Earlier this year, my mentor in preaching, Haddon Robinson, honored me. In the mid-nineties Christianity Today Inc.had published an article I wrote in Leadership Magazine. Haddon included the article as a chapter in the book Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching. He and fellow general editor, Craig Larson, contributed and collected 201 chapters, written by more than 150 people. They intend the book to be used by preachers, for "growth and enrichment in the high call of preaching for years to come," (16).

My chapter is entitled "Conviction and Compassion." The editors subtitled it: "It takes both toughness and tenderness to rescue people from sin." What I wrote represented my experience, as a person and a pastor, with the intimidating split between what human beings aspire to and what we actually are.

The Bible expresses this intimidating split as well as it can be expressed: For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing (Romans 7:19). Most people know what that is like. If you have a sensitive conscience, it can eat your lunch.

People in churches, of course, don't escape this contradiction. But they occasionally receive sharp criticism for not escaping it; and I think I know where the criticism comes from. Stay with me for a minute.

Jesus said, "Go into all the world and make disciples ... teaching them to do all things I have commanded you," (Matthew 28:20). Part of the Church's mandate is to teach good morals and to live a moral life.

However, it is easy to distort that mandate by trying to be a moral policeman and regulate the day-to-day moral life of people, some of whom have nothing to do with Christian morality. Tactics of this distortion include threats of divine anger, peer pressure, negative sermons, attacks on a person's character, nagging, and personal confrontation.

People, who don't like it, just walk away. But you know, and I know what people are watching for. They are watching for the preachers of moralism to act immorally. When that happens, the resentment can be ugly, and you can count on someone to express it this way: "See! Christians want people to think they are better than everybody else, but they're not. They are just like everyone else. Their moralism is hypocrisy." And you and I hear that and feel awful.

Our feelings aside, this oft-repeated scenario has placed in jeopardy part of our spiritual heritage. At stake is the disppearance of an important word from common parlance. Outside of a church setting, when was the last time you heard the word holy used in a positive way? Has anyone accused you of or praised your for being holy?

I'd like to take a step in rescuing this word from its banishment to cultural darkness. If we don't try, this piece of our spiritual heritage will slip further away from us, and this sermon series will fall seriously short.

Being Holy, More Than Being Moral
You can see why the word holy is important from a review of two statements I made last week. They sum up what this series is about. First, in this series I am poposing that the Church's vocation to be holy both defines and fulfills the longing of the individual to be authentic and to be free. What I don't want you to miss is this: the good life, as Christ reveals it, is closely bound up with the vocation of the Church. The Church is not an irritating appendix that could be excised without noticeable loss. It is the vital organ without which the plan of God for the liberation of humanity fails.

Second, the vocation of the Church is to be a global community that is gathered around Jesus Christ and serves as the dwelling place where God the Creator and Redeemer lives within the human family - a kind of beachhead from which He has begun the liberation of the nations of this world from the disorders of sin.

But, then, you look around you at the actual people sitting near you in their ordinariness. You remember the person you had words with at the church supper or committee meeting. You fight to shake off your drowsiness or your distractedness. You remember the scandals and the frauds and the Televangelist that turned you off. It's just too much. You can't connect the dots between the Church as you actually experience it and the high-sounding words of scripture and sermon. It would be nice, if it were true, but this is the real world. Let's not kid ourselves.

Doesn't that way of putting it bring us back to where this sermon started? We can't connect the dots between the Church as we actually experience it and the high-sounding words of scripture and sermon. Once again, it is the intimidating split between what human beings aspire to be and what we actually are.

Puritan idealism still haunts American culture. That's why it's hard on us when people fail, who are supposed to uphold the ideals. That's why people admire Jesus and despise the Church. That's why the word holy has fallen on hard times.

So, what are we going to do about it? First, we should bluntly contradict the prevailing distortion. Here's how. Biblically speaking, holiness has more to do with being under new management than with being a nice guy. In other words, the first lesson about holiness is that it has nothing to do with morality. I'm not blowing smoke at you. Turn with me to 1 Corinthians 1:2.

Poster Child for Realists
Paul the apostle was writing to the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ - their Lord and ours.

Without warning and without explanation the apostle referred to the Corinthian church as those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy. That is lofty praise. Maybe it was nothing more than religious rhetoric. maybe it sank to the level of sermonic flattery. Or maybe the apostle gave a different meaning to those words than we do. Before we decide, we need to know more about the Corinthian church.

Look first at 1 Corinthians 3:3-4. The apostle said bluntly to them, You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? ARe you not acting like mere men? For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not mere men?

They were jealous, quarrelsome, and divisive. They were taking sides and claiming that esteemed leaders of the church agreed with their sides, as if they were voting on who was most popular at the local high school. And yet Paul referred to them as those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy. What is going on here?

Let's dip into another vignette, 1 Corinthians 5:1. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occure even among pagans: A man has his father's wife. Talk about desperate housewives! You begin to have the impression of a church that's a quarter mile wide and a quarter inch deep. And yet Paul referred to them as those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy. What is going on here?

I'm going to skip over chapters 6-10 to chapter eleven, but each of the chapters I omit, except chapter nine, reads more like a soap opera than a service of worship. And so we come to 1 Corinthians 11:20-22.

When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry, another gets drunk. Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not!

Drunk at communion and disorderly, in the sense that they did not share food they brought to the church supper with the poor who came with nothing. And yet Paul referred to them as those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy. What is going on here?

1 Corinthians 15:12 will offer one last doctrinal example of this somewhat out-of-control church. But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

As Paul says further on in this chapter, verse 32, If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the pivotal belief of the Christian faith. Circulating among some in the Corinthian church was a denial of that pivotal belief. And yet Paul referred to them as those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy. What is going on here?

Was this the beachhead from which God began the liberation of the nations of the world from the disorders of sin? Apparently, it was. In a minute I'll show you an example of how that succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of people who lampooned the follies of the Corinthian churhc. We may ask again: what is going on here?

Belonging Precedes Behaving
What is going on here is a serious disconnect between what the New Testament means by the word holy and what we mean by it. When a odern person hears the word holy, thoughts of morality come at once to mind, followed quickly by thoughts of people who claim to be holy and aren't. They are just holier-then-thou.

Paul's experience with the Corinthian church tells a different story. 1 Corinthians is nothing if not realistic about people. Paul did not sweep their sins under the carpet. He wrote them in an open letter and was prepared to talk about them openly, when he returned to Corinth. He called a spade a spade, but in the next breath he referred to them as those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy.

The solution to this riddle is for us to believe that the first lesson of holiness is that it has nothing to do with morality. It has everything to do with another word that Paul used in 1 Corinthians 1:2, and which I have quoted several times now: sanctified in Christ Jesus.

Paul's meaning has been preserved in our English word sanctuary. This room is a sanctuary. It is not moral; it is a place set apart for worship. Sometimes, we refer to it as a sacred space. In fact, we talk about holy places. We don't mean they are moral; they are dedicated to religious use. Or let's get away from religious terms. The Serengeti National Park is one of the great animal sanctuaries in the world, home to more than three million wild animals living in complete freedom. What makes it a sanctuary? It is illegal to hunt those animals. They are protected. The park is dedicated to their preservation.

I'm sure you've heard the recurring words dedicated or set apart. Their meaning is not strange to us. But it has been divorced from the word holy. Could we remarry them? The Church is dedicated to God, available for His purposes and under His protection. As we put it last Sunday: the vocation of the Church is to be God's dwelling place within he human family, a kind of beachhead from which God has begun the liberation of the nations of the world from the disorders of sin. That's what it means to be holy.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Let's talk about how this liberation works in the jungle of life. Michael Horowitz, an observant Jew, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. One of his areas of expertise is religious liberty. In the September 2005 issue of Christianity Today he has an article called "How to Win Friends and Influence Culture," (70-78).

In his remarkable article he said this about evangelical Christians: "In fighting for human rights ... you've picked targets that few cared about and seared the consciences of your fellow Americans in order to offer hope and protection to people who desperately needed it .... you've become, beneath the radar screens of the national press, America's most powerful force for human-rights progress," (74). He illustrated his point with evangelical advocacy agains sex trafficking and abused prison inmates and for North Korean refugees and religious liberty.

All those causes have political expressions, but they did not arise out of politics. They arous out of a spiritual culture. They arose out of what evangelicals "honor, cherish, and worship - what they are willing to stake their lives on," (Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral, 30).

But what people honor, cherish, and worship has to be embodied somewhere. They need places to go and like-minded people to meet with and mutually-agreed upon ways of reinforcing and understanding and sharing what they honor, cherish, and worship. They need communities of faith. That's the Church.

Think about it for a minute. If the Church is the global community where God lives with the human family, how would He begin to make His presence felt outside the Church? How would He achieve the liberation of the nations of the world from the disorders of sin? He would do it by the actions of His people. We are His hands and feet.

Congregations like this one embody and express the spiritual culture that gives rise to these liberating actions. Out of this evangelical spiritual culture have come human rights advocates and missionaries and pastors and theologians and hospitals and schools and businesses and the abolition of slavery.

By all means, be realistic about the split between what the Church out to be and what it is, but never say again that you can't connect the dots between the flawed Church and the high-sounding words of scripture and sermon. You can. Just remember: out of this flawed Church have come people who have blessed all the families of the earth.

Its flaws ought to remind us that the first lesson of holiness is that it has nothing to do with morality. It has everything to do with being available to God and under His protection. Being available to God fulfills our longings to be authentic and to be free. So, no more Mr. NiceGuy. It's being under new management that will liberate the world.