"You have to be Carefully Taught"

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

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.

“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.