Us and Dirt

Text: Mark 5:21-43

It turns out that if you put a metal plate in a solution of the right kind of atoms, the atoms will naturally form into chain-like molecules call lipids. The lipids like to hang around together, and when they do, they like to stand side by side, with their heads all facing up, like a picket fence. The fence-like thing is floating in water, and sometimes one end of the fence meets the other end, and when that happens, the lipids all form a ring, with their heads outside and their feet inside. These little donut rings are primitive cells. There are a lot of things they cannot do—like they cannot do almost everything. But one thing they are really good at is keeping their insides separate from their outsides. The lipid wall is a great and selective barrier to things that want to come into these proto-cells. Even at this mechanical, not-quite-life stage, barriers—and their enforcement of what is inside versus outside—are fundamental to life.

In everything from cells to societies, there are insides and outsides. And barriers from cell walls to national boundary walls. We have some general purpose names for the difference between the two. We call the inside “Us.” And we call the outside “Dirt.”

Dirt is something that is in the wrong place or the wrong time. Soil in the garden is good. Soil in your salad is dirt. Oxycontin is good in a hospital. Oxycontin on the street, not so good. Maybe you think a beer would be good; maybe after a few, though, another would be bad. Some folks in Belmont thought that Mormons were OK, as long as they weren’t in the neighborhood. Sometimes things are out of place wherever they are. Cancer is dirt.

Dirt is either polluting or corrupting. When dirt is polluting, it displaces other, more pure things. That is what cancer does. That’s why people are afraid of new immigrant groups. Or new music. When dirt is corrupting, it harms other, more pure things. Guns in the city are dirt.

Not everyone agrees about what is dirt in any given situation. Some people think guns are almost always dirt, and some think almost never. Moral arguments are almost always arguments about what is dirt and what is pure.

What you think is dirt is one sense defines who you are. Your culture, your group, your class are the people who agree with you about what is Us and what is Dirt. We call these agreements “values.” When people talk about a decline in values, they are afraid things are getting dirty. (It is telling that when people first travel from their hometowns, they often comment about how the places they visit, and sometimes the people they meet, are dirty. When they become more familiar with the place, they don’t notice the dirt anymore.)

In humans, in our cells, in our organs, in our cultures, the barriers between Us and Dirt are permeable. Partly that’s because nothing can live by itself. Cells need to bring chemicals in and send chemicals out, and so do organs and organisms, and so do cultures and nations. And partly that’s because cells and so forth are not perfect. No barrier works well all the time. Life is not composed of little perfect parts, but of miscellaneous kind-of-pretty-good parts. Dirt does get in, no matter what.

For that reason, we create rules and codes of law. Laws seem to make rational sense, and in most cases they probably do. But different cultures have different laws, and that is not because cultures that are different from Us are wrong-headed, stupid, and mean. Laws codify what is dirt and what is not. They are barriers that protect against cultural corruption or pollution. It is significant that these laws are sometimes called holiness codes. The word holy means to be separate. Holiness codes separate Us from Dirt.

The woman without a name who touches Jesus is dirty. She has violated the holiness code of her culture. Her constant bleeding makes her constantly unclean—that is, dirty. We need to think a little about how horrible this being dirty would be for her. And to do that, we need to think a little about how horrible it would be for everyone else. They would think her to be disgusting. They would be disgusted. They would find her scary, even, and want to avoid her, and not let her come near them. It was like the extreme squeamishness that we get when we think someone is really sick and we think they are really contagious. Or how we get with really crazy people. She was corrupting. If they touched her, or if she touched them, they would become dirty, too. The woman without a name would have been totally alone, isolated, dirt.

When the woman without a name touches Jesus, therefore, it is a big deal. She has made Jesus dirty by her actions. She corrupted him. It was an aggressive and desperate thing to do. It was impolite. It was crazy. It was inappropriate. To us, perhaps it sounds brave and good and, it turns out, effective. But it would definitely not have seemed that way to the crowd or even the disciples, who should have known better, but never do.

The result of being treated like dirt is shame. Sometimes it is the intended result. You ought to be ashamed, folks say, meaning you just did a dirty thing. Shame on you. Shame is the way you feel when someone makes you feel like dirt. When you have been made to feel stupid, or weak, or cowardly, or foolish, or ugly. To be ashamed is be exiled. To shame someone is to push them outside the barrier of privilege or affection. Did the woman feel ashamed as she came to Jesus?

Jesus does not shame her. Jesus does not honor the distinction between inside and outside. There is no Us for Jesus and therefore no Dirt. It is not that Jesus does not see the barriers that exist. He is not clueless. But he is heedless. Jesus acts here, as he does many times in the Gospels, as if the barriers were fiction. He walks right through them. They are erected by humans; they are not God’s. The barrier that the woman crosses so fearfully is to Jesus nothing at all.

Most of us have felt like outsiders from time to time. Most of us have felt ashamed of things we have done. Most of us have been shamed by others. And probably most of us have made others feel ashamed. It is what people do.

But it is not what God does. To be ashamed is be exiled. But to be forgiven is to be invited back in. To be restored. In his turning to the woman who touched him, Jesus shows that for God there is no wrong time and there is no wrong place. In the kingdom of God about which Jesus teaches us, in the kingdom of God for which we daily pray and work, in the kingdom of God into which we have just welcomed [baptized child], instead of exile there is invitation. Instead of shame, there is forgiveness. There is no Us. There is no Dirt.