Law enforcement has a hard job, made doubly so because those they are sworn to protect the law-abiding against are not constrained by the laws officers must uphold.

Officers of the law must track and apprehend the lawless while themselves remaining within the bounds of the law at all times. While police officers breaking the law while chasing the bad guys makes for good TV, movies and dramas alike, it negates the law they are sworn to uphold.

In this country, and all the freer countries around the world, it is the fact that the law is an absolute authority, that there is no one, no matter how high or powerful, who is not constrained by its dictates, that makes those countries free. When all people are equal before the law, there can be equality.

But when officers, who are sworn to uphold the law, break the law, even for purposes we may rationalize and agree with, they must be doubly punished, for they are leaders and are held both to slavish obedience to the law, and to enforcement for the protection of all those who abide by it.

In other words: mind the Constitution, policemen and women. We citizens have our rights. It may be frustrating when we fail to obey you, but you are not the law, and we are not compelled to obey any command given by you if the power to make that command is not explicitly granted in the laws drawn up by our representatives. You serve and exist at our behest, for our protection, and the protection of our rights and property. Power trips and petty scrabblings which end up with our going to jail without legal justification can and should end up with you paying a strict penalty.

I support law enforcement. They have a hard and dangerous job as guarantors and protectors of my freedom. They are often unappreciated by those they serve. I will do my best to make sure the officers of the law have the resources they need to carry out their necessary work effectively and as safely as possible. But when they overstep their bounds and become not a protector of the law, but a law to themselves, with their own pride and power as their ultimate goal, then shall earn nothing except a quick trip to jail or whatever other punishment is commensurate to their crime.

Ask yourself this: Do you consider some sins worse than others?

Then consider this: What is sin, and how might one sin qualitatively or quantitatively exceed another?

Sin is rather simply defined as a transgression of God’s law. God has given instruction, and we act contrary to His instruction. That’s sin.

What is the result, the wage, for sin? Death. Not simply the end of life here on earth, but an eternal death for our eternal soul. Eternal absence from God, and not just absence, but separation; an enforced absence that cannot be remedied.

If sin is the transgression of God’s instruction, and the wage of all sin is death, then how can there be levels, or grades, of sin? How can one sin be more “saintly” than another.

Now ask yourself again: Do I consider certain sins to be worse than others?

There are verses that speak specific cautions regarding certain groups of sins, and we in modern American evangelicalism and fundamentalism find these groups of sins nicely coincide with our own favorite lists of to-be-specially-demonized sinners: drinking, sexual immorality (especially homosexuality), and… that’s it.

The temperance movement used intemperate (imagine that) hermeneutics and loose theologies to turn one of God’s special blessings of love for His children into an inherently sinful pastime comprised entirely of addicts and not-yet-addicts.

The culture sweeping sexuality under the rug made any deviance not just another sin, but a special sin, and Paul’s abundant warnings in scripture were just as misinterpreted as other passages to support the special sin category for these sins.

What we’ve forgotten is that sexuality is an inherent part of our lives and our selves, comprising key aspects of how we relate to each other. Our mores say less about sex and much, much more about our cultural hangups.

What we’ve also forgotten is that Paul never said homosexual or any other sexual sin was any worse than any other sin.  Paul dealt with cultures that were dealing with a rise in homosexual behaviors much like we are today, and he gave clear warning that homosexuality is a sin, just like it is today. Not THE sin, not a special sin. A friend tried to argue that because homosexual behavior is especially prone to certain medical issues, that was evidence for God’s especial dislike for those who participate in that lifestyle. But stresses and excesses and many other unbalanced and unchristian behaviors have accompanying medical issues as well, and yet somehow we accept the glutton and the cad and reject others.

There is no special ring of hell reserved for the sexual deviant. The homosexual is just as much a sinner as the unfaithful heterosexual. In fact, the base status of sexual relations, the only blessed and sanctified and acceptable state of sexual relations is between the married woman and her male spouse, and the married man and his female spouse. Any deviance from any of these particulars is sin, and to reject one of the particulars is just as sinful as to reject each of the particulars.

The status of a Christian is not that they do not sin, it is not that they have not sinned. The status of a Christian is that they are relying on God’s grace to forgive them of their sin and to aid their avoiding sin, and to come alongside in their repenting sin. We are, each and every one of us, still sinners. Yet for those of us who are saved, we are characterized not by our own sin, but by God’s everlasting grace.

So ask yourself: Are there really any exceptional sins?

If you weren’t already aware, recent events should have opened your eyes to the fact that Christians are not of this world. We are not welcome in it. Our words are twisted, our ideas ridiculed, our hopes and dreams remain unrealized because they are not from here. When we were given a new heart, that heart was not from here, and through it we are inexorably drawn away from the here and now towards the hereafter and Him.

This is a paradox, because while we are aliens and strangers, we are also inhabitants of Our Father’s World, which is certainly this physical realm that surrounds us. The earth itself and the things in it still belong to God, and it is still His will actively working in the world, yet still we do not belong here.

We see injustice, cruelty, hatred, not yet always leveled at us, but increasingly so. We are entering a period, here in the United States, of intolerance against those professing Christ crucified, yet it is we who are being called intolerant. Our Christians sisters and brothers around the world have suffered under such injustice since time immemorial, and they have grown strong and hearty in their faith through it, even as their possessions and bodies have been taken and weakened. It scares our minds accustomed to comfort and ease that we live in sight of losing those things we consider precious: our freedoms, our things, our rights, but we should never forget that this has been prophesied by Christ Himself and that we have only been enjoying a reprieve from what is the sinful order of things.

There are many things which should comfort us as we consider the inevitability of suffering, but here are two: first that it is yet another proof that we belong somewhere else, somewhere incomparably better, and second, that we find peace, love, hope, and forgiveness in showing these ourselves.

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

~C. S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

~The Prayer of Saint Francis (but probably not written by him)

Headline image Stranger In A Strange Land by Deviant Art Artist Pecuniam