Who Will Be Left?

The press, the TV people, the internet are full of stories about the picture of Michael Phelps smoking pot. He has been quick to admit that it is a real picture of him. He has acknowledged that he has made a mistake, and he has apologized to anybody who was bothered by his actions. The mountain out of this molehill is another example of our temptation to forget the humanity of our heroes. Michael has been a man under discipline for more than eight years. After four years of training and swimming he was arrested for a DUI in 2004. After four more years of intense training he was pictured trying pot. He is after all a college youth who has denied himself a whole host of activities that most college youths take for granted. So a couple of times in eight years he allows himself to try something that the rest of the college young people have tried. He does not handle them well because he does not have much experience at how to handle them. He makes a mistake. He is not perfect. He is a human being.

It is a basic affirmation of our Christian faith that all of us are not perfect. It seems to be one of the hardest doctrine in the Christian faith for us to get into our thinking. The orthodox affirmation that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" means that there is evil and something less than perfect about all of us. The continuation of that doctrine, "the total depravity of humanity," suggests that like sugar that gets dissolved in a glass of water evil is a part of all we are. The best of us and our best deeds always have a tiny taint of that selfishness that is seen most clearly in our worst times and most evil acts.

That should mean that as Christian people we are never surprised when that evil suddenly becomes visible in a person. In fact, we ought to be expecting it to be there. The neighbors are always saying that so and so was a very quiet neighbor and we never thought he or she would do that kind of thing. Well, why not? The neighbor was a human being. Of course, the evil shows up in lots of different ways in different people. Madoff's selfishness in the Ponzi scheme is different from the evil of Timothy McVeigh but both of them believed themselves to be their own gods, the one to decide what was right and wrong.

As long as we are going to eliminate a person from a role model, from a job, from a position of respect everytime we catch a glimpse of the "not perfect" in them, we are going to discover that there is nobody left to look up to. The much more important criteria is what they do when the "not perfect" in them comes out. Phelps has quickly and honestly acknowledged his. Richard Nixon never acknowledged his. If we keep looking for somebody without sin to be our hero, to be our leader, to be our role model, then we find the options reduced to one in the Christian faith, and even He was quick to be baptized for the remission of sin by John the Baptist