remarkably there for me and so I am free of the obstacles in myself that keep me from being there for you, even if these obstacles come from my religion.

I realized this one day when I was pastoring in Sudbury. Early on, a friend of mine, an Anglican priest, sat me down for coffee, and he gave me the most astute observation about the city I would learn for my ministry there. “Spencer,” he said, “Sudbury is not an unchurched town. It is a de-churched town.” What he meant by that was simply that most of the people I met in Sudbury had grown up in church or had some bad experience with one of the churches in town. However, as I realized, this meant nearly everyone I met knew what Christianity was basically about but had been burned by a judgmental church or cut loose by a pastor who clearly thought it best to go after less time-consuming sheep.

They knew Jesus, but how Jesus was modeled to them said that God was no different than all the other conditional forms of love in their lives.

I remember talking to one pastor who proudly admitted that he took his holiness so seriously he rarely hung out with non-Christians…hmmm…Well you can imagine churches like that have a lot of people fall through the cracks.

I said to myself, you know this whole game churches have been playing for all these years. It is great at attracting people whose lives are relatively put together, but if we are really going to reach people in need, we have to be different.

I adopted two rules that I felt were necessary to pastor in these parts: one was I believed that the love of God convicts people of sin. I don’t need to condemn folks or finger-wave. Enough Christians have already done that to them and a good deal of people I encountered were much harsher on themselves than I could ever be. So, I would be different. I would let the love of God convict people.

Two, if someone needed help in my town, even if it seemed like they never stepped foot in my church at all, I was going to do my best to help them. Believe it or not, I was criticized for this. One pastor I knew thought that was foolish. You aren’t going to grow the church that way, he said.

One day, I took a few guys to the food bank, and afterward, I invited them out for coffee at the local Tim Hortons. One guy remarked beforehand that he was on new medication, and he just did not feel like himself.

Well, over coffee, our conversations took an unexpected turn. They, one guy started going on about he realized that Snoop Dog is probably named Snoop Dog because he actually looks like a real dog. The other guy found that remark offensive and told him that he did not care for what he said. The first guy kept going, “No, no, no, I am not being racist or anything. I am just saying. He looks like a dog; that’s why he’s called Snoop Dog.”

Before I knew it, a chair was flung across the room, and the two guys were up in each other’s faces, yelling. Meanwhile, the third guy just sat there with a dopey grin on his face. Turns out he was sauced the whole time. To all of this the manager yelled, “Get out, all of you, and don’t come back. You’re banned from here.” She motioned at all of us.

We all walked out. I was stunned and a little bit mad. Did I just get banned from the only coffee shop in town? I turned to the two guys and said, you need to go in there and fix this.

So, they tried to go back in and plead with the manager to unban them. A minute or two went by. The manager came out, looked at me, and motioned that she wanted to speak with me. “So, they tell me you are their pastor.”

Sheepishly, I said, “By God’s grace, I supposed I am.” And I promised her that if I could keep them in check, they could keep coming around.

I remember coming out of that Tim Hortons, a bit annoyed, and looking at those guys. It was that look in their eyes, “Is this it for us? Is this where pastor spencer just says this is too much trouble; I’m going to focus my energies on more deserving folk?”

At that moment, I realized that the witness of holiness for them wasn’t really about whether I was a morally perfect person (which, of course, I am not,) nor was it about all the things I don’t do. In a moment where it seemed quite natural to be mad and storm off, holiness was saying, “I am not going to give up on you.”

God says, “I am God and not like a mortal. I am the Holy One. I choose to be in your midst, not far away. And I have chosen not to come in wrath.”

And so, we who have encountered this love, this holiness, how we will live so that we say with our lives, “I am not perfect, but I have been encountered by a God who sees us all as his children.”

Holiness says I keep messing up, but God is the kind of God that simply does not give up on us.

Holiness says I have ignored God, ran from him, acted like he does not exist, but God is simply the kind of God that chooses to be with us, no matter what.

Holiness says I am here today because God is a God very different than what I expected.

And our message as a holy people is simply this: because God is different, that is why I will not give up on you.

Let’s pray…