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t’s all holy—everything that God has created is holy. We see it in Torah; especially spelled out in seven of the Ten Commandments—Time is holy. Family is holy. Life is holy. Sex and sexuality is holy. Things/creation are/is holy. Words are holy. And your neighbor is holy.
But all of us have been raised on a steady diet of dualism that sees only the church building as something of a holy space. Do you think this is an over statement? How many of us will watch things on TV that we’d be embarrassed to see on Powerpoint in the church building? How many of us have our holy, sanctified, and carefully edited language which is used in the church building or in the company of church people, but another language that we let loose on the people in our workplace or in the privacy of our homes? There was a fellow in the church where I grew up who had two sets of jokes that he’d tell folks after worship—inside the church building jokes, and then those that he’d only tell if the listener would walk outside.
The dualism of our world says that the world is ugly and bad and that only religion is lovely and good. Dirt and daisies, prayer and praises—one is temporal and essentially bad, the other eternal and good (or so we’re told). We protect the church from blasphemy, dress a certain way, speak a certain way, and behave a certain way (saying things like, “Don’t run. This is the church building!”); and it’s because in this building we affirm that we are on holy ground—holy because God is present. But if that logic holds up, and I think it does (though there’s obviously nothing unholy about running in or out of the building), then what follows from the fact observed by Solomon at the dedication of the temple where he said, “ “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” (1Ki 8:27). Paul says the same thing in Acts 17.
God’s presence spills outside of our assemblies making it impossible to find a place suitable for telling jokes that are otherwise unsuitable for the assembly. The temple was holy because God’s presence was there; but His presence is everywhere, therefore, as the song teaches us, “. . . where He is, is holy!”
So why is dualism so prevalent in our culture? There’s much that could be said about our history that brings us to where we are today, beginning with Plato through to the Enlightenment, and now to a religious worldview more informed by the Left Behind Series than the Biblical text. But for most of us it’s simply that we see a world that looks terribly unholy and conclude that it must be that God will one day vaporize it so that we can all fly away to a non-physical existence forevermore. And then we enlist songwriters to help us affirm that supposed reality even though it’s not even remotely hinted at in scripture. Apparently, like the Left Behind Series suggests, we expect to one day “Fly away, O, Glory.” It makes for popular fiction and fodder for some old favorites in our hymnals, but it can’t be found in scripture, and that presents a bit of a problem.
Where are we? Are we on unholy ground our holy ground? Is creation good, very good, or bad, very bad?
It’s hard for us to accept that life is holy when so many humans act so blasphemously. It’s hard to imagine that words are actually holy given the fact that language has been soiled and desecrated. How can we suppose that the earth is holy when it seems so violent, producing tsunamis and cancer, drought and fires? Who can affirm that sex is holy given the fact that it has been reduced to a commodity bought and sold on the market of immorality? Can sexuality be considered holy given the rise in the cultural acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle? Can family really be considered holy given it is the place where the most violence and abuse occurs? Can our neighbor be holy, the same neighbor who smells bad and looks different, or competes with me for my job?
Think back to the Lord’s supper. When there was abuse, the appropriate response was to correct the problem, not give up the project. God’s creation has been blasphemed in a thousand ways, but God hasn’t given up on it—He’s redeeming it! Romans 8 teaches at least that much.
- To participate in the kingdom of God doesn’t mean the promotion of a devastating dualism with a God so small that He can’t clean up the graffiti sprayed everywhere by man’s sin.
- To participate in the kingdom of God is to step into vibrant reality, not a weak and flimsy religion.
- To participate in the kingdom of God is to realize that the answer to the question where are we is now and will always be “on holy ground.”
- To participate in the kingdom of God now, in anticipation of what He will do on the last day means that we go out in God’s grace and scrub away the graffiti with the cleansing blood of Jesus, affirming, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. ( Joh 3:16).
- To participate in the spread of God’s reign, His authority, His Empire, requires that we understand that He loved and loves the world, not just the churchy parts or the so-called spiritual parts or the parts with no graffiti.
- The soul of man is composed of two vital elements according to Genesis 2.7; it read, “ then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Nephesh, or soul, is dirt and breath. Good dirt created by the word of God, and God’s breath blown from the depths of God. That being the case, and along with the fact that Jesus became one of us (he became dirt and breath and then ascended as a resurrected, physical human), how can we but reject the philosophy of men—the platonic, dualistic nonsense that strips life of most of its meaning?
Where are we? How do you suppose the Darwinist atheist answers, or the humanist, the existentialist, and the nihilist? Let me conclude by illustrating what happens if we don’t know the answer to this important question.
Friedrich Neitzsche was a German writer and philosopher who lived from 1844 to 1900. He’s adored by many intellectuals and thinkers around the world. He’s best known to us common folk (if we know of him at all) by virtue of his influence over what became the Nazi philosophy. Leaders within the Nazi party studied his work, especially his book The Will to Power and his notions of the unafraid “overman.” One of his more famous quotes is the short statement, “God is dead.” He hated religion, and what he described as a herd mentality. He believed that religion was the rotten child of an escapist, platonic, dualistic, and therefore, meaningless humanity. He saw humans attempting to ascend to something like the light in Plato’s Cave Analogy, and since sooner or later he supposed we learn there really is no light at the end of the tunnel, he concluded that humans invented religion to escape the truth—the truth that life has no meaning, and that the only purpose is accept that bleak reality, with the only measure of man being how well he copes with the dismal futility of it all.
And what sort of light was he getting from Christianity at large? Did he find people rooted in the rich narrative off God’s history, yearning with Paul in Romans 8, for God to act and set all creation free from bondage and decay? No, he found rather light-less people who sang about this world not being their home, just-a-passing through as it were, a people who’d forgotten where they were and that they were made in God’s image to be good stewards over creation, people who were complacent, if not active in the exploitation of creation for the sake of economy or progress or whatever.
What did he see in Christianity? He wrote, “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 130. As confused as he was about reality, his observation was not way off the mark.
He comes to us, in our houses or workplaces, in the woods or on top of a snow covered mountain, and by his striking critique reminds us, not that it’s all meaningless as he supposed, but holy and that we have a responsibility in the kingdom of God to find the world beautiful and good, and by God’s grace and in God’s grace, to help Him make the world beautiful and good.
Nietzsche’s response to the blasphemy he recognized as ugliness was to reject the project and call it “nothing.” But Nietzsche’s the one who’s dead—God is very much alive, calling us to help restore His glorious creation. It is all holy.
Beautifully written.