First in a Lenten Series on the
Hymn:
Take Time to Be Holy
Taking
the Time for Holiness
For reasons that I no longer
remember, I recently became intrigued again with – and started listening again to
-- the music of Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien, the British pop and
R&B singer famous in the 1960's who was better known as Dusty
Springfield. She recorded a number of
memorable hits – The Windmills of Your Mind, I Only Want to Be With You, The
Look of Love, I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself, and my
personal favorite, Son of a Preacher
Man. There were certainly others, including a Hal David and Burt Bacharach
song later made famous all over again in the soundtrack to the movie My Best
Friend's Wedding, which started:
Wishin',
and hopin', and thinkin', and prayin',
Planning and dreamin' each night of his charms.
That won't get you into his arms
So if you're looking for love you can share
All you gotta to is hold him, and kiss him, and love him,
And show him that you care. [1]
In a
convoluted sense, the song's counsel is based on the same understanding of
reality as the song around which our Lenten thinking will be guided: Take time to be holy. Good things rarely happen just because we
want them to. “Wishin' and hopin'” won't
finally get it done. Ultimately, some
intentional action is required.
We understand
that principle more than we practice it.
I had my 50-year physical last month.
I know, that is about a year and a half overdue, but surely late,
at least in this case, is better than never. And as though to punish me for my tardiness,
the doctor poked, he prodded, he tested, he listened and he did various other
things not suited to public discourse.
Finally, he reported. And then he
instructed. These numbers and those were
a little beyond the comfort zone, but all would be well if I...and I knew these
words were coming...lost some weight. I
am smart enough to know that that has some implications for what I eat
(meaning “healthier”), but also how much I eat (meaning “less”). And it also makes some demand on my activity
level (meaning I need to exercise more).
That latter,
at least, shouldn't be a problem. We
have a wonderful space in our home delightfully outfitted for exercising. It has music.
It has cable television and a DVD/VCR player. We even bought a fancy new piece of equipment
last summer that we had tried out at the Fair.
So, we have it all, wonderfully arranged. But the tragically funny thing about it is
that having it isn't the same as using it. The equipment has no
electronic force field that simply by proximity purges me of calories and
stimulates my cardio-vascular system.
“Wishin' and hopin'” won't finally make it happen. There is simply no substitute for setting
aside the time, getting on, and getting after it.
And likewise
when it comes to our spiritual health.
We have to take time to be holy. Those words as we have come to sing them in
our hymnal originated with a man named William Dun Longstaff, a “wealthy
philanthropist and free church leader who was close to the nineteenth-century
American evangelistic team of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey.” [2]
According to
the story, Longstaff once heard a sermon based on a verse from the first
chapter of 1 Peter, which urges disciples to
“Be ye holy, for I am holy.” The thought struck him as solid,
sensible and even central to the meaning of discipleship. Not long afterwards, Longstaff heard a
missionary, recently returned from China, likewise refer to holiness. “Take time and be holy” the missionary
urged. Connecting the phrase to the
earlier sermon, something clicked. The
phrase knocked around in his mind for a time until, substituting a single word,
he made the phrase his own: “take time
to be holy,” and “before he knew it, the words and phrases were becoming lines
and stanzas, and he was reading the first stanza of his own original hymn.” [3]
Take time to be
holy, speak oft with thy Lord;
Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word.
Make friends of God’s children, help those who are weak,
Forgetting in nothing His blessing to seek.
It is, you might have
noticed, a hymn with heavy emphasis on verbs – take, speak, abide, feed,
make, help, seek; and those in the first stanza alone. It's as though Longstaff suddenly saw the
exercise equipment in the basement of his own soul and recognized the necessity
of some concrete utilization – that “wishin' and hopin'” weren't going to be
enough for discipleship, either.
Holiness requires intentionality.
“Intentionality”, of course, is right up the alley of Lent –
the season in the church's calendar that began this past Wednesday and
continues for the six weeks leading up to Easter. Traditionally, Lent is a time for clearing
away the accretions of culture and habit that, over time, come to muddy and
finally obscure the better practices of our faithfulness. Think of that icy moraine of sand and gravel
and repeatedly refrozen snow and ice that eventually petrifies on your
driveway. IceMelt won't dent it. I'm not even sure sunlight and warm
temperatures can soften it. It takes
something sharp and metallic, accompanied by muscle and sweat. So, too, with spiritual life. It has to be cleared, refreshed, and then
exercised. Intentionally.
Over the course of these six-weeks, then, we will be using
Mr. Longstaff's familiar hymn as a prod for our Lenten renewal. We will be taking his verbs seriously, but also
his sense of what the “holy life” looks like.
And so we will be...
Taking the time…
…for holiness
…for learning
…for community
…for prayer
…for obedience
…for
stillness
Not
all of those will feel comfortable; and none of them, I suspect, will come
easily. But the fruit of such
intentionality is desirable enough, and so I invite you to come along –
starting today with this notion of holiness.
So what is it? Let's assume for a
moment that we have all the time in the world, and that we are more than
willing to take it, but what does it mean to take time to be “holy”?
According to Frederich Buechner, one of
my favorite and most provocative authors, Only God is holy, just as only
people are human. God's holiness is his
God-ness. To speak of anything else as
holy is to say that it has something of God's mark on it. Times, places, things, and people can all be
holy, and when they are, they are usually not hard to recognize. [4]
Or as someone else has put it, “Wherever God's presence is
felt, there [people] encounter the wonder and mystery of holiness” [5]
Holy Cow. Holy smoke. Holy Bible.
Holy ground. Something – or
someone – with God's mark so indelibly inscribed that it isn't hard to
recognize.
“And you,”
reported Moses and later Peter, “shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am
holy.” You shall bear my mark. In you shall God's presence be felt.
I read that
this 19th chapter of Leviticus is “one of the most quoted and most
often read chapters” in American Reform Judaism. Indeed, it's often described as a “holiness
code.” After announcing this need to be
holy, the chapter proceeds to list all kinds of examples of holiness from
almost every area of life – a hodge-podge of moral, civil, and religious
injunctions -- with the punctuating refrain, “I am the Lord [your God] marking
the end of almost every one of the sixteen paragraphs.” [6]
Which is to
say that, for Leviticus, spiritual faith
and ethical behaviors are two sides of the same coin. We can, therefore, do away with all the cartoon
pictures of the sanctimonious holy person wearing a halo and a prudish
glare. To be holy is not to be
narrow-minded and primly pious; it is, rather, to imitate God. To be holy is to roll up one's sleeves and to
join in with whatever God is doing in the world.
So what is
God doing in the world? Well, as the
hymn will eventually go on to observe, part of the practice of taking time to
be holy is paying enough careful attention to learn and observe. But a quick scan through Leviticus 19 will
show that it looks a lot like social justice – protecting the welfare of the
poor and the disadvantaged; reverence for all people and the need for patience
and truthfulness between them. And
mindfulness of the difference between the Creator and the created.
When Peter
takes over the phrase, he introduces it with what would literally translate as
“gird up the loins of your mind” and “sober up” -- both of which suggest a
readiness, a preparation for, movement.
“Girding loins” being the equivalent of “rolling up your sleeves” in
order to get to work; and sobriety meaning exactly what it suggests: don't be drunk – drunkenness suggesting a
total unreadiness for action born of either satisfaction with, or resignation
about, the present circumstances or location.
I trust that
we will find ourselves to be neither – neither satisfied with, nor resigned to
the way we are, or the world around us.
But holiness – our own or the world's – will not happen automatically. It will demand intentionality, effort,
discipline, and patience. We'll need to
take some time for all of this. But it
will be worth it...
...in time.
[1] words
by Hal David. Music by Burt Bacharach
[2] Chalice
Hymnal: Worship Leaders Companion
[3] Ernest
K. Emurian, 200 Amazing Hymn Stories (www.tanbible.com)
[4] Wishful
Thinking: A Theological ABC, p. 39
[5] Interpreter's
Dictionary of the Bible vol. 2 p. 617
[6] New Interpreter's Bible, p. 1132