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…