Scriptures: 1Samuel 21:1-6; Matthew 12:1-8
When the first two hymns of the day are “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “Lord, Make Me More Holy”, you might get the idea that there’s a theme here. And it’s true. I’ve been thinking about “holy”. The idea of holiness, of something being holy. This is one of those themes where you may be wondering where that came from. Or not. Maybe it’s just that I’m sort of wondering where this came from. It was not one of the sermons I had in mind when I planned the summer sermon series on the David stories from the books of Samuel. It sort of surprised me when this theme sort of took hold of me and turned into the sermon topic for today.
I can tell you a little bit about how this happened. There is this short, relatively minor story—you heard the whole thing—tucked in among all the other stories about David that has to do with the holy bread David begged from a priest in order to feed his hungry soldiers before they went into battle. Most of the David stories are the stuff of legend, big epic dramas. This one is just a tiny incident, and you almost wonder why it’s there.
I ran across that story as I was preparing for last week’s sermon and it caught my attention as sort of an odd little insertion. But it also caught my attention because I knew, of course, that today was to be communion Sunday and this was a story involving holy bread, and so I thought to myself that maybe I’ll come back to this. Then too I knew that this was a story that Jesus actually referred to at one point in his ministry when he was under attack for breaking the Sabbath. He was accused of violating a holy day, and he reminded his accusers of the story about David who violated the holiness of the bread, in both cases the supposed violations occurring for the implied holy purpose of feeding the hungry. So both of these stories were in my mind as I approached the sermon for this morning, and for some reason I started thinking about this whole concept of holy days and holy bread and what that means, and I got stuck on it. It became one of those things where you can’t get it out of your head, like a song that for reasons beyond your control gets going through your mind over and over and over. Add to that the additional reason of a joyous occasion yesterday, celebrating a holy union ceremony and there’s plenty of reason to be thinking about “holy”.
So here I am preaching about “holy” and asking you to reflect on it with me. I suppose one reason I got stuck on the theme is that when I started to think about it, I started to get confused, and the more I thought about it the confused-er I got. Holy is one of those words or concepts that you sort of take for granted, or that I do. You use it often and without a problem and so you think you must know what you mean by it, until you start thinking about it. Holy God, Holy Communion, Holy Bible, Holy Land, holy union, Holy Week, and so on. What do all those holys mean? Do they even mean the same thing? Why is something holy?
The passages from scripture suggest that the idea of something being holy can, like religion itself, or like anything worthwhile, be misunderstood and misused and turned into something that is not worthwhile, maybe even harmful. This bread of the presence that David had to beg for for his hungry soldiers was a bread that was supposed to be a sign of God’s presence. It was not for eating, at least by ordinary people. It was for display, commanded to be on the table of worship, but just as a symbol. It was replaced every so often so that it wouldn’t get moldy, but the only people allowed to actually eat the bread were the priests.
So David comes along and says essentially, as I hear him, that this is sort of a stupid rule, treating this bread like it is something special and priests acting like they are something special so that only their holy bodies and their holy taste buds get to appreciate this holy wheat. David had a different view of things. I have some hungry soldiers here, he says, who have observed all the religious rules about what to do or not to do before going into battle. I have these hungry soldiers. You have bread. How about it. The priest, Abiathar, in this instance seems to have been not only a holy man but a man of some common sense, or at least with a healthy sense of self-interest, and he gives David the bread.
A thousand years later Jesus points to this story to suggest that it’s ok for his disciples to do a little work on the Sabbath, in the form of picking some grain to eat. They weren’t supposed to, of course. People were supposed to honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the ten commandments said. Jesus’ attitude seemed to be that that’s fine—he never said that Sabbath was a stupid idea—but that’s fine as long as it doesn’t prevent you from doing something sensible and maybe important, like doing just a little work so that people can have something to eat.
We modern day readers of the Bible know we’re supposed to side with David and Jesus in these stories. They serve to remind us not to be too rigid, that what is a good or bad thing to do may depend a lot on the circumstance, that people are more important than rules, that kind of thing, the various lessons that are easily available in these stories. The stories also contain a troubling idea of what holiness is all about.
The trouble is that we sometimes think of holiness as something that is surrounded by some kind of mystery and set apart as being better, or purer, or somehow closer to God. Holy communion, for instance. We set aside some bread and some grape juice and we say this is not just ordinary bread or grape juice. These are holy elements and because they are holy (this is where the trouble comes in), we must not allow them to be contaminated, contaminated by people who are not worthy to receive them. Like people who are too young to understand the deep meaning of communion, or people who aren’t too young, but still don’t understand, really, what this is all about, or don’t have the right understanding, or who don’t belong to the right denomination, or who aren’t so sure they’re even Christian, or…you get the idea.
Christians have often treated holy communion as being holy in this way—set apart and reserved for those who are closer to God, if you will, so that these holy elements will not be profaned by people coming to eat them who don’t have the proper reverence or godliness. In my early days of being Christian, communion had this aura about it for me. It seemed reserved for someone other than me. I was participating in other Christian or churchly activities, but this seemed to be the most sacred and mysterious part of the faith, and for a long time I didn’t take communion, and for an even longer time I didn’t feel quite comfortable with it, even though I was taking it. I seemed often to find myself in places where communion was being passed to me, either sitting in a circle with other students or in pews in a church, and as I saw the elements getting near to me as they were being passed around the circle or down the pew, my heart would start to beat and my hands would begin to tremble. I admit that my hands shake, always have, at the slightest provocation, or no provocation at all, so this was nothing new, but when communion came around, it tended to the extreme. I have to think this had something to do with my sense that this was something very holy, either the elements themselves or the whole ritual of communion, and that my faith wasn’t pure enough yet for such holiness, that my faith was just a little too ordinary for such things.
This may have been, probably was, my problem, not anyone else’s but it points again to an approach to holiness that I don’t find very attractive—an approach that sets something apart, separates it from ordinary things, and that divides and exludes people on that basis. Holiness movements in religion are those in which people are encouraged to separate themselves from the world, lead a holy life, which generally means abstaining from activities that have been determined to be un-holy or profane. Methodism was at one time a holiness movement within the larger church. The assumption was that your faith ought to make a difference in the way you lived. Christians ought to be holier than other people and therefore they should not hunt, or drink, or duel, or dance, or be lazy, or own slaves. And they kept on believing in the first five of those things for quite a while. And if they did all that and went to church and read their Bibles, it would show that they were closer to God.
I’ve always had that feeling about holiness too, that it is somehow associated with this holier-than-thou kind of attitude, that there is this sort of quiet air of superiority about people who aspire to holiness. So I have to admit that I’ve always had just a little bit of trouble with the hymn. I can think of all sorts of things I would like the Lord to make me more of. Lord, make me more faithful I can relate to. And more humble. More loving, certainly. And more hopeful and helpful and courageous. Lots of things. But I’m not so sure about holy. I’m not so sure I really want the Lord to make me more holy, at least in some of the ways we seem to think about it. Or maybe it would be ok if the Lord made us more holy if she did it but didn’t tell us about it, so that we didn’t have any fixed ideas about who was holier than who, and therefore closer to God. I’m reminded again that Jesus didn’t seem to want to spend much time with people who were looked upon by anyone, including themselves, as holy.
So I’m left asking myself: Is there any sense in which holiness is a good thing, any way in which holiness is something I want to aspire to?
Here’s my way of looking at it, at least for today. Something is holy when it becomes more than just itself and when that something more contains, as the Quakers would say, something of God. The bread of communion, the bread of God’s presence, is holy bread not because it is set apart, magically blessed, and offered only to the select few. It is holy precisely when and because it is offered to everyone. It is not just a loaf of bread. It is the bread of life, bread for the journey, your journey, my journey, our journey, everyone’s journey. The bread is holy because the journey is holy, and the journey is holy when and because it is not just going through the motions, it has something of God in it, it has our seeking for God in it, and it points us in the direction of God’s reign. This bread is a lot more than bread.
As I was thinking this thought, I remembered a poem that I read recently. It didn’t mention God, not exactly or explicity, but it captured something important for me about holiness. Let me read you part of it, so you get the idea. It’s called Pray for Peace, and it’s by Ellen Bass, and it reads in part:
Pray to whomever you kneel down to: Jesus nailed to his wooden or marble or plastic cross, his suffering face bent to kiss you. Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat. Adonai, Allah. Raise your arms to Mary, that she may lay her palm on our brows, to Shekinah, Queen of Heaven and Earth, to Inanna in her stripped descent.
Waiting in line for the moves, for the ATM, for your latte and croissant, offer your plea. Make your eating and drinking a supplication. Make your slicing of carrots a holy act…
Make the brushing of your hair a prayer, every strand its own voice. As you wash your face, the water slipping through your fingers, a prayer…
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day. Shakespeare, Sappho, Sojourner Truth. Pray to the angels and to the ghosts of your grandparents.
When you walk to your car, to the mailbox, to the video store, let each step be a prayer that we all keep our legs and don’t blow off anyone else’s legs. And if you are riding a bicycle or a skateboard, in a wheelchair, each revolution of the wheels a prayer that as the earth revolves, we will do less harm, less harm, less harm…
Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace, feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed that spills onto the earth another second of peace. Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine…for peace.
Everything can be more than what it is, and when that something more has in it something of God, like a prayer for peace, it is holy. I aspire to that. I aspire to having my every breath, my every turn in the night, my every apparently insignificant action contain a prayer for peace with justice, and a turn toward God.
When we just go about our business of daily life without thoughts of God or of anything much, when we just do what we have to do without any thought of meaning surrounding them, when things pretty much just are what they are, then we are in a non-holy place, not un-holy, not bad, just non-holy. It’s not bad to be in that frame of mind. It’s just that there’s only so much non-holiness we can take. And so, maybe, we come to church, maybe, not so much to find something holy or have some especially holy experience (though by the grace of God that may happen sometimes) but to be reminded that our lives are graced with holiness, with signs and hints and intimations and suggestions of God. Everywhere. All around us. And within us.
I know people who consider themselves atheists because they don’t believe in God, and when someone identifies him or herself that way, I don’t like to quarrel with them, say “no, you’re not”. People have a right to be atheist if they want to be and define that however they want and there’s nothing wrong with being an atheist. But I also want to allow myself the freedom to see things in a different way. Because to me a person is not an atheist unless life, in every aspect, has lost its holiness. An atheist to me is not someone who says she doesn’t believe in God. It is someone who has no concept of the holy, for whom the passing of days and years contains nothing more than the passing of days and years, nothing of value, interest, or meaning.
But I’m not sure I know anyone like that. I do know people who think of themselves as atheists who nevertheless sense that there is something holy about our human journeys. And although they may not use the same language I do to talk about it, I believe that we are one in the spirit, and I believe, in the language that somehow makes sense to me, that we are not just ourselves, that there is something of God in you, in me, and in all. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 3, 2003