A Reflection for the Community Lenten Series
Outer Banks Presbyterian Church
Kill Devil Hills, NC
March 25, 2015
Thomas E. Wilson, Rector, All Saints’ Episcopal Church
Lesson: Mark 11: 1-11
“You Have to be
Carefully Taught”
I have been ordained for over 30 years, and I have never
preached on the lesson I picked for today. It is the lesson we read during the
Blessing of the Palms, and then we have a procession, singing “All Glory, Laud,
and Honor” and waving Palms as we make our way into the church. We don't preach
on Palm Sunday since we read the long Passion narrative and that takes up so much time. This lesson tells us about Jesus’ triumphal
procession and how everybody seems to love him, and then in the Passion
Narrative, everybody turns against him. Did you ever wonder why?
Let’s start off with the preparation for the event - which
reminds me of revolutionaries setting up a public incident as a way to stir the
people up. Jesus knows where the colt he is to ride is tied up, and he tells
his disciples the exact code words to say to those confederates in the plot to
set the march in motion. Jesus is proclaimed as the one who brings
salvation. That is what the word
Hosannah means - “Bring us help, Bring us salvation”. In an occupied country
where the Romans are trying to keep things in order, this could be interpreted
as a call to revolution to throw the Romans out. The people line up behind
Jesus, wanting an uprising so that they can crush their enemy. In this context
it is a call to violence and hate.
Notice that Jesus doesn’t then take the logical step and
call for an armed revolution. Instead he “looks around and comes home”. I think
the reason that the crowd turns against Jesus later in the week is because he
has disappointed them. They wanted a
call to hate their enemies but he spends the next week talking about loving
their enemies. We like to hate. As
Rogers and Hammerstein suggested to us in South
Pacific, hatred is not an innate part of being human but it happens after
we are born:
You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught
 |
| anti-Smith reaction in 1928 election |
I think of the religious heritage my family passed on to us.
When the followers of Jesus became legal and became a protected religion in the
Roman Empire, we turned from love as our central value to “being right” and
using power to push our positions. My
mother was a Scotch-Irish girl who grew up in an Old Covenanter Presbyterian
Church tradition in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where they religiously remembered
the Scottish Presbyterian Martyrs who had been sacrificed during what was
called “The Killing Time” between 1680 and 1688. They remembered it
like it was yesterday, even closer than yesterday, as William Faulkner's line
from Requiem for a Nun reminds us: “The Past is never dead; in fact it
is not even past.” My mother related how it seemed that every week their
Preaching elder, who was from Northern Ireland, would warn them about the
Papist threat. She remembered when she was 10 in 1928 and Al Smith, a Roman
Catholic, was the Democratic candidate for President against Republican Herbert
Hoover. She recalled how hatred and fear would be stoked as Hoover preached,
reminding them that the Papacy was the work of the Devil and Catholics would
not be part of the elect to enter into God's favor. “You've got to be carefully taught.”
 | |
| Scene from Birth of a Nation |
My father grew up in North Carolina, and he remembered how
he was carefully taught. One of the Wilsons had gone to fight for the glorious
Southern Cause in the “War (pronounced
Wahr) Between the States” and was taken prisoner and died in a Union Prisoner
of War camp in Elmira, New York. The story was often told that the Wilson
family treasure was buried in Goldsboro, but that it was stolen by them
Yankees. My father remembered that, when he was a young boy, the movie “Birth
of a Nation” played in Asheville, and for weeks after seeing it, he and his
friends would ride on their broomstick horses covered with sheets as they reenacted
the heritage of the Klan putting down uppity blacks and Yankees - until his father reminded them that the Klan
was no friend of Roman Catholics, which he was. In his church he learned that
the Protestants were horribly misguided, and regrettably, however nice they
seemed, they were an enemy of the true church and would go to Hell, for there
is no salvation outside the church. “You
have to be carefully taught.”
You see where this is going? My Yankee Presbyterian mother
and my unrepentant Southern Catholic father met at the University of North
Carolina and fell in love - for as Jesus taught during the last week of his
life on earth, love is the only antidote to hate. It would be nice to say that
hatred and fear ended, but we like to hold on to them. When I was a teenager
and worked in Summer Stock and Outdoor Drama and became enthralled with being
an actor, my father was afraid I would turn into what he called a “Hollywood
Queer”, a phrase which he saw as redundant. You have to be carefully taught -
he was afraid that sexual orientation is a disease one catches. He was also
afraid when I joined a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
because he remembered the hatred that had been directed toward left-wing types during
the McCarthy era. “You have to be
carefully taught.”
As I grew up as an
Episcopalian (after they split the difference), I learned songs that passed on
the prejudice of the Protestant Episcopal church. One of them was “I am an Anglican”, and part
of it went:
I am an Anglican,
I am P.E., (Protestant Episcopal)
Not High Church or Low Church,
I am Protestant and Catholic and free.
Not a Presby, or a Lutheran,
Or a Baptist white with foam,
I am an Anglican,
Of course not from Rome
I am an Anglican,
Via media, my home.
I am P.E., (Protestant Episcopal)
Not High Church or Low Church,
I am Protestant and Catholic and free.
Not a Presby, or a Lutheran,
Or a Baptist white with foam,
I am an Anglican,
Of course not from Rome
I am an Anglican,
Via media, my home.
“You have to be carefully taught.”
After my father died and I was graduating from Carolina, my
mother took us out for a celebratory supper, and when the waiter suggested a
French wine, my mother launched into a diatribe against the French under Charles
De Gualle as ungrateful to all that America had done for them. “You have to be
carefully taught.”
My first job out of college was working as a counselor for
the Job Corps program, and I was working in Wilmington when the race riots blew
up. Of course they blamed it on “Outside Agitators” because no one would
acknowledge the racism that was at the center of our lives. There was a
reaction by a White Supremacist group called the “Rights of the White People”, known as ROWP, which they pronounced
“Rope” as a reminder that the old way of hatred at the end of a rope at least
kept people in line. “You have to be
carefully taught.”
Years later when I was going to Seminary, I bought a cheap
Japanese car, and my mother took one look at it and reminded me that my father
had spent World War II as a Marine combat artillery officer in the South
Pacific and dismissed my purchase with “Don't you know that those people tried
to kill your father?” “You have to be
carefully taught.”
I look at the news in this country and see the bright young
fraternity boys who should know better spew their hatred, and we call it “free
speech”, even though it is that kind of speech that enslaves us into hatred. I
watch as we are polarized with hate and fear mongers are not listening to each
other but twisting knives in public discourse and further dividing us. “You
have to be carefully taught.”
I look at the news on the International scene and see
different sects of the three major monotheistic religions, all founded on love
of God and neighbor, slaughter each other in the name of hatred of the “Other”.
“You have to be carefully taught.”
One of the reasons I like what we do in this Lenten Series is that we get all sorts of different
views and traditions, and we listen respectfully as we work together to live
lives where love is the center and maybe we can work together to teach
ourselves. Why do we do it? There is a story told by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust
survivor, and it goes like this;
One of the Just Men, Father
Abraham, came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and
punishment. Night and day he walked the streets and markets protesting against
greed and theft, falsehood and indifference. In the beginning, people listened
and smiled ironically. Then they stopped listening: he no longer even amused
them. The killers went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no
Just Man in their midst.
One June a child, moved
by compassion for the unfortunate teacher, approached him with these words:
‘Poor stranger,
you shout, you scream, don’t you see that it is hopeless?’
‘Yes, I see,’
answered the Just Man.
‘Then why do you
go on?’
‘I’ll tell you
why. In the beginning, I thought I could change (hu)man(s). Today, I know I cannot. If I still shout today, if I still
scream, it is to prevent (hu)man(s) from ultimately changing me.’
I believe that love
can be carefully taught.
