Consumed:Holy

 June 2 2024

Acts 2:29-41

         Its funny how, because I grew up on a farm, I think of planting corn and making hay during this time of year. But lately I have been thinking about my buddies in prison because it was around this time of year that the Kairos team would be meeting getting ready to head back to Belmont Correctional.I often get asked if I had any concerns going inside during the times our team would do weekends or visits, and I have to honestly admit that I always had a sense of peace when were serving at Belmont. I vividly remember the first time I went as part of the Kairos team. I thought I would quite naturally be apprehensive or nervous. Yet quite the opposite happened because when I entered into those prisons walls a great calm came over me; I never got over that feeling. What I sensed in those first few moments of being there was that God was not just already present with us but also, I sensed that he had been preparing everything in advance for us. So it seems that God is able to bring peace even there behind prison walls.

         As we continue to try and comprehend this experience of Pentecost by knowing that this experience is an outflow of the Lord’s Prayer, God’s ability to bring peace to our hearts does not seem to be evident. Yet if we look at our scripture for today as the fulfillment of the second petition of what Luke has recorded in his account of the Lord’s Prayer what we find is that there is more to our scripture than meets the eye.

         The second petition of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke’s account of this teaching of Jesus is simply, “Your name holy.”As we saw last week, the prayer begins with the title, “Father”. So here we discover that our Father in heaven has a name and this name is holy. In the version of the Lord’s Prayer that most of us were taught, the first few petitions say, “Our Father, who art in heaven; hallowed be your name.” For most of us, we may have never considered that when we pray that our Father’s name be hallowed what we desire is that the reputation of our Father, who resides in heaven, is that his reputation, his unchanging character, is known as being holy. This has much the same sense as when we might say that we are concerned if someone were to ruin our good name. God, too, is concerned that his good name, his holiness, could be ruined thus affecting how he might be thought of by those who do not know him.

         So we can relate to this concern that God has that his name not be dragged in the mud; we don’t want that to happen to our good name either. The problem is that it is difficult to define just what does, “holy”, mean? Most of us have met, or at last, know of someone who was what we call, holier-than-thou, haven’t we? You know, those whose nose is tilted slightly up with their eyes gazing down at us because they have surmised that they hold the moral high ground. Is this what, “holy”, means, this keeping of strict rules which make us stand out as moral and upright people? Is this holiness, this special quality that people want you to know that they have? It seems as if holiness is just another means of dividing the world up, you know, those who are holy over here and the rest of you, over there? 

         It becomes apparent that we need to understand just what is meant by this term, “holy”. What helps us to unravel just what it is that we are praying for, what we know the Holy Spirit will bring to fulfillment, is knowing that this petition is actually a scripture verse from the thirty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel.  Ezekiel was a prophet of the people of Israel. When God’s people were thrown out of their land at the hands of the Babylonian army and forced to march hundreds of miles into exile, Ezekiel went with them to be the spokesperson for God in this situation.  Here in the thirty-sixth chapter, God tells Ezekiel, “I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned . The nations will know that I am the Lord, when through you I vindicate my holiness. I will take you from the nations and gather you from the countries and bring you into your own land.” God is going to justify his claim that he alone is the holy God and he is going to do so by gathering his people and by bringing them into their own land. Of course, God did bring his people back from exile in Babylon to live in Judaea yet even so, the people never felt as if their exile had ended. You see, what God tells Ezekiel he is going to do has a deeper meaning than just bringing his people back to the land that he had promised to them. You see, the promised land represented a place of rest and peace for God’s people. In the ninety-fifth Psalm, God speaks of those he had rescued from Egypt who, in the end rebelled, against him. God says of them that for,…”forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.”Therefore I swore in my wrath, “They shall not enter my rest.” The writer of Hebrews, commentating on this verse, says that this Psalm holds forth the promise of a coming Sabbath rest for the people of God. This rest, this is what I believe that God is referring to when he tells Ezekiel that his name will be known as being holy when he gathers his people from among the nations and his people come to rest in their confidence of God. God’s people are to be known as people who have peace through their faith in him. This is something that only a holy God can do.

         When we begin to understand what it means for God to be holy then it is not much of a leap to see that the name of Jesus is the holy name of God.Consider the promise of Jesus from the twelfth chapter of John, where he states, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” This is exactly how God said that he would vindicate his claim of being holy. Then, in some of his last words to his disciples, Jesus tells them, from the fourteenth chapter of John, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Here then the name of God is made holy through these actions of Jesus, his willingness to be hoisted up upon the cross to draw all people to him so that all people might be given the very peace of Jesus that steadied him as he carried that cross. 

         As the disciples prayed there in that upper room for their Father’s name to be holy who could have guessed how the coming the of the Holy Spirit would bring this petition to fulfillment. The Spirit came upon Peter and through God speaking through him, those who had gathered around the confusion of that upper room heard the story of how Jesus, yes, the very Jesus that many in that crowd had wanted crucified, was now seated on the very throne of David. God had indeed not allowed his Holy One to see corruption just as David had prophesied in the sixteenth Psalm. No, this Jesus, God’s Holy One, had been raised from the dead and had been exalted to the right hand of the Father on high. From there, Jesus had poured out the Holy Spirit just as the Father had promised would happen. So, Peter concluded, this Jesus that those in the crowd had crucified, this is indeed the Lord, God’s exalted king.

         Suddenly, those listening to Peter understood exactly where they stood with God, being the very people who shouted for God’s chosen king to be killed. Their lives, you might say, were caught in the crosshairs. Luke records that when what Peter had said landed on them like a ton of bricks, their hearts were cut to the core. This was an obvious reference to the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy where Moses told God’s people that their exile would end when, “…the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring so that you will love the Lord your God with all of your heart and soul.” Suddenly those who cried, “Crucify!”, were now pleading to know just what they should do. They knew that they were deserving of death, justice demanded at least that for the killing of God’s anointed exalted king. Yet, even though the air was thick with the presence of God, they were found instead to be very much alive. What sort of mercy is this that the judgment of death, that was surely theirs, was now suddenly gone and in its place was the gift of life. Their hearts, so enamored with the desires of this world, needed this flesh which bound them to this earth, this needed to be cut away so that through the the grasp of the Holy Spirit they might be bound to heaven. They publicly needed to proclaim what they had experienced using the act of baptism.  They had to be seen as being plunged down into the waters of death, this dying to this world and this age. Then they needed to be raised up out of the water, up out of death, to be drawn into the kingdom life given to them through the Holy Spirit. Their baptism was done in the name of Jesus. In bearing the name of Jesus they vindicated the holiness of the Father because he alone can raise the dead to new life, this is the very foundation of the peace that he promises us. This peace is given to us through the Holy Spirit who, as Paul teaches us in the eighth chapter of Romans, is the one who gives us life and peace. So we could say that this kingdom of God is brought about through a promise of peace not, as earthly kingdoms are, through a declaration of war; this is the very holiness of God.

         When we consider the holiness of God we must wonder just what is this power that brings forth a kingdom through peace? The answer we find through out scripture is that the power which brings us into peace is none other than God’s holy love. No where is this better stated than in the first letter of John, at the end of the fourth chapter where we hear, “By this does this love of God reach its goal in us so we might confidence, an abiding peace, on the day of judgment because as God is so also are we in the world. There is no fear in love, but rather the result of God’s love is that it casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears, for this one the love of God has not accomplished what that his love is capable of doing. We are to love precisely because God first loved us.” You see, the holy love of God is our very hope on the day of judgment and because God, in his mercy has chosen to give us life in place of our sure death, we must ask, just how can fear remain in us? And when fear is thrown out then faith, this confidence, this peace we have with God, can flood our soul. From this place of peace then is where love can at last, begin to grow and flourish in us. So to ask that the name of the Father be proven holy by us means that we are asking that the Holy Spirit bring us to be people of a peculiar peace, a peace, as Paul says, that passes all understanding.

         When we can at last make this connection between, “holy”, and, “peace”, then as we consider the first two petitions of Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, “Father, your name, holy.”, it should come as no surprise that Jesus would teach about what the end of such a prayer should be. In the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus teaches, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God.” Here we have, first, the blessing of our Father which Jesus says is ours when we join him in building his kingdom through peace. The blessing that follows this making of peace is that we will have absolute certainty that we are sons of the Father who stand to receive an eternal inheritance. So the peace which comes through the the certainty of our eternity is here connected directly to our being those who are busy using all that they have been given to make peace. Is it becoming clear that if we refuse to be peacemakers that we will then have no peace about our future with the God of all peace and in the end we will be consumed by anxiety and worry instead of being consumed by the holy love of God. You see, as we look at this Pentecost experience and wonder at why the longing for kingdom became a passion which consumed them, we can know that it is the holy love of God which is the fuel that sets ablaze the fire of our heart. In the peace which God’s holy love creates in us we must endeavor to follow our Father’s lead and give all to make peace. Yet, such an undertaking seems fairly overwhelming in a world of overflowing with controversy and conflict. Perhaps we should start small, maybe with just one person, and simply do one thing- encourage them. This is what the writer of Hebrews tells us that we can do to increase the peace in someone’s life as we here in the third chapter, “Come alongside of someone and speak courage into their hearts as long as it is called, “Today”,that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” The lie of sin is that there can be no solid ground on which we might stand, no real place of peace. But we have been raised with Jesus, we stand on resurrection ground and here there is no greater place of peace to be found. So as we speak words which tell of a holy God, a God who has loved us with his holy love ,a God who draws us into his perfect peace, to someone whose heart is troubled, this is when we too will remember our God and our peace will abound. We must hold on to the words God spoke to Joshua as he entered into the land which represents the peace of God: Be strong and courageous, do not be terrified for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Take these words and go in peace. Amen.