No prizes for guessing how we started half-term. On Friday night we went to see the new Wallace and Gromit film, if you haven’t seen it go and see it. Of course Wallace and Gromit provide a wonderful romp through the idiosyncrasies of British life, and the pursuit of perfection is viewed through a very particular lens. Yet there is something remarkably endearing and powerful about the plasticine features of each character, particularly Gromit.

Completely silent throughout a two hour film, but every quirk of his ears, every twist of his eyebrows says something about his thoughts and his reactions, and about the subtle thoughts and humour of his artistic creator, Nick Park, whose thumbprints create such pathos; and I’ve been reflecting throughout the week on Dan’s reminder last week that God’s thumbprint has been imprinted into the soul of creation.

In fact, into our very soul. God is the source of our very being, and our living is to resonate and respond to God. So the call to holiness that we hear in our readings today should actually come as no surprise.

‘Be holy as I am holy’; this was the command God gave Moses to give to the people right back then as they became the chosen people; and what does this all mean?

In the Old Testament God’s holiness was understood in terms of God’s exalted position over creation; and as the supreme God above all false gods. God’s holiness had an ethical moral dimension too, his moral excellence, all perfect goodness, justice and righteousness.

Places and things could be holy, by virtue of them being set aside for a certain purpose, such as a shrine, the temple or things used in ritual worship. People could be holy in virtue of their consecration to religious purposes. The priests of the temple and the nation of Israel were holy because of their consecrated relationship with God. And that is the thread that goes all the way through scripture.

And today is Bible Sunday, you’ve seen it printed in your copies. There’s about four different sets of readings we could have used today and I chose this one because I think it says so much about all that the scripture is trying to show us. It’s that golden thread that goes through it.

‘Be holy as I am holy’, just as God’s thumbprints are in the soul of creation, God’s image and God’s thumbprints are in us. The whole of the narrative of scripture, the Old and the Testament, is how we connect and re-connect to that. And it is this aspect which Jesus picks up in his teachings in the Gospel: that we are holy because of our relationship with God.

I was leading a workshop the other day, looking at how parishes could make better links with the working community. I had a group of ministers and a group of lay people who had come together to wrestle with the idea of how we stop being church over here doing one thing and working community over there. We don’t always know how to connect with these two spheres. We were wrestling with ‘how do we break through’ this false dichotomy between sacred and secular in our lives, so we’re better able to live the whole of life directed towards God, at work or play, in business or at prayer.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul with all your mind” says Jesus. We agreed that when we recognised the source of our life and start to live with the recognition that the whole of life is on leasehold – that is, all we are and all we have is by God’s loving gift to us – then we can start to live with a more open and generous heart; living can become an expression of worship, a response to the generosity of God’s love for us; and it is this love that is the key. God’s love for us and our corresponding love for God. We become holy because of the consecration and the relationship of our life to God.

And all too often, when we talk about holiness, we actually try to put the cart before the horse. We often start with “Love your neighbour as yourself” but we rewrite it in our heads in popular understanding and say ‘Do unto others as you’d like them to do unto you’. And that, for many, is the starting point. But we can never truly love ourselves, let alone our neighbour, until we know and understand God’s love for us. Because ‘holiness’ in God’s book is not about saccharine sweet moral perfection in the way we so often understand it. It’s about sharing in God’s wholeness and completeness of love, purpose and action, which we see demonstrated most fully in Jesus.

I’ve been dipping through the scriptures this week looking at the whole idea of holiness and perfection and they’re often used as interacting terms. God talks about ‘be holy’ and then you’ve got another part in the early parts of Matthew where it says ‘be perfect’ and it’s picking out the same idea. Perfection in God’s understanding is about wholeness, reaching the completeness of all God’s purposes. You could wrap it up in the words ‘Shalom’: all God desires for each one of us is that we might be whole, that we might be complete.

But Jesus was made perfect in suffering, and we often don’t get our heads around that one; so I’ve been having a look at Hebrews. If you want to have a wrestle with this notion, have a look at Hebrews because there’s quite a lot about holiness and perfection. Jesus was made perfect through suffering. His suffering encountered the very deepest aspects of our brokenness, our lack of wholeness, our lack of hope and our lack of love. He was pierced to the very core by the things that hurt us most, but he didn’t turn them on us as weapons as we do to one another. Very often when we’ve been hurt we push it back out to others. Jesus absorbed the hurt and responded with love that knows no bounds.

The call to holiness is the call to wholeness, and when we’re basking in the love of God we can begin to encounter ourselves, our woundedness, our fears, our despair, our manifest lack of love for ourselves and others. And it’s as we begin to let God’s love touch us that we can begin to love others more fully, because we are also beginning to love ourselves.

I saw a really graphic illustration of this love in a documentary during the week about the lady who runs a charity for those who are really difficult and socially outcast children in London. I think it was called ‘Tough Love’. I came in just after it had started and the founder of this charity was an amazing lady. There was no comment made about any religious faith or basis for it, but she demonstrated the power of love in action. The children who come day by day to her centre are more than ‘asbo’ kids. You name it, they did it: challenging every social behaviour possible. They’ve been written off by every single social service element you can think of. They don’t want to know. They don’t know what to do with them. They come to this place which is a haven. They are so desperate for love, and she said ‘that is the key’ When you recognise and understand that they will do anything for unconditional love, which is something that almost all of them have never experienced; growing up in abusive, chaotic and broken relationships. The depth of their depravity was frightening.

And she spoke about the fact that she’d had to come to understand that at any time they can take out a knife on her. She could either be seriously injured or even killed in the process of doing her work. She had to learn to love and understand her own fear and her own mortality. She said ‘Until I can do that I could not be free to love these kids’. And she said ‘Once I can do that and I have to do it regularly I have to remind myself it is that fear which stopped me from loving’.

And so she’s able to reach out and love them, having met her own fear and loved herself. She is able to love her neighbour, and it showed. It was an incredibly powerful documentary, because we all long for love.

So, as we read the Scriptures, as we experience and bask in the love of God, as we find ourselves in the narrative of the people who asked those questions of Jesus, as we wrestle with “How do you love me” – may we find the love of God, and the way to love ourselves and others into the wholeness and the holiness that is God’s desire for every life.