The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

The scriptures this morning seem to have a couple gotchas in them. In Leviticus, which is pretty much a mirror and unpacking of the Ten Commandments, we hear the injunction, the commandment, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy”. And if that is not enough to bring us up short on a Sunday morning, we also hear Jesus say in his Sermon on the Mount, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

The question for this day for each of us and for the church is “How are you doing on that perfection and holiness thing? How is it going for you? Feel like you are on top of it?”

Or do you prefer to pretty much ignore it, because in your heart of hearts you know, “Its just not gonna happen. No way can I live up to that. No way. So thank you very much, I think I will just get on with my day, get on with my life, doing the best I can day-by-day.”

Let me see if I can help a bit here. I think most of us tend to hear these words from a punitive God, pointing his finger at us and saying, “You shall be holy, you shall be perfect!” We hear it as an imperative, as a command with a built in failure waiting for us.

We know that we are not going to be a Mother Theresa, or a Desmond Tutu, or a Billy Graham, or any of the giants in the faith. Although, truth be told, none of them reached full perfection in God’s holiness either.

One of my icons of holiness has been Mark Dyer, our former bishop. He has lived as intentionally close to God and God’s way as any living being that I have known. And I have loved him for it. But because I lived with him and worked him, I know that he would fail any perfection test. He is a living, believing, doing the best I know how, mortal human being with personal flaws and blindness just like all the rest of us, including Mother Theresa and all the holy band of holy saints.

Even St. Paul said in Philippians 3 writing about this call, “¹Beloved, I do not reckon to have got hold of it yet; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

And that is living in the holiness and perfection that we know as God, and which has been shown to us in Jesus who calls us.

How about if we hear these words as St. Paul did, “If you try to love your God with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor and yourself, you will be living a Godly life, you will be living in the reign of God, the kingdom right here, right now. And you shall be holy in the way your Lord God is holy. And you shall be working toward being perfect in the way your heavenly father is perfect.”

And you shall be witnessing to the world that it is God’s world, and God is present and available in it to all God’s people no matter who they are or where they are or who they have been or where they have been. This is God’s world and they, too, can live in God’s holiness and be nurtured in God’s way.

See, this is about simple things, about how we live daily, how we align our lives with God’s way daily, how we witness in God’s world to God’s world day in and day out. Here is an example of living that way from social media about Valentine’s Day.

The man brought the three cards, the three boxes of candy, and the three sets of flowers up to the cashier for checkout. The cashier rolled her eyes at him as she looked at his wedding band and mumbled..."these guys make me sick." This caused everyone else to look at the man funny too. So the man responded..."one set is for my mom because my dad passed away and he used to do this for my mom...and he taught me how to give love. The next set is for my wife because I love her and she teaches me how to receive and treasure love. And the last set is for my daughter...because it's up to me to teach her how she should be treated and who she should give her love to. Have a blessed day."

A little slice of daily life. A little window into God’s kingdom in the here and now. A little peek at God’s holiness alive and walking around and being true to himself and to God’s self. Being willing to stand up, speak up, and witness in just a little thing to the way God calls us to live.

God knows us. God knows true perfection is not an option. It’s not going to happen. Pure holiness is beyond almost all of us mortals. And yet God still loves us and seeks us. Jesus still loves us and calls us. The world still needs us and our love.

What is happening here is that we are being asked to take stock of our lives, not always an easy thing. We are being invited to go deep, looking in, under, around and through each aspect of our lives, asking honest questions about how we live and care for ourselves and those we love and those we live with, as we exercise our gifts and powers, as we share our love.

God does not stop the process of creating and redeeming us. The Holy Spirit is ever at work in a process some call sanctification, others call it, formation. The Spirit’s task is to unify, integrate, heal, strengthen, equip, renew us.  And that’s the work God asks us to actively take on.

And in the words of author, Anne Lamott, God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – God is militantly and maternally on our side. Calling us, urging us, leading us, encouraging us, and empowering us to live in God’s way, to live in God’s reign here and now, to work toward being the person God made us to be, perfect in God’s sight, and to be signs of God’s love to a hurting world, to bring a little holiness wherever we go; and that we can certainly do.