Step 10

"Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it."

 
Step 10 ushers us into a new mode of recovery...maintaining, nurturing and sharing.  Step 10 functions as a daily reminder that we are a work in progress, not a perfected work.  In this step, we see the combination of steps 4 through 9 put into our daily practice of living in wholeness.

 
The word in our Christian vernacular that describes Step 10 is 'holiness.'  I often hear this word holiness and wonder what people think of this term.  Is it that they are from the Holiness tradition, or perhaps a Pietistic faith tradition?  Do they have in mind perfection in which we never sin again?  Do they line up more with the way of the Pharisees with their Laws which one can keep without ever really changing the insides of who they are?  Or do they follow Jesus' example in which he breaks the purity, or holiness, laws of his day by working on Sabbath, touching lepers, eating with 'sinners' including prostitutes, thieves, a betrayer, among others?

If Jesus is our chief example of holiness, then what does his life via the Gospels teach us?  Jesus most often fights for those who have been excluded from, rather than welcomed into, the groups that seemingly have it all together.  Jesus dwells with both those striving to please God in his tradition as well as those considered outside the covenant tradition.  He tells parables, teaches and lives in such a way that leaves us with a clearer picture of holiness.

Holiness is bringing wholeness into our broken world.  It is a choice to not use that which has divided humanity in the past- things like ethnicity, socio-economic classes, religious persuasions and gender.  Instead, holiness is the invitation to bring the wholeness of God into each area that we tread.  Whether that is at a church, in school, at work, shopping, drinking a beer with a friend, hanging in the yard with a neighbor, sitting around the table with family, we are invited to choose to live a life marked by wholeness, by holiness.

Therefore, do we live into this way of Jesus, his way of holiness?  Mark Galli once wrote that "The difference between Jesus' holiness ethic and that of the Pharisees is this:
        The Pharisees refuse to touch any unclean thing.
        Jesus aims to make the unclean holy."

Are you living as Jesus would live?  Are you aiming to make that which is unclean holy?  Or, in light of this sermon series, are you willing to bring wholeness to our world?