Middle School.

I found it harrowing. Actually, when I was a kid, they called it “Junior High”—short for, “Junior High School”—a designation that, I guess, lost favor because it seems a bit condescending. Small, miniature version of the real thing.

Anyway, I remember moving to new schools, between my 5th and 6th grade year, and then again in the middle of my 7th grade year.

It’s tough on an introvert to be thrust into new situations, among a whole new crowd of unfamiliar faces—being singled out, afraid people are secretly talking about you, or worse, laughing at you.

It’s especially tough on a pubescent introvert to have to make those kinds of social and psychological adjustments.

When you’re going through puberty, you’re already so excruciatingly self-conscious. Every time you walk into a room, you’re convinced that all eyes are on you, judging you—what kind of clothes you wear, your haircut, how you walk, whether you’ve got something gross caught in your braces or you have a new Vesuvian-size zit in the middle of your forehead that makes you look like a cyclops.

All of which is bad enough in front of people you know. To have to make that trek in front of a group of strangers, who are also supposed to be your new peers, is terror of a new and unspeakable magnitude.

When I walked into a new school in a different state for the remaining part of my 7th grade year, it was, all things being equal, awkward enough. But, unbeknownst to me, apparently, the folks in Michigan had moved beyond the early 70s infatuation with bell-bottoms and love beads in ways that people in northern Indiana had not yet done. So, when I walked into the new school and saw immediately that everyone wore straight-legged jeans and no love beads, I immediately felt like a miscast character from a Cheech and Chong movie, a time-traveling retro love child.

As humans, a class of mammals, we maintain social boundaries. Those boundaries let us know who’s in and who’s out; which is to say, they let us know who we have to pay attention to, who we have to take seriously, and who can be harassed and ignored. Almost immediately. No long investigations are necessary.

Do they look right? Do they talk right? Do they know the customs that mark them as part of the tribe? Are they one of us?

That’s how it works among humans, as much as among wildebeests and orangutans. We need to know who poses a threat to the herd. Who’s been vaccinated, who wears a mask.

But whereas among animals, that kind of threat-detection system is a necessary part of survival, it no longer serves us humans quite as seamlessly. The danger we fear has less to do with being eaten than with being polluted.

Jesus runs into just this kind of social impulse in our Gospel this morning. If you recall from the time we spent in Mark some weeks back, Jesus has been making new fans left and right … but for all the wrong reasons.

Back in chapter six, Jesus fed the 5,000, garnering for himself the buzz of “potential candidate” for Messisahship. The crowds were convinced that Jesus could do for them what they had been unable to do for themselves, and were therefore prepared to immediately crown him king.

Jesus, not particularly enamored of the idea of throwing his hat into the political ring, took off by himself. After some time spent decompressing in isolation, he eventually stumbled across his disciples … out in the middle of the sea—them panicking, and him walking on water.

After he and the disciples finally made it across, the folks Jesus had escaped from hours before, found him once again and started hounding him to do some more miracles.

Apparently, the religious leaders get wind of Jesus’ new popularity, and decide to go check him out for themselves. When they find him, they catch sight of his disciples, who are blatantly not following certain customs about hand-washing.

Jesus sees what’s happening. The Pharisees are doing what the rest of us do upon meeting new people, entering new situations: they’ve put their highly trained sense of smell to work, attempting to determine just who’s part of the herd. Are these folks a threat to, if not our lives, then our way of life? Do they do stuff the way we do stuff? Which is another way of saying, do they care about things the way we care about? Are they with us or against us? Friend or foe? Comrade or threat?

And the Pharisees use the only sensors they have: custom. Of course, we know that custom sometimes get dressed up in church clothes. It’s easy to give stuff we care about a kind of theological turbo-charge, by saying that our personal prejudices and desires align with God’s.

There a was a woman in a church I used to pastor who was always sweet to me. She had a great apartment on the bottom floor of a big old house, filled with treasures from a bygone era—lots of lace and flowers. You know what I’m talking about. Served me tea when I came to visit.