Earlier today, I began thinking about holiness as a missional chategory. That is, holiness is less about avoiding sin than it is about offering and representing God.
Now, I want to expand a bit on what I meant.
If I'm privileging welcome and compassion over purity (which was where I was heading earlier), where does that leave spiritual formation? As someone trained in moral theology, this isn't a minor question for me. It's also not just an academic one; as a parish priest whose responsibilities lay in preaching, pastoral care and spiritual direction, it's at the heart of who I am and what I do. Where are Christian virtues modeled, practiced, and acquired? Where is saintliness and sanctity promoted, even expected? How am I to understand the Christian spiritual life if I'm right about this? How does holiness fit into being missional?
The first that comes to mind with this question is an important foundation. The people I tend to hold up as Christian exemplars -- people who show the radical kindness of Jesus -- are very often people of great holiness and sanctity. People of worship, prayer, moral discipline, and religious observance. I'm thinking here of people like Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, St Francis, Jean Vanier, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I'm thinking of the people at church: The most hospitable are often the most holy.
Most specifically, I'm thinking of God in Jesus Christ.
This afternoon, I've been thinking about 1 Corinthians 13 as a window into God's heart. And I'm struck by a line from it: "Love keeps no record of wrongs". Talk about kindness!
And then I think how often we shun sinners and exclude those unlike ourselves. We're good at keeping records -- detailed accounts -- of others' sins. Church stories are often filled with judgments about what's appropriate and what's not. About who can be "in" and who must be "out". About fault-finding and knit-picking. They're so common, in fact, I don't think it's necessary to offer any examples from my experience.
So what's the trick? How are we to pursue holiness in a way that makes us more hospitable rather than less?
I think a part of the trick is this: Holiness is a first-person rather than a third-person enterprise. Holiness is a personal rather than public affair.
Isn't this what Jesus was saying when he said don't worry about the speck in your sister's eye but attend to the beam in your own? Isn't Jesus saying that holiness is a first-person issue rather than a third-person issue? That holiness is about me and not about you? Just think Matthew 5-7 here for a minute.
When holiness becomes a third-person affair we end up as the moral police. We end up judging the behavior of everyone else. I think this is the root of the problem with the Christian culture wars. Across wide swaths of evangelical Christianity there is third-person finger wagging about the decline of values and morals in the larger culture. Christians become moral police and holiness Nazis. (Kind of like Seinfeld's "soup nazi" on moral steroids.)
In Matthew 5-7, I think Jesus preached that holiness is a first-person, private, and closeted affair. Holiness is for you, not your neighbor. And what's the goal of all that holiness? I'd phrase it this way: Holiness is personal training for hospitality.
What's more, I think this is the wisdom written into the very Holiness Code of Leviticus and the moral training of Deuteronomy. In the OT, I think the laws aren't universal; they're particular to that group of folks God has commissioned to represent God to the world. In other words, all those laws are about Israel's mission is relation to its hospitality to the poor, widows, orphans and foreigners. That, it seems to me at least, is the interpretation of Deuteronomy found in the prophetic traditions of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and the like. (Amos 5, anyone?)
I recently started an exercise regimen, so I can't help but think of holiness as a lifestyle-change. Holiness is about becoming a particular kind of person. One who represents God in kindness and hospitality to everyone.
The trouble is, to keep with the work-out metaphor, for most of Christianity holiness has become a spectator sport rather than a regimen of personal fitness.
Discipleship has taken a rather objective turn. Being Christian these days is about checking certain intellectual boxes of affirmation -- "believing" the "right" things. And less about being Jesus to the world. Which I think ultimately perverts the Gospel.
So this is what I think is a piece of the puzzle in negotiating the relationship between holiness and hospitality. Is holiness a first-person or a third-person effort? If we take Jesus in Matthew 5-7 seriously, holiness is first-person effort. Holiness shouldn't be moral blood sport, a spectator sport of moral finger wagging at the culture. Holiness should be a matter of personal training and fitness.
Think, then, how this reframes arguments around those hot-button cultural arguments of homosexuality and abortion. Think how this reshapes an understanding of being church.
For starters, hospitality becomes the community's way of exercising its holiness. Instead of judging and shuning those we deem "sinners", we become actively engaged in standing with them. This is the point I was making in saying ministry is the act of siding with the "losers".
Holiness and hospitality both have a self-emptying quality to them, a dying to self. Think Philippians 2 here (and read that "you" as a plural!). The barriers to my own holiness are less the "big" things, the deeds, but much more the little sell-outs, this self that refuses to die. It would seem that something similar happens with the community, that the turn to hospitality is that dying to the self, the letting go of our own institutional or communal narratives. It does seem as if the two, this personal dying to self, and the openness of the community are manifestations of the same, and so reinforce one another (I mean, really, what's the point of dying to self if it only ends up in a cell in the desert? That's a part of the monastic tradition we don't seem to appreciate in Protestantism.)
This, I think, is the direction Bonhoeffer was pointing in his Cost of Discipleship. So I have to say none of this is all that new with me. But that's for another day.