"Now I call this a messy history because if you look at the genealogy of people in the line of Jesus, you would see a rag tag group of ragamuffins and ne-er do wells who have stolen, murdered, lied, lusted, some worked in careers that were deemed questionable and destitute, and much more. But before you bring anybody out to the town square and say stone them, are we any better? We all in a sense live in this space of fragmentation, with cracks that dig deep into who we are, distorting our ability sometimes to live into our full selves. One of the things we talked about in this theology intensive I attended this week was the idea of the fall of humanity being seen in our need to differentiate and subjugate. A part of our messiness is our desire to uplift ourselves, but downplaying, or dehumanizing another. "