There is a story in Mark 9 where Jesus heals a man they believed to have an unclean spirit. It took place in Capernaum. Capernaum was estimated to be a town of about 1500 people. It was a small town, much like Rural America that doesn’t have a lot of people from outside of their homogenous culture.
Some 25 years ago, I bought some land and put a single wide trailer in it. This town had 98 people before my arrival and I became the 99th, 1 shy of 100 people. The rural American town.
People in this small town were nosy, “rednecks” as they proudly called themselves, unable to accept, welcome and care for people who didn’t look, talk or act like them.
One day I went to the only grocery store with a small cafe in town. All eyes fell on me when I sat down on the chair available. A man with a long beard and bald head asked me, “Who are you?”. I realized he wouldn’t be able to pronounce my name if I told him. Besides, I surely look different. So, with a smile, I responded, “I am Joe Hermit.” He looked at me with a smile and responded. “Joe, There are no hermits in Chester. So, from now on, you are Joe Hillbilly. Got it?” I smiled and became part of the town. I am Joe Hillbilly. I landed in a small town in America. He also cautioned me to watch out as our people haven’t seen the likes of “you people” among them.
These days, I hear of this “you people” spoken more often, coming to this country and destroying American culture and faith. Except for some big and exploding East and West Coast blue cities, American “red” is mostly small towns and villages with attitudes and behaviors similar to the people of Capernaum. The rhetoric around us goes something like, “People who are not born here don’t belong here. People who don’t look like us are against us. People who speak a different language are foreigners. In short, those who are not “homogenous” are all murderers, criminals, drug addicts contaminating “American blood” unclean!
How boring would a garden be that is full of roses only and not roses and lilacs and lilies and daffodils, and irises, and daisies and such? Won’t a homogenous community, the same looking, talking the same language, believing in the same things, acting like herds and crowds, be equally boring and colorless? The people of Capernaum were comfortable being small; therefore, the newcomer became unclean!
We are not born with “stranger danger” fear. We are trained to see “stranger danger” from early on. It is a taught fear. We are taught to be suspicious of someone who did not look like, act like, talk like, and behave like us, and therefore, there is something unclean about them, some say.
For centuries, we treated the Indigenous people everywhere as cruel savages. Why? Because they did not look like the white Europeans. They were silenced, hunted down, and segregated for being different. Their evilness was due to their external appearance. Hundreds and thousands of years later, the needle hasn’t moved much to the right.
But then, this is not all about how someone looks or talks, or acts. Is it? Let us be honest: it is greed, and no other words can describe it better! Even the pastors, teachers of the law like in Capernaum, the smart and intelligent fall for it. Greed!
When we call someone evil or different, we treat them poorly. When we assign evilness to someone, we tend to become the evil ourselves.
Let me distract you for a minute. We live in a beautiful part of the world. The seasons we see are amazing. While in India, when I saw the pictures of the fall and winter, I used to think they were fake. I wondered how there could be such beauty in the world that I had never seen before. I realized that the snow-covered mountains, the little country church lit up for Christmas in the snow, and the gold-tinted candle lights are all real. I saw the changing seasons and colors and realized how spectacular the world is when everything takes a new life!
I know now seasons are for a reason. They tell us how magnificent the world will be if we open our hearts to different seasons and changes around us. We are born to celebrate diversity and beauty. We are created to celebrate uniqueness and color.
But how? Speak one universal language. You and I learned it at birth.
SPEAK SMILE.
I wrote a book about it. Mother Theresa used to say, “Peace begins with a smile.” Yes, SMILE is the universal language that speaks to the stranger among us.
As Maya Angelou said, “A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.”
It is when we recognize humanity in the other we begin to cast out demons. When we see everyone as God’s children, we begin to cast out demons from ourselves and others.
Jesus casts out demons by embracing people as God’s beloved, as his brother, and as his sister. There is no way to ward off evil until the moment we see God’s imploding creativity within, making us uniquely beautiful in all our differences.
So, SPEAK SMILE. So that you can cast out demons everywhere you go.