Springwood Presbyterian Church: Whitsett, NC

The Assyrians had made war on Judah for 8 years when King Uzziah suddenly died, leaving the country in a time of chaos, of transition—you might call it an interim period!  The people needed encouragement from God’s prophet, and the prophet needed God’s encouragement to speak to the people on God’s behalf.

Isaiah 6: 1-8

Peter, James and John weren’t strangers to Jesus, since he’d lived his whole life in Galilee before beginning his ministry.

Luke 5: 1-11                                                                                                   2-28-10

Holey, Whole, Holy

“Holy, Holy, Holy!  Lord God Almighty!”, Isaiah trembled in his sandals overhearing the seraphs praise God.  The dictionary defines “holy” as characterized by perfection and transcendence.”  Do you expect—even hope--to meet the Holy when you come to church?  Annie Dillard writes that when we go to church, we should wear crash helmets, be given life preservers, and be lashed to the pews, in case God does show up!  [“Teaching a Stone to Talk”]  Isaiah’s vision is as terrifying as the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile: the foundations shaking, the air filled with smoke.    I wonder if we want that much holiness!

Peter marveled at Jesus’ power—a power that could only come from God—and he wanted to be anywhere but where Jesus was.  It was too frightening to be a sinful man in the presence of the Divine.  Only when Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid”, could Peter follow him. 

Isaiah saw God—high and lifted up, perfect in all things, far away, far too wonderful for human eyes to look at, so whole, so complete--and was overwhelmed with grief at the comparison to his own imperfection and sinfulness.  He felt totally unworthy of serving God, until God’s forgiveness set him free.  Then, he was eager and ready to do whatever God needed him to do, no questions asked.  Here I am, send me!

Only God is truly holy.  But we have a claim to a lesser holiness, because God takes what we are, and wants to help us be what we can be.  And what we can be is also holy—“saints”, you see.

The English word “holy” comes from the word “whole” [w-h-o-l-e] in the sense of “healthy, unhurt, free from wounds or injuries.”  God’s creation was good: complete and whole and healthy, until sin brought disorder, dis-ease, and brokenness into human life.  Ever since, God has been trying to lead us back to wholeness—and holiness.

Like Isaiah and Peter, we may see no way to be whole--certainly not holy.  We and our world are broken in so many ways.  A while back, I saw a collage at one of Greensboro’s public libraries, and the images have stuck with me.  Elementary school children from an afterschool program at one community center were asked to draw their neighborhood.  There were pictures of broken sidewalks, broken windows, and one, captioned “bad guys shooting.”  The only happy picture was called “me, jumping rope.” 

Even when we live in safe clean places, there’s brokenness in our lives.  Personally, we may be unsure about the meaning of our lives; troubled with bad habits; suffering feelings of unworthiness; with uneasy relationships with family and friends.  The world beyond is broken.  According to today’s News and Record, we’ve lost faith in our leaders, in the willingness of industry to produce safe goods for us to purchase, in the ability of the economy to bounce back.  Large numbers of people in Burlington and Greensboro call the streets home.  One fifth of our nation’s children go to bed hungry.  Guilford County has a particularly high number of folks receiving emergency food aid at this time.  We could just throw up our hands and give up.  But that’s not the answer if we have faith even as big as a mustard seed.

Perhaps we need an encounter with the Living God to shake us up, transform us, heal us, and bring us into God’s circle of holiness.  Perhaps that would help us recognize the holy in all things—even in ourselves.  But be warned: expect to be changed, just as Isaiah was changed and empowered to speak for God to a troubled country—as Peter was changed from a simple fisherman to be able to follow that strange, nonconformist teacher.  If you are willing to be changed from just rocking along in your faith, strap on your crash helmet, grab a life preserver, immerse yourself in God’s word in scripture, and ask what God, through a particular passage, is asking of you.  Soak yourself in prayer, opening your heart to listen to God’s words of comfort and words of challenge.  Hear and receive God’s forgiveness of you, freeing you from the paralyzing guilt about sin and freeing you to follow Jesus.  For us, forgiveness comes not by a burning coal on our lips, but by hearing the good news of God’s great love for the world—the news that God intends to heal the world through Jesus Christ. 

The best news about this good news is that it’s not just for us.  Spiritual healing prepares us to partner with God in moving the world toward health and wholeness.

That’s what John Calvin did.  During his many years in Geneva—preaching, teaching, and writing, developing and fine-tuning the doctrines that are now hallmarks of the Presbyterian Church—he was as much concerned with the physical soundness of Geneva and its citizens as with its spiritual health.  Geneva was like every other city in the 1500’s--a pretty crummy place to live: unsafe, unsanitary, unwholesome.  Under Calvin’s direction, the city government established practical—and very progressive--health and safety regulations: fires were permitted only in rooms with chimneys; chimneys were to be cleaned regularly for safety; the city provided latrines for homes without them so waste would no longer be thrown into the streets; railings were required for balconies so children wouldn’t fall off.  Calvin prompted the city council to set up a cloth manufacturing industry to provide work for the unemployed: to give them a living, but even more important, to restore to them their sense of worthiness and wholeness.  To be holy is to be physically and spiritually whole.  God’s good news of forgiveness and healing is for every area of our lives. 

As heirs of Calvin’s theology and practice, we Presbyterians have a long history of working for justice and healing in society as well as in individuals.  We look beyond ourselves, to the needs of others in society—because we’re concerned when some of our neighbors are drowning under unregulated credit card rates, when others don’t get needed medical help because they can’t afford to pay for it, when many in Haiti and Chile are dead and thousands more are  displaced and hurt and hungry.  What John Calvin modeled in Geneva, and what we can do here is seek holiness—not a halo of sainthood for our own glory, but wholeness and health, spiritual and physical, for all people and for the earth, for the glory of God and for the sake of Jesus.  Can you envision that world?   

We are a holy people, despite our imperfections, our sins, our brokenness—because we are God’s people—created by God in God’s own image.  The apostle Paul called us “temples of the Holy Spirit.”  Yes, we should claim our holiness, because another definition of “holy” is “belonging to, or coming from, God.” 

We belong to God because God will not let us go.  God ceaselessly calls to the holiness within us—to the image of God within us—calls it to come out into the open, into the light.

Frederick Buechner says that “It is in Jesus…and in the people whose lives have been deeply touched by [him], that we see another way of being human…the way of wholeness.  All his life long, wherever Jesus looked, he saw the world, not in terms of its brokenness … but [rather] in terms of the ultimate mystery of God’s presence buried in it like a treasure buried in a field—the wholest and realest part of reality.” 

To be whole is to see the world like that.  And to be whole is to work for the world’s wholeness, in partnership with God, wherever we see pain and brokenness.  Join God in visiting a lonely neighbor or tutoring a third-grader who’s having trouble in school or graciously serving a hungry person at the soup kitchen.  Pray fiercely for others, collect food for Urban Ministry, contribute a little more for outreach.  Look to Jesus for  patience with people who annoy the dickens out of us.  In each person, see not only the visible brokenness, but also—and more importantly—the hidden kingdom of God—the holiness that God places within everyone and everything that God creates.

Keep looking to Jesus Christ for forgiveness and healing—and for his vision of wholeness and holiness that leads us to say, Here I am—send me!