Australian Homiletics / Preaching


        Janet Nelson
        GOD'S HOLY PEOPLE

        Address given at the Graduation and 1993 Commencement Service of the Brisbane College of Theology, 19/2/93.

        Based on readings for Ordinary Sunday 7: Leviticus19:1-2; Psalm 103: 1-5; 1 Corinthians 3: 16-23; Matthew 5: 38-48.



        How many of us, I wonder, have difficulty in accepting ourselves as holy? We are generally painfully aware of our shortcomings and have a fragile sense of our own value. Yet in a society where increasingly our old securities are more tenuous, where relationships break down and jobs are lost or never found, we need a very strong sense of our own value if we are not to be overwhelmed by feelings of failure and worthlessness. We need to know that we are intrinsically people of worth, holy people, whose value does not depend on our external circumstances or on how others may view us.

        Writing to the church at Corinth Paul tells his readers 'Do you not know (- in the Jerusalem Bible it says didn't you realise) you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? God's temple is holy and that temple you are.' In his ministry Paul finds it necessary to remind the Corinthians that they are holy people. It remains a primary task of ministry today to recognise holiness in others and to encourage and enable others to see themselves as holy, to recognise themselves as God's holy people. And if we are to perform this task effectively we need to begin by seeing ourselves as holy.

        I speak to you tonight from my perspective as a lay person reflecting on my experiences in the church. I speak without formal theological training (and therefore tonight I feel considerable apprehension), but I speak with a conviction that our own experience provides valid ground for theological reflection and insight. I speak from my perspective as a woman who during the past ten years has been involved in the ordination debate in the Anglican Church. This experience has helped me to understand more clearly what can hinder our seeing ourselves as holy, and what happens when we realise we are holy people. I believe that questions of holiness are important questions for theological students to consider; they are certainly important for those who engage in ministry.

        The passage from Leviticus and the excerpt from Paul's letter to the Corinthians both speak to us of holiness but from significantly different perspectives. The Leviticus injunction 'You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God am holy' comes after the lengthy section of rules of ritual cleanliness and laws of holiness where the priest could pronounce a person clean or unclean, and those who were unclean had to take care lest they defile God's tabernacle or contaminate others by their presence.

        Although in Paul's writing to the Corinthians the holiness of law is set aside by the holiness of grace, today many of us are still engaged in searching ourselves for metaphorical spots and blemishes which might make us unacceptable. Cries of 'unclean, unclean' have continued to echo loudly through the ages. Down the centuries theologians and church councils have pronounced women defective, demonic, polluted and polluting and these pronouncements continue to have their effect today. For some the condemnation 'unclean' remains all too real an experience. In Australia, women in orthodox churches are not allowed to share in the Eucharist while menstruating. In Catholic churches girls are forbidden to serve at the altar and only in most recent days have women in the Anglican Church been admitted to holy orders. One Australian Anglican archbishop spoke a few months ago of bishops 'soiling their hands' in ordaining women. Women and girls have been kept a very safe distance from the sacred places - safe, that is for men, but dangerous for women. ( No, dangerous , I think, for men and for women. ) For what messages are women to take in about themselves when they are kept from contact with what the church regards as sacred? When such strong messages of 'unclean, unclean' have been given is it any surprise that we may find it a large part of the task of ministry to say 'Didn't you realise, you are God's holy people?'

        Put beside this exclusion from the sacred, women's limited participation in decision -making bodies of the church - in the Anglican General Synod last year there were thirty women out of two hundred and twenty members Recall that the traditional language of worship has made women invisible by rendering them brothers, fathers, men and sons and by ignoring their experiences of life. Remember that almost all our language for God is masculine so that women are constantly reminded that they are different from God while men are reminded that they are like God. Consider, too, that the holiest woman which the church has provided as a model is a virgin mother, impossible for any normal woman to emulate. Should it come as any surprise that when asked 'Didn't you realise you are God's holy people?', women may answer 'No'.

        There are other difficulties which may stand in the way of seeing ourselves as holy, and here I am not speaking particularly of women. As the custodian of the holy, the church has developed an unfortunately narrow perception of holiness. From Peter's profound insight that nothing created by God is to be called unclean, we have moved to a view of the world which categorises life in a series of divisive dualisms: holy and profane; sacred and secular; body and spirit; male and female; clergy and laity; homosexual and heterosexual; even distinctions between evangelist and evangelised; those who minister and those who are ministered to.

        Many of these unhelpful dichotomies imply notions of superior and inferior, dominant and subordinate, normative and deviant, placing one part of creation in opposition to another. Behaviour which results in the oppression of those of different class, race, gender and sexuality is based in this type of thinking. It is a mode of thinking which encourages us to see some categories of people as more holy than others; it is not a mode of thinking which encourages us to recognise holiness wherever it may be found.

        The church has also tended to adopt a rarefied view of the sacred so that the church's sacramental life is in danger of not connecting with the daily lives of its people. When we separate the sacred and the secular we can easily lose sight of the fact that God reaches us, and we respond to God in all the ordinariness and dailyness of our lives. If we limit the holy to the sacramental life of the church we miss out on much of the sacred discourse of life. This is not to take a low view of the sacraments of the church, but it is to take a high view of the sacredness of life. In her book, 'Fierce Tenderness, a Feminist Theology of Friendship', American Catholic theologian Mary Hunt writes:

          To sacramentalise is to pay attention. It is what a community does when it claims ordinary human experiences as holy. …It is.. taking time to attend to the people around us, to see in real lives ... the stuff of human existence: birth, pain, growth, bonding, break-up, loss, friendship, and to recognise it as such. This is what sacraments are for. They are concrete experiences with food and touch, dance and drink, prayer and silence, affirmation and music. Think of a good dinner party . What could be holier? How one dimensional much of what passes for sacraments in churches is by comparison. Sacrament is paying attention to the ordinary in a way that makes something extraordinary happen. By taking the ordinary seriously it is invested with transcendent significance.

        Limited views of holiness have little attraction for those who see the sacred painted on a vast canvas. You will probably, like me, have read recently about the remarkable life of Fred Hollows. Early in his life he began training for Christian ministry, a training he abandoned when, in his words 'sex, alcohol and the secular goodness of people surgically removed his Christianity leaving no scars'. The church could not accommodate his wide view of the sacred. But secular society is sometimes more holy, more just, more compassionate than the church - who more than Fred Hollows has said to the poor, the sick, the outcast of society 'Didn't you realise you are God's holy people?'

        It is, I believe, far more dangerous to the church to have too limited a view of the sacred than to risk having a view which is too wide. The world stands in great need today of recovering an expansive view of the holy. We need to see the whole earth as sacred if we are to be responsible stewards of creation and arrest the greedy, destructive, pillaging rape of the earth. We need to recover a truth from the beginning of time: God looked and saw all that was made and behold, it was very good.

        When the church's definition of holiness has led it to exclude rather than to include, then a major turnaround is needed if the church is to begin to be inclusive in its thinking and practice. Imagine the turnaround, the conversion, needed by the Jews to accept the Gentiles as God's holy people Perhaps no less a conversion is required of us today. Patricia Wilson-Kastner, another American theologian, describes the sort of inclusiveness needed by the church in the following terms:

          To be inclusive is to value, gather, nurture, and find the significance of all that is good and true. By and large we humans are tribal, provincial and selfish. Our horizons are acutely limited and often we fail to see and respect the good in the other; when we do we often try to quantify and to measure which is better and which is worse, gauging the other in terms of ourselves and our own way of doing things. To be inclusive is to be open to the other, not to be bereft of judgement and discernment, but to decide to accept another person because of his or her worth, and to treasure other people for their contribution to the whole. ...The basis for our judging is the desire to include all that is positive, good and true in perspective of the good which constitutes the cosmos... Such a desire to include is not on the periphery of our consciousness; it must be our central concern. We are called to seek, find, refine and encourage the good. Such efforts are essential expressions of creative and redemptive love.

        I would see the Brisbane college of Theology's joint venture with Griffith University as a sign of an inclusive and expansive outlook in this College I commend you on this exciting step and hope that it will prove a mutually enriching partnership.

        But how genuinely does the church at large desire to be inclusive? How serious is the church in asking 'Didn't you realise, you are God's holy people?' Is the church really ready to take this risk? For what if there comes back a loud reply from women, the poor, the dispossessed, from those from different cultures, and from the gay and lesbian community, 'Yes, yes we realise we are God's holy people'? What will the church do then? Experience suggests that there will be a great deal of resistance to the changes needed to transform the church to a true community of God's holy people. It is wise to be aware of the consequences if we enable people to see themselves as holy.

        The church has for centuries maintained a very tight control over its structures and authority, regulating what it teaches, who may teach and what questions may be asked. The content of its theology and the interpretation of its faith reflect the experience of educated, European men, usually clergy. Is the church ready now to value as holy the experiences of other cultures? Are we ready to take seriously those theologies which have been born and grown out of different experiences - liberation theologies, feminist theologies? Is the church ready to reexamine structures of domination and subordination and look again at who makes decisions and who makes the tea?

        These are not just hypothetical questions, but questions which the church must face now, for we are living in a time of radical reassessment of where holiness is to be found. The protracted debate on the ordination of women is but one manifestation of this paradigm shift in the perception of the sacred. This is a debate with profound and far-reaching implications for the church, and those who have described it as the tip of the iceberg are correct. We are living in a time when many believe we are witnessing the greatest changes in the church since the Reformation. And this challenge is coming to the church as people realise they are God's holy people.

        When women say 'Yes, we realise we are God's holy people', there comes a point where they see their treatment by the church is at variance with their understanding of themselves. Many women can speak of a 'conversion experience' when the scales have fallen from their eyes and they view the world from a different vantage point. They begin to ask themselves 'If we are God's holy people, as the church tells us, why does the church treat us the way it does? Something here is wrong.' Often the questions women raise are dismissed as trivial or illegitimate. They do not count in the traditional view of things. And traditional answers do not satisfy women's questions. But women have been empowered by an inner authority. They have become increasingly self-determined, refusing to be defined by others or condemned by rules they do not accept. They have claimed their own life experiences as valid ground for theological insight and have declared holy what the church has pronounced unclean in them, claiming, for instance, that the body is as sacred as the soul.

        As they have become empowered, women from different church communities and those who have abandoned the traditional church have joined together to ask their own questions and to seek their own answers; in short to do theology In doing so they have claimed a genuine place within the tradition of the church. Members of Women Church, Catholic women from Women and the Australian Church and from New Vision for Woman, Uniting Church women from the Feminist Uniting Network and Anglican women from the Movement for the Ordination of Women have together sought answers to what it means to be God's holy people. As women have been empowered there has been a creative flowering of writing, liturgy, music and art; the desert has blossomed. To be free to be God's holy people in ways of our own choosing is a life-giving experience.

        But this is not the behaviour which the church has traditionally affirmed in women and women have been accused of being aggressive and self-seeking Benedictine prioress Joan Chittester describes it differently, saying: 'I think it's what happens when a person comes face to face with the grace of God in life.' Can we be certain that this is the work of the Spirit? Mary Daly, in 'Beyond God the Father' speaks of an inner assurance that is rooted in experience rather than external authority: 'When I am coming alive, I know that I am coming alive.'

        Nevertheless, feminist theologies have met with fierce resistance from conservative quarters and in many other parts of the church are not considered important enough to study. Women's attempts to claim for themselves an equal place in the church have uncovered levels of misogyny and violence towards women which were invisible while women stayed in the place which had been allotted to them.

        Several years ago when I was reading James Gleick's book Chaos I was arrested by his description of the way in which chaos theory had been received by the scientific community, for it seemed to me to parallel precisely the response of the church to feminist theologies. A true paradigm shift is a transformation in a way of thinking. It is incongruity, the 'something here is wrong' syndrome, when it changes the way a scientist sees, that makes possible the most important advances Chaos theory was greeted with ferocious hostility from traditional scientific quarters. Problems which were explored by chaos scientists were not regarded as legitimate lines of inquiry; graduate students were warned that their careers could be jeopardised if they wrote theses in an untested discipline in which their advisers had no expertise. The hostility encountered, says Gleick, 'showed how revolutionary the new science was Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas which require people to reorganise their picture of the world provoke hostility.'

        Just so in the church, Duncan Reid, writing recently in St. Mark's Review, said 'A notable feature of paradigm change (and this is equally true of scientific as of theological revolutions) is that it is never purely rational: it always involves some sort of "conversion experience".' And conversion is what we require if we are to move from a theology of division to a theology of wholeness, from a theology of exclusion to a theology of inclusion, from a theology of domination to a theology of mutuality. We need to regain a sense of the interconnectedness and the sacredness of all creation if we are to be true to the gospel and if all people -male or female, black or white, rich or poor are to know the life-giving experience of being God's holy people. Quite possibly we need this conversion for the survival of the earth.

        As you graduate tonight I congratulate you on achievements. I hope that you will take with you from your studies knowledge to ponder and to share with others. I hope that you will encounter the world with an open mind, an inquiring spirit and a generous heart, an expansive view of the sacred and a sense of wonder.

        In concluding I would like to speak to those who are to engage in some form of ministry, lay or ordained - and in greater or lesser measure that includes us all. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus' injunction to us to be perfect can be a frightening thing - there is so much scope for failure and falling short of the mark. It is right to approach ministry with a certain apprehension and awe for in any intimate dealing with others we have the capacity to hurt as well as to heal; we are on holy ground and should tread carefully. But do not be afraid: the perfection of which Jesus speaks is gospel, not law. We are called not to be free from failure but to be fully and wholly human. In my own experiences of being ministered to I have seldom been helped greatly by the sure and the strong, although all of us, ministers included, will sometimes need those who can bear our weight. But I have been helped greatly by vulnerable people, by those who have not been afraid to admit to their own uncertainties and weaknesses; indeed it is often through their weaknesses that their humanity is disclosed.

        A few weeks ago I was walking on the beach when I discovered a beautiful Nautilus shell. It was not perfect - in fact quite a large section of this fragile shell had been broken away. But enough of it remained to fill me with wonder. Because it was broken, damaged, it revealed what otherwise would have remained hidden inside - a more perfect likeness of the whole.

        If we come to ministry as broken, holy people in compassion, mercy and love we will meet other broken, holy people and there encounter God, the broken, Holy One in whose likeness we all are made.




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