Peter never says that holiness means one must separate oneself from people who are not holy. Because when we do that, we confuse, holiness with purity, and they are not the same thing. Purity ends with us saying that single mothers, or people of different sexual identities are automatically not holy. Holiness is not something over which we have power or control. It is the action of God with which we co-operate in love, not judgement. Purity demands conformity, holiness loves diversity in God’s light; it is dancing to a million tunes, each one perfect, each one caught and shared.
The call of the Christian is to live on the very front line of holiness, the risky place where we can reach over the frontier and draw people into the love of Christ. A person is holy, the church is holy, a community is holy, only because Christ is in the middle of it.
In our church history, we find people who say ‘put up a wall, keep the unholy separate.’ But that is not what Peter says. He says, ‘Go out, engage, transform’. We are to declare the wonderful works of God. Jesus’s incarnation, and life and death, and resurrection and ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit into an unholy world shows that separation is not the same as holiness.
And so reflect, how do we walk together with those who are alien and exiled? What would our communion, our church around the world, the Christian church look like if everyone was loved as a chosen person of God? What would the world be like?