The Untouchables - Featuring an excerpt from Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
October 9. 2022
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Luke 17:11-19
The Untouchables
Kerra Becker English
An American Untouchable – Isabel Wilkerson, in Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, p.21-22
“In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and triumphs to come, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta, landed in India, in the city then known as Bombay, to visit the land of Mohandas Ghandi, the father of nonviolent protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters, ‘To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.’
He had long dreamed of going to India, and they stayed an entire month, at the invitation of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. King wanted to see for himself the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for justice in America. He wanted to see the so-called Untouchables, the lowest caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read of and had sympathy for, but who had still been left behind after India gained its independence the decade before.
He discovered that the people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in America, knew of the bus boycott he had led. Wherever he went, the people on the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph.
One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been Untouchables. The principal made the introduction.
‘Young people,’ he said, ‘I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.’
King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, hand dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest caste people in India would view him, and American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them. ‘For a moment,’ he wrote, ‘I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.’
Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries ‘still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,’ quarantined in isolated ghettos, exiled in their own country.
And he said to himself, ‘Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.’
In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.”
Let that story settle in for a minute.
Even after slavery ended, the ongoing trauma of having been an enslaved people did not.
Those whose families had benefitted from slave labor found novel and horrific ways of keeping the hierarchy that they knew intact.
They feared a loss of power, so they used tactics of terror to keep the power structure in place.
According to records maintained by the NAACP, the last lynching in America occurred in 1968. 1968!!! - a mere two years before I was born, and I dare say that some of you may have memories of 1968.
Especially in southern states, laws were put on the books to make it hard for black citizens to vote, or own property, or even be in the same restaurant or use the same water fountain as their white counterparts.
It was 100% legal to do many things we would find repulsive by today’s standards.
Just a reminder – you have to teach people to treat others this way.
It may be in our nature to compare and contrast ourselves with others, to determine the familiar from the unfamiliar, but a unified structure that demeans a specific group of people over time is not only oppression, it is the creation of caste, a determination of who is clean or unclean, safe to be around or untouchable.
Caste is defined a social structure that ranks people in a hierarchy according to differences in wealth, status, religion, or in the specific case of the United States, race.
As Isabel Wilkerson researched her own family’s history, she discovered, like Martin Luther King, Jr. that the United States is built on the framework of a caste system – one that has parallels to India in terms of favoring the wealthy elite, and to Nazi Germany in terms of determining the value of a person based on a particular characteristic like race or religion.
These kinds of hierarchies didn’t just show up in the 20th century either.
They’ve been around for centuries, and yet we have not figured out how to eliminate them.
Neither the value of freedom, nor the commitment to progress has done much to change this game we keep playing.
There may be some here today uncomfortable that I’m talking about how we have come to rank other people in terms of societal value.
Truthfully, I am uncomfortable and sweating a bit up here too.
I’m not immune from those times when I think I’m either better than, or not good enough depending on what room I find myself in.
But what can be learned, I believe, can also be unlearned.
Spiritual truth tellers, like Jesus, are the ones who will help us change our own perspective.
I would love to think that such spiritual truth tellers would help us change the world.
I want God to swoop in and make it different, like permanently and perpetually different.
AND…I’m not going to hold my breath for that day to come.
But what Jesus does is tell stories and care for people in ways that remind me that I’m supposed to be different because of who God is in my life.
That’s so, so much harder, isn’t it?
Today, I read our Jesus text from Luke from the most recent translation of the NRSV which tells us that as Jesus entered the village, 10 people with a skin disease approached him.
Do you remember growing up reading the text that way?
Me neither.
This is the story of the 10 lepers.
Lepers.
Guess what?
When you hear the word LEPER, I bet you hear it like I hear it.
It is a reminder to stay away, that this is an untouchable group, not a group you want coming up to you as you get into town.
The Bible consistently denotes lepers as unclean.
Leper is meant to be a slur.
Like the other slurs that you know.
Yes, the ones you know about black people.
Yes, the ones you know about Jews.
And the ones you know about the gay community.
Jesus was approached by 10 members from the lowest caste of his time.
They come to Jesus, and they ask for God’s mercy.
When you have been repeatedly demeaned and dismissed for who you are,
what else can you ask for?
Jesus sent them to the priests – the ones who had the power to declare them clean or unclean.
On the way, their lesions healed, their disease disappeared.
The priests had no choice but to change their status in the community.
Here’s where the sermon usually begins – one of the 10 comes back to say thank you.
We clergy have used that as the guilt trip of gratitude.
See, kids, better write your thank you notes for those birthday gifts.
This time through this text, I’m noticing something different.
I think it’s because we’ve been sticking around in Luke’s gospel.
This is a message, not for those who are healed to grovel in gratitude.
It’s for the priests to see their role more clearly.
It’s for them to remember that they were once slaves in Egypt, that God has restored their freedoms, promised them wholeness.
God delivers.
God delivers whether we pay attention and give thanks, or whether we grumble in the desert.
God also notices when we have made ourselves a bit too comfortable sitting in the seat of judgment over others.
Jesus restores all 10 lepers to their value and worth.
This is our reminder too that the freedom and the worth that we have does not come from human hierarchies, it comes from God.
This is a reminder that we are made fully in the image of God – which means that sacredness resides within.
This is also a reminder that society will try to teach us otherwise.
John Calvin used the depravity of human beings to teach us about God.
If everyone is equally messed up, completely unworthy, lower than a worm when it comes to our ability to compare ourselves to the goodness of God, then we are all in the same circumstances together.
I am a leper and I am a priest.
I am the one being judged and the one doing the judging.
Today, I want us to think about the other 9.
Nine out of ten times, I too forget that my worth and value, that my freedom and sense of inner peace are gifts from God.
Those moments of pure connection – the world cannot give them and neither can the world take them away.
But one time out of ten, the overwhelming feeling of being made whole, of being able to be my purest self, the one that God can see, that does spark gratitude of immense proportions.
Jesus wanted the priests to remember that feeling, to not get so bogged down in doing God’s work of judgment and correctness that they forgot how to have joy.
All, ALL these texts in Luke repeat that conclusion.
The lost get found.
The prodigal son gets welcomed home.
Debts are forgiven.
The leper becomes clean.
So celebrate and throw a party.
When the Reverend (the priest) Martin Luther King, Jr. first heard one of the Untouchables identify him as an American untouchable, it felt like an insult. Then he realized they had much in common, and to free their own minds and demand real justice became a common goal.
We all have ways in which we are the leper, the untouchable, the lost.
We all have ways we judge others just like the priests and scribes.
Jesus reminds us that we are all God’s children, all beloved community,
All given the chance to walk each other home.
Will that knowledge change the world? I don’t know.
Will that knowledge change me? I can only hope. Amen.
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Luke 17:11-19
The Untouchables
Kerra Becker English
An American Untouchable – Isabel Wilkerson, in Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, p.21-22
“In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and triumphs to come, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta, landed in India, in the city then known as Bombay, to visit the land of Mohandas Ghandi, the father of nonviolent protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters, ‘To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.’
He had long dreamed of going to India, and they stayed an entire month, at the invitation of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. King wanted to see for himself the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for justice in America. He wanted to see the so-called Untouchables, the lowest caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read of and had sympathy for, but who had still been left behind after India gained its independence the decade before.
He discovered that the people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in America, knew of the bus boycott he had led. Wherever he went, the people on the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph.
One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been Untouchables. The principal made the introduction.
‘Young people,’ he said, ‘I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.’
King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, hand dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest caste people in India would view him, and American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them. ‘For a moment,’ he wrote, ‘I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.’
Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries ‘still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,’ quarantined in isolated ghettos, exiled in their own country.
And he said to himself, ‘Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.’
In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.”
Let that story settle in for a minute.
Even after slavery ended, the ongoing trauma of having been an enslaved people did not.
Those whose families had benefitted from slave labor found novel and horrific ways of keeping the hierarchy that they knew intact.
They feared a loss of power, so they used tactics of terror to keep the power structure in place.
According to records maintained by the NAACP, the last lynching in America occurred in 1968. 1968!!! - a mere two years before I was born, and I dare say that some of you may have memories of 1968.
Especially in southern states, laws were put on the books to make it hard for black citizens to vote, or own property, or even be in the same restaurant or use the same water fountain as their white counterparts.
It was 100% legal to do many things we would find repulsive by today’s standards.
Just a reminder – you have to teach people to treat others this way.
It may be in our nature to compare and contrast ourselves with others, to determine the familiar from the unfamiliar, but a unified structure that demeans a specific group of people over time is not only oppression, it is the creation of caste, a determination of who is clean or unclean, safe to be around or untouchable.
Caste is defined a social structure that ranks people in a hierarchy according to differences in wealth, status, religion, or in the specific case of the United States, race.
As Isabel Wilkerson researched her own family’s history, she discovered, like Martin Luther King, Jr. that the United States is built on the framework of a caste system – one that has parallels to India in terms of favoring the wealthy elite, and to Nazi Germany in terms of determining the value of a person based on a particular characteristic like race or religion.
These kinds of hierarchies didn’t just show up in the 20th century either.
They’ve been around for centuries, and yet we have not figured out how to eliminate them.
Neither the value of freedom, nor the commitment to progress has done much to change this game we keep playing.
There may be some here today uncomfortable that I’m talking about how we have come to rank other people in terms of societal value.
Truthfully, I am uncomfortable and sweating a bit up here too.
I’m not immune from those times when I think I’m either better than, or not good enough depending on what room I find myself in.
But what can be learned, I believe, can also be unlearned.
Spiritual truth tellers, like Jesus, are the ones who will help us change our own perspective.
I would love to think that such spiritual truth tellers would help us change the world.
I want God to swoop in and make it different, like permanently and perpetually different.
AND…I’m not going to hold my breath for that day to come.
But what Jesus does is tell stories and care for people in ways that remind me that I’m supposed to be different because of who God is in my life.
That’s so, so much harder, isn’t it?
Today, I read our Jesus text from Luke from the most recent translation of the NRSV which tells us that as Jesus entered the village, 10 people with a skin disease approached him.
Do you remember growing up reading the text that way?
Me neither.
This is the story of the 10 lepers.
Lepers.
Guess what?
When you hear the word LEPER, I bet you hear it like I hear it.
It is a reminder to stay away, that this is an untouchable group, not a group you want coming up to you as you get into town.
The Bible consistently denotes lepers as unclean.
Leper is meant to be a slur.
Like the other slurs that you know.
Yes, the ones you know about black people.
Yes, the ones you know about Jews.
And the ones you know about the gay community.
Jesus was approached by 10 members from the lowest caste of his time.
They come to Jesus, and they ask for God’s mercy.
When you have been repeatedly demeaned and dismissed for who you are,
what else can you ask for?
Jesus sent them to the priests – the ones who had the power to declare them clean or unclean.
On the way, their lesions healed, their disease disappeared.
The priests had no choice but to change their status in the community.
Here’s where the sermon usually begins – one of the 10 comes back to say thank you.
We clergy have used that as the guilt trip of gratitude.
See, kids, better write your thank you notes for those birthday gifts.
This time through this text, I’m noticing something different.
I think it’s because we’ve been sticking around in Luke’s gospel.
This is a message, not for those who are healed to grovel in gratitude.
It’s for the priests to see their role more clearly.
It’s for them to remember that they were once slaves in Egypt, that God has restored their freedoms, promised them wholeness.
God delivers.
God delivers whether we pay attention and give thanks, or whether we grumble in the desert.
God also notices when we have made ourselves a bit too comfortable sitting in the seat of judgment over others.
Jesus restores all 10 lepers to their value and worth.
This is our reminder too that the freedom and the worth that we have does not come from human hierarchies, it comes from God.
This is a reminder that we are made fully in the image of God – which means that sacredness resides within.
This is also a reminder that society will try to teach us otherwise.
John Calvin used the depravity of human beings to teach us about God.
If everyone is equally messed up, completely unworthy, lower than a worm when it comes to our ability to compare ourselves to the goodness of God, then we are all in the same circumstances together.
I am a leper and I am a priest.
I am the one being judged and the one doing the judging.
Today, I want us to think about the other 9.
Nine out of ten times, I too forget that my worth and value, that my freedom and sense of inner peace are gifts from God.
Those moments of pure connection – the world cannot give them and neither can the world take them away.
But one time out of ten, the overwhelming feeling of being made whole, of being able to be my purest self, the one that God can see, that does spark gratitude of immense proportions.
Jesus wanted the priests to remember that feeling, to not get so bogged down in doing God’s work of judgment and correctness that they forgot how to have joy.
All, ALL these texts in Luke repeat that conclusion.
The lost get found.
The prodigal son gets welcomed home.
Debts are forgiven.
The leper becomes clean.
So celebrate and throw a party.
When the Reverend (the priest) Martin Luther King, Jr. first heard one of the Untouchables identify him as an American untouchable, it felt like an insult. Then he realized they had much in common, and to free their own minds and demand real justice became a common goal.
We all have ways in which we are the leper, the untouchable, the lost.
We all have ways we judge others just like the priests and scribes.
Jesus reminds us that we are all God’s children, all beloved community,
All given the chance to walk each other home.
Will that knowledge change the world? I don’t know.
Will that knowledge change me? I can only hope. Amen.
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