Take some of the bull’s blood and put it on the horns of the altar with your finger, and pour out the rest of it at the base of the altar. Then take all the fat on the internal organs, the long lobe of the liver, and both kidneys with the fat on them, and burn them on the altar. But burn the bull’s flesh and its hide and its intestines outside the camp. It is a sin offering. – Exodus 29:12-14

Today’s Scripture Reading (September 8, 2018): Exodus 29

Salvadore Dali commented that we need to “Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.” Dali is right; perfection is beyond our feeble grasp. And while Dali admonishes that we need to have no fear of perfection, we also do not need to fear failure because failure is our constant companion. And not just ours, but it is the companion of every person who walks the earth. Maybe we need to celebrate our failures instead of mourning them because, if we are honest, every failure helps to shape the people we are to become. Often the biggest problem that we have as humans is that we do not fail enough. And because of our lack of failure, we never develop into the kind of people that we could have become.

However, there is a caveat in this endorsement of failure in our lives. And the caveat is this; while performance failure is inevitable and strengthening, moral failure does not hold the same redeeming qualities. Moral failure is a rejection of the things that we ought to know, and it often involves the destruction of the people around us. Moral failure has the potential to tear away at our social fabric, and it isolates us like no other personal action can do.

Not that we do not all fail morally. All of us make decisions even though we know that the decision is morally wrong. We do it because we place our needs above the needs of others, and sometimes because, in pride, we believe that we know what to do better than God. Sometimes we do wrong for no other reason than that our wants command us more than our knowledge of what is right and wrong.

Here God describes the death of an animal on the altar, this place of killing. He calls the death a “sin-offering.” Not that the animal has sinned, because it hasn’t. The animal is perfect. It is our sin that has caused the death of the animal. It is our decision to give in to our selfish wants that has demanded a blood sacrifice. This is not a positive failure, where we fail and find ways to do it right. This is the result of a selfish failure that says what I want is more important than the demands of the community or God. I love the way that David Guzik describes this moment. “The sin offering said, ‘We have failed to give our best to God. This animal now gives its best to atone for our failure, and we decide to live now giving our best, even as this animal who dies in our place.’”

Paul says that the wages of sin are death. It always has been that way. But in the face of the death that results from our moral failure, we can step forward and, with the strength of God, decide to make a change. We can learn to resist our selfish impulses, and in that resistance allow the desire of God to flow through our lives. We probably can’t do it perfectly, but we can do better.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus 30