The Contaminated God--February 23, 2023

The Contaminated God--February 23, 2023

"For our sake [God] made him [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." [2 Corinthians 5:21]

The cool kids can be merciless, you know?

You know the scene--it's a typical junior high or senior high cafeteria, and there's someone sitting all alone eating lunch, because everyone else has agreed that THIS person is the social leper.  The cool kids won't eat with them, because they only hang out with other cool kids.  The ones who aspire to be cool won't sit beside them, because they are taking their cues from the popular crowd.  A whole bunch of the kids are just keeping their heads down and not even paying attention to who is left out. And then there are kids who know they are toward the bottom of the social pecking order, and often they won't even eat with the very lowest-ranked of their classmates, because they are afraid of losing what little clout they do have.

It's a terrible system of castes and cliques, but it repeats itself over and over again across the country, because we have this common fear of being "tainted" by the ones we think are "beneath" us.  If you've ever been the one sitting alone at the lunch table, you know how cruel other kids can be in the name of preserving their own social standing. But I'm going to guess that if you've ever been the one who looked the other way or chose not to go sit with them, you know from a different angle how easily we can be persuaded to leave someone else out and treat them with contempt, just to get a bit more of the non-existent substance of "cool-ness."

Of course, at the junior and senior high school level, the stakes can be somewhat lower--it's no fun to be the one left out, to be sure, but everybody gets to eat and go to math class still.  On a larger scale, though, we human beings have been doing the same thing to each other throughout history, often with terrible consequences.  The same impulse to find someone to exclude, or some group of people who are like social Kryptonite, keeps rearing its ugly head in era after era, and society after society.  It's the way the Dalits--at one time actually called "the Untouchables"--were permanently relegated to the lowest place in India's caste system. It's the way the Nuremburg Laws of Nazi Germany made it not only socially acceptable, but legally required, to regard Jewish neighbors as less-than.  It is the way over centuries our own country forbade interaction between Black and White communities, from literal chattel slavery to Jim Crow segregation to their more subtle and pernicious versions that linger today. It is the way those with HIV or AIDS were ostracized or hidden from view in the 1980s. And we could go on all day with the ways we keep finding new people to label as "untouchable."  We keep arranging our societies by finding someone to be a scapegoat or an outcast, and we tell everybody else not to touch, or speak with, or associate with "those people," or else they'll be "tainted" with whatever it is we think the outcast ones have wrong with them.  It's just as immature and childish as the junior high lunch-room scene, but the damage is far worse.

The thing that kills me about this terrible recurring pattern is how, even though we all know intellectually that it's a terrible system, no matter who the outcast is, we so often let those systems remain in place--or at least we don't question them--because we are afraid of losing whatever status, position, or clout we do have.  And it's the cafeteria scene all over again--nobody wants to incur the wrath of the cool kids or be targeted for alienation, and so we just accept that way of doing things.  We end up believing, whether we realize it or not, that there are some people whose mere existence will taint you with bad things if you let them get too close.  And whether it was the lynch mobs of the 19th and 20th centuries torturing and killing African Americans for "crimes" like talking to White neighbors or being on the streets after sundown, or the El Paso Wal-Mart mass shooter whose manifesto obsessed over fears of an "infestation" of "invaders," it is horrifyingly easy once we accept that kind of thinking to be swept up into violence to keep the scapegoat people "in their place."

The other thing about this kind of arrangement that makes it so appealing is how it gives MOST of the people in a society someone to look down on.  That is, it appeals to our arrogance and feeds our ego to have someone to see as "beneath" you--someone who needs to be kept in their place, and someone whose supposed negative qualities would corrupt, infect, or taint all of your good qualities.  It's amazing how we can be persuaded to treat someone else like they are "less-than" if it allows to over-inflate our egos and tell ourselves we are "more-than" the ones on the bottom.

So... what's a God who cares about love and justice to do about all this?  How does God deal with the ways we keep targeting people to be untouchable outcasts?

God becomes one of the untouchable outcasts, too.

Even more than that, actually--God, in Christ, absorbs the stigma itself that makes others into outcasts. God takes the contamination once and for all into God's own life.

That's the jaw-dropping, world-shaking, scandalous news of the gospel. That's what makes God's kind of love so radical. Or as Paul says it, "God made the one who knew no sin to BE sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God."  In Christ, God doesn't shy away from being "tainted" or "contaminated," not even with our terminal case of sin.  God chooses not only to love us AS sinners, and not only to associate with us AS sinners, but in Christ God chooses to be regarded AS a sinner himself.  Even more than that, Paul says that Christ became sin itself for us--that is, God absorbs all the negative, rotten, stigmatizing consequence of our sin and takes it all into God's own being in Christ.  Like a sponge that absorbs the dirty dishwater in the process of removing the yucky stuff from your plates and glasses, Jesus absorbs all the negative baggage that comes with our being sinners, and bears it into himself to get rid of it for us.  That means Jesus loves us more than Jesus cares about looking good, fitting in, or being at the top of the social ladder.  

How might it make a difference in our lives and our actions in the world today to move with that kind of love?  Where might we be led to give up the old childish game-playing of trying to fit in?  To whom might Jesus call us to stand beside--or even just to side beside at the lunch table?  How might we let go of the familiar ways of arrogance and ego, so that instead we can love like Jesus?

That's the adventure we're called into today.  Let's go.

Lord Jesus, take all the garbage and poison we carry called "sin" into yourself and free us from the need to find someone else to look down on.