"So put away all malice and all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander," he says. "Like new-born babes, long for the pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord." And then he echoes the great cry out of the thunder clouds with a cry of his own. "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people," he says, "that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."

What are we going to be when we grow up? Not what are we going to do, what profession are we going to follow, what niche are we going to choose for ourselves. But what are we going to be -- inside ourselves and among ourselves?

That is the question God answers with the Torah at Sinai. That is the question the old saint answers in his letter from Rome. Holy. That is what we are going to be if God gets His way with us.

It is wildly unreasonable because it makes a shambles of all our reasonable ambitions to be this or to be that. It's not really a human possibility at all because holiness is godness and only God makes holiness possible. But being holy is what growing up in the full sense means, Peter suggests. No matter how old we are or how much we've achieved or dream of achieving, we are not truly grown up till this extraordinary thing happens. Holiness is what is to happen.

Out of darkness we are called into "his marvelous light," Peter writes, who knew more about darkness than most of us if you stop to think about it, and had looked into the very face itself of light.

I've seen a few such faces in my day, and so have you, unless I miss my guess. Are we going to be rich, poor, beggars, thieves, or in the cast of most of us a little of each? Who knows? In the long run who even cares? Only one thing is really worth caring about, and it is this: "Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."

Israel herself was never much good at it. That is what most of the Old Testament is mostly about. Israel didn't want to be a holy nation. Israel wanted to be a nation like all the other nations, a nation like Egypt, like Syria. She wanted clout. She wanted security. She wanted a place in the sun. It was her own way she wanted, not God's way, and when the prophets got after her for it, she got rid of the prophets, and when God's demands seemed too exorbitant, God's promises too remote, she took up with all the other gods who still get our votes and our money and our 9 to 5 energies, because they couldn't care less whether we're holy or not and promise absolutely everything we really want and absolutely nothing we really need.

We can't very well blame Israel because of course we are Israel. Who wants to be holy? The very word has fallen into disrepute -- holier-than-thou, holy Joe, holy mess. And 'saint' comes to mean plaster saint, somebody of such stifling moral perfection that we'd run screaming in the other direction if our paths ever crossed. We are such children, you and I, the way we do such terrible things with such wonderful words. We are such babes in the woods the way we keep getting hopelessly lost.