Last year, Pastor Ryan and I submitted an essay for the new book Renovating Holiness that explores a younger generation's understanding and experience with holiness and sanctification. Below is the essay that was published. It is at times more theologically driven this most of our blog posts. You can check out the book here.
“Holiness Now: Resurrection and Shalom on the
Big Island”
Ryan Fasani and Eric Paul
Hanu (hah-noo), an unwed mother of two young children, is a ‘local’ here—she’s
of Polynesian descent, grew up in Hawaii, and considers the culture of the Big
Island normative. Hanu conceived her first child as a teenager. Under the pressures of motherhood, part-time
employment, living in a multigenerational home, and being single, she chose to
complete a GED rather than high school. Her current boyfriend (and father of her
second child) works for a hotel when not serving scheduled, three-month stints
in jail. Cost of living here is beyond their means and they suffer from health
complications and family dysfunction. We have found Hanu’s story very
common. As pastors on the Big Island of
Hawaii, we ask: What does holiness look like for Hanu?
The doctrine of holiness is the
church's articulation of Christ’s life being enacted, through the power of
grace, in the world. The life of holiness is the embodiment of
that truth. However, our observation is
that the doctrine has largely ignored the Christ who came preaching the Shalom Community
as the Kingdom of God, and thus has not been helpful for realizing embodied
holiness. We contend that holiness is
the embodiment of Shalom in a particular place with particular people—where
Christ’s life has become our own.
Consequently, holiness is both contextual (to a particular place) and
communal (to a particular people). We
find it helpful to use the biblical vision of the Shalom Community (Micah 4) to
understand embodied holiness, which is to say that the biblical vision of a
particularly placed people will help us better understand how we ought to
envision holiness for Hanu here and now—in our community.
Hanu and the Holiness of Our Past
Holiness has been taught as a moment of entire sanctification rendered by the
grace of God in an individual's heart. Nazarene understanding of where sanctification
occurs is indicative of where we locate sin: in the heart of the individual. This
is why the adage “justification is what God does for us, sanctification is what God does in us” is so fitting. Sin is rooted in the human heart, and therefore, sanctification also takes root in the human heart. Unfortunately, with
this understanding, holiness can only be understood in contrast to an individual’s
(non-communal) breech of (non-contextualized) faithfulness.
In this way, the Nazarene church has focused on Hanu and her boyfriend’s litany
of personal sins: premarital intercourse, criminal activity, poor financial stewardship.
The Good News for Hanu, from this perspective, is that God forgives and can do
a sanctifying work in her. The bad news
is that it leaves unaddressed a majority of Hanu’s life and therefore a
majority of the healing God desires.
The scriptures are clear that God alone is a holy, self-giving God, and
desires to sanctify Hanu's whole realm of existence (Colossians 1). Locating
sin and sanctification in the heart of the individual certainly offers the
potential for a narrow “inner cleansing” but it ignores the totality of God’s
desire for reconciliation, which includes the breeding ground of Hanu’s sin. We
simply cannot separate the experience of holiness from all that is implicated
in the holy self-giving of God. We
contend that this self-giving and the Kingdom preached by Christ are
all-encompassing—implicating the complex web of relationships and influences in
Hanu’s life. Where Hanu lives, her social and familial network, and the cultural
structures that govern her life are all environments of influence and sinfulness.
Sanctification, then, must be dislodged
from the very limited locale of the heart so that it can be realized as broadly
as God desires.
But Hanu’s life (and sinfulness) is unlike anyone else’s. So too should
sanctification be unique to her experience.
Sanctification must be conceived broadly enough to included Hanu’s whole
sphere experience and particular enough to be realized in her immediate, unique
context. Hanu’s story teaches us that holiness is necessarily both communal and
contextual.
The Shalom Community of Micah 4
Holiness, far from only being the state of a believer’s heart, is God’s
move to restore the intricate web of relationships—personal, social, political,
economic, etc.—in which we all participate. But if God is actively restoring
these relationships, then we must be able to speak in terms of restoring
concrete interpersonal, socio-political and even economic relationships.
Inversely, we must speak of the brokenness-needing-healing in each of those relational
arenas. We must speak of communal brokenness, and the communal context of
restoration. Scripture is ripe with such
articulation. Take for example Micah 4:
In
days to come…
2 many nations shall come
and say:
‘Come,
let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to
the house of the God of Jacob;
that
he may teach us his ways
and
that we may walk in his paths...’
3 He shall judge between many
peoples,
and
shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they
shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and
their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation
shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither
shall they learn war any more;
4 but they shall all sit under their
own vines and under their own fig trees,
and
no one shall make them afraid;
for
the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. (Micah 4).
In general, the prophets proclaim words of disaster and optimism, grief and
comfort, apocalyptic end and future hope. But they refuse to divorce “spiritual
health” from the totality of health in communities. When we read and engage
prophetic literature, we must read it through a totalizing “lens of life”: no
aspect of the human experience is excluded from the blessings and ultimate
judgment of God. As such, three
important aspects of Shalom are apparent in this prophetic vision.
First, this is a religious text.
God, judgment, and a divine voice along with particular references to
“the God of Jacob” and “Lord of hosts” are all clear references to a religious
tradition known as Israel. But the
vision itself is hardly “religious,” as if religion were a sector of life
distinct from economy or politics.
Instead, God’s restoration is concrete and practical, a matter of
worship and work.
Second, Micah gives us a broad picture of what the Kingdom will look like
and it’s not only the restoration of individuals. The restoration encompasses individual
estrangement from creation, poverty, starvation, and violence. God’s sanctifying power reaches into every
facet of communal existence.
Third, the prophetic vision is a universal hope but not a universal
reference. In other words, the
particularities of a this-world, communal context are evident. Though there are references to “nations far
away” and “many peoples”, the peaceful community envisioned is not like every
community—it is a particularly placed people.
They are familiar with an agrarian lifestyle (“ploughshares”), which is
to say they are not nomadic and make a living through cultivating soil. They have a history of combat and wield a
particular arsenal of weapons (“swords and spears”). Among them are orchardists (requiring
“pruning-forks”) and vintners or winemakers (“sitting under their vines”). They may have a history of being the
underdog, likely a reference to their small size (“strong nations far away….make[ing]
them afraid”). We get the image of an
agrarian community with a non-aggressive foreign policy or expansion tactic,
relieved to finally put up their weapons to more fully invest in peaceful and
satisfying pursuits of stewarding creation.
The holiness vision of Micah 4 is not limited to God’s sanctification of
the human heart; instead it is a holy restoration of all the complex facets of
a particular community, in and between the concrete lives of neighbors in a
particular place. Holiness is communal.
Holiness is contextual.
Holiness Now
So how does Micah 4 help us understand sanctification for Hanu? Micah clearly
understood the distinctions of the envisioned community. In order to envision redemption and
sanctification, we need to know that which is broken (needing healing) and
unholy (needing to be sanctified). We
can start, then, by better understanding unique brokenness and sin in Hanu’s context.
Many of Hanu’s relationships are strained or broken, creating immense stress,
anxiety, and fear. The consistency
necessary for marital health is abruptly interrupted every few months when her
husband is in jail—vacillating between single parenthood and dual
parenthood. Her living environment is
not conducive to conflict resolution because of the proximity to multiple adult
family members. Discussions often turn to arguments, arguments to abuse. And each sphere of relationship is negatively
affected by her material poverty.
She also suffers from multiple socio-political systems in Hawaii that have
failed: a food system that promotes disease and unhealthy bodies, a punitive
criminal system that dismembers families, an education system that cannot
accommodate unique family needs, an economic system that exacerbates poverty, a
governmental aid system that serves as a disincentive to gainful employment,
and a cultural system that is often ethnically oppressive.
As we learn more about the complexity of Hanu’s brokenness, we begin to see
multiple interlocking spheres. When one
sphere is stressed or broken, the pain (or sin) reverberates into all other
spheres. We believe that God cares and longs to restore the brokenness in each
of these interrelated spheres so that Life and sanctification may be fully
expressed.
The question of holiness could be posed thusly: what if these relationships
could be healed? We contend that this is
the abundant, shalom life that God desires.
When we abandon the belief that sanctification addresses the sinful
heart alone and begin to believe that the self-giving holy God that we worship
desires the complexity of our existence to heal and be made new, then we begin
to harness the imagination of Micah and the Shalom Community. Sin, we believe, is a “heart issue” and a “systems issue” and a “relationship issue” (Ephesians
2), thereby making sanctification holistically relevant and necessary.
For years, the local church created specific programs to heal suffering in
each sphere (i.e. food pantry or ESL classes).
But, in Hanu’s case, her experience and suffering from sin is unique to
her context, rendering generic programs partially effective at best. Because Hanu’s sin is both internal and
systemic, she suffers from a web of brokenness, rendering charitable,
one-dimensional solutions too narrow and mostly unhelpful. The only “solution” we can imagine for Hanu’s
convolution of sin is the slow and gentle inclusion into a worshipping body
that takes seriously God’s call to Life and holiness in every facet of existence.
As is
the case in Micah 4, only a self-giving community bent toward holiness can envision
and ultimately realize holiness for Hanu’s broken context. Only a community of shalom can realize a
radically different (set apart, holy) way of life together—from the way we consume
and clothe ourselves to how we interact with the broader market economy, from
the way we nurse our babies to the way we adopt unwanted children, from the way
we embrace a diversity of cultures to the way we worship one God, from the way
we use our ploughshares for farming to the refusal to bear arms. These are part
of the Shalom Community—these are all part of Hanu’s sanctification. We find
that we can not talk of Hanu’s holiness apart from the holiness of the
community in which she lives. Imagining and enacting such a community
contextualizes Hanu’s life while caring for both individual and communal growth
in Christ.
