Holy, Holy, Holy
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Is nothing sacred anymore? On a rhetorical level the answer seems to be that there isn't. The question itself challenges its own premise, as we ask it so often in such a flippant way that we no longer even take desecration seriously. But on a more straightforward level the answer is, of course. It is the very nature of the sacred that it is unbesmirched by the vicissitudes of a given era. The "anymore" part doesn't belong. That which was sacred remains sacred. To be sacred is to be transcendent, and so safely out of reach of the most diligent of graffiti artists. Does anybody treat anything sacredly anymore? Perhaps not. Is anything sacred? Most definitely.

The world, of course, creates its own sacred objects, because as Paul tells us in Romans 1, man is incurably religious. We fashion something with our hands, and then bow down before it. When the Senate debates the merits of a Constitutional Amendment to ban desecrating (which means to make unsacred, or to treat as unsacred) the flag, they are acting not as legislators but as priests of the state religion (which worships the state), calling their council to pronounce canon law about that which is sacred. When one is expelled from academic society for suggesting that perhaps that secular saint Martin Luther King was guilty of academic fraud and marital fraud, we know what is considered sacred. When one redneck yells "Earnhardt!' and receives the reply from another redneck, "Stinks!" (I know, I know, but this is a family magazine), we see two rival witch doctors trying to put the whammy on the religion of another. When one announces that there is too an objective truth, and that relativism is a lie, one not only desecrates but defenistrates the most sacred of cultural cows.

The church responds in one of three ways. The most common response is, surprise, surprise, to do the same thing. Who do you think is driving the movement to make the flag sacred, but the Christian right? And while we might speak ill of Dr. King, woe betide the fool who should ever speak a word against Saint Billy. I still hold the record at World magazine for the article which prompted the most mail, when I humbly stood by the gospel and challenged Dr. Graham's assurance to the nation in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing that all the little children who died there were in heaven. Even in the Reformed camp one must be careful to presuppose the inerrancy of Dr. Van Til.

A second response to the sacred is that we make clear distinctions between the sacred and the secular. This view holds that if there's no Bible verse saying such and such is a good thing, then forget about it. These are the missionaries who ship their little children off to boarding school so that they can do the work of the ministry. These are the Protestant flagellants who eat their parsley potatoes and their Wonder bread, and become suspicious of those who use pepper. These are the good folks our friends at Credenda/Agenda like to call "Amillenial Gnostics." The sacred, which consists of prayer and Bible reading, is good. Everything else is bad. And won't it be great when we get to heaven so we can pray and read our Bibles all day lone. And we won't have these pesky bodies to get in our way and tempt with pleasure.

The third response is to treat nothing as sacred. The idea of the sacred is anathema to the pagans we are trying to reach. They wallow in the muck, and so, because we love them so, should we. We play the realism game, doing our best to offend any sensible sensibility, all in order to be with it. We see this in the dumbing down of our worship, where we try to make Sunday look as much like every other day as possible, only worse. We throw on our cut-offs, blow out our flip-flops, step on pop-top, and saunter down to the local meeting place to hear some hip comic tell us that God is just a regular guy like us, only better. Jesus likes a dirty joke as much as the next guy.

Of course not one of these approaches is biblical. Whether we are treating the unsacred as sacred, orthe sacred as unsacred, we are failing to judge rightly. In some sense everything not sin is sacred. When I sit down to eat a cheeseburger and fries I am enjoying the bounty of our God. That's why we pause to give Him thanks. When I'm splitting wood for the fire I am doing the sacred tasks both of exercising dominion over creation and of providing for the family God has entrusted to me. And it is a good thing to remember that such is true. Our lives only seem mundane when we fail to see them in their true context, in the context of glorifying God and enjoying Him forever.

But we must also remember that some things are more sacred than others. When I kneel at the Lord's Table I am again enjoying the bounty of our God. And I must again give thanks. But I am enjoying so much more than the provision of daily bread. I do not live on bread alone. Instead I am also feeding upon the body of Christ, and enjoying a closer fellowship with Him than I do at MacDonalds. When I am teaching my children to obey, I am engaged in a sacred task. But such is not as sacred as when I place upon them the mark of Christ at baptism. These are sacraments because they are sacred. And they are sacred because they are holy. And because they are holy, they are set apart, and we are to revere them.

It is a function of our ignorance of and hatred toward the Old Testament that causes this problem. We know that in the New Testament the Pharisees made a big fuss about what was clean or unclean. And we know that the Pharisees were the bad guys. Therefore, we wisely conclude all these distinctions are wicked, (making the distinction that the making of distinctions is unclean) forgetting that as with all the law of God, the trouble with the Pharisees was not that they obeyed God's law, but that they disobeyed it, and made up their own. I'm not arguing for keeping kosher. I am saying that the making of distinctions is a biblical idea. Egalitarianism, on the other hand, smells like sulfur, which is to say, rotten eggs.

That all things are sacred, and some things more sacred than others means, of course, that we have a sacred duty to assess accurately the sacredness of various things. To treat something as more sacred, or less sacred than it actually is is to love something more or less than we ought. C.S. Lewis argues that all sin is a failure to love "ordinately." That means in order. When I love my dog more than I love my wife (which, of course, I would never do, because my dog is a money pit. When she isn't eating my chickens she is getting herself hurt enough to require an expensive trip to the vet) I cannot excuse myself by pointing out what great and glorious thing love is. In affirming that wine is a great gift of God I am not giving myself a license to swim in it. Love does not forgive everything.

But we also get into trouble when we don't love, or revere things enough. When I gossip about my friends I am failing to revere them, to think them more important than myself. When I tell little lies, puffing up my accomplishments, I show a severe lack of reverence for the truth. I do the same, by the way, when I determine never to study anything controversial, or to talk of such matters because they can break the peace. I'm revering peace more than I should, truth less than I should. When I sit down for a night of Must See TV I am not only watching and laughing at the desecration of any number of things God calls holy (families, marriage, sex, etc.), but I am also showing a severe lack of reverence for time. What's three hours in the grand scheme of things?

Isn't it ironic, that we defend our desecration of the little things with the argument that they are part of a bigger thing? Because the big thing, say, eternity, is so big, we reason that the little thing, say, three hours, is so little. We ought to revere time precisely because it is a part of eternity, just as we are to revere each other, little tiny people that we are, because we bear God's image, and He is not so tiny.

We are a people stuck in neutral. We have made everything so commonplace, having been there and done that our problem is not so much a passion for evil, but an evil lack of passion for anything at all. Far better to live in a world in which the answer to the question, "Is nothing sacred?" is, "Of course, the holy, esteemed dog's backside is sacred, and death will fall swiftly on any who speak ill of the exalted backside of the dog." Such would be a people, like the foolish Greeks at Mars Hill, who at least have the sense to worship something, who at least see that something is more important than their personal peace and affluence. The solution is not to persuade them that nothing is really all that important, but to shift their adoring gaze from the creature to the Creator. Instead we live in an age in which Jesus is just all right with me.

We are trying to show the holiness. When we seek to live simply we are trying to see the mystery, and therefore the holiness of life, which horribly shrouded by the deadly efficiency of the seamless process from Archer-Daniels-Midland to the processing plant to the cannery to the distributor to the store shelves, through the scanner and into our microwaves. When we seek to live separately we are trying to live holy lives, which is what holiness is all about. We want to be set apart, distinguished, and so go through our lives not swimming in the lukewarm position of quiet desperation, but rather swimming upstream with all the determination of a salmon whose biological clock is ticking. When we try to live deliberately we are trying to order our loves, to determine what to value, and how much to value it through the wisdom of the prophets, rather than through the madmen of Madison Avenue in search of their prophets.

We don't need to add drama to our lives by living vicariously through the denizens of the world of the soaps. The drama is already there if we will but see it. We are not replacing light bulbs and changing diapers in monotonous drudgery, we are fighting the great war, beating back sin from our garden as if it were a voracious, creeping weed. We don't need to manufacture holy moments for they are all around us. We don't need to bungee jump or skydive in order to give our lives the thrill that they are missing. We need only to realize that we are at work building the holy Kingdom of our holy King.

Every day is jihad, holy war. And as such every day is both war, and holy, and all the moments therein. And when we forget that truth, when we kick back and relax, we are losing the battle, a battle that has already been won.