New Testament Reading—Acts 10: 24-36
Hebrew Scripture Reading—Deuteronomy 10: 16-22
After having removed my shoes and socks outside the Chamundi Temple in Mysore, the dirty wetness of the stones underneath my feet heightened the sense that I was about to enter a world hitherto unknown to me. Previous to my trip to India, my experience of Hinduism was limited primarily to reading the Bhagavad Gita as a sophomore in college. Somehow reading the sacred scriptures of Hinduism does not compare with the experiential griminess of barefoot worship. As I entered the Temple, I soon forgot about my fears of prickly gravel and athlete’s foot as I stared down a corridor of doorways to the Chamundi goddess decorated with garlands of flowers.
The corridor, the incense, the reverence of the priests bestowing offerings, and the otherworldly aesthetic of the statue all conspired to give me the sense that I was catching a glimpse of the sacred. Looking back on this experience, perhaps the most important lesson, however, was the one imparted to me by the magnanimity of our host. A Hindu PhD student who had taken on the task of escorting my father and I from one tourist site to the next found it perfectly acceptable for us as Christians to enter into the sacred confines of a temple cherished by his faith.
This sort of magnanimity I would find again and again in India. I would find it amid the humid 104-degree heat of Chennai, a mega-city in Southern India. With humor and patience, our host Visu Venkataraman showed us around one of the city’s large temples. At one point, we found ourselves at a shrine waiting for the priest to bless us by sticking holy water in our hands. In India, there are careful rules to be followed when it comes to using one’s hands. For example, because you are to use your left hand in the bathroom, you are to use your right hand to eat. For the same reason, you are to use your right hand to receive holy water. Realizing our potential for error, Visu kindly prepared us for the holy water by standing behind us and whispering over and over again, “Right hand, right hand, right hand.” Prior to meeting Visu, my father and I suspect that we had used the wrong hand in a previous temple. I had wondered why people were giggling at me.
As Visu showed us the temple, he let me pepper him with questions. Patiently, he explained the meaning behind each shrine. Perhaps sensing that I was making matters more complex than they needed to be, he eventually shared that the important thing to remember is that every prayer at the shrines ends with a wish for the world’s happiness. It occurred to me that this insight was a bit like remembering God is ultimately about love despite all of the questions and thoughts that might lead us elsewhere.
Visu had other gems of wisdom and insight. He recalled with longing the magnanimity he had once witnessed between religions in India. He remembered Hindu women with sick infants waiting with their children outside Muslim mosques. They waited for the men worshipping in the mosques to exit and blow the blessings of God onto their children. This small image speaks poignantly as a metaphor for inter-religious goodwill in a country that has become plagued by inter-religious violence. In 2002, an onslaught of Hindu fascist violence killed 2,000 Muslims. In recent times, there has been violence elsewhere, including the violence between Christians and Hindus in the state of Orissa. In Orissa, conditions have long been exacerbated by global corporate greed for natural resources that has kicked people off their land.
As an outsider, it might be easy to become fixated on the violence, oppression, and poverty of contemporary India as if such things were unknown to us in the United States and as if we do not bear some responsibility for these problems. Luckily, my hosts helped me to see both our connection to India’s struggles and the hope that is in India. For me, this was particularly true with regard to India’s caste system. For those of you unfamiliar with the caste system, it’s a social hierarchy that puts one caste or ancestral group above another while excluding those known as Dalits altogether from any caste. To us in the United States, the condition of Dalits is often reminiscent of blacks in the South during Jim Crow. Despite the formal abolition of caste by India’s constitution in 1950, Dalits still suffer from what is known as untouchability. As such, they are segregated, excluded, and stigmatized. The Lutheran World Federation summarizes:
Dalits are deprived of education, employment opportunities, access to land, temples, and shops. They are not allowed to drink from the same cups in tea stalls. Dalits have to do work which is considered polluting, and are themselves regarded as impure. They are forced to undertake demeaning work such as manual scavenging (the collection and removal of human feces from dry latrines by hand).
In rural areas, many labor under a system of debt peonage. For some Dalits, however, the government has provided a pathway to economic betterment through affirmative action provisions in public education and government jobs. Yet, thanks to the privatization of government industries championed by the United States, many government jobs have disappeared only to be replaced by private industry jobs that are denied to Dalits.
The caste system is more than 2,000 years old making it one of the longest, most enduring sources of oppression and despair in the world. As I was struggling with this history and reality, my host Joseph Prabhakar at the seminary where I lectured helped me to see the hope that also exists among Dalits. Prabhakar is a Dalit Christian who is full of passion for the causes of Dalits today. I had the good fortune of participating in his class devoted to Dalit liberation theology. With Prabhakar’s help, I embarked on an educational crash course on Dalit sources of inspiration. It may come as a surprise that the historical figure whose birthday evokes the most noise from politicians in India today is not Gandhi. It is B.R. Ambedkar, the legendary leader of the Dalits who lived from 1891 to 1956. With rousing speeches and nonviolent demonstrations that violated the codes of caste, Ambedkar spearheaded a freedom movement that shook the nation and still has relevance for today. Ultimately, Ambedkar served as the primary author of India’s constitution. Especially given Gandhi’s own short-sightedness on issues of caste, it occurred to me that Ambedkar’s name deserves to ring out in the United States as much as Gandhi’s, yet his name is scarcely known here despite having received his PhD from Columbia University.
Thanks to my friend Prabhakar I was also directed toward professors and activists who are themselves inspiring in their commitment to Dalit liberation. On one weekend, I visited the Dalit Resource Center located at a seminary in the city Madurai. In addition to investigating more than a hundred atrocities against Dalits each year, the Dalit Resource Center celebrates art as a weapon of emancipation for Dalits. Once every year they have a Dalit folk festival of music, dance, and theatre that runs all through the night. It is the only thing like it in the country, and it serves to keep alive endangered cultural practices that have long been unrecognized by the broader society, if not disparaged, despite their beauty. Whereas drumming was once associated with religious impurity, the festival has affirmed it as an art. Whereas Dalit women often experience the triple oppression of caste, class, and gender, the festival has displayed a band of 100 women drummers playing similtaneously. Whereas Dalit Eunuchs are triply marginalized as well, Eunuch artists have also been affirmed by the festival. At the Dalit Resource Center, I had the opportunity to watch a DVD of past festivals. What I saw highlighted the truth of something Prabhakar once said to me. He explained to me that Dalits aren’t just an oppressed people. They are people with a rich and vibrant culture. They are people who celebrate life and its abundance.
Perhaps, the central lesson that I learned from all of my hosts is that while there are the devils of poverty and oppression, religious conflict and violence, there is still a God of unexpected graces, a God of life and celebration, a God of magnanimity and openness, a God who is not partial to the biases of the world, but who reveals herself amid the outcast and disinherited. This is the God in our scripture readings for today. It’s the God who embraced the Gentiles with their perceived impurities. It’s the God who embraced the downtrodden and the outcast regardless of nationality.
While I was in India, I came across a story that captures the spirit of this God of unexpected graces. I had been trying to come to terms with how it was that all the different religions of the world might peacefully co-exist when a professor I encountered directed me to the books of a Catholic priest named Aloysius Pieris. In one of his books, Pieris tells of attempting to worship at a golden Hindu temple beside the Ganges River in India. As he sought to enter, a man came forward and denied him passage. The reason was unstated but it could well have been because he did not appear to be of the right caste. Pieris felt disappointed and despondent, but then he turned toward the Ganges River next to the temple. He was struck by how open this sacred river of the Hindus seemed, how freely it flowed as people bathed in it. He then realized the great contrast between the temple and the river. The temple was a human construction, “but the river was God-made.” Its “water flowed down from the Sacred Himalayas.” It was open and free. Pieres removed his outer clothes and began to bathe himself alongside others. He soon noticed that those around him were starring at him. They asked him where he was from, and eventually it dawned on him that their curiosity was stirred by the cross hanging around his neck. Yet, the cross was not a barrier. Among the common people bathing in the river, Pieris felt a sense of “absolute tolerance.” He felt “free to speak, free to act and free to worship” as he wished. It then dawned on him “that this [act of] bathing was God’s sacrament.” It was true religion, religion that had not been polluted by “human perversity” masquerading as “ritual purity.” With wonder Pieres, saw how the river was “open to everybody.” There were no guards. Anyone could walk into the water. In the same way, Pieres realized “God is nobody’s monopoly.” Like the river, God “is available to everyone and everywhere.”
As Pieris often does “whenever something meaningful happens,” he celebrated the Eucharist after leaving the water. He never cared for rules and regulations about how to celebrate and where to celebrate. He has lived by the belief that Christ calls us to worship “always and everywhere.” Spreading his shawl on the sandy banks of the river, Pieres lit some sandalwood incense and sat cross-legged as he celebrated the sacrament. From the throngs of people by the river, a good number joined him and sat by his side. They could sense “that something holy and divine was taking place.” As we celebrate communion this morning, let us celebrate with this same sense of the holy and the divine, with this same sense of openness and magnanimity knowing that we worship a God who plays no favorites and who loves us without distinction. Amen.