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“I appeal to you therefore, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Rom 12:1.

The theme for preaching in these evensong services is, as I understand it, ‘The beauty of holiness’. And here we have one of our readings for today speaking of holiness: ‘present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’. I put this text up front, then deleted it several times. It seemed to be one of those passages where Paul is saying – don’t enjoy yourselves, be good, be holy. Yet I do want to address the theme, ‘The beauty of holiness’, so I lowered my resistance and took on the question. Does holiness mean not enjoying yourself? In what way is holiness beautiful? This text from Paul does not at first sight help very much.

On top of that, I chose to develop the theme of in relation to friendship. How does friendship reveal to us something of the beauty of holiness? When I think of friendship I think of having a meal together with friends, animated conversation, wit and repartee, and a lot of laughing. That doesn’t sound much like being a living sacrifice, let alone holy and acceptable. So what are we to make of all this?

Let’s start with the question of holiness. Holiness is not something that we are by nature, or that originates from human nature. It is something that belongs to God, and we become holy in so far as we become more like God. It belongs to our calling as human beings and as Christian people, to become more God-like. Yet ‘holy people’ still conjures up piety, a group set apart from others so as not to be tainted by the things of this world. It conjures up people who are withdrawn from worldly things, and who frown on those who genuinely enjoy life.

I am not sure where these assumptions come from. But let’s have a fresh look at the beauty of holiness. The psalm for this evening expresses this for us. To love God and want to be like God is a desire, a passion, that is greater than life itself. The psalmist seeks God, thirsts and faints for God. And praises God, ‘because your steadfast love is better than life’ (v.3). Then the psalmist finds fulfilment in God: ‘My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat, and my mouth praises thee with joyful lips’ (v. 5). God is more to be desired than gold, and sweeter than honey, according to Ps 19 (v. 10). So the first point is that the desire for God, which is the desire for holiness, is a strong passion, better than life itself. Holy people are passionate people who cast themselves on God and sit lightly to this perishable world. This is not to have disdain for the world, but to love God above all else. Holiness comes first and foremost from a passion for God, not from following certain rules of behaviour.

But what is the attraction, the beauty of holiness? The psalmist speaks of God’s steadfast love. Other Old Testament texts associate the holiness of God with God’s goodness, God’s righteousness and wisdom.[1] To desire holiness is to desire goodness and to want to participate in the goodness of God as we live our lives in relation to others. Goodness, love, righteousness and wisdom are not things that exist in isolation. They have no life as separate ‘things’ but only come into being in relationships, by the way God relates to us and the way we treat each other. So holiness is not best exercised by withdrawal from the world, but by further and further engagement in it. This is also the way holiness was expressed in the life of God.

When we move to the New Testament, we don’t find the term holiness used very much in the gospels themselves, but what we do have is the holy God coming to dwell among us. Matthew’s gospel speaks of Emmanuel, God with us, in Jesus’ birth story. The Gospel of John talks of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, full of grace and truth. The holiness of God did not put up a barrier or division between us and God. Rather it brought down the barrier and reconciled us.

The love and goodness of God was recognised in Jesus by his followers. But goodness is not always clearly seen or understood. At one point in John’s gospel, Jesus is surrounded by people with stones in their hands ready to kill him. He says to them, ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these are you going to stone me?’ (Jn 10:31). We will continue to argue about what is good in a particular situation, and what is the best way to act, but in Christian theology, it is to Jesus we look for a revelation of holiness in a human life – and Jesus loved God’s goodness more than life itself. Further, in Jesus’ ministry and teaching, holiness did not mean that he put up divisions and barriers to protect himself from us, but rather he challenged the divisions that existed at the time, and the suffering caused by them.

So far we have seen that to be holy is to desire God, and to want to live according to God’s love and goodness. To do this is to engage in one’s society rather than to withdraw and protect oneself from it. But my third point comes as a counter-balance to this. Holy people are cultivated. We do not wake up one morning to find ourselves holy. The reading from Romans 12 goes on to say, ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, and acceptable and perfect’ (Rom 12:2). It takes practice and intentional work to become holy, and to be part of a church whose members are called to be holy people. This is not to say that holiness can be manufactured. Rather it is to admit that it requires choice, and we need to discern what is good, and we need to overcome our own bad habits and to cultivate good habits so that God may work more fruitfully in us.

Any good work requires a lot of practice and it requires choice and discernment about our priorities and where we will put our time and energy. This is the case for our general health and fitness let alone for our spiritual health. So although holiness is a quality of God’s that we can share in, and not something that we can create out of ourselves at will, it is also the case that it is a spiritual, life-long path of transformation. So sometimes we will need time out for meditation, contemplation, prayer, and facing our demons, as Jesus did. But holiness is essentially expressed in relationships. That is where its beauty is known and manifested, in relation to God, and to others.

Having looked at holiness, how might we view friendship as an expression of holiness?

I am not sure why I chose this theme of friendship all those months ago, except that my friends are important to me, and I wanted to reflect on this a bit more. There were a few books on friendship I wanted to read, so this would give me the excuse to do so. Here are some of the things I learned in the process:

Friendships, compared with other sorts of relationships, are mutual and reciprocal. This is part of their joy. Friends are not in a hierarchy, but are on the same level, and have reciprocal care and trust in one another. I may act in a friendly manner to a stranger who needs help, whom I may never see again, but that is charity rather than a friendship. Friendships are mutual and reciprocal over time.

Second, friends are those that we feel more at home with, those we can share the deepest part of ourselves with. As Graham Little in his book on Friendship says, friends play host to each other’s strongest feelings and most extraordinary ideas (p. 59). You can reveal more about yourself with friends, and expect to be heard and accepted as well as challenged. Good friends do not feed each other’s illusions, but help each other become more authentically themselves.

Third, the heart of friendship, according to Graham Little, is not companionship or sympathy, though it is both of these. Rather it is mutual self-awareness. It takes the friends beyond the shoulds and oughts of a society, and lets them test out who they are in their fullness. This takes effort and imagination and commitment (p.15). Friendship requires an investment.

Finally, another point from Graham Little. Friends are the ones who see the good in us. Friends are those that we ask to speak at our birthday celebration or at our funeral, so that others may know us at our best, however messy our lives may have seemed from the outside (p. 12). It is our friends who know us thoroughly, yet still like us and accept us. There are limits to this of course, and friendships can be broken, but in general we can say that our friends see and like us, not in spite of who we are but because of who we are.

All of this can be said about friendship outside of any Christian understanding of it. When we move into theological writings on friendship it gets a bit more complicated.[2] The main problem with friendship, which has been an issue from the time of St Augustine, is that friendships tend to be exclusive, and friends love each other as particular people, whereas the highest form of Christian love is agape, love for all, love for the neighbour, love for the whole world.

Friends love each other because of who they are. Agape loves all people, in spite of who they are. Friendship is mutual and reciprocal, agape is self-giving and without the expectation of reciprocity. Loving your neighbour as yourself is one of the highest Christian virtues. It is what marks someone who is holy, and like God in God’s expression of goodness. Today in the church’s year, for example, is Migrant and Refugee Sunday, an occasion that calls us out of our comfortable little friendship groups into a broader care for others, whom we do not even know. Does this make friendship a limited form of love? Not necessarily.

Augustine and others after him defended friendship in a number of ways. Yes, friendships may be exclusive. But there is a difference between being exclusive because we are ourselves limited in the number of people we can love and care for, or being exclusive by choice by closing out and not welcoming others.

Further, since we can’t love everybody in the world, is it not better to love some well rather than try to spread ourselves too thinly and achieve not only nothing but worse than nothing. Surely it is worse to leave and neglect those you know and have a mutual obligation to, in order to rush off all over the place helping others? It is better to let the love of friendship be taught by agape to be outward looking and inclusive, than to neglect friendships altogether.

We may then move one step further and think of the church on the model of mutual friends, friends because God befriended us. It is as church communities that we may together reach out further to others, welcoming migrants and refugees among us, sharing in the welcoming of God to others.

For Augustine, friendships are best thought of, not as the ultimate love, but as the kind of love that takes us through to God as the giver of friends in the first place. In other words, we love our friends because God teaches us and cares for us through them. Friends are companions on the journey, and friendships are the places that teach us how to be better people. In short, Augustine saw friendship as a school, training us in love, and friends as a foretaste of God’s friendship with us.

The beauty of holiness can be expressed in friendships. They contribute to our training and discernment of what is good. Their enjoyment and pleasure are a sacrament and foretaste of our delight in God. But it is in Christian communities, at their best, that the kinds of friendships are forged that bring us closer to the goodness and love of God for all others. And this requires intentional work, time and effort and imagination, discernment and the sacrifice of some desires over others.

‘I appeal to you therefore, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

[1] Dan Hardy, ‘Worship and the Formation of a Holy People’, in Finding the Church, SCM: London, 2001, p11.

[2] G. C. Meilaender, Friendship: A study in Theological Ethics, University of Notre dame Press, Notre Dame, 1981; P. J. Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life, University of Notre dame Press, Notre dame, 1989.

Solemn Vespers, Sunday 28 August 2005.