July 24, 2022: Disgust
Heart & Soul: Disgust
Psalm 139:19-22
Rev. Rhonda Blevins
O that you would kill the wicked, O God,
and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—
those who speak of you maliciously
and lift themselves up against you for evil![a]
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with perfect hatred;
I count them my enemies.
I bring you greetings from the 72nd annual conference of the International Council of Community Churches. This year I was joined for part of the conference by Chuck & Pam Roost, Tondra McGinn and Rhys Blevins—next year in Charlotte maybe Chapel by the Sea can win the high attendance award (I’m not competitive at all!)
If you were to ask me what my favorite part of the conference was, I would have to name seeing friends from across the country, some of them I’ve known for 14 years. But in addition to that, I enjoyed dropping my son off for the children’s program where he was the only white kid in the room. I noticed; he didn’t. And I loved that.
The International Council of Community Churches (ICCC) formed as a merger in 1950 between a group of predominantly white community churches and a group of predominantly black community churches. This was 1950. It was hard to find a place in the United States that would allow an interracial meeting. This was before civil rights. Before Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, before John Lewis marched at Selma, before Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. The ICCC was on the cutting edge of recognizing that we should judge people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” (MLK)
So in 1950, the white leader of the white churches entered stage left and the black leader of the black churches entered stage right. The two men met in the middle, shook hands, and the International Council of Community Churches was born. 72 years later, we remain beautifully “ebony and ivory . . . together in perfect harmony” to quote Stevie Wonder. With our church’s affiliation with the ICCC, we are a part of what I believe is the most racially diverse church in America. I am proud of the ICCC for that.
This, in part, is why I find myself disgusted when I hear about racially motivated hate crimes or white supremacy in all its hideous manifestations. Disgusted.
Which brings me to our emotion of the week: disgust. We continue our study of the Psalms in a series I’m calling “Heart & Soul”—exploring the intersection of our emotional life and our spiritual life. So far we’ve covered six of eight basic emotions: fear, surprise, anger, joy, sadness, and trust. We’ve looked together at Psalms (which are basically poems, prayers or songs) that express the particular emotion of the week. And this week, we find ourselves exploring the universal human emotion of disgust, and a Psalm in which the psalmist, King David, was expressing disgust toward his enemies.
The irony about Psalm 139, is that it begins as a beautiful Psalm of thanksgiving, a familiar Psalm to many (verses 1-3):
You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways . . .
This is the part of Psalm 139 that is included in the lectionary. But then the Psalmist takes a violent turn:
O that you would kill the wicked, O God,
and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—
those who speak of you maliciously
and lift themselves up against you for evil!
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with perfect hatred;
I count them my enemies.
The lectionary, conveniently, leaves out this part. This part of Psalm 139 is considered an imprecatory Psalm—a Psalm that seeks God’s calamity and destruction to rain down with vengeance upon the psalmist’s enemies.
You’ve got to hand it to King David, he didn’t mince words. If he felt it, he wrote it. He was disgusted by those he deemed his enemies.
But just because he felt it, just because he wrote it, doesn’t mean he was right. I mean, he felt something for Bathsheba, and we know how that whole thing turned out. David was repulsed by his enemies, but we should always remember the words of Anne Lamott:
You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Ouch.
This hatred that David expressed is an intense form of disgust called “loathing.” Disgust tells us, simply, that something is wrong, or rules are being violated. It helps us notice when something isn’t safe or something is wrong.
From an evolutionary standpoint, disgust probably began with food. Caveman 1 and caveman 2 were hungry; they came upon some rancid meat. Caveman 1 ate it, he got sick and died before he could have offspring. Caveman 2 decided to go pick some berries instead of eating the rancid meat, and he lived to pass on his genes to the next generation who would know to take a hard pass on rancid meat. Disgust is now one of eight basic human emotions. Thanks be to God!
Here’s the most interesting thing I discovered about disgust: the world’s preeminent scholar on the topic of disgust, Dr. Paul Rozin, believes that disgust is the emotion that separates humans from animals. We know animals experience fear, trust, sadness, anger, surprise, even love. Only humans, according to Rozin, feel disgust. And we can tell when someone is feeling it. The facial expression is universal whether you’re African, Asian, European . . . doesn’t matter. You know the face. It’s called the “gape.” The upper lip curl, wrinkled nose, eyebrows down. Show me disgust . . . yup, you know disgust.
Disgust keeps us away from rancid meat. That’s probably a good thing. But what about the kind of disgust David felt toward his enemies in Psalm 139 and other Psalms? Is that a good thing?
To begin to answer this question, it might be helpful to think about the different forms of disgust:
· Core disgust: the emotion that keeps us away from something that might make us sick like rancid meat, vomit, feces. (Some of you are giving me the gape at just the mention of these things!)
· Animal nature disgust: this relates to things that remind us that we’re animals and that we’re vulnerable to death. This is why many of us eat fried chicken but fried Aunt Sally . . . yuck!
· Moral disgust: the disgust we might feel about the ideology or behavior of another person or group of people. Moral disgust is what David felt when he called his enemies “evil” in Psalm 139.
Is moral disgust appropriate?
One could make a case that God experienced moral disgust at the people of Israel for oppressing the poor. Listen to God’s words to the people of Israel through the prophet Amos (Amos 5:21-24):
I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
Moral disgust. Like what Jesus apparently felt at the temple one day (Matthew 21:12-13):
Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”
Leon Kass, the chairman of the president’s council on bioethics from 2001-2005, wrote an article called “The Wisdom of Repugnance.” The article was written not too long after “Dolly,” the cloned sheep was born. The subtitle of the article: “Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans.” In the article he claimed that the person who cloned “Dolly” the sheep “would find it offensive” to clone a human being. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. To most, the idea is offensive, repugnant, disgusting. There might just be wisdom in heeding our moral disgust.
So the question, for me, is not if it is acceptable to feel moral disgust. Our faith tradition presents a long line of faith leaders who exhibited the “wisdom of repugnance” from Amos to Jesus to Martin Luther King, Jr. The question, for me, is first of all, what should people of faith find repugnant?
We should be disgusted at the things that disgust God. What does God find repulsive? Proverbs 6:16-19, the book of wisdom, gives us a list:
There are six things the Lord hates,
seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.
Seven things. Seven is the number of completion in the Bible. Seven things disgust God. Now that we know what we should find disgusting, the next question is, what should we do about people: with haughty eyes, lying tongues, who shed innocent blood, devise wicked schemes, and rush into evil, who pour out lies and stir up conflict in the community?
Should we do, like David did, and pray that God would kill them? Or even take vengeance ourselves; exact violence ourselves? Let’s look at what Jesus taught regarding our enemies—those we find “disgusting”—in the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5:43-45a):
You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
David shows us what not to do with our disgust. Jesus tells us what to do with our disgust.
Love.
The Brothers Grimm recognized the transformative power of love. Their fairy tale, “Beauty and the Beast,” offers the story of a handsome prince turned into a despicable beast. The only thing that would make him human again? Love.
So take your moral disgust and own it! Then use the power of love to transform.
Hear these words of Dr. King from his sermon entitled, “Loving Your Enemies”:
Probably no admonition of Jesus has been more difficult to follow than the command to “love your enemies.” Some people have sincerely felt that its actual practice is not possible. It is easy, they say, to love those who love you, but how can one love those who openly and insidiously seek to defeat you? . . .
This command of Jesus challenges us with new urgency. Upheaval after upheaval has reminded us that modern humanity is traveling along a road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction . . . the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.
I am certain that Jesus understood the difficulty inherent in the act of loving one’s enemy. He never joined the ranks of those who talk glibly about the easiness of the moral life. He realized that every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God. So when Jesus said “Love your enemy,” he was not unmindful of its stringent qualities. Yet he meant every word of it. Our responsibility as Christians is to discover the meaning of this command and seek passionately to live it out in our daily lives.
Your homework this week is simple and yet oh so challenging: identify someone or a group of someones who disgust you. Then pray this prayer each day: God, you know how disgusted I get at ________; help me find a way to love him/her/them.
You might find the power of love can transform even you.