Open Hands

by Jim Kast-Keat

I’ve learned a lot about holiness in my years in youth ministry. Some lessons
I’ve learned have come from the typical places. Other lessons have come
from the unexpected places, catching me off guard and teaching me all at
the same time. Two good examples of lessons I’ve learned have come from…

A Student I Know…

…who grew up in a Christian home with his pastor father and in a Christian
school with his teacher mother. All of his friends were Christians and so was
almost everyone he knew. The few people he knew who weren’t Christians,
he avoided. And he also avoided those he believed could go either way on
the Christian/non-Christian line. (Better safe than sorry, he figured.)
As this student grew up, he began to learn more and more about the
word holiness. Except he’d always believed holiness meant pointing his
finger at “those people” who weren’t like him and his Christian friends. After
all, pointing his finger made him feel good about himself and his “holiness.”
To him, being holy meant knowing he followed certain rules while others
flippantly broke them. He was holy, and they were not—and that’s what
holiness is all about.

Or at least that’s what he thought.

Exodus…

…where we see God’s people, Israel, having just left Egypt where they’d
been enslaved. They were God’s people, but in their oppression and fear of
being forgotten, they cried out to God. And God heard their cry and
answered.

At this point you might be flashing back to Charlton Heston triumphantly
holding stone tablets in The Ten Commandments or Val Kilmer’s voice in The
Prince of Egypt. This Bible account (and those movies) continues as God, via
Moses, leads his people out of slavery from Egypt, through the parted Red
Sea, and to the mountain called Sinai.

Sinai is where the Ten Commandments were given to Moses—and where
Israel begins her track record of forgetting them. They begin this track
record by making a golden calf.

Sinai is also the place where God gave a specific and unique identity and
mission to the Israelites. God told them, “Although the whole earth is mine,
you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5-6).
The student struggling with holiness and Israel struggling in the
wilderness demonstrate to us the unique challenge that holiness is for us.
It’s elusive, and yet, it’s a biblical call. When I reflect on all of that, I realize
that…

Israel Is…

These words, kingdom of priests and a holy nation, represent more than just
cozy words or a new nickname. They’re an identity and a mission for all the
people of Israel.

During this time in the ancient near east, every country had its own god.
And every country also had its own priests. If you were traveling to a
country and wanted to know what its god was like, you went to the country’s
priest. The priest was the one who showed you his nation’s god—who put
the Divine on display for everyone to see. The priest was set apart; the
priest was holy; a nation’s priest was supposed to be like his nation’s god.
(Buddhists, for example, still refers to the Dalai Lama as “His Holiness.”)
And now the God of Israel told them they’d be a kingdom of priests and a
holy nation. Not just some of them, but all of them. This wasn’t just a
responsibility for a few select individuals to uphold but the identity and
mission of all of Israel. Its identity as a nation is that each Jew was to be
priest-like, that each was to be set apart, to be holy. Israel’s mission was to
be an entire nation that showed others who God is and what God is like.
This meant that for Israel, holiness wasn’t something used to exclude
others; rather holiness meant being set apart so that the nation of Israel
could place God on display—to show the world who God is and what God is
like. In fact, Israel was to go into the world and be like God, be God’s
representative, be God’s image.

We Are…

The church has the same charge: As Peter wrote, we are “a chosen people, a
royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession” (1 Peter 2:9). As
followers of Jesus, the Messiah of Israel and the world, we are to be holy.
For youth workers, this means that our role isn’t just to be an example so
we can show students a better kind of life. We’re more than mere role
models, teaching proper behaviors and etiquette. We’re to show students
the divine; we’re to embody God; we’re to bring holiness up close and
personal, to every student, to every parent…to everyone.

Our programs and teachings and small groups and events aren’t just
things we do to fill time, but things we do to show our students who God is
and what God is like. Car rides home aren’t just space for quality
conversation; they’re times to display the divine. School lunch isn’t just a
time to “be a pastor”; it’s a time to “be God” for students.

We don’t just sit with our kids and their friends, laugh at their jokes, and
crack a few of our own to show that pastors can be hip, too. Rather, we
show them a totally different kind of person. We’re to be like God, be God’s
representative, be God’s image.

Because we are a royal priesthood, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation,
set apart for the sake of the world and for the sake of our students, so that
they might find God in us. And when they find God in us, they can find God
in themselves.

Students Are…

As student ministry pastors, we’re not just a kingdom of priests for our
students, but also with our students. Too often the thought of holiness and
being holy creates an us/them schism, with some people self-righteously
proclaiming godliness while all the while raising their noses and pointing
their fingers at all the “heathens” who surround them (like my opening story
about the student).

Holiness isn’t for “us” (youth workers) to display to “them” (students) so
that they might feel unworthy or unrighteous. Rather, holiness includes us
all, invites us all, by the grace of God, to become a different kind of people
for a different kind of world.

One of my students, after learning this, went to school and saw a kid
being bullied. Instead of ignoring it—as he had often done—he went up to
the bullied kid as a friend.

Another of my students had saved more than $100 to buy a four-wheeler,
but when he learned of thousands of homeless widows in Guatemala, he
decided to forego the four-wheeler and instead show them what God is like
by giving them his money.

A couple more of my students learned of kids in Rwanda who couldn’t go
to school because their parents had HIV or had died from AIDS. So they
started their own organization to help these kids go to school. They raised
money and awareness, and now all 10 of these Rwandan kids—though still
affected by HIV/AIDS—have experienced the holiness of God in two middle
school girls.

When our students learn that they’re part of God’s holy nation,
everything can change: Bullied students are befriended, orphans and widows
are remembered, and those left orphaned by HIV/AIDS are given hope. This
is the result of a holiness that walks around in the lives of our students.
PowerPoint or People?

As their pastors, how are we equipping our students? For what are we
equipping them?

It’s easy to say that we’re “equipping them for the works of ministry,” but
what does that really mean? We need to show them what it means to be a
holy nation and a royal priesthood, not just what it means to be cool and
listen to the newest music.

We need to give them chances to show people how God hears the cries of
the oppressed by hearing it ourselves, not just what it means to tune out to
everything and everyone. We need to give them chances to radically change
the lives of others and see their own lives radically changed in the process,
not just give them an escape from home or one more thing to do during the
week.

Does equipping them for ministry mean having them run PowerPoint at
our programs or other tasks that, though important, end up simply serving
ourselves? Or does equipping them for ministry mean much more? Like
giving them the chance to be the hands and feet and face of God in
someone’s life; to love and learn and change everything; to be a kingdom of
priests, a holy nation, putting the Divine on display to the desperate world
around us.

Holiness That Walks Around
When holiness begins to walk around, everything changes. A word that so
easily conjured up an us/them mentality ceases to exclude itself against the
world and begins to embrace the world for the sake of, and in the name of,
God. This holiness, rather than being divisive, becomes the catalyst for
God’s redemption, love, grace, and forgiveness to radically change and
restore everything.

And it all starts with God calling his people a holy nation. It continues
with us hearing those words as our identity and mission. And it’s left in the
hands, feet, and lives of our students to be that holiness in the world.
Our holiness is not to remove us from “the world.” It’s to impart us into
the world in a whole new way. We are blessed to be a blessing. We are
restored by God so that we can join in the restoration of all things. We are
made holy by God’s grace, so that God working through us can in turn make
all the world holy.

From a Pointing Finger to an Open Hand

Remember the opening story about the student with the skewed view of
holiness?

It’s a true story.

I was that student.

I thought I knew all the answers and had it all together. And I thought
that made me holy.

Growing up, holiness was me pointing a finger at those other people who
weren’t “good enough” (which from my perspective was really just what I
thought of as “not as good as me”). My pointed finger was the barometer of
holiness. And sadly, it was a reflection of a false image of God. How many
people saw my posture of a pointed finger and then saw God the same way?
Now I understand holiness differently. And now I seek to model it
differently as well. Instead of pointing a finger, my holiness is an open hand,
showing the love of God to a world that desperately needs it. My holiness is
not self-serving, simply making me better. Being “holy” and “doing the work
of ministry” never ends with myself, but always moves from myself to the
world.

Our students’ hands can do many things—from holding doors, to running
PowerPoint, to changing tires, to serving food, to building houses.
We need to change their postures of holiness from pointing fingers to
open hands.