This is a redux of an earlier post so that I could read something to my Sunday school class based on several conversations with Claude about the lesson material and things learned on my mission:
We talk about holiness like it’s up ahead, waiting for us,
if we can just get enough things in a row. Enough time, enough discipline.
Enough refinement. Enough years of not messing it up quite so often. Holiness
starts to feel elevated — not just in the moral sense, but in altitude. It
belongs to apostles and general authorities, to the people who seem to have
worked out the contradictions the rest of us are still stuck inside. “More
holiness give me” sounds less like a prayer and more like a training regimen. Church
is where you go to get strong enough before you’re allowed to really matter.
But that’s not how the scriptures talk. In the wilderness, Manna
wasn’t a placeholder. The tabernacle wasn’t a temporary workaround until they could
build something more permanent. These “stop gaps” were part of the curriculum.
That was the form their lives were supposed to take. Not later. Not once they’d
proven something. Right there, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing
stabilized yet.
Exodus and Leviticus don’t spend much time on arrival. They
circle, almost obsessively, around offering. About bringing to the alter - what
you have and what you are. Not what you wish you had. Not what you think you’ll
have once you’ve improved enough to be worth taking seriously. What you
actually have. The animal you raised. The grain you grew. The life you’re
actually living.
Come as you are — which sounds simple until you realize it
means coming before you feel ready. And you won’t feel ready. Not really. There
will always be something unfinished, something unresolved, something that
disqualifies you in your own mind.
But the text doesn’t wait for that to clear. It keeps
calling you forward anyway. With the heart that’s actually broken. With the shortcomings
you actually have. With whatever mixture of sincerity and self-interest you’re
bringing that day.
Holiness doesn’t show up first.It shows up slowly, almost
reluctantly, in people who keep making offerings anyway. Day after day. Sabbath
after Sabbath. Not because they’ve become the kind of people who qualify, but
because they keep refusing to wait until they do.
You don’t become holy and then offer something. You offer
something — imperfectly, inconsistently, sometimes almost resentfully — and
over time, in the middle of that repetition, something in you is changed. Not
all at once. Not cleanly. But actually.
This lesson lives in that gap. Between the holiness we
picture — clean, resolved, already arrived — and the holiness the text keeps
describing, which looks a lot more like people showing up before they feel
qualified, and staying long enough for God to do something with that.
