I’ve had the blessing of teaching at Elizabethtown College for nearly three decades, interacting with the most delightful students a professor could imagine. From the beginning of my teaching career, when I wasn’t so far from the students’ ages myself, my goal was to speak to the basics of what it means to be a human being. Because if I couldn’t convey at least that much, then anything else would hardly matter.

I told them that the most successful among them would demonstrate three qualities. They would work harder than others. They would take risks others weren’t willing to take. And they would walk the talk — meaning they would live with integrity and tell the truth. 

I said to them, “You can have the first two qualities — hard work and risk-taking — and yet still end up in the police report or in the obituary section of the newspaper sooner than you need to. But if you have the third, and walk the talk, then you’re going to do just fine, because the world desperately needs people like this.”

I’ve also taught my students that their lives are sacred. From my theological perspective, this means God created them and that therefore both their bodies and their spirits — their flesh and bones and their lifetime journeys — are sacred. This I believe with all my heart. 

Regardless of anything else — their religious commitments or lack of them, their sexual orientations, their experiences of trauma, their criminal records, their emotional and mental health challenges, their race or ethnicity — each is a sacred person.

To explore this most vital of beliefs, I initially ask students to read Frederick Buechner’s earliest memoir, The Sacred Journey. Buechner’s point is that God is always speaking to each of us and that our lives bear the mark of God within us.

But there’s a problem for many of us Christians: We forget that “God so loved the world” (John 3:16a) — meaning that it literally is the world (and every person in it) that God loves. 

Too often we live as if the verse reads, “God so loved the special people of the church.” Without saying so, we imply that the rest of the world can go you know where! 

Our insider’s assumption about who God loves reveals a belief that the poor souls outside the church haven’t gotten their stuff together, and we aren’t sure they ever will. Yet we will pray for them (after we finish shaking our heads and talking about them). 

We act as if a person’s life becomes sacred only after they choose to love God — when, in fact, “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). 

The psalmist sings of it: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. . . . In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed” (Psalm 139:13, 16).

This is more than poetry. It is the ultimate truth that pertains to every person God has created. Each one of us is a sacred creature of God’s own making, with the sweetness of God’s breath infusing us with life. This is true whether we have chosen to live our lives for God’s sake or not. 

Thoughts of God’s universal love and humanity’s universal sacredness get me thinking about what people imply by asking, “Have you got Jesus?”

We who say we love Jesus would have infinitely more credibility if our love for Jesus revealed, in our lives, the ways Jesus universally loves. Then we would begin to see this same love appearing within our families, friends, neighbors and co-workers, regardless of whether or not they’ve “got” Jesus. Some of them might even dare to ask us about the hope that is within us.

Every semester I have a classroom full of students who bear the distinct mark of God upon them, set apart and given a name uniquely their own, loved with a sacred love that is from the foundation of the world, offered to them at the very moment of their birth. This means I am called to love them just as Jesus does. 

Who knows? Maybe one or two or more of them will someday surprise themselves by saying, “I think I’ve got Jesus.” Or, more accurately, Jesus will have gotten hold of them. And I might have played a small part in that.