"Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Doctor, lawyer, merchant chief. Or, if you're feeling especially pugnacious, sometimes "Indian chief. Well, that's how the old rhyme went when I was a little kid, anyway. You used it when you were counting the cherry pits on your plate, or the petals on a daisy, or the buttons on your shirt. And the one you ended up counting was, of course, the one you ended up being: maybe rich or maybe poor, standing on a street corner with a tin cup in your hand, maybe a career in organized crime. Who knows? What in the worldwhat in heaven's namewere you going to be when you grew up?

It wasn't just another question; it was the great question. Everything I want to say to you today is based on the assumption that it's the great question still. What are you going to be? What am I going to be?

I'll turn this summer, God help me, but I think of it still as a question that's wide open. I hope it's wide open, for God's sake, literally. What do you suppose we're going to be, you and I, when weif wegrow up?

You shouldn't take that altogether sitting down, of course. S or or or or whatever you happen to be, whatever we happen to besurely we've got our growing up behind us. We've come many a long mile; we've thought many a long thought; we've taken on a lot of responsibilities. We've made (at least what we'd like to think of as) lots of mature decisions; we've weathered many a crisis. Everybody in this church has weathered many a crisis. Surely the question is rather, "What are we now, and how well are we doing at it? If not doctors, lawyers, merchant chiefs, we are whatever we are. Computer analysts (I don't know what that is, but there must be one out there), business women, school teachers, artists, ministers even. Or maybe some of us are retired; maybe our job is just to find a way to fill the time. In any case, we don't have to count the cherry pits on our plate to find out what we're going to end up being, because for better or worse, the die's already been cast. We simply get on with being it; that's what life is all about.

What does Scripture say we should be?

But then maybe we have to listen, and I mean listen back even further than the rhymes of our childhoodthousands of years further back than that. A thick cloud gathers on the mountain, as the Book of Exodus describes it; there are flickers of lightning, jagged, dangerous; the clap of thunder shakes the earth, sets the leaves the treestrembling a little bit, maybe even sets you and me trembling a little bit. We have our wits about us, when suddenly the great ram'horn shofar sounds, and out of the darkness, out of the mystery, out of some cavernous part of who we are, the voice of God calls out, "Now, therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me, above all people. Segullah, my precious ones, my darlingsye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.

Then thousands of years later, but still thousands of years back, there's another voice to listen to, which is the voice of an old man dictating a letter. Peterprobably the best friend Jesus hadPeter himself says, "Put away all malice, all guile, insincerity, and envy, and all slander. Like newborn babes long for the pure spiritual, that by it you may grow up to salvation, for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.

So the question is, "What are we going to be? What are we going to be when we grow up? Not "What are we going to do, or keep on doing? Not "What profession are we going to follow? What niche are we going to choose for ourselves? but "What are we going to beinside our skins and with each other? That's the question the whole Ten Commandments delivered at Sinai are an answer to. That's the question the old saint tries to answer in his letter from Rome.

God calls us to holiness.

Holy!

That's what we're going to be, if God gets his way. It's wildly unreasonable, because it makes a shambles of all our reasonable ambitions to be this or to be that.

Holy. It's not really a human possibility at all, because holiness is Godness, and only God makes holiness possible. And yet being holy is what growing up in the full sense means, according to Saint Peter, anyway: Grow up means to be holy. No matter how old we are, how much we've achieved or failed to achieve or dream of achieving, we're not really grown up until this extraordinary thing happens. Holiness is what is to happen.

Are we going to be rich, poor, beggars, thieves, or in the case of most of us, a little bit of each? Who knows? In the long run, who even cares? Only one thing is really worth caring about, and it's this: "You shall be a holy nation.

Well, if you know anything at all about the Bible, you know that Israel herself was never very much good at it. God knows, he above all. It's what most of the Old Testament is mostly about. Israel didn't want to be a holy nation; Israel wanted to be a nation like everybody elselike Egypt, like Syriajust the way she does today. She wanted clout. She wanted a place in the sun. She wanted security. It was her own way she wanted, not God's way. When the prophets got after her for it, she got rid of the prophets.

We can't really blame Israel very much for that, because you don't need me to remind you that of course we are in that respect Israel. Who wants to be holy? The very word has fallen into disrepute: "Holier than thou. "Holy Joe. "Holy mess. Words get in such awful straits, the way we use them.

And yet, we have our moments, I think. Every once in a while, it seems to me, we actually long to be what out of darkness and mystery we are called to be. We have moments when we hunger for holiness even though we'd never dream of using the word. There come moments, I think, even in the midst of our cynicism and our worldliness and our childishnessmaybe especially thenwhen there's something about holiness when we see it, as we all have. There's something about the saints of the earth that bowls us over a little bit when we run into them, that every once in a while stops us dead in our tracks.

Illustration: I hope you remember the movie a few years back called Gandhi. I remember going to see it when it first came out. We were the usual kind of Saturday night movie crowd, restless, sitting there waiting for the lights to dim, with popcorn and soda pop, and girl friends and boy friends, and your legs draped over the seat in front of you, and so on. By the time the movie came to a close, if you can remember it with the flames of Gandhi's funeral pyre filling the whole great screen, there was not a sound or movement in that whole theater, and we filed out of thereteenagers and senior citizens, and blacks and whites, and swingers and squares, and God knows whatin as deep and telling a silence (Saturday night! Movie theater!) as anything I think I've ever heard or been part of. Peter said something about "tasting the kindness of the Lord, and we'd all tasted it in that theater. In the life of that little, bespectacled Indian, with his spinning wheel and his bare feet, and whatever it was he had in him in the way of selfless passion for peace and a passionate opposition to every form of violence, we'd all of us tasted something that at least for a few moments in that most improbable place made every kind of life except for his kind of life seem empty. We'd seen in his life something that, at least for the moment, I think every one of us longed for, the way in a foreign country you can sometimes long for home.

Can a nation be holy, the way a person can be holy?

"Holy nation. Can a nation be holy, the way a person can be holy? It's hard to imagine it; it's marvelous to imagine it; it breaks your heart to imagine it: a holy nation. Maybe some element of a nation, some remnant or root of a nation. "A shoot coming forth from the stump of Jesse, Isaiah says, "that with righteousness shall judge the poor and decide with equity the meek of the earth description of a holy nation.

I think of the men and women who founded this nation, United States of America. How they dreamed just such a high and holy dream for us and gave their first settlements over on these shores names to match that holy dream. Those first settlementswhat are they called? New Haven, New Hopenames that can bring tears to your eyes if you think about what they mean or what they once meant. Providence, Concord, Salem, which is Shalom, the peace of God that passeth all understanding. Marvelous dreams, marvelous names, and dreams like that die hard, and please God, there's still some echo of them in the air around us.

But the way things have turned out for this nation and the nations in general! The meek of the earth that Isaiah speaks of are scared stiff of the power we have to blow the earth to smithereens a hundred times over. They shudder with terror; I do. And maybe that's the way it inevitably is with all nations. They're so huge, and they're so complex, and they're so (by definition) concerned above all things with their own , that they have no eye for holiness. How can a nation have an eye for holiness, of all things? No ears to hear the great command to be saints; no heart to break. The thought of what this world could bethe friends we could be as nations, the common problems we could help each other to solve as nations, all the human anguish we could join together to heal as nations!

Of course, you and I, we're the eyes, and we're the ears and the heart. It's to us that Peter writes his letter. "Put away all guile, insincerity, envy, and slander. No shofar, no ram's horn, has to sound; what Peter charges us with is as quiet as the scratching of a pen on paper. It's as familiar as the sight of our own faces in the mirror. We've always known what was wrong with us: the malice in us, even at our most civilized; the way we focus on the worst in the people we know, our insincerity; our phoniness; the masks we wear that we do our real business behind; the envy, the way other people's luck stings like wasps; and all slander, all the ways we have of putting each other down, of making such caricatures of each other that we treat each other like caricatures, even when we love each other. All that infantile nonsense and nastiness"Put it away! Peter says. "Before nations can be holy, you've got to be holy. Grow up to salvation! For Christ's sake, grow up, he says.

People at my stage of the gamefor us isn't it a little bit too late? Young peoplefor them isn't it a little bit too early?

I don't think so. There'd be no point in talking about it if I thought that. I think it's never too late; I think it's never too early to grow up, to be holy. We already tasted it, Peter says; we tasted the kindness of the Lordthat's such a haunting thought. I think you can even see the kindness of the Lord in our eyes sometimes. Just the way sometimes you can see something more than animal in an animal's eyes, I think you can sometimes see something more than human even in your eyes and my eyes. I think we belong to holiness, even when we're not even sure it exists. And it's because we belong to holiness, and we recognize it when we see it, and feel it in the air about us, that everybody left that crowded Florida theater in such unearthly silence. And it's because we know something about holiness that it's hard not to be haunted by a photograph I hope you've seen somewhere or another, of the only things that Gandhi is supposed to have owned at his deathhis glasses and his watch, sandals, a bowl and a spoon, and a book of songs. What does any of us own to match such richness as that?

We start being holy by being generous and kind.

We know in our hearts, children as we are, not only that it's more blessed to give than to receive, but that it's also more fun. I mean the kind of holy fun that wells up in the eyes of the saints like tears, the kind of blessed fun in which we lose ourselves and at the same time start to grow up into the selves we were created to become.

Illustration: Henry Jamesyou didn't expect me to mention him particularlywhen Henry James, the great old and American novelist, was saying once to his young nephew, Billy, son of his brother William, he said something the boy never forgot. Of all the fancy, labyrinthine, impenetrable things that fancy, labyrinthine, impenetrable old novelist could have said, what he did say to Billy, or Willie as he called him, is this: "Willie, there are three things that are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.

In the unlikely event that anybody should ever ask you what the preacher said on this particular day, I'd be happy to settle for that: Be kind. That's what in my own labyrinthine and impenetrable way I try to say, anyway. Be kind, because though kindness isn't the same thing as holiness by a long shot, kindness is very close to holiness, I think. It's one of the doors that holiness enters the world through, enters us through. Not just gently kind but sometimes fiercely kind. Be kind enough to other people to listen, beneath the words they speak, for that usually unspoken hunger for holiness, which I think is part of even the unlikeliest of us. Because by listening to it, cherishing it, maybe we can help to bring something like holiness to birth both in them and in ourselves.

And be kind to this nation of ours by remembering that New Haven, New Hope, Shalom, are the names not just of our oldest towns but of our holiest dreams, which most of the time I'm convinced are threatened by the madness of no enemy without as much as they're threatened by our own madness.

And "the kindness of the Lord, Peter's phrasethat, of course, ultimately is the kindness, the holiness, the sainthood, the sanity we're all of us called to, so that by God's grace we may grow up to salvation at last.

Consider the lilies. Consider the sounds in the air in this church at this momentthe silence, the cough, the light through the windows, the color of the walls, the sense we have of each other's presence, the feeling in the air among all of us here, one way or another, basically, secretly, preciously to give each other our love, and to give God our love. This kind moment itself is a door that holiness enters through. So may it enter you and may it enter me, to the world's saving and to our saving.

Frederick Buechner is a renowned author of fiction and whose books include Godric, Now and Then, and The Alphabet of Grace.

© Frederick Buechner
Preaching Today Tape #56
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