Hand Sanitizer

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 17, Year B
August 29, 2021
 
Say your prayers and wash your hands, because Jesus and germs are everywhere.
 
We have that saying on a dishtowel.  These days you can get that saying on a mug, cup, bumper sticker, t-shirt, sweatshirt, soap dispenser, and all manner of signage of any size and font.  It is an old saying, but talk about a message meeting a moment.  The statement is not trademarked or copyrighted, so purveyors of cutesy ephemera have gone to town.
 
While the pandemic has left many desolate and ruined, it has opened up a whole series of new markets.  Once in short supply, masks are now everywhere.  They are right there with the tabloids in the grocery checkout aisle.  Instead of calendars and key chains, the institutions of higher learning I support have sent us logo branded masks, I am sporting a Virginia Seminary one regularly (Go Fighting Flamingos).  Covid tests were once the thing nobody could find and get in any timely way.  Now we can get in home tests by the dozen for free.  Restaurants now have very robust takeout and delivery services.  Temperature scanners are legion.  Zoom has exploded as the main platform for meeting.  The paper products aisle is crammed with new players in the market for paper towels and that previously coveted and horded toilet paper.  Our economic system responds quickly, but we are only a selectively clever bunch of humans.
 
And then, there is hand sanitizer.  Once scarce, it is everywhere and widely available.  In the earlier days of the virus, my pharmacist told me they had every bottle she had put out for customers was lifted at the rate of ten a day.  Finally, they put out a three-gallon container that would be really awkward to put in one’s purse or pocket.  Nowadays, we hardly have to carry our own, though we do.  Hand sanitizer is on every retail counter, in every office, and everywhere people with potentially dirty hands gather.
 
While we are creative and markets adapt quickly, the hand sanitizer thing is a telling obsession.  First, soap and water are just as or more effective as a disinfectant.  And, of course, once sanitized, there is no protective wall around our hands that lasts for hours.  Once we open the door, grab our wallet and keys, or scratch our nose, we are right back in the germ pool.  Though there is little to no evidence that the virus spreads on surfaces, that does not stop us.  When faced with something we cannot control, we arm ourselves.  It gives us the illusion of safety or immunity.  We cleanse to feel clean.
 
Please note, I am a rabid proponent of doing everything we can to protect ourselves and one another.  Washing hands is a good thing and always has been.  Wearing masks and keeping respectful distance is something we can do that is effective.  Even if the chances of our masked and distanced, twice vaccinated selves will spread infection is small.  It is a possibility, thus we do so because some are not able to be vaccinated, some are immunocompromised, and all of us are in this together as fellow humans, called to love neighbor as self.  This is not partisan, political, or philosophical.  It is Gospel.
 
After the last five weeks of John’s gospel taking us into the deep mysteries of bread and wine, body and blood, over and over, finally we have a lesson that we can get our hands on. It is all about hand washing.  Or so the uptight religious folks think.  Apparently, some of the disciples were seen eating without washing their hands.  For the Scribes and Pharisees, washing hands was not just a soap and water thing where you sing the happy birthday song to give it the time it needs.  For the super exclusive religious, hand washing had a whole ritual.  They had special prayers, special fancy pitchers and basins.  The in crowd practiced and believed that doing such ablutions were like the magic of hand sanitizer, giving them belief in their purity.  They believed that doing that “right” thing, made the righteous.  And more important, more righteous than others. 
 
Thus, some of the disciples were not eating with dirty hands, so much as they were not playing the ritualistic game of magical thinking.  Jesus supports them, telling their critics that uncleanness is not washed away in an external practice.  We are made right in looking inside ourselves, seeing where we think and do things that hurt or exclude people we ought to love.  Sin is not the devil on forcing us into vile behavior, rather, sin is an inside job working in our self-centric insecurities and greed.
 
The bigger idea of all our lessons for today is all about religion.  If our religion does not lead us to compassion and moves us to widen our embrace of all humanity, it is the wrong application of religion.  Believing the right thing is not the right thing unless our life shows the fruit.  If our so-called righteousness stifles the generosity, yields less empathy, and shuns diversity, we are confusing what we claim as right with what righteousness is.  If we have enough religion to hate, but not enough religion to love, we are using religion as a barrier, rather than inviting our religion to use us.  Righteousness is an outflow, not a set of practices that work some magic.
 
Granted, we do things in church that are ritualistic and repeated.  We do this to open our hearts and minds, not to close them down and shut others out.  The 20th century poets Edwin Markham put it this way: 
 
“He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!”
 
Say your prayers and wash your hands.  Jesus and germs are everywhere.  True enough.  We cannot ever be fully sanitized souls this side of heaven.  We may not get right - or even righteous - at least not on our own.  But stick with it.  There are flashes of righteousness happening all around us, and sometimes, because of us, and through us.  Be careful out there.  The world is volatile and life is a chronic condition.  We can, however show up, wash up, be nice, and make good, knowing that we will have to do so again and again.  After all, even a life of love can be messy.  Amen.