A reading from the Gospel of John:

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they may have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

I remember the eyes as though it were yesterday. They were pretty. Blue. Expectant, yet afraid. “This is Diane,” one of my new fourth-grade classmates said, pointing in her direction. “Don’t let her touch you. She’s the Cootie Girl.”

I did not know then—and I’m not entirely sure today—what a cootie is, but I could tell from the context that it wasn’t a good thing. Cooties, and, by extension, Diane herself, should be avoided at all costs.

I was the new kid at Wenona School. My family had just moved to Bay City, Michigan, from the farm country of southern Minnesota. And on that first day of school, I was desperate for a friendly face amid these city kids everywhere around me.

There was something different about Diane. My family was hardly affluent, not by any stretch of the imagination, nor were the kids at Wenona School. But the dress she wore was tattered. Her shoes appeared to have been repaired crudely and by hand. Someone whispered that she and her mother lived alone. Although she had a pleasant smile, Diane looked slightly disheveled and unkempt. Waiflike.

Occasionally, the Cootie Girl would play along. After listening to taunts on that blacktop that passed for a playground in this strange new world, Diane would chase her tormenters, who would shriek in horror and run away. Anyone she tagged, boy or girl, had cooties, which, although it appeared to have no long-term effect, was not considered a good thing by the fourth-grade cohort at Wenona School.

Like a pack of wolves taunting a moose, children can devise ingenious ways to belittle anyone they choose to ostracize. I recall one day standing in a queue across the hallway from a janitor’s closet. One of my classmates had apparently been musing on the word “custodian” painted on the door. “Hey, look,” he shouted, moving his hands across the letters and articulating the syllables slowly: “Cus-to-Dian.”

Everyone chortled at the brilliance of the put-down. But I caught the wounded look in Diane’s eyes. Yet another insult, yet another scar to carry home that night. “And where do you stand?” the eyes asked. Would the new kid become just another tormenter, or maybe, hoping against hope, a friend?

I think I recognized even then that it was a defining moment. Are you with us, my new classmates were asking, or are you going to be a geek, a loser, an outcast like the Cootie Girl? In the words of the Pharisees in the Gospel reading, “What do you say?”

Jesus fashioned an entire career out of his association with outcasts. He spent his time with harlots and tax collectors. Fishermen were hardly the elite of Palestinian culture in the first century. And when the Jewish equivalent of a lynch mob was collecting rocks to execute the adulterous woman, Jesus crouched down, scratched a few letters in the sand, and, with a few well-chosen words, dispersed the mob.

The Gospels don’t record what he wrote there in the dust, but my guess would be that it had something to do with who we are, all of us, in the divine economy. Perhaps Jesus listed the names of her accusers, and perhaps he added the names of every man who had ever slept with the accused woman, and—who knows?—there may have been a name or two that appeared in both columns. The bearded men packing stones were no better than the woman caught in someone’s bedroom. We are all sad and pitiable, the dusty letters read. We have terrible secrets and overwhelming fears, and one of the signs of our wretchedness is that we organize into packs to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are not somehow as lost or as desperate or as hopeless as we know we really are. There is safety in numbers, and one of the timeless ways we congratulate ourselves is to draw lines and boundaries, marking off who is good and bad, righteous and unrighteous, saved and damned, cool and not cool—careful, of course, to locate ourselves on the right side of those lines.

I’d like to think that Jesus scratched out a few choice words for the Pharisees in the Palestinian sand: “You sorry old fools are really trying my patience,” or something like that. But then he thinks better of it and rubs out the curses. He stands up and surveys the scene. His eyes meet each of the accusers and then take in the woman. Back to the Pharisees and back again to the woman. Then Jesus steps back several paces, crouches down, and with his index finger traces a large circle—a circle big enough to take in the whole crowd, the Pharisees and the woman and maybe even a few bystanders, the accusers and the accused.

A circle. The quintessential symbol of femininity. A metaphor for eternity. A circle large enough to encompass everyone entangled in the web of our shared humanity, our wretchedness, our loneliness and suffering.

I wish I could tell you that you that I did the right thing back there on the macadam playground at Wenona School. We all like to be the heroes of our own stories. But I’m not very good at this hero business. I’m reasonably certain that I could never have been numbered among Diane’s worst tormenters. But sometimes—very often, in fact—silence is complicity.

I don’t pretend that history would have been different if I had been kind to Diane, the Cootie Girl, back in Michigan nearly five decades ago. But I would have been different.  And perhaps she as well, if only for a moment. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sad and lonely, and I was wearing a ratty dress because my mother couldn’t afford anything better. But you stood up to the crowd and became my friend. If only it were so.

I lost track of Diane long ago, although I remember her from time to time in my prayers. She never made the transition from elementary to junior high school with the rest of us. Perhaps her mother found a new boyfriend or a new job. Or perhaps they decided to try a new city, to take their chances in a different school and a different community, a place where the Cootie Girl could simply be Diane, and she could start over.

Jesus comes along and disrupts our childish games, our taunts and our sarcasm. He reminds us that he, the crucified one, was the ultimate outcast, facing the ridicule of everyone, deserted even by those who had claimed to be his friends, that he was suspended naked between earth and heaven for the benefit not only of the righteous or even the self-righteous but for the outcast, the person of color, for the hungry child. Jesus visits our playground with a thin piece of chalk and draws a large circle. He straightens up, surveys his fellow sufferers, and gently suggests that if we have the courage somehow to see Jesus in the Cootie Girl’s wounded blue eyes, then we will have grasped something very important about the gospel.

I was naked, and you gave me a shirt. I was thirsty, dangling there from that cruel wooden tower. You came with water. I was hungry, and you brought me a slice of pie at the lunch counter, even though you would be fired for serving me. I was unconscious, lashed to a barbed-wire fence on that cold Wyoming night. You wrapped me in a blanket, hoisted me over your shoulder, and carried me home. I was the Cootie Girl. You were my friend.

Conversation with Randall Balmer

Daniel Pawlus: Randall, thank you for joining us today.

Randall Balmer: My pleasure.

Pawlus: A beautiful message about inclusiveness and standing up for the other in our midst. We’re grateful for that. I am really intrigued by your most recent book and would like to spend a little time talking about the making of evangelicalism.

Balmer: Alright.

Pawlus: My evangelical friends always talk about the attraction to the faith experience is the relevancy and the communication aspect, and you speak to this in a interesting way from an historical point of view. I wonder if you could start by talking about that a little bit.

Balmer: Sure. I think the genius of evangelicalism throughout American history—and it is in many ways a peculiarly American phenomenon; there are other places in the world that have it but evangelicals in America, I think, is particular to the United States in some ways—but the genius of it is the ability of evangelicals to speak the idiom of the culture no matter what they might be. When we did the documentary “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” we opened in Willow Creek in South Barrington, Illinois, for example. It’s a perfect example of how you speak to the surrounding culture, how you speak the idiom of the culture using the language of corporate America, for example, using expressions and ideas but also programs that will appeal to suburbanites and their tastes. But this is a long tradition. George Whitefield, one of the most famous preachers in American history, the apostle of the Great Awakening, had been trained in the London theater so he understood the importance of the dramatic gesture and using a stentorian voice, dramatic pauses, and so forth, and in a tradition that had at that time no theatrical life, no theatrical tradition. We was enormously successful. Contemporaries said he could bring tears to your eyes simply by saying “Mesopotamia!” But throughout American history there are more and more examples. Right here in Chicago, D.L. Moody at Moody Church—what is now named Moody Church, it wasn’t then—a wonderful example of speaking the idiom of the culture and that’s what evangelicals do better than anybody else.

Lillian Daniel: You starting giving serious scholarly attention to the evangelical movement back in the 80s. What motivated you to turn your scholarship in that direction?

Balmer: I’m really trained as a colonial historian and in many ways that’s still my love and my passion, but I had just started teaching at Columbia in 1985 and shortly thereafter the televangelist scandals began to break. I’m sure that a lot of folks will remember this when Jim Bakker had a tryst—you can’t make this up—with a church secretary from Long Island and Jimmy Swaggart was caught in a Louisiana motel room engaged in some sort of voyeuristic activity. Oral Roberts declared that God would call him home unless God’s people ponied up several million dollars, and so forth. A lot of it was entertaining, I have to say, and the media got a kick out of it, but I guess I was distressed at the tone of the media coverage. The media seemed to think that all evangelicals were the moral equivalent of Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart. And as somebody who grew up as an evangelical, who was intimately familiar with the movement and also somebody who had studied American religious history, I thought I could offer a different perspective. So I got this crazy idea at the time to travel around the country and visit evangelicals at the grass roots. And then the book, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” came out of that and then the three-part documentary.

Pawlus: So what do you think the perception is today of modern evangelicals? You talked about the 80s idea that has evolved with the mega-churches in many cases. What does someone who’s not an evangelical think about evangelicals?

Balmer: That’s a very good question. I think what I’ve noticed in my lifetime is how much it’s changed. Now I grew up within what I call the evangelical subculture in the 50s and 60s and we were very much aware of ourselves as being a subculture, that is, being a people apart from the rest of the world. And we were also a counter-culture. We understood ourselves as being different from the rest of the world and we took pride in that. That was a matter of real substance, that we were not worldly. The most damning thing you could say about a fellow believer was that she or he was “worldly” in the 50s and 60s. That changed dramatically, I think. I can almost pinpoint at least the year 1980. It changes when evangelicals become involved in politics in a big way. They help with the election of Ronald Reagan, which is very significant in all sorts of ways. So my sense is that after 1980, evangelicalism still is a subculture. But it’s no longer a counter-culture and that’s a very, very different feel, a very different understanding of the entire movement. So I think other folks look at evangelicals and they say these folks are savvy, they know how to do communications. Look at Sarah Palin, for example, who is one recent example. They are politically adroit, but they are no longer counter-cultural in the way that I was certainly growing up.

Daniel: Briefly, I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey. You were raised evangelical. When I met you a few years ago, you were preparing for ordination as an Episcopal priest. What’s happened since then?

Balmer: Well, I love being a priest. I still consider myself an evangelical, although I’m careful to distance myself politically from what most people think of that movement. But I love preaching. I love celebrating the sacraments. My wife and I are just part time priests in a small country church in Connecticut near where we live and I love it. In many ways it has kind of completed me in ways that I never could have understood twenty years ago or even ten years ago. I’m also convinced of the importance of the sacraments and this is something that is different from my childhood. I was introduced to the Episcopal Church really when I was in grad school at Princeton and we lived a couple of blocks away from Trinity Church in Princeton. I just wandered in one Sunday and I felt like I’d come home. First of all, the building itself said something important happens here and I wasn’t sure what it was. Something important happens there unlike the kind of warehouse stuff that too often I’m afraid is characteristic of evangelical churches. But also the fact that the Eucharist, the sacrament, was at the center of the worship and the liturgy was for me a very important moment. Preaching is wonderful but preaching can become theatrical, it can kind of be over the top. And I’m very careful in my preaching. I believe firmly the sermon should never overshadow the main event of the worship, which for me is the Eucharist.

Daniel: We’re glad that you brought your preaching to us today.