May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. —1 Thessalonians 5:23a
On Pentecost Sunday, the day when we, in the Church, remember the gift of God’s Holy Spirit that descended on a multicultural gathering of faithful people, enabling them to speak from their own languages with the ability to still understand each other, I bought a red candle. It was one of those tall cylinder-shaped prayer candles that often have a picture of Jesus on them with his heart on fire, or the Virgin Mary, a saint, or even a celebrity. This one had no images on it. I just wanted the red to honor the day.
The red of Pentecost is an outward commemoration of the inward transformation by God’s Spirit in each of us. That transformation is a gradual one taking shape over a lifetime of discipleship, a life’s journey of following Jesus. Some Christians call this process sanctification.
In her spiritual memoir, Beautiful and Terrible Things, Rev. Dr. Amy Butler writes that sanctification is “the process of a life changing gradually to reflect the values of faith.” And while the gift of God’s powerful Spirit is freely given to each of us, one thing I was reminded of during my recent sabbatical is that nothing changes without deliberation. We’ve got to do the daily work in relationship with the Holy Spirit to spur along the process of gradual change in our lives that makes the values of faith shine brighter and brighter from the one, unmistakable life we’ve been given.
Every morning that I’ve been at home since Pentecost, May 19th of this year, I’ve lit that red candle. It’s warm glow in our small kitchen signals a time for me to sit at the table where the candle burns, take in a few moments of silence, maybe say prayer, and then read. Sometimes our four-legged love, Amelia, joins me. During that sacred time that I have to carve out each morning—sometimes just 15 minutes, sometimes nearly an hour—I read in an effort to nurture sanctification.
For several weeks I would read a few chapters of the First Nations Version of the New Testament (an Indigenous translation) and then a section of The 1619 Project, an anthology of essays and poetry, edited by Nikole-Hannah Jones, that reframes American history by placing “slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative.” When I completed those, I started reading essays from Howard Thurman’s Meditations of the Heart, and a chapter each morning from bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions. One could argue that The 1619 Project and All About Love are not explicitly about faith and spirituality, but if sanctification is a gradual process of making us shine forth as pure gold, as the old spiritual sings, then God’s Spirit dwelling within us can use all the tools She can get to nurture the wholistic process of faithful formation.
“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God” (Romans 8:28), and I believe that all things must include, beyond immersing oneself in Scripture, a discipline of learning about our history so that we can work with deliberation to change our present and future to look more like God’s kingdom, and of learning about the spiritual virtue that Jesus commands us to uphold above everything: love.
What steps are you taking to nurture sanctification in your one, unmistakable life? Hear me, the way I’m doing that in my life isn’t the absolutely right way to go about it, let alone the only way. Nurturing the faithful transformation of God’s Spirit in your life might look completely different from lighting a candle, sitting at a table, and reading; but whatever it looks like, be deliberate. And may the God of peace sanctify you through and through.
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