“Get your cooties away from me!” Or, “Don’t touch me, you have cooties!”
It was ugly. It was mean. But when I was a kid, it was what kids said to other kids with whom they did not want to associate. “Cooties” was the imaginary scourge one group of kids projected onto those whom they looked down upon.
I was at times the target because my family was poor. But, I am sorry to say, I also spoke those words to or about kids I perceived as lower on the socio-economic totem pole than I.
I don’t know what label was used in your elementary school to establish hierarchies of social value, but I bet there was one. We humans seem to be pretty thoroughly afflicted with the desire to see ourselves as better than some other category of human.
Another
example of this was accurately and heart-rendingly portrayed in the movie
Mississippi Burning. It is a story difficult to tell because it uses language
no longer used in polite company. So bear with me as I tell it anyway!The teller of the story in the movie is the adult son of a poor white farmer, who scratched out a meager existence on a farm next to a poor black farmer. Then the poor black farmer managed to buy a mule, which gave him an edge: the possibility of renting more land.
This made the poor white farmer the butt of his friends’ jokes and teasing. How could it be that the poor black farmer was outdoing the poor white farmer?
So… next thing you know, the mule is dead. Poisoned.
And not long after that, the poor black farmer just disappears. Probably packed up and moved north, the adult son of the poor white farmer speculates. And it was at the moment of driving past the abandoned farmstead, that he as a boy had looked at his father and known exactly what had happened to that mule.
And, he says, his father knew that he knew. At that moment in the movie, he quotes his father saying, "If you ain't better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?"
The drive to see oneself as “better than” some other category of people causes untold damage in this world. It is at the heart of many wars—the U.S. American Civil War and World War II being chief among them.
By the way, I am well aware that some apologists claim the U.S. American Civil War was not about that, but the Articles of Secession and the Constitution of the Confederacy say otherwise.
And the central strategy for construing ones’ own human category as “better than” some other human category is to define and label those people as in some way a defective, contaminating presence.
All forms of religious violence—from the hate speech of Westboro Baptist to the murders of ISIS—are based on an obsession with destroying people defined as sinners and infidels. Tragically, this violence is done either to please or to appease God, even though we have plenty of evidence that is not how God thinks.
Those are extreme examples. We do this in less extreme but always hurtful ways. Our church recently decided at national convention that all baptized Christians are equally entitled to all of the sacraments of the church, including the sacrament of marriage and regardless of sexual orientation.
And some see that as a contamination of the church and have left. Indeed, the evolution of the Episcopal Church’s changing stance on human sexuality is a story of individual people, congregations and even entire dioceses fleeing the contaminating presence of those they believe to be morally inferior.
When we divide poor people into categories of “deserving” and “undeserving,” we are doing the same thing. And when we are fine with “doing charity” of some kind, but don’t really want poor people showing up in our churches, we are doing the same thing.
Charity is a really good way to keep poor people at arm’s length because it is almost always done at some other location: the homeless shelter, the food bank, and so forth.
In his book, “People of the Way,” Dwight Zscheile tells the rather elitist history of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. We once were the “establishment” church. This history lingers in a certain Episcopal snobbery, perfectly summed up by the man who said, “Everyone in this community who should be an Episcopalian is already an Episcopalian.”
That man was a member of a small and possibly dying Episcopal congregation in a small Louisiana community with plenty of unchurched folks who were poorer than he or of a different racial or ethnic identity than he.
Human efforts to keep our own particular brand of religion pure are always focused on others, on who to keep out, or at least who to not invite in. And that is not how God thinks.
It IS how the world thinks. It IS a rather natural human tendency. But it is not how God thinks.
In today’s lessons, both St. James (1:17-27, NRSV) and Jesus (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, NRSV) speak of the phenomenon of people who talk good religion but do not live good religion. I especially appreciate James’ mirror analogy: For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves, and, on going away, immediately forget what they are like.
I wonder if the problem is not more basic. I wonder if we ever see ourselves as we really are in the first place! If we in fact see ourselves honestly, then how is it we keep looking for defilement in other people?
Jesus makes it clear we are looking in the wrong place. Defilement cannot come from without, he says. It comes from within, from our own human heart.
Consider the ultimate consequence of what Jesus says here. If we see defilement or contamination in some person or situation, it is because we brought it to that person or that situation. It’s coming from us, not from them!
Brothers and sisters, in today’s collect we ask God to graft in our hearts the love of your Name and increase in us true religion. My additional prayer is for us to understand that true religion can increase in us ONLY by the transformation of our hearts by the God who is Love. May we give up the false religion of trying to figure out who we are better than, for the true religion of seeing us all as equally limited, imperfect and beloved children of God. AMEN
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