Anal Naga Baptist Centenary #2
The great Trinitarian hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty,” praises God in the early morning with our song and that all God’s work on earth, in the sky and sea praise his name. But in the third verse, we as saints may hide in the darkness and our eyes may be blinded by sin that we may not see God’s holiness.
In 1 Peter 1:15-16, the writer says, “As he (God) who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” This is a quote from Leviticus 11:44-45.
What does “holy” mean today? Unfortunately, in many places in the United States, people whose lives are not necessarily based on the Christian faith would never want to be labeled “holy.” It would mean one is strange and odd and someone outside of the group. For example, many people would never want to be caught carrying or reading the Holy Bible in a public place. People might say, “Are you trying to be better than us?” Or they may think that you are a religious fanatic. But isn’t that what being holy is?
What does “holy” mean to you as Anal Naga Baptist people?
When I was in my early teenager years, now around 55 years ago, I was baptized at my home church in Boston, MA. As a typical teenager, I had my doubts and questions. While I strove to live as much of a holy life as I possibly could, I always had some selfishness that I couldn’t eliminate. I wanted more than what my parents could afford to give me. When it was an expected time for me to attend the pastor’s new membership or baptism class, I went forward. After many sessions, I got baptized which was a great moment. I was inspired and uplifted. I thought that I am now holy and I would have no more selfish thoughts and interests. I thought I was going to be walking just a little bit off the ground.
But after all the excitement died down and the baptismal water dried behind my ears, I was like before. Nothing seems to have changed. I still had my doubts and felt I wanted more for myself than thinking about others. I still wasn’t as holy as I thought I would be.
Holy Rooted in Christ
The passage in 1 Peter is about the work of Christ and what it means to our witness in the world. It is when we have a clear understanding of Christ’s vision in the world is when we would have an idea of the fruits that we produce in our Christian life.
In the following verses of 1 Peter 1:15-16, we see that Christ’s ransom of our souls opens us to a trust of God, an obedience to the truth and a love for one another. Read 1 Peter 1:17-22.
Peter tells us that from our birth, we have hope in the resurrection of Christ. In our relationship with Christ, we have a love for the Lord. This is when we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. This is when we accept baptism and make a public profession of our faith. From this new birth of water, we realize the holiness within us formed by hope and love. This life-long journey moves us from Christ’s work toward our sanctification. Saints are holy people. Holy people are saints.
The metaphor of ransom is a powerful one in our Christian theology, collecting into one a strong sense of our bondage in sin, the price of Christ’s blood, and the freedom that we find in Jesus. Peter uses this image to testify to Christ’s ransoming us from our futile ways, and argues over the course of this passage that his ransom turns us in trust of God, in obedience to the truth, and in love to our neighbor. Christ pays the concrete price of the gift of himself to free us from our bondage, but he buys for this price a reformation of our wills, a change of hearts.
In my own Christian journey, I began to be freed from the bondage of my selfishness because Jesus Christ paid the ransom for my salvation so that more and more of my life is believing that God’s trust is in me, being obedient to the truth, and loving my neighbors as much as I love myself.
Before the American Baptist missionaries arrived to the Anal Naga and other parts of Manipur and the rest of NE India, tribes traditionally lived in isolation from others with different histories and even languages. There was always conflict with neighboring villages fighting over land. The ongoing warfare led to headhunting as trophies of victory. Mostly young men fought and this shaped the social life of the village. But with the coming of Christianity, loving one’s neighbor and enemy alike as loving oneself, liberated the tribes from the anarchy of incessant warfare and headhunting. You became holy from headhunting to heart hunting in the name of Jesus Christ!
This movement or progression of God’s activities points to our becoming holy. We are to be holy as God is holy. When we strive toward holiness, our holiness flows from the grace that we find in Jesus Christ.
Marks of Holiness
There are three marks of holiness that we can discern from 1 Peter. The first is that we have a trust of God. It’s not that we have trust in God but rather that we have God’s trust in us. Christ’s offer of love in his ransom for us means that we can now affirm that the trust of God is engendered in us. Christ’s offer of love serves as a foundation of our obedience and that we can also learn to trust in the ways of God.
Christ’s sacrifice gives us a new inheritance that God trusts us.
What powerful good news for us today! As Anal Naga Baptists celebrating your 100 years of faithful ministry, God continues to trust you to continue carrying out God’s mission in the world. God believes in you to continue proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ in the world!
To be holy is to be obedient to truth. I read that in your early history as a tribal people, there were many gods whom you believed. There was the supreme creator named Asapavan as well as secondary deity named Wangparel and numerous spirits.
In the arrival of the missionaries who shared the Good News of Jesus Christ with you and the ongoing revelation of God’s plan for your lives today and tomorrow, you were empowered with the truth of the Lord. You now believe it is one God revealed to us in three ways: God the Creator, God the Savior and God the Comforter. Just as the hymn sings, “Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! God in three persons, blessed Trinity!
As you face emerging and sometimes troubling claims of truth today, you will need to be obedient to God’s word, trusting in God as God is trusting in you to be his servants and witnesses in today’s world.
And thirdly to be holy means to love one another. Loving other Anal Nagas is not a problem. Look at how many of you are here today! You understand each other because you speak the Anal language. You wear familiar clothes that are rooted in your history and traditions. But in your history there was a time when you went to war with the Kukis whom you opposed back in 1917. To be holy, you need to also love the Kukis people.
As Christians, we know that God created the whole world and all the people on earth. If God only created the Anal Nagas, you might be able to say that God only loves us and we are only expected to love other Anal Nagas. Don’t we wish that to be true? But God created all the people in the world. God created the hundreds of tribal people in NE India. God created all the people in India. God created people in our lands; people like those of us who came from the US to be with you this weekend. If God created all of us; and Jesus Christ came to give us all new life, a new beginning, a second chance then we are commanded to love one another. To be holy means to love one another.
Holy People
I have had the opportunity to visit some of the great cathedrals in Europe and what we found were museums. There were more tombs in the floors and in the walls than there were living people on the pews. Many church leaders are worried that American churches may become museums too.
There’s a church planter, Ed Stetzer who separates the 75% of Americans who call themselves Christians into three categories: cultural, congregational and convictional.
He defines cultural Christians as people who are Christians simply because their culture tells them they are. But they’re Christian in name only, and are not practicing a vibrant faith.
Congregational Christians are similar to cultural Christians, except that they have some connection to actual congregational life, a church they attend at least occasionally, perhaps on Easter and Christmas.
Convictional Christians, on the other hand, are those who actually live according to their faith. They are the people who would say that they have met Jesus, that he has changed their lives, and that their lives are centered around the faith in him.
You may have read that in demographical studies, more people are now identifying themselves as “Nones” as having no religion. Stetzer suggests that the change is coming from defections from the cultural and congregational Christian categories, because there’s now less societal pressure to be “Christian.” These folks “feel comfortable freeing themselves from a label that was not true of them in the first place,” Stetzer says, but he quickly adds that convictional Christians are not leaving the faith.
Christianity may be losing its top-down political and cultural influence, but Jesus spoke about his followers making an impact in a very different way. He taught that God’s kingdom will begin with the last first, the least becoming the greatest.
There was a story by MacKinlay Kantor, “A Girl Named Frankie,” published in Reader’s Digest.
In the middle of a terrible airline crash, an ordinary stewardess named Frankie returned again and again to the crashed plane to retrieve victims. Then the plane exploded, killing this ordinary hero. In the author’s own words,
Frankie lies on a hill now. Toward the north is a hill where Central High School looms and where her principal used to talk about heroes. Maybe three miles away to the southeast is the house where she spent the first nine years of her life—and that is on a hill also…You might imagine that Frankie was up there somewhere, waltzing; she’d always loved to dance.
She could be, too… Except that something made her go back into that airplane cabin 11 times, and 11 times was just one time too many.
A crashed airplane is strictly for stalwart men and asbestos suits and masks. It is not for the petite little Miss Pretty—not unless she is Mary Frances Housley. Then she had such love in her heart that no high-octane explosion can ever blast it out.
To be holy means to love one another even at the risk of one’s own life. How many times might we go with the love of God in our hearts to make a difference in the world? Are you a convictional Christian who has met Jesus and now your whole life is centered around your faith and love in him?
To be holy means to see the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ and ask what would Jesus do in such situations because God’s trust is in us.
To be holy means to be obedient to the truth in Jesus’ teachings of the greatest commandments are to love God and love our neighbors and nothing else really matters that much.
To be holy means to put the life and vitality of the church first and foremost by tithing and giving sacrificially trusting in God that everything is possible in God.
To be holy means to wake up in the morning and ponder about how I can proclaim the Good News to others in my words and deeds.
The reason why we are here is that we want to be anointed, to be made holy so that tomorrow when you are at work or in the supermarket or in the office or over the kitchen sink or God forbid, at an airplane crash, that you—God’s holy one—is chosen to be the one.
Let us pray.
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty, make us holier as you are holy and made visible to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lead us to believe that your trust in us empowers us to love our neighbors and our enemies. Teach us to be obedient to the truth found in the Bible and in the Christian way of life that would give us renewal and strength in the days ahead. Bless each and everyone here with your peace and understanding. In Christ we pray. Amen.