The Sacredness of People

Sermon

This week, I had a moment when I completely understood, in the fullness of my being, John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity. Calvin held that, using Augustine’s notion of original sin, human beings cannot help but be bad, that our actions are displeasing to God, that without Christ, we are worthless. It’s a bleak understanding, to be sure, but when an 18-year-old murders 19 children and two of their teachers, it’s not hard to nod our heads with Calvin.

Except that on normal days that don’t include mass murder, I don’t believe that. How we would give up if we thought God hated us. One need only hold a baby and know that that child is beloved, forever and ever. The ancient church father Pelagius said that when we look into the face of a newborn, we are looking into the face of God freshly born among us. (Newell, p. 32) As the psalmist says, God has crowned us with glory and honor.

In his book Sacred Earth, Sacred Souls, John Philip Newell traces back Christianity’s roots in the Celtic tradition, a smaller branch of our religious family tree but one that bears revisiting. He notes the difference between the Celtic strain of Christianity and the Holy Roman imperial one. The Celts saw the sky and forest as their sanctuary; the Romans built monuments of stone. The Celts believed that every created thing carried within a spark of its Creator; therefore, every created thing – the earth, the animals, the humans – was sacred. The Roman church held that God created everything out of nothing, not out of Godself, so that the earth is neutral.

This is the third and last sermon on sacredness. As a reminder of where we’ve been, let’s remember our working definition of what makes something sacred. Something, or for today, someone, is sacred because God made them and because the essence of God dwells within them. Some describe that as the light of the divine in each person; others call it the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). The apostle Paul wrote that we see the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, and so we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

We cherish what is sacred; we revile what is sacrilege. A sacrilege is something that abuses the sacred. The root word means to take possession of the sacred, to use the sacred selfishly rather than honor it. (Newell, p. 6)

So violence is a sacrilege. Killing those children and teachers at Robb Elementary was a sacrilege. They were robbed of their sacred life.

Racism is a sacrilege. The murder of ten black people at a grocery store in Buffalo because of the false doctrine of white supremacy had nothing sacred in it.

Homophobia is a sacrilege, believing that one’s sexual identity and sexual expression is grounds for judgment dishonors the divine spark in our LGBTQ siblings.

But so often it is easy to see the sin, the sacrilege in others, and so often we are unwilling to take that log out of our own eye to examine ourselves.

Sometimes we dishonor ourselves, telling ourselves the lies that society would have us believe, that in one way or another, who we are is not enough. We’re not smart enough, or thin enough, or fit enough, or talented enough, or rich enough, or whatever enough, to be worthy. I call baloney on that. A person I admire once said, “Never say something to yourself that you would not say to your best friend.”

Sometimes we sin by failing to see ourselves or others as God’s beloved, as sacred creatures. I will tell you, right now it is impossible for me to see the light of the sacred in the men who murdered those people in Uvalde and Buffalo. I will leave them to God. But I also know there are times when I don’t acknowledge the sacredness of the person I see as my political opponent, the person who parents differently from me, or the person whose lifestyle is different from my own. That’s on me, and God asks me to do better.

And so forgiveness plays a big, big part in the relationship that all of us sacred people have with each other. That’s why every week in our worship, we confess our sin and receive forgiveness – it’s a way of helping us restart, a bit like unplugging the computer and waiting a minute before turning it back on so that it can reset. Once we have reset, we can get back to the work God calls us to.

What is that work? Newell says, “We are being invited to view [others] in their deepest identity, to see and think of them not primarily for their failings, but first and foremost in their original nature, made of God. Each one of us is essentially brother of Light, sister of Light, [a sibling of Light,] no matter what we have done, even those in whom there appears to be only falseness and violence.

“At the heart of our being is the light from which we have come. We can choose to live from this place of deepest identity and, at the same time, confront the darkness that violates the light in ourselves and one another. We can call each other back to live from these true depths, not because we have somehow achieved sacredness in our lives, but because we are made of sacredness, pure grace.”

Do you believe you are sacred? Do you know that you are beloved beyond all understanding? There are days when I wake up and see the bags under my eyes and the effect of 57 years of gravity and the lack of collagen and what I see doesn’t look so sacred. But to see the sacred in ourselves and others, we need a different set of lenses.

It is the lens of love that allows us to recognize all the divine sparks all around us. It is love divine (all loves excelling) that enables us to set aside all our very human prejudices and fears so that we can understand, in the minutest of ways, how God sees us, so that we can begin to imitate God.

In his classic sermon “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis reminds us of how we are called to see each other. “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest, most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

“All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

What if we dedicated ourselves to see the other as an everlasting splendor, as bearing the light of the divine, as sacred? How would the world be different?

I am indebted to John Philip Newell for sparking so much of this sermon, and I’d like to share one last story of his. He writes, “Many years ago, I was giving a talk in Ottawa on some of these themes. I began the presentation by using a phrase from the prologue to St. John’s Gospel, ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world’ (1: 9). I spoke of the way the Celtic tradition invites us to look for this light in one another and in everything that has being.

“Attending the talk that evening was a young Mohawk elder who had been invited to be there specifically to make observations at the end of my talk about the resonances between Celtic and Native wisdom. The Mohawk elder stood with tears in his eyes as he spoke.

“He said, ‘As I have been listening to these themes, I have been wondering where I would be tonight, I have been wondering where my people would be tonight, and I have been wondering where we would be as a Western world tonight, if the mission that had come to us from Europe centuries ago had come expecting to find light in us.’ Sometimes words cut us open with their power of truth. These words, spoken humbly by the Mohawk elder, pierced my heart with a truth that I have never forgotten. We cannot undo [these] tragic wrongs… We cannot reverse the injustice, pain…”

We cannot reverse the injustice and pain in Uvalde, in Buffalo, in all those places of terror and death. Today there are sacred mothers and fathers, sacred grandparents, sacred EMTs and medical teams and coroners, sacred teachers who are in deep grief, and their light is probably dimmed by sorrow but still there. We cannot undo their sacred grief, nor should we.

But we can recommit ourselves to acknowledging the sacred people whom joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. So let us do that.

I am sacred.

You are sacred.

They are sacred.

God is sacred.