Last year I posted three sets of thoughts on this topic -- one, two, three -- and am probably done with the subject for general consumption. However, I still have some thoughts from the perspective of my tribe: the "holiness people" associated with the Church of the Nazarene.
I was introduced to Mildred Bangs Wynkoop's book The Theology of Love in the late 1990s. It was a breath of fresh air to me. I was just discovering new ideas from outside the bubble I had been raised in, where holiness preaching promised freedom from sin and, yet, often produced people who could be described as "mean-spirited."
I have told the story before of following one of the premiere holiness preachers of my teen years through a cafeteria lunch line and listening to him speak in an irritated, devaluing tone to the young lady working there because the food he wanted was not available. I had noticed a frequent discrepancy between the preaching and the living but thought maybe I just had yet to find a prime example of sanctification. But if this beloved holiness preacher wasn't sanctified to the level of his own preaching, who was? Surely sanctification ought to, at a minimum, generate enough grace and mercy to be kind to a young cafeteria worker who obviously had no control over the menu or the food on hand.
The simplistic answer to this issue is that even sanctified people are still human and get tired and grumpy. Grumpiness is not a sin, it's just grumpiness -- a human response to fatigue and the irritations of life. Grumpy people sometimes direct their irritation toward the wrong people. It's no big deal.
Ok, but, then, what DOES sanctification do for us? The most frequent answer I’ve heard is that it gives us power to refrain from sinning. What is sin? John Wesley famously defined sin as "a voluntary transgression of a known law of God." What known law of God? Again, the easy answer is: "Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Honor thy father and thy mother." You know, the Ten Commandments. (This is the answer Jesus gave the young man who asked about inheriting eternal life in Luke 18:18-23, although I'm pretty sure he didn't use King James English in his response. 😁)
Still, as I observed in the first three posts on this subject, pagans often do better than that. They may break some of the Ten Commandments, but they often excel at "love your neighbor as yourself," which Jesus called, along with loving God, the greatest commandment.
Wynkoop defines holiness as love. And there is actually more to the Wesley quote above. In full it says: "Nothing is sin, strictly speaking, but a voluntary transgression of a known law of God. Therefore, every voluntary breach of the law of love is sin; and nothing else, if we speak properly." (Emphasis added.)
“Love is patient. Love is kind” (1 Corinthians 4:8).
If holiness doesn't make us patient and kind, what good is it? If we don't count impatience and unkindness as "sin," are we true Wesleyans? Aren't these breaches of the law of love? Are all examples of impatience and unkindness in holiness people involuntary and unavoidable, therefore not sin? If so, I ask again, what DOES sanctification do for us? If it's not powerful enough to enable a gracious response to something as trivial as a disappointing cafeteria lunch selection, why bother?
I can't get past the definition I grew up with. Holiness as I heard it preached always seemed to mean following a list of rules: being religious in appearance, doing religious things, keeping oneself clean by avoiding the moral dirt around us. Sanctification was something we could get in a moment and then perfect over a lifetime, having had our sinful nature eradicated and being made pure. I sought that experience for years with growing despair.
Jesus didn't live a life of religious piety that prompted him to move away from people. He was kind to the hurting. He touched the unclean. He hung out with the wrong sort of people. He wasn't afraid of getting dirty. As Rebecca Pippert Manley wrote in Out of the Saltshaker, "It is a profound irony that the Son of God visited this planet and one of the chief complaints against him was that he was not religious enough." Not that he wasn't loving enough. He wasn't "holy" enough.
Holiness, as I have traditionally heard it defined generates a religion long on piety and short on love and compassion toward those who most need it. I try to align the definition of holiness as deeper love and compassion with the messages I've heard, but it doesn't seem to fit. One moves toward broken people, the other maintains a distance from them in order to stay pure.
In my life, I have had to leave traditional holiness preaching behind in order to embrace holiness as love. The first thing I had to do was open the door to the idea that I am not even close to living a sinless life by John Wesley's definition of sin. I am not always kind or patient. Sometimes I am just plain mean. Or grumpy. By choice. (If not a choice in the moment, sometimes a choice in not recognizing and working to avoid my triggers.) I truly dislike some people. It's not a case of "love them but don't like them." The truth is, I don't love them. More, I don't want to love them. In fact, I would be just fine with God smiting them -- just a little. Enough to knock them off their high horse. My love and mercy are far from perfect.
That's not where I want to stay, but it is where I sometimes find myself. In order to move forward, I need to accept that lack of achievement in myself and truly rely on God's grace as a compassionate and merciful God. I don't measure up. I have never measured up. But I am loved by the God who created me, sees and accepts my every blemish, and every day nudges me another step forward. I have not arrived, but by the grace of God, I think I may be making progress.
I like the parallel passages from Matthew's "Sermon on the Mount" and Luke's "Sermon on the Plain." In Matthew 5:48 Jesus says, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." In Luke 6:36 he says, "Be merciful, just as as your Father is merciful" I have heard people explain that "perfect" in Matthew doesn't actually mean perfect, as in flawless. Rather it means completely able to serve a purpose. A perfect tool isn't flawless; but it is completely able to do what it's intended to do. Once again, we're back to the idea of personal qualifications. But what if the goal of a "perfect" life is unwavering mercy toward others? What if that is a goal we always and forever pursue rather than a state we can achieve and then retire from the race? I will admit that the idea of always finding a new goal toward which to strive appeals to me. Every time I finally manage to develop compassion toward one person or group of people, I discover another blind spot I need to work on. I wonder if that old holiness preacher was actively nurturing greater compassion in his heart for the young people serving him in a long string of campground cafeterias. I wonder how often he was able to see them and love them and if he was working on doing it more and better today than yesterday. (For all I know, he may have later apologized to the teen girl in the cafeteria for his irritation.)
The truth is, I fully believe in "heart holiness." I believe God can transform us into people whose primary goal in life is to show love and compassion to all we encounter and who accept every failure to do so as falling into the same category as stealing (from the other person's self-worth), murdering (the sense of value within them that needs to be kept alive and nurtured), and coveting (wanting the self-centered careless life we think others enjoy). It's only when we fully embrace Jesus' call to show compassion and mercy to others that we can see how far we have to go and anticipate moving steadily in that direction.
There is no endpoint for spiritual growth. Maybe someday, with enough perseverance, I can catch up with my "sinner" friends who are entering the kingdom ahead of me. (See Matthew 21:31) That would be a wonderful achievement! I'm still working on it and thankful for every chance I get to see genuine love in action.
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