Text of an address to the National Celebration of Confessing Churches, Atlanta Georgia, February 26, 2002

We are here to talk about holiness. And we do so on the brink of a new day in the Presbyterian Church. God has blessed and prospered the witness of the Confessing Churches. Amendment A is going down to decisive defeat. The church has once more upheld its solidarity with scriptural and apostolic teaching on human sexuality.

This is not the last nor the only battle you shall have to fight, brothers and sisters. When our Book of Order lifts up the preservation of truth as a great end of the church, it does not understand it as a once and done affair. But the current circumstances do place before us a new agenda.

A New Day
As disciples pledged to the Lordship of Christ and the Authority of Scripture, we know that defending and proclaiming the truth is not enough; we must also live out the truth in love. Jesus warns about the dangers of confessing the truth without living it: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord' shall enter the kingdom of heaven," he says, "but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven" (Mat. 7:21). We dare not merely proclaim the truth, we must also strive and pray to become the truth!

What does that look like? That is the urgent question that presses upon us in this hour. What does a church and a denomination look like that embodies and lives out that commitment to holiness which the Confessing Churches have so faithfully lifted up?

No "Middle Way!"
The first thing we simply must say is that holiness under the Lordship of Christ and the authority of Scripture has no place for a so-called "middle way." Jesus warns us about the dangers of middle-way compromises: "Enter by the narrow gate," he says, "for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few" (Mat. 7:13-14).

Our call as Christ’s followers is not to find an easy compromise between truth and falsehood, between righteousness and unrighteousness. Our call is to forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead, pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:13-14).

The Dangers of the Narrow Way
But the New Testament also testifies that it is just here, as we seek the narrow gate of righteousness, that the quest for holiness becomes especially hazardous. The devil is never more dangerous than when he shows up at the foot of the altar.

The New Testament has many examples of solid, Bible-believing folk like you and me who have repudiated middle-way compromises and devoted themselves to the higher righteousness. I am referring of course to the Pharisees. Recent scholarship has shown the Pharisees to be not the hypocritical devotees of works-righteousness that we all heard about in Sunday School, but devoted keepers of the covenant. The Pharisees, as much as any Confessing Church member, were striving for a holiness that repudiated easy compromises with a corrupting culture. These were people intensely serious about living out a biblical faith.

Yet the really unnerving thing is that the New Testament singles out the Pharisees for special attention as people who did not "get it" when it came to Jesus. Jesus hangs out with real sinners— scores of genuinely contemptible and unrighteous persons. And yet for all of that, it is the Bible-believing Pharisees who receive his most blistering condemnations:

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of extortion and rapacity... Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs... You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?" (Mat 23:25,27,33).

In the Pharisees, my sisters and brothers, we have a commitment to holiness that ran off the rails and led to destruction. Those of us who are committed to lives of holiness need to look very carefully at what went wrong, lest we too wake up one day and find ourselves the objects of Jesus' condemnation. How did the Pharisees go astray?

Two Kinds of Holiness
I submit to you that there is a huge difference between the holiness of the Pharisees and the holiness of Christ, and that the difference between them is the difference between life and death, heaven and hell. How can the Confessing Churches be sure they are lifting up the right one?
Let me give you an example of the kind of holiness the Pharisees are practicing, illustrated from a passage in the Book of Numbers:

"Whoever touches the dead body of any person shall be unclean seven days; he shall cleanse himself with the water on the third day and on the seventh day, and so be clean; but if he does not cleanse himself on the third day and on the seventh day, he will not become clean. Whoever touches a dead person, the body of anyone who has died, and does not cleanse himself, defiles the tabernacle of the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from Israel..." (Numbers 19:11-13)

There is also a worldview at work in this passage. God, you see, is the author of life. That means wherever we see death in the world, that is a place where God's holiness is absent. And so those who live and practice this Old Testament sort of holiness are defiled when they come into contact with what is dead, it’s unholiness corrupts them and requires cleansing.
Pharisaic holiness, you see, is a fragile thing. It is a sacred, uncontaminated space that has been separated out from a corrupt and corrupting world. Pharisaic holiness requires walls and boundaries, because if such holiness comes into contact with what is unholy, it picks up the contamination. Pharisaic holiness maintains itself by separation from all that is unholy and unclean. The Pharisee’s instincts in the presence of unholy people is to separate, to withdraw. (Does this have anything to do with our situation today? Do we ever hear talk about separation or withdrawal in order to preserve our own holiness?)

Now let me illustrate with an incident from Matthew’s Gospel just how different Jesus' holiness is from all of this:

While he was thus speaking to them, behold, a ruler came in and knelt before him, saying, "My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live." And Jesus rose and followed with his disciples.... And when Jesus came to the ruler's house, and saw the flute players and the crowd making a tumult, he said, "Depart; for the girl is not dead but sleeping." And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl arose. And the report of this went through all that district."
(Mat. 9:18-19, 23-26).

Here we face again the corrupting unholiness of death staring us in the face as a brute fact in the midst of God's world. Yet Jesus, rather than withdraw to protect his own purity, marches straight into the corruption’s stronghold and makes direct contact with the uncleanness—he grasps the dead girl by the hand. And it is just here that all the expectations of the Pharisees get turned upside down. Instead of the unholiness of death contaminating Jesus' purity, the flow is the other way. Jesus' own holiness flows into the dead child, banishing the uncleanness and raising her to new life!

Unlike the Pharisees, Jesus’ holiness does not have to be walled off from an unclean world. Jesus’ holiness is stronger than the uncleanness. Jesus' holiness is an active power that crashes the barriers between pure and impure. Jesus' holiness enters in love and mercy into all the dark precincts of ungodliness and abomination, and there plants seeds of healing.

This is something the Pharisees simply couldn’t fathom.

And Levi made Jesus a great feast in his house; and there was a large company of tax collectors and others sitting at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes murmured against his disciples, saying, 'Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?’" And Jesus answered them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick... For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. (Mat 9:10-13)

Jesus' holiness seeks out and embraces the world’s contamination and corruption in order to bring mercy and plant seeds of healing! So here’s the question. How can churches who have pledged themselves to the Lordship of Christ live out that strong and merciful holiness of Jesus, and avoid the fragile and walled-off holiness of the Pharisees? What does that look like in practice?

Corruption in the Church
Brothers and sisters, I am not going to sugar-coat or sentimentalize the situation we face today. As I look around the Presbyterian church, I see a supposedly Christian institution where abominations litter the landscape. Everywhere we turn, there are open and flagrant violations of the clear teaching of both Old and New Testaments, flaunted before the church with a brazenness utterly devoid of any sense of repentance.

I refer of course to rampant consumerism and callous indifference toward the poor. We live in a world where some 4,000 children die every day because they lack access to the medical vaccines we take for granted in the west. Tuberculosis, which has been all but eradicated in the west, will claim an estimated 30 million lives over the course of the next decade. Millions of our fellow human beings lack the most basic resources for proper health and nutrition. And we Presbyterians fill our driveways with luxury cars and our houses with expensive gadgets.

I have two cars back home. And I know perfectly well that in my community there are struggling people, working poor for whom the lack of reliable personal transportation is a major obstacle in their day to day existence. The New Testament says, "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise" (Luke 3:11). Do you suppose that applies to automobiles as well?

You don’t think I’m serious, do you? How quickly we cook up for ourselves an easy middle way! Jesus has something to say about our hedging and our compromises here:

"No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Luke 16:13).

He doesn't mean us to take this literally, does he? I'm a middle class person, for heaven's sakes. I give generously to the church—that counts for something, doesn't it? I didn't choose to be born into an affluent society, it's just who I am. This is America, after all.

The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him. So he said to them, "You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God." (Luke 16:14-15).

Jesus calls us to a love that puts the needs of our neighbors on a par with the needs of the self. Do our churches ever challenge us about our use of possessions in that light? Sometimes we hear a few words about tithing when it comes time to raise the budget. But do we ever hear anything that would raise questions about the kind of cars we drive, or the houses we live in, or the uses we make of our so-called "disposable" income? Do we believe in the authority of scripture, brothers and sisters?

And the tough thing is, for all my pious talk up here I cannot tell you that I am going to go home after this conference and give away one of my cars. It would just be too inconvenient. We might have to band together with friends and learn to help each other, heaven forbid, and I just...can't...do it. I can't even want to give away that second car, much less look at all the other uses I make of my money. Serious repentance about possessions is just not within my grasp at this point. It's a good thing those 4,000 children are far, far away..

Here’s a question. If genuine repentance seems so terribly out of reach in the face of my attachment to a second car, where would I be if I were a gay person, and the demand were to go home after this conference and let go, not of an inanimate piece of machinery, but of the intimacy that bound me to a beloved partner with whom I had built a life? What would it be like to hear that?

The church has to uphold biblical teaching. We must never lose our grip on the word of life that comes to us in Jesus’ mercifully uncompromising vision of the persons God intends us to be. We must never compromise away the purity of love to which Christ calls us—both in the use of our possessions and in the use of our sexuality.

But let's take this matter of sexual holiness. Jesus calls us not just to fidelity and chastity, but to a joyous, procreative, mutually sacrificial love between a man and a woman that in its sheer self-giving perfection stands as an icon of the love that binds Christ to his church. Do our marriages measure up to this standard? Are the easy compromises our churches have made with the no-fault divorce culture in line with this teaching? Are the uses we make of the internet or television or movies consistent with this ideal?

Does it make sense to single out gays and lesbians as the only ones who have a struggle to live in accordance with Christ's teaching here? When is the last time you heard a challenge coming to heterosexuals from the church that was anywhere near as serious or exacting as the challenge the church has delivered to homosexuals?

Am I the only one here today who looks at the uncompromising purity of Christ’s call and Christ’s promise, and says, "Jesus’ Lordship isn’t fully visible in my life yet?" Am I the only one who has to confess that there is unholiness and uncleanness here, both in my use of possessions, and in areas of love and marriage and sexuality? Am I the only one who suspects there are areas of sinfulness in my life that I'm not even consciously aware of yet, where self-deception keeps me from actively repenting?

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner! I stand before you steeped in uncleanness and a long way from being able to repent as I should. And as people who take the Scripture and Christ’s Lordship seriously, we have to say that this is real corruption and real lostness we are dealing with here.. These aren’t just word games.

Brothers and sisters listen to me very carefully. There is absolutely no coherent way to argue from the Bible that this particular struggle with sexual orientation is an abomination, but those other heterosexual problems, or this whole business of possessions and love of neighbor—well, those are optional matters open to negotiation.

The Apostle Paul hammers this point home. Paul’s mention of homosexuality Romans 1:26-27 is a key text in establishing the traditional biblical teaching on sexuality. The irony is that Paul’s reference is part and parcel of a larger argument that condemns not only homosexuality, but also:

wickedness of every kind, evil, greed, depravity, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, impiety, insolence, arrogance, boastfulness, disobedience to parents, senselessness, faithlessness, heartlessness, ruthlessness.

And Paul goes on to say in chapter 2 that if you pick one particular item out of this list (like homosexuality) and use it to condemn a brother or sister, in doing this you bring God’s wrath and condemnation upon yourself because you are so blind and unrepentant of your own sin (Rom 2:1-5)! How does Paul conclude all this? "None is righteous, no not one" (Rom 3:10)! The world isn't split up into sinners over here, and good people over there. The cross of Christ unmasks the self-justifying pretension in all these little divisions we make.

The bible calls all of us to holiness, and not just in matters of sex. Do we believe the Scriptures or not?

Clinging to this second automobile is really just the tip of the iceberg. I see no hope in the foreseeable future of my being able to muster that purity of self-giving love to which Jesus calls me, either in the realm of my marriage or in my use of money and possessions. Jesus calls these unholy attachments to my possessions an abomination in the eyes of God. Repentance is mostly out of my reach. What am I to do?

The Holiness of Jesus
Let me tell you what you and I can do, brothers and sisters, we can take refuge in the holiness of Jesus. Do you see what a gift it is?

The holiness of the Pharisees would condemn people like me who struggle and compromise and fall very far short of a perfect repentance. The Pharisees see a person like me and recoil in horror, shouting "unclean, unclean!" Separate, draw away! Righteous people will be polluted by contact with such a one. Withdraw, depart, form a new denomination, start the inquisitions, separate, purge the uncleanness, our purity is a fragile thing, it has to be protected!

But when the crowd had been put outside, Jesus went in and took the dead girl by the hand, and the girl arose. The holiness of Christ reaches out even to those of us who appear totally dead in our compromises and impenitence. The holiness of Christ reaches out even to those of us who have not the strength or life to reach out to him. The holiness of Christ has come to seek and save...the lost! Jesus descends into hell to find us in the depths, Jesus pursues us into the far country, Jesus crashes the gates, he trespasses the boundaries, he scours every inch of wilderness wasteland. And he does it not to condemn, not to separate, not to castigate— but to heal the brokenhearted and bind up the wounded and lead every lost sheep along the path toward home!

Christ’s Holiness in our Churches: Faith
That strong, seeking, holiness of Jesus is such a precious thing for sinners, brothers and sisters. And I want to finish by suggesting how the three theological virtues can guide our congregations to this holiness of Jesus in our life together, and help us to avoid the condemning, separating holiness of the Pharisees.

The first virtue leading us to Christ’s holiness is faith. We have to get the Gospel right. Our presentation of the faith must be faithful. As Paul puts it, "The Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes" (2 Cor. 1:19). The Gospel is not "yes" to this group and "no" to that group. The Gospel is Christ’s powerful holiness coming to rescue sin-sick souls! Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick!

You know, in its dealings with most of us, the church has embraced the Gospel truth that there is no entrance requirement for coming to Jesus. I thank God the church hasn’t said to me, you must give up that second car (or sell all you have!) before you’re fit to be a part of us. You cannot argue from the Bible that fullness of repentance is the precondition for discipleship. There are no such preconditions in the New Testament. How many times does Jesus heal helpless people because of the faith of their friends? Does Jesus ever say to tax collectors or prostitutes or even Pharisees, "First get your life together and then I will come eat with you?" Does Jesus require that little dead girl to reach out to him first, before he takes her by the hand? The good news of the Gospel is that God has come to us—in the midst of our helplessness!—with mercy. Dear Christians, if God has been so generous with us, how could we possibly say to our materialistic brothers and sisters, "You are not welcome in our churches until you first give away that car?" If Jesus has been so generous with us, how could we possibly say to our gay brothers and sisters, or to those with marital difficulties, "You are not part of us unless first this aspect of your life is fully healed?" Our proclamation must start with the Gospel: God has consigned all persons to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all (Rom 11:32). Jesus came not to call the righteous, but sinners (Mark 2:17).

Christ’s Holiness in our Churches: Hope
The second virtue for upholding and proclaiming Christ’s holiness is hope, and it means confidence that Jesus will begin the long slow work of healing in us and in our neighbors— but according to his own plan and timetable!
Brothers and sisters, when you come across a lost sheep in the wilderness, what you do not do is show that struggling one a postcard of home and say "Gee, you’re not there…too bad!" The desperate, crying need of that lost sheep isn’t to be told they're lost, it is to find help in locating the first step along the road toward home. When Jesus calls his disciples, do they appear fully formed and perfected in the faith? They are confused, they are doubting, they are self-centered, they are misguided, they are frightened, they are faithless—in the end they all run away! Does Jesus ever give up on them? No, he does not. He leads them one small step at a time.

When Jesus comes to a lost sheep like me, is the first word, "Sell the car and then we’ll talk?" "Give up the partner and I’ll come visit?" No! What Jesus does, and what the church that embodies Jesus’ holiness does, is to cover my inability and my impenitence under grace, so he can show me the first step on the road toward home. "Mark, how can we help you hold your possessions a little less tightly? Mark, how can you work on loving a little more deeply?" Lifting up Christ’s holiness, the church challenges all of us week in and week out with our own next step, not just one small group we've decided to single out.

Yes, Jesus heals, but his healing may at first be partial or even invisible. That little girl Jesus brought back from the dead was not raised to the fullness of resurrection life. She lived and died an ordinary, mortal death like you and me, and she awaits her resurrection into glory like you and me. What Jesus gave her was not the fullness of healing but a down payment. A step along the way.

So for all of us who struggle under the powers of sin and death. The first step along that road toward home may be a very small and halting thing. Maybe it simply means standing inside the church rather than outside—where at least we're able to hear the Gospel. Maybe it involves receiving a new name. When someone says, "Who are you?," perhaps I can learn to say "I am a sinner redeemed by Christ" rather than, "I am a middle-class American," or "I am a gay person." Maybe that first or next step involves a move from unbridled consumerism to keeping a budget; or a move from rampant promiscuity to settling down with a partner. Maybe that first step means accepting my spending limits and ceasing to borrow. Maybe it means receiving as a gracious gift the lessening of sexual desire as we get older, rather than seeking to rev it up again with estrogen or viagra.

That first step along the road toward home may not involve fullness of repentance. It may involve struggle toward a mere desire for repentance. I cannot even want to give that car away, but maybe I can start to pray in the abstract for God to align my wants more closely with his will. Do you remember Augustine’s famous prayer? "Lord make me chaste and pure and faithful—but not quite yet!" Maybe I cannot want to submit my sexuality fully to Christ’s lordship, but perhaps I can hope and pray Jesus will start to do his will with me in ways I dare not even name.

"Let go and let God," evangelicals are always saying. Does it make sense to demand complete and miraculous healing all at once—as the price of admission? When was the last time God worked fully and completely according to the timetable you laid out? "But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." (Rom 8:25). Brothers and sisters, you cannot on the basis of scripture demand the fullness of Christ's Kingdom in anyone's life before the fullness of Christ's Kingdom has actually appeared!. We must hope in the gracious working of Christ’s holiness over the long haul!

Christ’s Holiness in our Churches: Love
The last virtue that grasps and proclaims Christ’s holiness is love. In contrast to the Pharisees, Jesus' holiness does not withdraw from the unholiness of sinners like us.

My friend Alan has done a much better job with Christian stewardship than I. Alan’s family has undertaken the rigorous discipline of having only one car. But Alan has not separated from me, despite my struggles. He has never made me feel like it's really his church into which he invites me as a favor. I have never felt judged by him. Alan and I pray together, we encourage each other in discipleship, he stands with me and I with him as brothers in Christ. Together we have confidence that Jesus is working (sometimes very slowly!) in all those areas of our lives that need it. It is a tremendous gift of grace, this solidarity in Christian love and community.
We are followers of a Lord and Master who identified himself with us sinners, who took all our brokenness on himself and bore it all to the cross. Jesus prayed for sinners even as they were pounding the spikes into his hands (and that without a hint of repentance!). How could we be his followers if we did not stand with our fellow sinners in love and solidarity? How could we not be there for each other as we submit our lives—even those areas we struggle to repent of just yet— to Jesus’ healing mercy?
The last words of Martin Luther as he lay on his deathbed were, "We are all beggars." You and I, our gay and lesbian neighbors, every last one of us....is totally dependent on God’s grace. God has consigned all persons to disobedience that he may have mercy on all. Christ’s holiness reaches out to all of us beggars at the table. There is no distinction.

Can we not stand in solidarity, all of us beggars? Must we not embrace one another and rejoice together in thanksgiving for God’s wonderful gifts, even as we submit ourselves as best we can to the healing mercy of Christ? How can we not stand with our gay and lesbian neighbors, even as Christ stands with them and with each of us? Must we not all say together, "There is sin and brokenness in my life that I can't repent of just yet, that I’m not even ready to name as sin yet. But together we trust in God’s grace, together we give our whole selves to Jesus, together we trust him to work in us and on us, leading in the end to eternal life.