2023.03.19 | Who Sinned?
“Who Sinned?”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 19, 2023
The Gospel Lesson today is rather long compared with the pericopes that the liturgical scholars have chosen for most Sundays in the lection. Public Information Officers (PIOs) would advise preachers to truncate these stories, because their audience has the attention span of a gnat. I get their point.
Now that Zoom is the not-so-new room for staff meetings, our employees have to discipline themselves not to roll their eyes when I start telling stories. They know that the Church has paid real money for our Zoom account, so the meeting won’t automatically end in an hour or less. Pity them.
I was raised in an oral culture. I’ve tried to adjust my communication style to match urban expectations, but as you know, I haven’t been successful. Here’s why.
If you don’t hear the whole loooooong story, you don’t hear the gospel, and if you don’t hear the gospel, you leave the Sanctuary or drop off Zoom still stuck in your sense of shame and blame that festers and fosters otherizing.
What is “otherizing”?
Otherizing is a term commonly used by my graduate school friends to describe the behavior of people who draw a thick dark line between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” between “us” and “them,” between the “washed” and the “unwashed.”
II
Otherizing moralizes and polarizes. It divides and separates the left from the right, the right from the wrong, the saved from the damned, and it takes no prisoners. Otherizing always leads to death.
Human history is full of examples in which tragedy and scapegoating are aligned. Just 30 years after the death of Jesus, Emperor Nero blamed Jesus' followers for the deaths and property losses that resulted from a fire that nearly destroyed the city of Rome and all of its inhabitants.
Fast forward to the 17th century and life in the American colonies, where our Puritan ancestors struggled mightily amidst the harsh realities of life in Salem Village following the French-American War, the effects of a smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from Native American tribes, and their general fear of outsiders.
The conflation of those losses, the deprivations experienced during those long winters, and the unresolvable ambiguities that the Puritans wallowed in created a climate in which the Salem Witch Trials occurred.
It’s probably been a while since some of us had a class in Colonial American history, so I’ll remind us that our spiritual ancestors executed 19 of their own people and locked up another 150 others. These “others” weren’t the French migrants or the indigenous American Indians. These were people who looked like them, talked like them and whose families rode on the same ships from the Old World to the New.
Given what our forebears were capable of doing to their peers, is it any wonder how much damage they’ve done to others? Particularly to those who they otherized?
Religious minorities, especially Jews, have often been the victims of otherizing. Structuralists use the term “otherizing.” Psychologists describe this behavior as “transference.” Theologians call it “scapegoating.” Part of the Christian story, sadly, is filled with vignettes when our spiritual ancestors, and maybe we ourselves, have been guilty of otherizing, of transference, and scapegoating. So if we are ever going to get beyond these egregious sins, we must repent, we must perform acts of contrition, and we must amend our ways of life.
The Anne Frank Guide explains that early 20th century Roman Catholics--and I would add Protestants--in Germany were taught and believed that Jews killed Jesus. This assertion is not a stretch. Jesus was a Jew. Nearly everyone in Jerusalem was a Jew. Jesus spent most of his ministry serving among Jewish people. His lack of popularity among his own people wasn’t because they didn’t like Christians--Christianity wasn’t even an identified religion until the third century. Jesus was engaged in a reform movement within his own tradition, and he was most unpopular with the gatekeepers of his own religion.
Sadly, when people read the Bible without any knowledge of the history behind the narratives described in this book of books--which is most modern day espoused Christians--and when readers lack awareness of ancient Jewish culture which was so different from the culture of modern Christians, and when people don’t even know a modern Jew, it is very easy to make stuff up about Jews--and a whole lot of other people--and unintentionally (as well as intentionally) reinforce antisemitic stereotypes and philosophies.
So if it’s that easy to mess up when we’re not trying to be antisemitic or behave in antisemetic ways, imagine how much damage can be done when one is unapologetically antisemitic?
Oh wait, we don’t need any imagination. All we need to do is listen to reliable news sources, like NPR, which has carried several stories about the rising incidence of antisemitism and antisemitic views in recent years. In fact, a study conducted during the pandemic has shown that antisemitic activities have been at the third highest level in the history of the US during the pandemic.
This phenomenon is not hard for those of us who are part of other marginalized groups to comprehend. The Nazis not only otherized and scapegoated Jews, they also believed that “Gypsies,” homosexuals, people with disabilities, and Blacks were inferior, and they/we did not belong in Germany. (Yes, half of my relatives are from Germany.)
Consequently hundreds of thousands of these additional minorities were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where they/we were exterminated or died from disease or starvation, and thousands of people with disabilities were put to death by lethal injections administered in German hospitals.
That’s a fact. I didn’t just read this stuff in a history book. I was able to visit Germany for the first time when I was a sophomore in college. Dr. Ulrich, the chair of the department of religion and philosophy at my alma mater, blew his J-term taking a busload of us students--mostly of German descent--to visit his town and all of the major points of interest related to WWII and the Natzi rule of German in that era. I’ve been to Auschwitz and seen the wording on the front gate as you enter from the train station. In German the words are: "Arbeit macht frei." (In English the phrase is: Work will set you free.” These and other lies were posted and perpetuated around this and all of the other concentration camps.)
Most of us, particularly in my generation, imagined that such egregious sins would never be committed again--at least not in the Western world--in our generation or the generations to come. Because we were so beyond that, but then Donald Trump was elected President, and here we are. And we are where we are, because Donald Trump was elected by the people, not because he raised an army and took the nation by storm. He got elected by people who were educated in our public schools.
So for those who feel that the arc of the moral universe is bending towards justice, let’s just say, I’m not really feelin’ it. Because the ubiquity of otherizing is hard to overstate.
Pick up a copy of Romeo and Juliet, and read it again. Ask yourself, when was the last time we witnessed peace in the Middle East? Remember the Hatfields and McCoys. Watch West Side Story. Check the membership of the Bloods and the Crips online. They are alive and doing very well. Ask any high school kid from Cherryland what they know about the Norteños and Soreños.
Why have these groups been at each other's throats lately or longer?
There are many reasons and one reason. People have had a very difficult time dealing with theodicy--the problem of evil--the irony that there could be a good God, a good creation, and bad things that happen to good people.
III
“Was it this man’s parents’ fault that he was born blind?” the anonymous inquirer in the crowd asks. Or was it his own fault?
I can’t stand the suffering. Give me an explanation. No, wait, I can make up one for myself, so that I do not have to live with this question or ponder their suffering.
Let’s pretend for a hot second that it’s this man’s fault that he was born blind. What kind of moral gymnastics does one have to go through to fabricate an argument that an unborn baby could do something so egregious that they could justifiably be punished and that their punishment was blindness.
Arguments have been made and endorsed by theologians for ages, but I’ve never embraced them. Have you?
Maybe yes, and maybe no. Still, the mind wanders. You naturally look for answers to life’s biggest questions. Was it this man’s fault or his parents’ that he was born blind? OK, it’s not his fault. So what’s left? You have to blame his parents.
You wonder, “What must they have done, or left undone that they and their offspring could be punished with blindness? What sin of omission or commission merits a lifetime of suffering. Note that in first century Palestine, a person born blind would never be schooled. They would never get a good job. They could never provide for themselves or their loved ones. They would, at best, be pitied, and more than likely shunned from the community--left to beg outside the city gates, or languish on the portico of their religious sanctuaries.
You don’t know. So you make stuff up that in some strange way accounts for the child’s infirmity, when more than likely the parents were merely flawed, but decent people, like you and me. But therein lies the problem.
We don’t want the parents to be like “us,” because we don’t want to be like the parents. Because if we were like the parents, then, our children could be like their child. Our child could be born blind, and that thought freaks the hell out of all of us. So we just don’t go there, not even in our dreams. Instead, we have a tendency to otherize.
IV
Despite the human propensity to otherize--to blame the victims--there are other ways of dealing with pain, ambiguity, and grief that is unresolvable this side of heaven.
One option is is to blame God for all of that and more. And this is what the Pharisees were afraid of. They were afraid that their people would see the illogic of blaming the son and the parents, so they would pivot and blame the man’s blindness on God.
And since they couldn’t get up in God’s face and tell God to go to hell. The Pharisees were rightfully afraid that these upset people would blame them. You know the phenomenon. It’s called guilty by association. It happens all the time. Psychologists have a fancy name for this phenomenon. They call it “transference.” It happens to religious leaders of all types.
I get it. I feel the pain of the Pharisees. I’ve been an ordained minister for 35 years. I’ve got my own stories. I’ve been the object of transference and scapegoating numerous times. If you’d like to hear some examples. Let me know how much time you’ve got. I could share one example, or if you’ve got a week, maybe we could cover the Cliff’s notes version of all of them.
So I understand why the Pharisees didn’t want to go there. They were rightfully nervous about being found guilty by their association with God. They had had their fill of “transference.” They were in jeopardy of losing their political power, their religious stature, and ultimately their worldly compensation.
Instead of creating a space for people to blame God and explore and air out their grief, like Russian Philosopher Fyodor Dostoyevsky did in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the Pharisees expediently chose to blame the victims of blindness. Pick one they essentially said. Either blame the blind man, or blame his parents for his loss of sight. But don’t blame God, and DEFINITELY do not blame us!
V
Fast forward to our current situation. Fortunately for us and the whole human race, there is a third way. Yes, there is a third way of dealing with pain, ambiguity, and unresolvable grief, and that third way is to branch out. It’s to develop more empathy. It is to become more like Jesus, and ultimately, more godly.
We could opt out of the blame game. We could respond to the question about fault with a resounding, “No!”
We could say, “No, it’s not the man’s fault that he was born blind. No, it’s not his parents’ fault either. It’s not even God’s fault.
The man’s blindness is simply the result of him and all of us being born into a fallen, imperfect, finite world.
Open your eyes, you spiritually blind people, says Jesus. Open your eyes and get off your duffs. Heal the sick, comfort the afflicted, and bury the dead. Stop otherizing. Give it up for Lent! And as you do, you will experience deep healing--the likes of which the world can’t give or take away. Amen.