Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: "Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy." – Leviticus 19:2

Today's Scripture Reading (November 16, 2021): Leviticus 19

I am not perfect. I know that that is a massive surprise to many of my friends. I am not perfect, and neither am I always able to understand what it is that I am supposed to be doing. It seems that, on almost a daily basis, I come in contact with problems that I can't solve regardless of how hard I try; I just don't know what I am supposed to do. Yet, we expect in our culture that experts know all of the answers and that they are perfect in executing their duties. (I mean, who wants to go to a doctor who got a 70% on his anatomy final? We don't want to hear him commenting in the middle of an operation, "I think that's the appendix, but I am not really sure.”) But the truth is that the decisions and the lives of most of us (including our doctors) just aren't that cut and dried. Sometimes, we just don't know.

Inside the church, this struggle we have with what we don't know with which life seems to adorn itself is made even more difficult by this simple command; "Be holy because I am holy." Our problem is that we often define holy as being perfect and possessing a knowledge of what to do next.

But holiness is not about getting things right – it is about being different. In our Western Culture, the message of holiness seems to be limited to the idea that there are superficial differences between who we are and what we do. Maybe we comb our hair differently because we are holy. We listen to different music because we are holy. I have even heard a pastor make the argument that men wearing pants and women wearing dresses and skirts is part of our holiness. (By the way, he also argued that Jesus wore pants. I admit, once again, that I don't think that I get it.)

Holiness is about being different, but the real difference is on the inside. I don't think holiness has anything to do with the clothes you wear, but it does have a lot to do with how you react to the clothes that you wear. Holiness might not be about how you use language, but it is about how you react to the language you hear.

Holiness is all about being set apart for the use of God, whatever that might mean in our situations. God is holy. What that means is that he is qualitatively different from us. We may be created in his image, but we don't contain all of God. He is still different. His instruction for us is that we are to be holy, set apart, and different so that he can use us to change the world in which we live.

God's holiness is also tied up in the way that he loves. God loves us differently; he loves us without expectation. He is holy, and he is love. It is love that is the fundamental change agent in our world. And so, we choose to be about the work of love, being part of the movement that God is using to change this world, and in that movement, we, too, are holy.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Leviticus 20