What Is Holiness?

With gratitude to Jeri Cagle Vandiver, whose song once led me into the presence of God.


I met him while visiting a long-term care facility. He had lost a leg to diabetes and was sitting in his wheelchair, leaning slightly to the left.

“Hey, young man,” he said. (I was a young man!) “Come sit here a spell. Let’s talk.”

He had been a Nazarene pastor. He wanted to reminisce about old times and thought I might be interested.

“Wanna hear a funny story?”

“Sure,” I replied.

“We had a minister’s conference once and everyone went to it ready to fight. (Of course, we always had some issue, in every conference.) The issue that year was sanctification and whether it was instantaneous or gradual. Well, sir, the debate about sanctification got so hot that a few guys finally got out into the aisle shoutin’ at one other, faces red as beets. They got so furious and worked up. I thought sure they’d come t’ blows. But just when I thought they would have and honest t’ God fist fight, someone shouted out;

“Brothers! It doesn’t matter if sanctification is instantaneous or gradual. Ain’t none of us sanctified no how!”

“Bwahahaha,” the old man snorted. “I like that story.”

“I like it too,” I said.

“Don’t forget it,” he added.

I haven’t.

After the American Civil War, millions of Americans became part of what we call the “holiness” movement. A blog doesn’t offer enough space to tell much about its history and theology. However, if you are a Pentecostal or any other kind of Wesleyan Christian, it would be well worth your time to read about it. It is enough here to say that holiness churches – Nazarenes, Pilgrim Holiness, the various kinds of Churches of God, nearly all Pentecostals – a huge percentage of American Evangelical groups -- are the products of American Methodism. That means of course that they are the spiritual children of John and Charles Wesley.

At various stages of their development, nearly all of these churches encouraged a radical separation from the world. Most of them were at first pacifists, then conscientious objectors. They were poor for the most part and profoundly conscious of their lower-class origins. That is evident in the gospel songs they wrote, and which many of us still sing but no longer believe. (“Though cabin or cottage, what should I care, they’re building a mansion for me over there.”)

Most importantly, the holiness movement taught that a believer’s dress, speech and behavior ought to clearly reveal that he or she was “sold out to God” and separated from the world. In time, it was these cultural markings that became most identified with the word “holiness.”

For one who grew up in the holiness movement, the verse, “without holiness no man shall see the Lord,” clearly means that unless we observe the distinctions of dress and behavior taught by our church we will not go to Heaven.

I love that verse, and all the passages that call us to holiness. However, they mean something quite different.

The word “holy” actually means “different, alien, other, and apart.” To experience holiness is to experience a profound otherness, a sense of something otherworldly, something beyond time and space. Holiness provokes something akin to terror. Holiness shakes the soul. It breaks up the encrusted toxic scar tissue of our hearts.

Holiness is an awareness of sacred things. It is a radical humility that leads to continual repentance. It is a sense of human dignity rooted in God’s promise that we will soon be different creatures than we are today. It is our first feeble steps into a new nature. It is stumbling toward the outstretched hands of an encouraging Father.

In short, holiness is the presence of God. Without it, no man shall see the Lord.

If we do not have times and spaces where we leave everyday life behind; times and spaces that evoke a different kind of behavior, speech and attitude; time and spaces in which we truly “come and bow down and rejoice in God our Savior;” will we ever experience “holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord?

Does what we now call worship lead us into holiness? And if not, to what does it lead us? If what we experience at church is not different than what we experience at the mall, concert or at Starbucks – all good places to be sure – where will we enter holiness?

Lest I be misunderstood, this is not a dig at contemporary worship. I have been in contemporary worship settings where God was very present. I have also been in traditional services that felt like an injection of spiritual Novocain. It’s not about either contemporary or traditional.

It is about what happens between our soul and God. It is about whether or not we ever enter into “the beauty of holiness.”

The holiness movement made a mistake in focusing too much on dress and other surface issues. That’s why the old preacher’s story is so funny. The fact is, if we encounter the presence of God, it is very likely that our values and tastes in all sorts of things will begin to change. We may indeed start dressing differently. We will stop using bad language and all other kinds of abusive speech. We will flee gossip as though it were a cobra. We will just quietly abandon the world’s values and set our hearts on things above.

But we will never mistake any of this for holiness once we have actually experienced holiness. And, we will not be consumed with the behavior of others, trying to force other people to conform to our way of life.

Instead we will be like the early followers of the holiness movement, who echoing the words of the Prophet sang this piercing invitation to life:

Ho! Every one that is thirsty in spirit,

Ho! Every one that is weary and sad;

Come to the fountain, there’s fullness in Jesus,

All that you’re longing for: come and be glad!

“I will pour water on him that is thirsty,

I will pour floods upon the dry ground;

Open your hearts for the gifts I am bringing;

While ye are seeking Me, I will be found.”

Child of the world, are you tired of your bondage?

Weary of earth joys, so false, so untrue?

Thirsting for God and His fullness of blessing?

List to the promise, a message for you!

Child of the kingdom, be filled with the Spirit!

Nothing but “fullness” thy longing can meet;

’Tis the enduement for life and for service;

Thine is the promise, so certain, so sweet.

Why Was Jesus Born During Hanukkah?

I predict that this year, as in every other year, someone will tell me about the pagan origins of Christmas. They will passionately point out the lack of evidence that Christ was born in December. They will rant about commercialization of the season. They will say all sorts of things to discredit the importance of Advent.

So, this year, as in other years, I will sigh. Then I will go buy presents for my family and friends.

The attitude that produces the distrust of Christmas is, at the root of things, a rejection of the incarnation. It is a sense of disgust at the thought that God became a man; that he didn’t just put on a “man suit” and walk around but BECAME a man.

Jesus got hungry.

Jesus wept.

Jesus defecated.

Therefore, the spiritual path Jesus offers must necessarily be consistent with the incarnation. In other words, Christianity is human, as well as divine. As a consequence, “spirituality” cannot mean becoming increasingly detached from material things or from physical action. Instead, Christian spirituality must involve the redemption of matter and its use as a spiritual instrument. Consecrated matter is to be received with gratitude, enjoyed and celebrated as God’s gift to his children.

There is, in other words, an inescapable sacramental reality to our faith.

Cut out the ceremonies, sacraments, awe and reverence; the material components of worship and all human ways of expressing spiritual life and you will end up with a philosophy or a political path.  You may call the result “Christianity” if you wish, but it will have no lasting grip on the human soul.  It will gradually lose its hold on the human imagination. It will die because it never really lived.

Nor is Christianity meant to be an endless repetition of the first century. Otherwise it would be unholy to sing Amazing Grace or to play Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. We would chant the Psalms and read the scriptures from a scroll, just as Jesus and his apostles did.

The demand that we return to the first century is impossible nonsense.

It is also a sin against the gifts God has given through His church for two thousand years

Christianity is not a thing. It is a river of life that flows from God, through the Jewish law and prophets, culminates in Christ, and then flows from Christ into the entire world. It keeps flowing through history, collecting the contributions of God’s people in all times and in all places and carries those contributions toward the end of days. Thus, Christians joyfully receive not only the contribution of Christ and his apostles but the contributions of all who have benefited and been transformed by the work of Christ and the apostles.

St. Francis of Assisi taught us to build a manger scene.

Charles Wesley gave us Hark the Herald Angels Sing.

St. Nicholas gave us the idea of following the example of the wise men by expressing our faith by giving gifts, especially at Christmas time.

If the pagans offer something to the season that doesn’t offend or undermine our message of redemption, who cares? Their gifts are also welcomed.

God sends rain on the just and the unjust. That’s why we may eat corn that God’s rain produces, even if it comes from farms owned by pagans.

If a string of colored lights helps people celebrate the birth of the Lord, why all the fuss?

And yet, the origins of most of Christianity’s sacramental and liturgical life is not pagan at all, but Jewish!

 The Jews gave us incense for worship.

The Jews gave us the public reading of scripture.

The Jews gave us the basic structure of the Eucharist. (The traditional Christian liturgy of Communion is simply an adaptation of the Passover ceremony.)

And, yes, the Jews gave us Christmas.

1 Maccabees, chapter 4, tells the story of the first “feast of dedication,” or what we now call “Hanukah.”

The Gospel of St, John, chapter 7, tell us that Jesus celebrated Hanukkah, even though it was rooted in the Apocrypha rather than in the Old Testament.

This connection between Hanukkah and Christmas must surely mean something.

Christians have always believed that the ancient Jewish feasts reveal something important and enduring about spiritual life. But for some reason, the feast of Hanukkah is one we often ignore. Perhaps that is because Hanukkah is first mentioned in the Apocrypha rather than in canonical scripture. Or, perhaps, because the New Testament does not say when Christ was born, modern Christians are uncomfortable with the idea that genuine knowledge can sometimes come through oral tradition. At any rate, early Christians seemed to have connected the birth of Christ with mid-winter celebration and their belief has stubbornly resisted the centuries of complaining by frustrated puritans.

Of course, every ancient culture in the Northern hemisphere noted when the days of darkness were about to make a subtle turn toward the light. They all had some form of celebration and ritual to mark the turn.

Many people believe it’s just too great a coincidence that the Lord’s birth should come so conveniently, at the very same time of the year as the mid-winter pagan celebrations.

But that is hardly the point.

Whenever Jesus was born, Christians have always associated his birth with two great spiritual realities: the coming of light and the cleansing of the temple.

Hanukkah is the celebration of the Maccabean revolt against the Greek-speaking Syrians. The Jews drove them out, not only because the Syrians had occupied their land but also because they had defiled their temple. This  “abomination that makes desolate,” had inflicted a deep psychological wound on the Jewish people. They felt driven to rededicate the House of God. 

As they had fought to regain the city of Jerusalem, the consecrated oil in the temple nearly ran out. In fact, there was not even enough oil to keep the lamps burning. But the lamps burned anyway. For eight days.

After driving out the Greeks, Judah Maccabee led the people to rededicate the temple.  When this was accomplished, the Jews regained a sense of God’s presence. The darkness had lost. The lamps were burning.

God’s Temple had been cleansed.

But a greater cleansing was coming. The world had grown dark from a much darker force than that of Syrian armies. The world, made by God and for God, had suffered a long, long spiritual winter. The people who lived in the world, whose bodies had been made to be the temples of the Holy Spirit, had been occupied by an alien force. Evil had defiled the souls of humanity.

Then, “in the fullness of time,” a light suddenly flickered in the darkness and the darkness could not overpower it.

Why was Christ born during Hanukkah?

No one explains it better than Christina Rossetti.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; 


Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. 


In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed


The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

This year, as in other years, I will put up lights. I will set out candles. I will buy gifts. I will eat with my friends. Then, on December 24^th, I will eat bread and drink wine as someone sings Silent Night.

God became a man to cleanse my heart and to rededicate my soul.

I will joyfully receive all the gifts a grateful people throughout history have given that help me honor the coming of Light of the World, God-made-flesh we could well call Holy Hanukkah. 

Reflections on Incense

Blindfold me. Drive a few hundred miles.

Stop your car one block from MacCorkle Avenue, in front of a little house on the banks of the Kanawha River, lead me into the house.

Ask me where I am. I’ll know.

The scent of cedar and apples, mixed with the slightest hint of mothballs will reveal your secret more effectively than sight.

I’m at Grandma’s house.

The fragrance of home will give you away.

A fragrance lingers in that old place that announces the presence of the woman who inhabited it. Gone now for twenty-five years, she still inhabits the house through her fragrance.

And you know just what I’m talking about.

There’s just something about scent that grips a person.

The magi’s second gift, the carol insists, “owns a deity nigh.” It speaks of “prayer and praising all men raising,” and calls us to “worship him God most high.”

Their third gift is a “a bitter perfume that breathes of life of gathering gloom.”

Together, the two scents create a unique fragrance to fill the house of God. The historical churches have burned this unique combination to call the worshipper to prayer.

The holy scent fills the pages of the Bible too.   

All along their earthly journey, God’s people offer incense. According to the Bible’s final book, we will offer it still after we reach eternity. Heaven is evidently filled with holy smoke; its scent penetrates the souls of pilgrims as they travel toward the holy city.

The scent is also present in more mundane facets of the believer’s life.

In the Song of Solomon for example, the lover offers scented oils for lovemaking. She sings about the fragrant smoke that rises above the place of her lover’s dwelling. She longs to anoint her beloved’s body with those oils and enjoy with him the fragrance she has prepared. After their night of love, the smell becomes his mark of identification. She breathes in the fragrance to become entranced with his presence, especially when he is absent.

Later in the Bible, a sinner woman approaches Christ and pours upon his feet the fragrant oils she has been saving her entire life.

For what purpose, you ask?

Well, such oils were used for two things:  for one’s honeymoon and to honor one’s loved one who has died. This woman pours her scented oil on Jesus, her chosen bridegroom.  

She will never experience a physical union with him but a bond stronger than death attaches her soul to his. But she also pours the fragrance on his body because he is about to die.

Both purposes are fulfilled in this act of devotion: scented oil for love and scented oil for death.

As the scent fills the house, the Pharisees recoil from the intimacy the fragrance creates.

And they still do.

Despite the continual mention of incense in both the Old and New Testaments, many Protestant Christians find incense frightening and, some even find it diabolical.

They associate it with pagan rituals and Eastern mysticism.

Not me.

To me, it smells like home.

In John Travolta’s silly movie, Michael, the archangel comes to earth. He travels with a group of less-than-holy friends. As God’s great angelic warrior walks among human beings, a strange phenomenon follows him. Women swoon, overcome by a fragrance they say is something like fresh baked bread. But it is much more than that, they claim. The scent takes their breath away. As they swoon, the track plays “It Feels Like Home to Me.”

The mighty archangel carries a scent of human’s forgotten home. The fallen human people interpret their response in an erotic way but their longing is something far beyond mere eroticism.  It is an intimacy that erotic love cannot reach. But that is the only intimacy they know and it seems so inappropriate to attach to God.

That’s precisely how Pharisees respond to Mary Magdalene’s scented praise: too much, too intimate, too ‘out there’.

Pentecostals and Charismatics correctly employ the idea of incense as metaphor: fervent worship is that “sweet smelling savor” the Lord most seeks for us, they claim.

Well, yes.

But if a metaphor is spiritually accurate, why would we reject the material offering upon which the metaphor is based? The Magi did not offer the baby a metaphor; they offered a material substance that smelled good.

So, no, we don’t need incense for worship. Nor do we need music, or nice buildings. We don’t NEED art, or anything else material. But honestly, coming as I do from a Pentecostal background, it is difficult to think what worship really means without referring to music. In fact, to most Charismatics and Pentecostals, worship has come to mean mostly music. When we say, “I loved the worship in that church,“ we certainly don’t mean the testimonies. That isn’t worship. We don’t mean the sermons; that isn’t worship. The offering is not worship.  So what is left?

Music.

In other words, sound can be worship, but not scent.

Should we even talk about taste? Can taste ever be worship?

When the Lord says, “taste and see that the Lord is good,” is he using JUST a metaphor?

I mean, think about it. Human beings in love don’t just meditate and talk about love. They touch, taste, and smell one another.  Every lover knows the scent of his or her beloved. 

Why? Because human beings want to experience love with skin on it.

Like human love, Christian spirituality is not abstract. It is material. Our body, and not just our mind, participates in experiencing God. We don’t just talk and ponder about God. We touch, taste, see and feel God.

And, perhaps, smell Him.

The frankincense and myrrh, the sweet and the bitter, the life and the death, the love and the loss mingle and create holy smoke. It fills the house. It shakes the soul. It’s unsettling. 

It’s irresistible. It’s unforgettable.

I have long ago given up trying to convince people of the worshipful nature of incense. I let it go. Except in my heart.

But when I step on the other side, the first thing I’ll notice may well be the fragrance.

“Frankincense and myrrh,” I’ll think.

Then, perhaps I’ll notice something else. Maybe, just for me. God will mix in a bit of cedar, some apples and the slightest hint of mothballs.

And I’ll sigh and say, “ahhh, that smells just like home to me.”