by J. Ellsworth Kalas
During this past fall term I had an exciting time teaching an elective course titled, “Homiletical Holiness.” The course is intended to prepare Asbury students to develop and deliver sermons on holiness. I’m sorry to tell you that this course hadn’t been offered in many years, so I’m trying to make up for lost time.
As a result of teaching this course I decided that I should tell you how I became a holiness preacher. It happened perhaps a decade ago. I was preaching for a camp meeting in Tennessee and Janet and I were staying in a modest motel in a small west Tennessee town. When we returned from the Sunday morning service and the celebratory meal that had followed, we discovered that the cleaning woman hadn’t yet gotten to our room.
When she appeared a little later, she was tired. Now somewhere in late middle age, she had been doing such work for years, and this was a bad day. Several of the younger women, she explained, had phoned in that they weren’t feeling well, a problem they seemed to have on Sundays, so she was left doing the work of three women. I had already left a tip on the bed, but I hurt for her, so as she left the room I gave her a ten dollar bill and told her I was sorry it had been a rough day.
Perhaps an hour later I came upon her in the hallway, finishing up her last room. She straightened up with a question. “Are you a holiness preacher?” I told her that, yes, I was a preacher, and that I was hoping to be holy.
“I thought so,” she said. “I thought you was a holiness preacher.” And we went on our respective ways.
So that’s the day I became a holiness preacher. I don’t have a certificate to that effect to hang on my office wall but I know a holy moment when I see one, and I also have some convictions about ordination. I won’t take a mite away from my ordination as a Methodist elder on a May Sunday in 1954, and I hold in grateful memory my ordaining Bishop, H. Clifford Northcott.
But I’m also grateful for the tired, overworked chambermaid who identified me as a holiness preacher. I’m still trying hard to live up to the honor she bestowed on me in a motel hallway that hot summer afternoon in west Tennessee. Because being a holiness preacher isn’t easy to come by.
I too am a holiness preacher. I hope to move on to perfection.
Dr. Kalas This is a positive and refeshing note. Thanks for sharing.
Dr. Kalas, thanks for this story This is real holiness, not just theory. Real holiness is lived out in day to day relationships, not just in theology and theory.
I sometimes think the ‘titles’ we are given by children, marginal folk or people who serve us are the only titles that really matter. You are a holiness preacher. The kind of holiness you preach is the kind of holiness that makes me want to dance.
Yes dear Marilyn is correct! A preacher he is and not until I really got to know Dr. Kalas did I realize just how holy he is. God bless, Sir. PS to Marilyn – during my cancer YOU were my angel!
I appreciate the fact that though you appreciated the credentials bestowed by the institutions you have served, you truly know what it means to be touched by the spirirtual. Who knows, perhaps the cleaning lady was placed in your path by God.
Great Mentor Kalas, You are modeling the way for many of us. Thank you for sharing this beautiful story.
Not the expert, I suppose, but having traveled many a mile with Dr. Kalas while transporting him to many preaching engagements, I can say “AMEN” to the cleaning lady. My wife says that traveling with Dr. Kalas is like traveling across the wilderness with Moses.
I fear these “sacred moments” are in front of us all the time as we miss them–God please help us to see others as you see them and to bless them as yours. Bless you Dr. Kalas for reminding us.