Apart from the Crowd

"Apart from the Crowd"--February 6, 2017

"For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.  For this is the will of God, your sanctification...." [1 Thessalonians 4:2-3a]

Lord, have mercy.  More churchy jargon:  sanctification. 

Honestly, it is hard to get excited or passionate about words that end with "-ication," isn't it?  They tend to sound either like bureaucratic quagmires or medical procedures, rather than something you would choose to sign up for (phrases like "application for identification" or "double indemnification" come to mind, along with "innoculation," "vaccination," "intravenous medication," and a host of others).  Whatever "sanctification" really is, it sounds sterile and rather passive--like it is something done to you, something you undergo, perhaps something that someone else has to wear latex gloves for or which will require you to sit on that exam room seat covered with white butcher paper from a roll.  And let's be honest, that is not a very pleasant place to spend much time. It's not really a very comforting picture of God the Great Physician, either.

We are learning this month to learn to ask a new question, "What does God want for us?" rather than our culture's self-absorbed question, "What do I want... and how do I get it?"  But at first blush, we may find ourselves asking, "Why should I care that God's will for me is some dry-sounding abstract concept called sanctification?" So maybe we need to rescue the word "sanctification" and see why Paul thinks it is not only our homework at the present, but also God's mission to accomplish in us at the same time--and why any of it matters.

First of all, sanctification is an attempt to say in a single word, "when God makes you holy."  Well, most of those words are more familiar to us, and at least have fewer syllables, and perhaps also less sterility to them.  But there's still that alien word holy there that we don't quite know what to do with.  What does it mean to be "made holy," and is it something worth being passionate about, something to want and to long for and to work toward, or just something God requires to stand the sight of us, like heaven is some hoity-toity restaurant in the clouds with a requirement to wear suit jackets to get inside?

Usually conversations about the Biblical idea of "holiness" begin with notion of being "set apart" or "special."  But granted, even that by itself can sound stuffy or starchy or elitist.  After all, your grandmother probably had a set of "good dishes" that were set apart for special occasions, but which spent most of the year gathering dust in the hutch, and which probably seemed so fragile and delicate that you were afraid to eat a good meal on them for fear you might ruin the floral pattern or break a dish.  If that's our picture of "being holy," like we are all God's special-occasion-china, kept from danger at the cost of missing the day-in, day-out moments of earthy, ordinary joy, well, then I can completely understand why we might not be very eager for God to make us holy in that sense. 

The other common way we talk about being "holy" or "set apart" is in the negative "holier-than-thou" sense where people put themselves above others, and we are pretty sure that's not what we're after, either.  Jesus, after all, was known as "the Holy One of God" (Mark 1:24), and yet he got quite a reputation for hanging out with the riff-raff and inviting himself over to dinner with unsavory sinners and sell-outs. 

Neither the fragile-as-good-china sense nor the aloof-arrogance picture of holiness will do for us.  And frankly, neither of those seems much worth God's investment of time and energy to bring about in us.  If that's what it means to be made holy, it seems hard to imagine that being God's will for us--at least the God we know in Jesus, at any rate.

And maybe, as is so often the case, Jesus is the key.

Jesus, after all, really was and is (and will be) holy.  So whatever it means to be holy, Jesus can still be it, even while he is eating with Zacchaeus, Levi, and the rest of the tax collectors in town, or while he is washing grimy, dirty feet, or while he is raising a glass of wine to toast a wedding in Cana, or while his clothes smelled like seaweed and fish after a day with Peter and Andrew. Jesus can be holy when he is laughing it up at a party, and when he is falling to his knees in the mud weeping in the graveyard over his dead friend Lazarus.  Jesus can be holy when he is lobbing sly attacks at the pompous blowhard puppet ruler Herod (as he does in Luke 13:32, among other places). Jesus can be holy making mud with his own spit to heal a man's blindness. And Jesus was holy, too, as he touched contagious lepers to make them well and let them be reunited with their families and villages, too--even though the clear wisdom of the day said, "There are just some people you don't let into your community because they might endanger us all!" 

Apparently, being holy does not mean being taken out of the beautiful ordinariness of life, nor being sterilized and set on the shelf to collect dust in order to keep us from "the world." Being holy doesn't even mean you stay away from people labeled "sinner" or "outcast" or "potentially dangerous." Jesus never shied away from those encounters--and if anything, that was part of what made him "holy". In fact, maybe we could try substituting "being like Jesus" for the more daunting and impersonal "sanctification," and see if it helps us make sense of this verse better.

"For this is the will of God... that you be made to be like Jesus..."  Yeah, that does have a certain ring to it.  That makes sense--and that is a mission you could see God getting invested in, couldn't you?  That seems like something God would care about and would will for us, so that we might have the same beautiful, compelling, blessed strangeness that made Jesus stand out from a crowd precisely by the way he could be with people in the crowd. 

That is what God is after among us--to transform us to be people who live as truthfully, faithfully, graciously, generously, and courageously as Jesus.  That is the kind of life I want to lead--the good news today is that God has the same goal in mind for us, too. God is making us holy--making us to stand out from a crowd precisely by the way we are with the people in the crowd.

Good Lord, do your work on us and in us, so that we may be transformed into the likeness of Jesus.