Set Apart for a Reason

The word "holy" is a strange one. In popular speech it rarely refers to anything good.  It's used as a general exclamation. "Holy ____!" Or it's used to speak negatively of who think too highly of themselves regarding the morals or the like, as in "holier than thou." Only at church is it about something good, and here it has a more specialized use, often to speak of God. We talk about the Holy Spirit and some people begin prayers, "Holy God." 

So what to do with the opening line from today's Old Testament reading. "For you are a people holy to Yahweh your God." Given the common notion of the Church as the continuation of God's people Israel, presumably this could be read to say the Church is supposed to be "a people holy to Yahweh." (The notion of the Church as a continuation of Israel can be found in the New Testament book of Acts, and I have  no problem with the idea. However this has often been read to mean that the Church replaced Israel, which I do see as problematic.)

So what does it mean to say that we church folk are to be holy in some way? That might be an interesting thing to explore as a Lenten project. Just how is my or your congregation supposed to be holy?

It may help to realize that one meaning of the word is "set apart." Part of this set-apartness is about purity, but it is also about being set apart for a special purpose. Israel is called to be a holy people because the are set apart with a special calling.  That goes all the way back to Abraham who is called so that, through him, "all the families of the earth shall be blessed." In a similar way, the Church is set apart to be an instrument of blessing, to incarnate Jesus, the one who comes for the sake of the world.

Perhaps because for many centuries we labored under the delusion that we live in a Christian culture or nation, this notion of being set apart was hard to realize. If everyone is Christian, what does it mean to be set apart. I actually think it still means something significant, but it is easy to see how such a notion withers when we presume everyone else is Christian, too.

Unfortunately, the loss of any sense of our holiness (i.e. set-apartness) robbed congregations of a strong sense of mission and purpose. So we turned inward, and many congregations lost any significant identity around being set apart, called to bless the world, or existing for the sake of the other. But without such an identity, the Church loses much of its reason for being and much of its vitality.

How is God calling your congregation to bear divine blessing to the world? How have you been set apart as a special people who are to be a blessing to others and the world? For church people, those are absolutely critical questions.

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