Stranger God

Meeting Jesus in Disguise

Richard Beck

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506433752
• eBook ISBN: 9781506438412
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Accessible, challenging, funny, and one of the best reads on how to love others in any situation.

Love and hospitality can change the way you see the world and others. That's exactly what modern-day theologian, Richard Beck, experienced when he first led a Bible study at a local maximum security prison. Beck believed the promise of Matthew 25 that states when we visit the prisoner, we encounter Jesus. Sure enough, God met Beck in prison.

With his signature combination of biblical reflection, theological reasoning, and psychological insight, Beck shows how God always meets us when we entertain the marginalized, the oppressed, and the refugee. Stories from Beck's own life illustrate this truth -- God comes to him in the poor, the crippled, the smelly.

Psychological experiments show how we are predisposed to appreciate those who are similar to us and avoid those who are unlike us. The call of the gospel, however, is to override those impulses with compassion, to "widen the circle of our affection." In the end, Beck turns to the Little Way of St. Thérèse of Lisieux for guidance in doing even the smallest acts with kindness, and he lays out a path that any of us can follow.

II

The Emotional Battlefield

4

Hitler’s Sweater and Cooties for Grown-Ups

Do you remember playing cooties on the playground as a child? “Cooties” are those imaginary germs that children use to play infection games. When I was a child, girls had cooties, so you never wanted to go near or touch a girl. The girls, of course, disputed this. According to the girls, it was the boys who had cooties, so they avoided us. Our arguments on the playground often focused on finding the true source of our epidemics: Who really had the cooties—the boys or the girls? Our playground talk sounded like CDC specialists tracking down an Ebola outbreak.

We don’t outgrow this game. Adults play cooties as well. Think of all the adjectives we use to convey feelings of revulsion about people we don’t like. We call people creepy, slimy, sleazy, icky, rotten, repellant, lousy, detestable, offensive, nasty, awful, bad, distasteful, loathsome, horrible, vile, vulgar, trash, obnoxious, repugnant, gross, stinking, nauseating, revolting, and beastly. Each of these adjectives points to emotions of interpersonal revulsion. As grown-ups, we don’t think people have actual cooties, but the social emotions associated with cooties stick with us and cause us to avoid each other, using behavior not unlike that of our childhood playgrounds. These feelings of revulsion or contempt are the feelings of social avoidance and exclusion, the emotions that narrow the circle of our affections. These feelings are the battleground of hospitality.

Would You Try on
Hitler’s Sweater?

Truth be told, it’s more than feelings. Even as adults we behave as if we still believe in cooties. For example, psychologists have brought people into a laboratory to show them an old sweater.^[1] They tell the participants that the sweater was once owned and worn by Adolf Hitler, and they invite the subjects to put the sweater on. Would they be willing to do that? And if they did, how would it make them feel, wearing Hitler’s sweater?

Most people refuse to put the sweater on. Those who do put it on feel icky and uncomfortable wearing it.

True, we don’t believe in actual cooties, but we act as if we think Hitler’s sweater has been contaminated by his evil. We don’t want to wear or be near Hitler’s sweater because we feel that it’s somehow morally polluted, and we’re worried about that evil rubbing off on us.

We know this is an irrational response. Evil isn’t a germ that can contaminate fabric, yet we treat the sweater as if it has a moral virus. It’s totally illogical, but that’s how we treat moral failings.^[2] Psychologically, we treat sin as if it were cooties, a moral contaminant that is passed via physical contact, which becomes another source of interpersonal revulsion. If we emotionally treat sin as if it were cooties, we naturally keep our distance from sinners. It doesn’t make rational sense, but it’s where our emotions lead us if we don’t check them. These are the emotions that scandalized the Pharisees and religious leaders about Jesus’s behavior in the Gospels. “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” they asked. When you experience sinners as a source of moral cooties, Jesus’s hospitality to them is disturbing. What Jesus was doing didn’t feel right.

This hasn’t changed in the last 2,000 years. The psychology of moral cooties gives us another explanation about why the advice to “love the sinner, hate the sin” doesn’t work so well. It’s like Hitler’s sweater. When we experience sin as a form of moral contamination, we can’t help feeling emotionally uncomfortable around “sinners.” We fear the sin will rub off on us, so we act like the Pharisees in the Gospels.

Consider another feature of contamination psychology called “negativity dominance.”^[3] Imagine I take an apple and a piece of dog poop, and I touch them together. I then offer you the apple. Would you eat it? Of course not. The apple has been contaminated, ruined by its contact with the poop.

So it should work the other way, too: if the poop ruined the apple, then the apple should have made the poop delicious. But no, contamination doesn’t work that way. It’s not a two-way street. The poop ruins the apple, and the apple does nothing to the poop.

When it comes to contamination, the negative dominates the positive. That’s negativity dominance. When the pure and the polluted come into contact, the pollutant wins. The pure becomes impure, but the pure does not purify the polluted. The poop always trumps the apple.

Now, in the world of food, this makes perfect sense. But notice what happens when we start treating people as if they were polluted substances. The Pharisees use this same reasoning about Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners. When Jesus —the apple—and the sinners—the poop—make contact, who gets contaminated? Jesus does. Because that’s how contamination works. That’s negativity dominance.

When the Pharisees see the pure and the impure come into contact, the conclusion they draw—that Jesus is made unclean by eating with sinners—is natural and reasonable. That judgment feels right, because that’s how contamination works. If we were standing there with the Pharisees, we’d make the exact same emotional judgment.

The point of all this is simply to highlight how hospitality is an emotional battleground. What Jesus was doing in the Gospels in welcoming tax collectors, sinners, and prostitutes felt strange; for those who saw him do it, it was emotionally counterintuitive and hard to compute. To practice hospitality, then, we are going to have to do some hard emotional work to overcome the feelings that cause us to avoid and exclude people. In a world of moral cooties, hospitality doesn’t come very naturally to us. Hospitality demands emotional discipline and intentionality.

How about Drinking Spit
out of a Dixie Cup?

I keep coming back to the phrase “the circle of our affections,” because this is the case when it comes to these emotions of social revulsion and disgust. Consider the Dixie cup demonstration: How do you feel about swallowing the saliva in your mouth right now? No problem, right? Okay, how would you feel if I asked you to spit into a Dixie cup and then quickly drink it? That’s a bit more disgusting, right?

But what’s the actual physical difference between swallowing the spit in your mouth or spitting it out and quickly drinking it? There’s not much physical difference, but there’s a huge emotional difference. Swallowing the saliva in your mouth is no problem, but drinking the spit from a Dixie cup is disgusting.

What the Dixie cup demonstration illustrates is this: disgust is a boundary psychology.^[4] I don’t mind swallowing the saliva in my mouth because it’s on the inside of me, a part of me. But once that saliva crosses the boundary of the body, once it’s outside of me, it’s no longer a part of me. And because it’s no longer a part of me, feelings of revulsion rise up, and I push the Dixie cup away.

A circle of affections is at work here. An emotional boundary is erected between the inside and the outside, and feelings of revulsion and disgust act as border guards. That which is inside is treated kindly, as a part of me. But that which is outside, that which is not a part of me, is rejected with a feeling of disgust.

Ponder again the adjectives we use to evoke emotions of disgust toward people: creepy, gross, icky, revolting, slimy, rotten, nauseating, trashy, sleazy, or nasty. We’re back in the world of cooties. These associations elicit feelings of revulsion, causing us to treat people like spit. We use these adjectives to associate people with filth and pollution, making it easier to exclude and, in extreme cases, exterminate them. Disgust triggers dehumanization.

The Dixie cup illustration shows us exactly how our emotions carve up the world into insiders and outsiders. This is how our emotions tell us . . .

. . . who is inside our moral circle and who is outside

. . . who gets treated with kindness and affection and who gets ignored or shoved away

. . . who gets welcomed as a friend and who gets excluded as a stranger

When we treat people with disdain, revulsion, or contempt, we are expelling them from the circle of our affections. Emotionally, as in the Dixie cup experiment, we are treating these people as something alien, strange, and vile.

Embracing Eunuchs

It’s fascinating to observe how the church in the book of Acts overcomes the social emotions of disgust and contamination to widen their moral circle. Prior to his ascension into heaven, Jesus commissioned his disciples to take good news of the kingdom into all the world, to those strange foreign people with weird accents. But the emotions of moral and social cooties interfered. The church was becoming an insular community of the same and similar.

We know that an emotional boundary associated with moral cooties was the problem because of how God challenges the church to expand the moral circle. The story is found in Acts 10. Peter is praying alone on a rooftop. There he sees a vision of unclean animals—animals the purity codes of Leviticus prohibited Jews from eating. And yet a voice from heaven commands, “Get up, Peter! Kill and eat.” As a good Jew, Peter responds, “Surely not, Lord! I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” In response, the voice from heaven says, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happens three times, and three times the voice says, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

The vision is all about disgust and contamination, but as the story unfolds, we come to see that the issue isn’t really about unclean food. The issue facing the church was its rejection of unclean people. God uses the vision to explode the Dixie cup psychology of the church—how the church was excluding unclean people, treating them like spit. Feelings of social revulsion were crippling the mission of the church. So on that rooftop, God forces the church to overcome its fear of moral cooties to start acting like Jesus.

Another example of how the unclean were embraced within the moral circle of the church is found in in Acts 8, when Philip encounters the Ethiopian eunuch. The backstory goes back, once again, to the Levitical purity code, the same code that Jesus violated by touching lepers. Similar to the lepers, eunuchs were also unclean. As it says in Deuteronomy 23:1, “No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.” Since eunuchs lacked genitalia, they were strange and foreign, neither male nor female. Under the purity codes, this made eunuchs unclean. So the contamination logic of negativity dominance was enforced: eunuchs were excluded.

But the story doesn’t end there. The Hebrew prophets had a way of pushing back on the purity codes. Jesus liked to quote the prophets to critique the purity concerns of the Pharisees. In Matthew 9, the Pharisees were scandalized by Jesus breaking bread with notorious sinners. So Jesus quoted the prophets, a line from Hosea 6:6. “Go and learn what this means. ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Mercy trumps your worries about purity.

In a similar way, the prophet Isaiah pushes back on the Levitical exclusion of eunuchs from the people of God. One day, declares Isaiah, the unclean eunuchs will be welcomed into the moral circle of the kingdom:

Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say,
“The Lord will surely exclude me from his
people.”
And let no eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree.”

For this is what the Lord says:

“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.” (Isaiah 56:3–5)

The people the Levitical code excluded as unclean would be welcomed in. So we’re not surprised in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction: Welcoming the Stranger God
• Entertaining Angels
• The Emotional Battlefield
• “I Shall Be Love”
• Practicing Hospitality
• How to Save the World
• Conclusion: The Kindness Revolution
• A Note About the Cover
• Acknowledgments