Allow The Sacred To Work Its Power

Do you ever wonder where certain phrases come from? I’m thinking today of “sacred cow.”

Our common understanding of that term strongly implies that something is untouchable, thus sacred. Or is it sacred, therefore untouchable?

Whatever, our sacred cows are things, people, attitudes that we cannot touch or change. I suspect the term comes from our stereotypical understanding of India’s honest-to-goodness sacred cows. These cows are untouchable because they represent a sacred part of the Hindu belief system.

What “sacred cows” exist within your religious experience? What is “untouchable?”

For some, it’s the Bible. For others it may be the church kitchen or certain strongly held beliefs, or maybe a certain memorial item in the sanctuary.

The list is no doubt endless.

When I think about all of the misunderstanding and emotional pain caused by the sacred cows I’ve met during my ministry, I get to wondering if we church folks aren’t more Hindu than Christian when it comes to sacred things.

(I realize that may sound very insulting to the Hindus. It’s not meant to be. I simply want to suggest that we Christians are not always what we think we are!)

The best dictionary definition of “sacred” I found has to do with being “made or declared holy, like sacred bread and wine.” It’s a good definition because the word “holy” has less to do with being untouchable than it has to do with being “different.”

The common stuff of bread and wine is made different in the way we Christians see it as the body and blood of Jesus during our celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist (Thanksgiving for God in our lives). We become different when we allow any form of the sacred to touch us.

And so identifying bread and wine as sacred is also significant because it reminds us that “sacred” is not about untouchable things, but about very touchable reminders of God’s presence and power in our lives.

Whether we turn to the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic tradition or the two sacraments of the Protestant tradition, we are turning toward hands-on reminders of God’s presence in our lives.

Any ritual that we hold sacred is an act that keeps, or gets, us in touch with the hope-filled mystery we might rightly call God of the Second Chance.

For instance, one of those rituals that has never been declared a sacrament, but most congregations hold sacred, is the annual children’s re-enactment of Jesus’ birth story at Christmastime. It’s a hard story/ritual to beat for its dramatic power and for joyfully reminding us that God loves us so much he became like us.

Yet it is sadly ironic that we diminish the sacredness of Jesus’ birth story and countless other stories, rituals, metaphors and daily experiences by making them somehow untouchable. For when we don’t dare look at these things with a faithful curiosity, the sacred becomes impotent to inform us, redirect us, even transform us.

Sacredness, you see, is not really inherent in the ritual, story, poetry, metaphor, experience or the object. These things are simply the channels through which we are touched and made holy (different) by the sacred and through which we mysteriously can touch the sacred.

Play a quick letter game with me. Switch two letters in “sacred,” and you get “scared.”

My theory is that a sacred cow really becomes a scared cow when it is considered untouchable! If we believe our rituals, etc. are untouchable and cannot be held up to the light of examination and even reshaping, it is possible we are scared to touch, to question, to approach those things with our own fuller humanity.

Yet the primary miracle of Christianity is the incarnation, God becoming human so he/she could touch and be touched by his/her creation!

God must grieve when we turn the sacredness of life into the scaredness of life. And we do that too quickly, too easily, in the church.

Our rituals, within the church and in our lives “outside” the church, become untouchable.

We go through the motions but keep the power of those rituals, etc. from touching us.

Slowly we become scared, not sacred/holy/ different. We become untouchable and lose a conscious awareness that we are sacred beings, that we have an unquenchable spark of the divine within us.

Fortunately, God never forgets we are sacred. And God never gives up on us, especially when we are scared.

xxxx