What Do You Do To Be Holy?

7 October 2026  Galatians 2:1-2,7-14

“If you, though a Jew, are living like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”  (Galatians 2:14)     

In the introduction to his book Temptation, Diogenes Allen recalled the time in his young adulthood (1950s and early 1960s) when he felt very worried about the churches that were growing at a fantastic rate:

[A]lthough people were coming to church in increasing numbers, I was afraid that, unless they started to find what we assured them was there, before too long we would find an exodus. I felt in my own life, and sensed in the lives of the people in my parish, that for some reason the reality of God’s presence was far less than we would like it to be.

What are you looking for? What do you do to be holy? Whatever it is, does it compare to receiving from Jesus His own life?

Dr. Allen, at the time, was a Presbyterian, and was deeply troubled by the realization that he was just religious enough to realize he wasn’t very religious, and didn’t even know what it would be to become more religious.

In his time he was numbered among the greatest living philosophers, and taught at one of the premier theological institutions in the world (Princeton Theological Seminary), so if he didn’t know what it would mean to become more religious, that meant that most Presbyterian parishes were even more lost than he was.

The original twelve apostles had a pretty tense relationship with St. Paul. The twelve were all Jews, and all their lives they knew what it meant to be religious. They had sanctified space, like the Holy of Holies, which only the High priest could enter, and then only once a year on Yom Kippur. They had sanctified times, like the Sabbath, like the great feasts of Succoth, Pentecost, and Passover. They had sanctified people like the Priests and the Levites, and they had sanctified objects, like sacrificial animals, tithes, and food prepared in the kosher way. That was the way to be religious for the Twelve. Their Christian faith did not mean that they were no longer Jews, but that being religious was substantially different from the way they had always been religious.

But then along came Paul who wanted to bring Gentiles into the Church without those traditional ways of being religious. How would the Gentiles be religious, then? What would they do to be holy if the Priesthood, the Temple, the sacrificial system, and all the kosher laws were set aside? The Jewish followers of Jesus at first didn’t know, and so they were suspicious of Paul. Really suspicious. It caused fights. Big fights. Paul confronted Peter in public in Antioch, and accused him of hypocrisy. There was shouting, and hurt feelings, hard feelings. They held the very first Church Council in Jerusalem (cf. Acts 15), and that led to some reconciliation, but not enough that Paul himself ever mentioned it.

The Early Church wasn’t idle on this matter. It began immediately setting up what became over time the sacramental system. The Eucharist and Baptism came first – that seemed obvious. By the 5th-6th centuries sacraments of Reconciliation (Confession), Marriage, Holy Orders, Confirmation, and Healing (Last Rites) were in common practice, and they all reached canonical status by the 12th century, reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in the 16th. Today, the Sacramental System is the way Catholics answer the question, “What do you do to be holy?”. The sacraments are recognized as the ways, sanctified and authorized by Jesus, whereby believers receive from Jesus the divine life, the very life of Jesus Himself. Not a metaphor for that life, but the life.

That’s the answer Diogenes Allen was looking for. He got as far as becoming an Episcopal priest before his death in 2013. His outlook was completely transformed by his reflections on the early Church Fathers who set up the Sacramental System, and those in the modern world who knew them.

What are you looking for? What do you do to be holy? Whatever it is, does it compare to receiving from Jesus His own life?