“Unwashed, Unmasked, Unbothered?”

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, August 29, 2021, the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

    Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

“Is it bad to be really ticked off at people who won’t mask or get vaccinated?” I received this text several weeks ago from a member of the Foundry family. And, since then, I’ve received versions of the same question again and again. Headlines proliferate about the appalling behavior of citizens in school board and city council meetings and clashes between parents, teachers, and governors about the use of masks. And of course there are countless personal stories of church and family strife caused by the divides around vaccination, masking, and other public health protocols related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The accounts I’m reading, and receiving about what some folks are saying and doing really make it seem like we’re experiencing some kind of collective mental break—because either I’m losing my faculties of reason and proportion or a whole bunch of my siblings are.

Other common headlines these days highlight the stories of outspoken anti-vax, anti-mask advocates suffering and dying from the virus. And data points like: “About 99% of deaths today are people who did not get vaccinated. Patients dying in hospitals are telling loved ones they regret not getting the vaccine.” 

But of course any of these last points can and have been brushed off as inaccurate or hyperbole. One article I read chronicled the author’s effort to understand the reasoning of her brother who refuses to get vaccinated. What she receives seems reflective of much of what I’ve heard elsewhere. At the heart of it all, is lack of trust. Many people:

Don’t trust the actual vaccine (side effects and breakthrough cases)

Don’t trust the messengers (politicized–FDA a government organization could have been pressured to approve)

Don’t trust the data (unvaccinated passing to children? Children COVID data vs. other risks… the continued mutations…CDC wrong on a lot?)

The lack of trust is understandable since blatant misinformation has been allowed to spread unchecked all over social media from the start. Also, at the beginning of the pandemic, the former president downplayed the severity of the virus, decided to make masks a symbol of “liberal” oppression instead of a time-tested deterrent against dangerous infectious disease, and treated public health scientists who have decades of faithful service under their belt as if they are the enemy. The reaction—perhaps “overreaction”—from the other side of the aisle to shut and keep most everything shut down, whether it was well-intentioned or not, did its own damage to lives and livelihoods. A headline from the Brookings Institution last September summed up a key point, namely that “Politics is wrecking America’s pandemic response.”

Alongside these concerns is the reality that, as one scholar puts it, “If you aren’t white, you know a history that may make you weary about what the medical sector may be telling you to do.” For those who may not know that history, “The medical establishment has a long history of mistreating Black Americans — from gruesome experiments on enslaved people to the forced sterilizations of Black women and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study that withheld treatment from hundreds of Black men for decades to let doctors track the course of the disease…” More recent “studies have found Black Americans are consistently undertreated for pain relative to white patients; one revealed half of medical students and residents held one or more false beliefs about supposed biological differences between Black and white patients.” 

Vaccine hesitancy among people of color is understandable due to these factors, though both Dr. Anthony Fauci and Rev. Jesse Jackson have used their platforms to make sure the public knows a leading researcher and developer for the vaccine at the National Institutes of Health is imm