"One of these truths
that hit me between the eyes is so obvious and so straightforward
that I should be embarrassed even to want to point it out to you. And
you will say, "It is odd, isn't it. Does it take so long for the
penny to drop?" Please bear with me. Jesus breathes on his
disciples. Jesus says, "As the Father sent me, even so, send I
you." We who are the disciples of this one are the bearers of
the Holy Spirit. We are sanctuaries; we are God-carriers We are
precious beyond computing. So we should not just respect but revere
every fellow human being.
In some of our churches
you know how they have a special part of the church, a special
chapel; they will have a tabernacle, and there will be a light in
front of this tabernacle. Normally, when we reverence the altar we
just bow, but when we come before the sanctuary where there is this
lamp burning, alerting us that there is a reserve sacrament there --
we genuflect..
If you and I took our
theology seriously, this is the point -- we bear God in us; we are
sanctuaries; we are temples of the Holy Spirit. We shouldn't just
shake hands and greet each other in the normal kind of way. We ought,
each one of us, to genuflect before one another because we will be
saying, as the Hindus and the Buddhists say, "The God in me
greets the God in you."
And so, friends, to
treat human beings as if they were less than this, is not just evil,
which it is; it's not just wrong, which it is; it's not just painful
as it frequently must be for those who are victims of injustice and
oppression, but for you and for me, it is a veritable blasphemy
because it is as if we were spitting in the face of God. And so, what
Jesus is saying there is explosive. It is to say, "Everyone,
everyone, without exception, everyone, even the most unlikely, even
the most undeserving -- the down-and-outs, the derelicts, the louts,
the drug addicts, the substance abusers, the prostitutes, the pimps
-- if we had but the eyes to see, we would discern even in dark
conditions, that they were God-carriers, precious in the sight of
God, with a value that cannot be computed. But where we might have
felt we needed to recoil, we should, in fact, genuflect, kneeling
before them as Saint Francis knelt before the beggar" (Desmond Tutu)
