Holiness at the Welcome Table

When Peter wrote "be holy in all you do," the church he addressed was a scattered community of immigrants and strangers — people pushed to the margins of the Roman Empire. Holiness, for them, was never about purity codes that separated clean from unclean. It was about becoming a people set apart by radical belonging.

A small congregation in Portland discovered this when they converted their fellowship hall into a weekly free laundromat for unhoused neighbors. At first, members stood behind the counter handing out detergent pods like charity dispensers. It felt holy in a safe, distant way. Then one Tuesday, a woman named Deb — who had slept in her car for three months — looked at a volunteer and said, "You know, you could just sit with us while the clothes spin."

That invitation broke something open. Soon church members were washing their own laundry alongside their neighbors, sharing the same folding tables, the same lukewarm coffee. The line between server and served dissolved. As Rachel Held Evans often reminded us, the table is the place where God shows up — not in our separateness, but in our willingness to be changed by proximity.

The God who says "be holy, for I am holy" is the same God who pitched a tent in human flesh and moved into the neighborhood. Holiness is not withdrawal from a contaminated world. It is the courageous act of drawing closer — to the stranger, to the suffering, to the sacred disruption of genuine community.

This week, ask yourself: Where have I mistaken distance for devotion? True holiness might begin the moment you sit down at someone else's table.