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The Heat of God’s Holiness, the Light of God’s Glory
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 18, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 3:13-15; 34:1-10 Acts 4:5-22
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty we sing, but what has God’s holiness to do with our human existence? Once the great cathedrals bowed sinners down in awe before God’s majesty; the liturgy intoned God’s mystery; the host was hid behind the altar, beyond the reach of mortal hands; a saint’s bone offered God’s presence at a glimpse locally. And with every hint of God’s holiness, the people trembled. But for all the right reasons, the Reformers rejected the notion that God’s holiness was mediated only in the church—her sanctuaries, her saints, her priests, her things, her rituals--claiming Christ alone as the mediator of God’s holiness, with the whole world under the sway of God’s sovereignty. No doubt the Reformers, John Calvin in particular, had a keen sense of God’s holiness—God’s otherness, God’s awesome uniqueness, God’s over-against-ness. Jonathan Edwards’ proclamation concerning sinners in the hands of an angry God surely kindled a kind of holy dread among those who assembled on the first day of the week to worship in the colonies. But as the boundaries between secular and sacred vanished, so has our sense of God’s majesty and might, God’s purity and power, God’s mystery and menacing judgment. The heirs of the Reformers have put away all fear and awe of the holy God it seems, in favor of a comfortable familiarity with Jesus. Therefore absent any understanding of God’s holiness, when we read stories like the two before us this morning, we are at a loss. How did it come to be that the God who was known to Moses in a burning bush is now the same God whose presence is a fire that consumes any who come too close? Moreover, what are we to make of Jesus, whom Peter has just confessed to be the Christ, the Son of God, who now burns brightly and blindingly with the glory of the God whom to behold is to die? We would do well, once more, to begin at the beginning…or actually at the end of the first creation story where the word holy first appears. God “blessed the seventh day and hallowed it,” we read. God made the day holy in that God separated the seventh day from the rest of time. On the first six days, the focus is “on creation in all of its complexity, the realm of the profane. But on the seventh day, no act of creation takes place,” notes Old Testament scholar Thomas Dozeman. “The focus instead is on God who is described as resting in the divine realm, prompting worship (sacred activity) in the human realm.” Though Dozeman makes another point that, in the turn of a page, will be forgotten by Israel: “Holiness” he says, “is only introduced on the seventh day as a moment in time, not as an object within creation.” Nevertheless, we turn the page to find that the nature of this separation between God and humans is played out in two ways: first in the separation of the sacred from the profane, of God’s eternity from our mortality, in the division between what makes God, God…and what makes us human, finite; second in the separation of the pure (which is life, health, wholeness, order and peace) and the impure (which begins with Abel’s blood spilt on the ground but soon encompasses all manner of disease, decay, disorder and violence). Now when the one comes close to the other—when the profane approaches the sacred without regulation or when the impure threatens to contaminate the pure--the meeting is volatile and dangerous. It seems that God’s holiness, paradoxically, can either kill us or heal us! Therefore fear and awe are often the words used to describe the Israelites’ response to God. “The volatile nature of holiness” Dozeman concludes, “makes clear that…confessions such as ‘Immanuel’ (“God with us”) or ‘Yahweh, the Holy One in our midst,’ are filled with unresolved tension, giving rise,” says Dozeman, to the central theme of [Scripture, namely]: How is God able to overcome the separation inherent in holiness, take up residency on earth, and renew the world, without destroying human beings?” It is surely the question that that dominates the book of Exodus. Take slavery in the land of Egypt. Seen through the lens of God’s holiness, slavery is a profanity that is “incompatible with divine holiness, making any contact between [God] and the land [of slavery] violent.” Hence the plagues! Or take God’s presence in the wilderness. The place on earth where the holy God comes close, though only as close as the summit of the highest mountain, is Sinai. Here Moses alone is allowed to approach God’s presence, to receive God’s words, to record the laws given to purify the relationship. Yet it the people come too close to this volcanic Presence, they will die. Still, because holiness has also to do with beauty and because mortals were made for God--are restless until they rest on the seventh day in God--the question of God’s proximate dwelling to human beings upon the earth without destroying them remains. We turn the page and read of the solution: a sanctuary! “Have them make me a sanctuary,” God says to Moses, “so that I may dwell among them.” The Israelites do precisely that, constructing what sounds like a little bit of heaven on earth so that God may enter in. After a few fits and starts, the sanctuary is complete, the law is placed within the holy of holies, and the cloud of God’s presence descends, “covering the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle”: God-in-residence! Problem solved? Not quite, for as soon as God’s presence descends, a greater problem surfaces in the next sentence: Now Moses, even Moses, is not able to enter the tent of meeting. “Thus,” says Dozeman, “the book of Exodus ends with a paradox. [For] what good is the residency of God on earth if human beings are not able to access the healing power of holiness?” We turn the page again only to encounter, stage right, the priests…holy men! Separated from the people, they are chosen by God not because of some special gift or quality [or I daresay body part!]; rather they are chosen arbitrarily for the purpose of mediating God’s holiness. Their power and authority reside not in themselves, but in the vestments they put on and in the rituals they rightly perform, so that the meeting between God and mortals heals rather than kills. Leviticus is their operating manual, a book filled with precise instructions on how to manage this dangerous boundary where the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure come close. God must at all costs, you see, be quarantined from the impurity of the people and the profanity of mortal existence, lest we die or God goes away for good. But here is the rub: eventually in Rome as in ancient Israel, in Mecca as on the Dome of the Rock, human beings mistake the holy things, the holy rituals, the holy people, the holy places, for the One who alone is holy. “I abhor your feasts and holy days,” roars God from God’s high and holy distance through the prophets of every age. “Is this not the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” Dwelling at a distance from God’s address, strangers one and all to the Scriptures, we do not hear. And so the question comes round again: Will God ever overcome the separation inherent in holiness, take up residency on earth, and renew the world, without destroying human beings?” Turn the page. In fact, turn a few hundred pages until you come to the scandalous claim of the apostle Paul that God was in Christ: that the holy One has come to dwell in mortal flesh; that the child born of a virgin pure has grown up to dine among the impure, among tax collectors and sinners; that the Son who is eternal with the Father has consented to die! The incarnation is inconceivably scandalous to God’s holiness. In fact he was crucified, notes theologian Paul Minear, “because he seemed to be the enemy of holy places (like Jerusalem and the Temple) and holy times (like the Sabbath and the festivals) and holy things (like ‘clean foods and dishes’).” What has God’s holiness to do with our human existence? In Jesus Christ God has assumed even and especially the impure and profane as God’s own. In him “God’s holiness is now not simply identified as that which distances God from us: rather, God is holy precisely as the one who in majesty and freedom and sovereign power bends down to us in mercy.” [John Webster, Holiness] It is a bending that would breed a familiarity in those closest to him, save for this haunting scene on another high and holy mountain where we are told that Jesus was transfigured. His face, says Matthew, shone like the sun, his clothes became dazzling white, Moses and Elijah (representing the law and the prophets) appear and talk with him who fulfills both by his self-emptying love. Curiously, Peter is not cowered in the least by the scene, but cavalierly joins the conversation with the aplomb of Nadab and Abihu at the foot of Sinai. However while Peter is still talking, God speaks from out of the cloud, just as God had spoken to the Israelites at Sinai. The disciples fall to the ground, overcome with fear--no doubt expecting to be struck dead by the dangerous and volatile holiness of God’s address. But Jesus came, writes Matthew [Jesus bent down, we imagine] and touched them [they did not die!] saying, “Rise and do not be afraid.” Mediating God’s power in weakness, God’s eternity in a moment in time, God’s purity in the impurity of a human body, God in Jesus Christ has come to us too, has quit the distance forever, has redeemed our mortal lives from death that God may dwell with us and we with God eternally. Therefore on first day of week, on the day set apart at Christ’s resurrection as a moment in time to be hallowed, we assemble in the presence of the God who in majesty and freedom and sovereign power has first bent down to us. In the light of his glory, his touch having calmed our fears, we find that the old operating instructions do not avail. We offer up an improvised and inchoate awe as creatures who know only enough to come into his presence with singing. “We have confessed, in a low, distinct murmur, our sins; we have become the people broken, and then the people made whole by our reluctant assent to the…proclamation of God’s mercy. Now, as usual” notes Annie Dillard, “we will, in the stillest voice, stunned, repeat the Sanctus, repeat why it is that we have come:
God of power and might, Heaven and earth are full of your glory…” |