Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on Reformation Sunday, October 27, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Leviticus 19:1-4, 9-18; Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Matthew 22-34-40

You shall be holy.

                      -Leviticus 19:2

     [Circumstances permit only a short sermon today. Short but intense.]

     "Be holy." What an extraordinary commandment! I think about what it might mean, and a whole list of unattractive synonyms comes to mind: other-worldly; unearthly; sanctimonious; chaste; prim; uptight; self-righteous; legalistic; fanatical; zealous. Suicide bombers are totally committed to being holy. Holy people are people who either withdraw from the world or attack it.

     But Darlene told us the story of the death of a holy man, Moses, and it contains none of that sort of holiness. After a hundred twenty years of living and forty years of journeying towards the Promised Land, Moses climbs to the top of a mountain from which at long last he can see across the Jordan into Canaan, he can see all the way to the Mediterranean, and God says to him: That's the destination, Moses; that's where your people are going, but you're not going with them. You're stopping here. They're going on without you.

     That's pretty much how I think about my own death: The rest of you going on without me. Doesn't that ring true? The rabbis have spun many a midrash on the death of Moses, telling stories about the story. According to them, Moses was just like me in this respect: he didn't want to die, he begged God not to require him to die. In fact, he became so passionate and wept such bitter tears that a company of angels tried to intercede for his life with God. The host of heaven was in an uproar, and eventually even God was drawn into the conversation to reassure Moses that it was all right to die, and the great angels Gabriel and Michael and other angels made a place for Moses to lie down and a pillow for his head and helped him to close his eyes and let go of his soul.

     That was the death of a man who loved this life. How can a person be holy, as Moses undoubtedly was, and yet love this life so much and cling to it so fiercely? To ask that question is to confess how little we understand of holy living.

     But the Bible is perfectly clear about what it means to be holy. If we misunderstand it, we do so not from confusion or ignorance, but from perversity and anxiety: We caricature holiness, we create a cartoon version of it, we make it either silly or malignant, because we don't have the guts to take it seriously.

     Question: "Teacher, which commandment is the greatest?" Translation: Teacher, tell us how to be holy. Answer: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself. This is the whole enchilada." Translation: Throw yourself at God as hard and as fiercely as you can, and God will throw you even harder and more fiercely back into this messy human community that you're so torn up about, you don't know whether you want to embrace it or to escape from it. Because that mess is God's beloved mess and as God's own person you belong in it. That's what it means to be holy: To belong to God in this world. Whatever made you think it meant anything else? It's so simple we don't get it, and so plain that we can't see it.

     Holiness, we suppose, is a theological thing: It's about being with God. Here in the Gospel Jesus says No, it's also an ethical thing: it's about being with other people. He fuses the theological and the ethical; he says you can't separate them, each entails the other. Jesus didn't invent this. He took it straight from the Torah, from Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy. All Jesus did was to embody both sides of it, the godly and the human, in himself. To show us what it actually looks like in the flesh.

     We all live and move and have our being in a profoundly atheistic world, and it's a kind of atheism that has nothing to do with the number of people who snooze or read the paper or play some game on Sunday morning, as against the number who come to church, and nothing to do with the sneering despisers of religion or the debunkers of creeds. It has practically nothing to do with what outlandish propositions or superstitions you claim to believe or not to believe.

     Atheism is none of that. Atheism is a lifestyle. It's living as if God were not alive and active among us. It presumes that holiness, genuine holiness, simply doesn't exist. We all participate in that lifestyle whether we mean to or not. There's no escaping it. The only choices are to submit to it, which is the overwhelming favorite option, or to confront it face to face. And that's why it is so difficult and so important to go out of this place determined, with all our being, to be holy. And see what happens.

     Amen