NOTHING SACRED

Granted, I have a vested interest in this: it seems that almost every television show in which either a clergy person or a dad is a character, that person comes across as either a bumbling idiot or a fool or both. They certainly are not depicted as normal human beings. But then, the last time I looked, every clergy person, every dad I have met was never more than human.

The last time I read the Bible, everybody God ever called to follow Him was totally human -- Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, Martha, Mary Magdalene. God called them all, warts and all. And they remained human to the very end, which is to say that they remained sinners, filled with foibles and foolishness, just like everyone else. They were not saints, if we define "saint" as one who does not sin. Mother Theresa on her best day sinned probably seven or eight times. My best days don't even come close.

Being a Christian, being a community of Christians, being a church, is a messy business because we are all sinners. We are tempted every day by the beauty of God's creation: the body, the chocolate candy bar, the you-name-it. We are tempted to use and abuse. The more tempting something is, the more beautiful and alluring, the more we want it for ourselves, baptism, ordination, profession of faith notwithstanding. It has been that way from the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end.

We don't suddenly become sinless and immune to temptation because we believe in Jesus Christ. Would that it would be so easy. In fact, life becomes all the more difficult because now we know better. Now we know what is right and what is wrong. That does not mean that nothing is sacred, that we’ll all go to hell in a handcart and we might as well accept that fact. The struggle that we all have is that we know our failings and shortcomings, our sins, and that they do get in the way of our living out of our faith as we know we can and should. Our humanity gets in the way.

And because our humanity is so evident, we sometimes feel that we have an excuse, even a good excuse, why we cannot and even should not be a witness to our faith -- tell others about it. In fact, it is because we are so less-than-perfect that we are even better witnesses than those who are less sinful than we. We have more to tell others about how God has been working in our lives.

We may not understand how God works in us or even why, but we know that God does -every day in every way. And when we tell others about the workings of God in us, when we remind ourselves of how God works in us, we not only share our faith and our faith journey with others, we also make that journey – theirs and ours – a little easier.

One of the reasons why Mother Theresa was such a saint was that she knew she was such a sinner (at least in her own eyes and mind) and that God still loved her, forgave her and wanted her to continue doing His work, witnessing to His love by her love. Is there nothing sacred? Yes. Our humanity, foibles and all, is sacred because it is in and through our humanity that God's work is done today.