As we enter the season of Lent this year, I am working on leading the people in this congregation deeper into relationship with God using the spiritual streams identified in Richard Foster's book, Streams of Living Water. Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus modeled several ways of being in relationship with God. From holiness to contemplation, from compassion to incarnation, from the work of the Spirit to the sharing of the Word, this relationship does not take on any single form. While Jesus, the only one to ever be perfect, was able to incorporate all of these ways of being into himself, for us it can be a different matter.
So I will be taking on one of these streams each week to explore what they look like and how we can use them in our own spiritual journeys. In some ways, these different streams of spirituality are something like love languages for our relationship with God. (Some may be familiar with the concept of the 5 Love Languages that ha been around for about 25 years now.) And just as not all of us speak the same love language in our everyday relationships, I suspect we will find along the way that no single spiritual language for our relationship with God works for all of us the same either.
This week, we looked at the Holiness Stream using the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness found at the beginning of Luke 4 (Luke 4:1-13).
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As we consider our text this week, we may remember that a few weeks ago we heard that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan and then named and claimed by God. Though that was several weeks ago for us, the text today actually immediately follows that story. It tells us that immediately after leaving the Jordan Jesus went out into the wilderness to spend time in solitude preparing himself for the journey ahead. He placed his complete trust in the Divine during this time to help him resist the temptation to simply walk away from God’s calling on his life. And this of course was exacerbated by the tempter who followed him around. By the end of forty days, he was hungry and fully aware of the ways in which he could use the divine part of his nature to make all his problems go away.
This is what makes the words of the tempter so powerful. Try to imagine holding within you the fullness of what it means to be God. All of the powers of the Creator are found within you though you live in the body of a mortal. After 40 days of nothing to eat and fully aware of the rejection that will come from the ministry you are preparing to undertake in the world, those words from the tempter would have been just that...tempting.
It would be tempting to make food for yourself and all that are hungry in one single act of power. It would be tempting to simply make everyone believe as they should and to be in relationship with God and one another as they should. It would be tempting to use all of his divine power to simply fix it all.
As I tried to think about what this might look like, I was reminded of the character of Thor in the Marvel movies. As we are first introduced to Thor, he is full of pride in his own strength and power and might. He is a prince of Asgard and sees it as his right to make others bow before him as befits his name. His strength and position have made him arrogant, and he lives only for the thrill of pleasing himself.
It doesn’t take much to see the difference here between the two. Where Thor used his power for his own selfish desires, Jesus resisted the temptation to simply snap his fingers to change the world to what it should be. Instead of giving in to these particular temptations, Jesus holds fast to his relationship with God. Jesus places his complete and total trust in the path that God has called him to and shows his commitment to God’s work in his life. This shows us the depth of the virtuous life, the life of righteousness, which we call holy. It is in total reliance and trust in God. It is a striving to be completely aligned with God’s desires for you and the world. It is about being in relationship with God.
Jesus knew all the things he was capable of as the Son of God. He knew in his very being that he did not need to be hungry or despised. The tempter even uses Scripture as a way to prove that his interpretation of what Jesus should do is correct. But Jesus continues to fall back on his trust in and reliance on the things that God is doing through him.
This is what it means to live a life of holiness, a life of virtue, a life lived well and rightly - to constantly deepen our relationship with God and to seek alignment with God’s will. Holiness is not about striving for a heavenly reward somewhere in the future, but to be infused with heaven here and now. Holiness is not a checklist that we can pull out to track how we or anyone else is doing according to some sort of external norms. Holiness is not about our will or ability to accomplish certain tasks. Nor is holiness about perfection every moment of every day.
Instead, holiness is a matter first and foremost of the heart. As we focus our hearts on God, we are changed and transformed. God’s undeserved grace grounds us and shapes us into the very beings God intends us to be. This then becomes the source of our righteous acts in the world - as we focus our hearts on God we desire to act more righteously in the world. It is not that our good deeds earn us God’s grace; rather God’s grace leads us to good works in the world.
For Jesus, tempted in the wilderness, it was his reliance on God’s love that allowed him to resist temptation. It was his reliance on God’s love that allowed him to act righteously in the face of those temptations.
After Thor’s arrogance leads him to almost restart a long ended war, his father, Odin, declares him unworthy. He strips him of his power and banishes him to Earth. The only way to regain his power is to prove himself worthy once again. Thor spends much of the rest of movie moping over the loss of his power. He is depressed and uncertain about his future. He cannot conceive of who he is without his powers. His only thought is on reclaiming his magical hammer. Finally near the end of the movie, he decides to sacrifice himself to give others a chance to escape. And in that moment, he proves his worthiness and is again infused with all of his power.
But where Jesus’ sacrifice came out of his deep relationship with God, Thor’s was based only on his own willpower. This is important for us to remember as we think about holiness. Though we sometimes have a tendency to equate holiness and worthiness, the two are not the same. Worthiness is about a person’s own will and actions and abilities. Holiness is about a life lived fully in relationship with God. Worthiness requires no external force. Holiness is only possible by God’s grace.
We can see this at work in many of the saints and others that we consider holy in our tradition. Even a cursory look at their lives shows us that they are not what we would consider worthy. Before he became Paul, Saul was a Jewish zealot that helped kill followers of Christ. Augustine lived with a concubine and fathered children out of wedlock before becoming a bishop. Ignatius of Loyola has a notarized police record on file. John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, fled his ministry in Georgia in the midst of a legal dispute involving Sophia Hopkey, a woman he had fallen in love with but refused to marry, and her new husband. It is hard to call any of them worthy. But we look to them because they were holy.
The word saint literally comes from the Latin word for holy. The saints model for us a life lived in relationship with God. This holiness does not look the same for each of them, and even a cursory glance into their lives will reveal they were anything but perfect. But they lived their lives trusting in God and constantly sought to center themselves in God’s will.
As we look to the lives of the saints and others we see as holy, we begin to see what holiness looks like.
- We must take Jesus seriously. And not just the cross, but the entirety of his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. The cross by itself does not contain the fullness of all that Jesus accomplished in the world.
- We need to take discipleship seriously, perhaps especially when doing so is hard. God’s grace, while freely offered, leads us into a limitless love for others.
- We need to practice the spiritual disciplines. The spiritual disciplines teach us to rely on God rather than ourselves. Through practice and preparation we become aware of God’s prompting in our lives, and we become more reliant on God the more we focus on God’s presence.
- We must take free, responsible, obedient action seriously. Holiness is not about a prescriptive set of rules that must be followed, but about listening to and seeking God’s will in all aspects of our worldly lives. Holiness does not look exactly the same in every situation, and sometimes simply following a prescribed list of dos and don’ts causes more pain and suffering if it leads us to sit quietly in the face of violence and injustice.
- We must strive as church to be the church. We must avoid idolatry and must constantly show ourselves as disciples of Jesus before all else. This means we must be careful not to place anything else in God’s place or make anything else bigger than God in our lives or in our church.
- We must take the world in which we live in seriously. The church does not exist for the sake of the church alone anymore than Jesus existed only for his own salvation. We are the continuing body of Jesus in the world called to show we are his followers by our love and care for others.
While it may seem daunting to consider how we put this into practice, author Richard Foster suggests three concrete ways to put holiness into practice. First, just as we would prepare for a big game or an artistic performance, we train and we practice what it means to be virtuous. And just as each part in a play or each position on the playing field has a different task, we recognize that holiness looks different for each person. Whatever it is you struggle with in your own spiritual life, you grow by focusing on the opposite in an effort to hear God more clearly. If your spiritual concern is pride, focus on acts of service. If you suffer from a lack of hope, focus on prayer and meditation. If you are afflicted with addiction and compulsion, look to fasting and abstinence. If you are unsteady in your faith, focus yourself on the worship of God. By focusing on the opposite of those things that come easiest to us, we learn to trust and rely more fully on God.
Second, we should seek out others to assist us on the journey. The longest, hardest journey becomes easier with a good companion at your side. It is the same in our spiritual journey with God. We need to seek out those who can assist us with discernment, counsel, encouragement, guidance, direction, and accountability. For some this may be a pastor or other spiritual director. For some, this may be a Sunday School class or a Life Group. For still others it may be a prayer partner or other spiritual support person. Whatever the case, it is good to surround ourselves with others who will ask us, “How is it with your soul?” and who will seek to hold us accountable on our journey.
Third, we must recognize that none of us is perfect. So when we stumble, we confess, we get up, and we start the journey again. We will stumble. We will fall short. But we continue to practice what it means to be holy so that we can learn from our mistakes. We also extend that same grace to others, recognizing that they are on their own journey of holiness. Just like each of us, others make mistakes along the way.
At the end of the day, holiness is about our lives lived in relationship with God, about attention to God’s grace reaching into us to shape our hearts. And it is about living out that relationship in the world, about acting righteously in the situations in which we find ourselves, about God’s grace infusing our actions in the world.
Holiness is not worthiness. It is not perfection. It is not a checklist for us or for others. It is not anything we can do on our own.
It is about trusting the promptings of God in the midst of our everyday lives, about hearing God speaking to us here and now, today, and not simply in the words of the past.
God speaks to our hearts if we will listen. God calls to us, guiding us still today.
God seeks relationship with us, a relationship that we live out in our relationships with others.
May we seek to grow deeper in love with God and all that God is calling us to.
(And for those that might wish a more contemporary look at today's scripture, may I suggest "Just a Tempter" from Carl Thomas Gladstone: https://music.carlthomasgladstone.com/track/just-a-tempter)