Greet one another with a holy kiss. (II Corinthians 13:12 ESV)
Holy
When I was a lonely teenager, I used to giggle about this verse. I considered, a few times, trying to sneak a kiss from a cute girl by claiming to be simply following this command. I am glad I never actually tried it because I misunderstood the verse.
Paul is not commanding us to do something selfish (like sneaking a kiss) by pretending it is a holy thing. Any more than God wants us to rob a bank, so we have more to tithe, take offense easily so we can offer forgiveness, or swear loudly so we can loudly confess and repent.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Paul is instructing the Corinthians to make everything holy… a greeting-kiss being somewhere in the middle of the extremely mundane and the extremely important. And making everything holy (as the rest of Paul’s letters describe) means submitting every bit of our lives to our Lord.
Making everything holy means having Christ in our minds always, not just on Sunday. Making everything holy means knowing that Christ has given us His robes to wear all the time, not just in formal worship. Making everything holy means knowing that Christ is beside us constantly, and that changes our awareness, our intentions, our desires, and our actions. Especially when we realize that the only way our awareness, intentions, desires, and actions are done right is when we submit to Him in all of those things.
Even a greeting, then, is potentially holy… because even a greeting is bathed in Christ.
We are peculiar, we can be holy.