A Line in the Sand

Today I went to worship at Ocean View UMC with my wife and two of our children. We are on vacation here at Oak Island, NC, and we go to Oceanview each year when we are here. Being on vacation is a great opportunity to visit another church. Being United Methodist, I find comfort in getting into a new the town and seeing the cross and flame on a sign or a church building. It's kinda like a beacon for me, guiding me, and also reminding me of the beautiful aspects of our connectionalism. So going on vacation shouldn't be a time to skip church. What a wonderful chance to get to worship with some extended family that we don't know yet, but we will be spending eternity with!

Being a pastor on vacation is a great opportunity to worship with my family, and extended family, in the pews rather than the pulpit for once. I get to sing the hymns with the rest of the body, and receive the sacrament of Holy Communion with my wife, being served by others as I reminded that, "in the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven", and that the body and blood of Christ were given for me.

The preacher today was preaching a series on "Revival" from a book by United Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton. Today's topic was on holiness, and the Scripture was 1 Peter 1:15-16. Here is that passage:

But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”

 I love to read, and each year I bring a book or two to read while sitting on the beach. This year, ironically, I brought a book by Ken Collins, entitled, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love & the Shape of Grace. In the book Collins outlines the major themes of our faith, and Wesley's views on them, and how his views were shaped by others.

One chapter is on sanctification, or Christian perfection.
For Wesley, we are called to grow and mature in our Christian faith, we are not supposed to stay static in our faith. Once we are saved and ask for forgiveness of our sins and accept Jesus as our Lord and savior, we experience a new birth (aka "born again") and we are justified by the grace of God through faith in Jesus. As we mature into the faith we profess we are being sanctified by the grace of God.
It is a process of Christian perfection, growing in holiness. In fact, at the moment of our salvation, we are made holy before a perfect, holy, and loving God by believing in and trusting in Jesus, through the working of the Holy Spirit in us. That's a lot happening!
In 1776 Wesley wrote

"It is impossible that any retain what they receive without improving it. To use the grace given is the certain way to obtain more grace. To use all the faith you have will bring an increase of faith"

So then we are holy.
You are holy.
We don't like to use that term often, especially when we talk about ourselves. I have even heard born again Christians use terms like "sinner" to describe themselves.
Wesley would have been abhorred by this.
You have been created in the image of God. Jesus died for your sins to bring you into right relationship with God. You have asked Jesus to be the Lord of you life...and you call yourself a sinner?
Sure, that's who you were. That's who we all were. That's part of the whole "original sin" (I will write a post on that later). We need a savior, and we have one!
We were once lost, but now we are found. Blind, but now we see. Sinner, and now....saint...holy.

And yet we still sin at times. But the growing in sanctification, this process that is leading us toward Christian perfection, should be a sign of who we are. No, it should be a sign of WHOSE we are!
We are CHRISTians. We are, perhaps, the only glimpse of the goodness of God that some people might see today.
And He is holy.
And in the scripture referenced above Peter is reciting a passage from Leviticus, that God calls His people to be holy because we are His and He is holy. So the Holy Spirit is at work in us, making us holy.
Not  sinless. Although how we sin should be ever decreasing outwardly and more aware inwardly.

"Absolute perfection belongs not to man, nor to angels, but to God alone"- John Wesley

The long and short of all this is that we are called to be holy, and this means that we are being perfected in Holy Love. This is because God is love, and love is how we are showing God to the world around us.

I think sometimes we just don't do a good job showing love because of our differences. Rupert Meldinius, a German Lutheran theologian of the early 17th century, is attributed a quote that Wesley surely agreed with:

"In essentials unity. In non-essentials liberty".

I think we struggle in our own sanctification, in the growing in this holy love, because we have drawn too many lines in the sand.

 My daughter Hannah found this line in the sand today, and then she added these two words for me:
Sacred
Secular

I wonder how definitive that line is. I absolutely agree that there is a line between "lost" and "found", to use parable words of Jesus.
But I wonder if the line between what is deemed "holy", or sacred, and what is not, is more of our own making? Is the line exactly where we think it is? Or have we made the line ourselves?

I am not saying everything is holy. Sin is obviously not. I am just saying that maybe we can look for the holy in places where we might not have thought to. Maybe Jesus is at work in some unique places today. After all, He has been known to do that. And in so doing maybe He is making things and places holy because He is there.

I heard once that Jesus did not live in the "Holy Land", but rather Jesus made the "Land Holy" because He was there.

Maybe we can't drag people across the line in the sand from secular to the sacred. But maybe we can take some sacred across the line into their secular.

And maybe that is where holiness begins.