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| The Body of Christ Genesis 3:8-11; 21 and 2nd Samuel 6:1-5 March 30, 2008
Getting comfortable with our bodies is very hard to do in our culture. The public presentation of the human body in our society in terms of health, fitness, sexuality, youth, beauty, simply conspires to make us feel that we don’t belong to our own human species! For every one person who, like Barack Obama, can get photographed bare-chested swimming in Hawaii, there are two hundred and fifty of us who say with John McCain, “He can take off his T-shirt if he wants to. I’m not even taking off my sweater!” You know, Freud wrote a book called Civilization and Its Discontents. It could be updated, thanks to the economic engine that exploits our shame, Civilization Makes Me Discontented. It shames our inadequate bodies as not fit enough, not healthy enough, not beautiful enough, not sexual enough, not thin enough! Now, the Christian church has a real chance at offering a vital counter-cultural alternative to our body-obsessed, but discontented, society. The church has been the mirror opposite of society. If society has gotten obsessed with all things physical, from sex and sales to health and medical costs, to fitness and fatness, the church has just about gotten away with its obsession: pretending that no body ever attends church, only souls, and a few spirits you can shake hands with! So we have, like a candidate with no voting record, a chance to speak up, break our own self-imposed taboo, and engage in a conversation with ourselves and the world that tells truths about our bodies, shows reverence towards our bodies, and frees us to unfasten our seat belts and “to move about the country!”! Now, I have worked, in the creation of this worship service, to help such a counter-cultural conversation to progress here. And as a congregation, we are already counter-culturally ahead of many other churches and way ahead of our culture. This church actually supplies its pastor with free gift cards for massage therapy! Some folks here are actually interested in learning a body language for worship, to walk the ancient labyrinth, scores of people showed up for the adult education series on mind, body and spirit, and almost everyone here has gotten the Shaker slogan down as a life style. The American Shakers used to say, “Hands to work; hearts to God.” 96% of you all put your hands to work for God through some project in this church every year. And the other 4%, well, we just love to sit and watch! And we are committed, here, to increasing our manners, our mores and our buildings’ comfort to those who are ahead of us on the ability-disability spectrum. But we have miles to go before we can truly offer the world and ourselves a vibrant, alive, sensitive, sensual, counter-cultural alternative to our secular culture. So I’ve worked to help us today, with the body thing, somewhat blatantly. All our hymns lift up for us Jesus as the Son of God, and yet as a man, and as a ruler of all nature. These are hymns that image Jesus as a real human being, as well as the revelation of Christ as the center of the cosmos. More “obviously subliminal,” if I can contradict myself (can you be obviously subliminal?), our three scripture readings all got us to hear about naked bodies in the Bible. First, God making clothes for Adam and Eve (and was He dressed or not!?) Next, King David as vital, vain, vulnerable, dancing naked before the ark (truly he’s not the poster child for the guild of sacred dancers!) And then the poignant flash of a naked boy escaping during the arrest of Jesus with only his skin intact. Scholars wonder if the boy was the writer of that passage. I thought such scriptures would be a good way to raise the bar in terms of body-talk in church, to have us hear these Biblical scenes. But I’m going to step back from my own brinkmanship, however, and only focus us on that one naked body part (other than our hands) that we are most comfortable seeing in public and that, of course, is our face. Let the counter-cultural Christian conversation about the human body begin with our lifting up for greater awareness the undressed human face. I could also say the unaddressed human face, because the first conversation we need to have is with our shame about our flaws. From our face down to our toes all of us have body-shame. We can address and redeem that by facing our face. There will be no place of grace for our bodies unless we face our shame, our antagonism, our judgments, about our faces, which are just the tip of the iceberg of our potential body shame. Now, it took a woman to be brave enough to write a book and call it, “I Hate My Neck.” Men like to pretend we are above such bonfires of vanities. A lot of our body shame we project onto our cars. (Have I told you about my restored 1955 Porsche 356?) Now our conversation for counter-cultural health can be greatly helped by a long unheralded Christian tradition: the Celtic Christian tradition. Celtic Christianity has a paradoxical logic, a poetry and language that include both Christ and nature and the body and the feminine. The Roman Christianity that came out of Augustine and the empire had a pathological prejudice against both nature and the feminine. And so Christianity began to be a potential breeding ground for shame. Body shame, sexual shame, and fear and shame of the feminine. I will illustrate the Celtic alternative. I talked to a young woman the other day who had a small, beautiful, silver cross on a chain around her neck. I commented politely. She said, “You should see the other one my mother also gave me from Ireland. It has stones like a rainbow.” Stones. Gems. Like a rainbow. What a beautiful Christian symbol. Nature as beautiful with God’s first promise—the rainbow—no more floods—and God’s last promise—the cross—I will be with you always, even beyond death. How wonderful to see a young woman celebrating her Christianity through the Irish Celtic rainbowed cross. Now let’s be frank. I am shamelessly, somewhat blatantly, trying to sell you on a version of Christianity we could call “the counter-cultural, new-naked Celtic Christianity,” because our society and we in it desperately need an honest conversation about the body, a conversation that leaves us with a sense of transcendence. Our material world hungers for some vision of transcendence from it, from the material world. Now that we have so much, the question that could drive people to church, or keep us here, is, “Is there more? Is there something more than all this stuff, this gross national production?” A contemporary writer (Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind) observes that “…more people—liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it—are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning.” Columbia University’s Andrew Delbanco says boldly, “The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence” (Pink, p. 35). And as I try to sell you this—in the old days we called such salesmanship “evangelism” -- I’m an evangelist for a Christianity that takes us through the real natural body to the real transcendent spirit. To further my salesman image, I’m trying to get my foot in your door by giving you this free sample: the unveiled human face. I don’t expect you to buy a whole dancing naked King David (though I see I have some hands up bidders!). Why the face? Because all our shame and all our transcendent respect are there, right there, right here, in the exposed, vulnerable, vital, vain, human face. And if we can enter into an honest dialogue with our own faces, we can begin that counter-cultural conversation about our bodies and ourselves that our world so deeply desires. So note that we are already in the world of Irish Celtic poetry. For while I truly mean “face” here, skin and bone face, we are already taken to a deeper level, one that transcends skin and bone. For as John O’Donohue, another Celtic-inspired poet, poet-philosopher wrote, “Your face is the icon of your life. In the human face, a life looks out at the world and also looks in on itself” (Anam Cara, p. 43). Our faces are already reflections of our lives, on our lives. A silent human face is already in dialogue with the life within its person. One of the oldest Greek words for person is mask—“prosopon”—the face mask indicating a person is there (p. 43). Your face listens to your life. Your face speaks to the world of your life, from your life, for your life. Your face speaks for you. The conversation has begun We are speaking here of an astonishing spiritual form of intelligence and communication. (Let me make a quick practical defense here of my Christian sermon on the embodied, revealed human face—its gospel merit. A recent church growth article plaintively asked what real, what deep, spiritual dynamic, spiritual hunger are the churches missing, not addressing, in the people of our world? And wouldn’t, he was suggesting, our pews fill up if we could get the church to tune into this as yet to be perceived spiritual hunger, need, dynamic? Well this is a huge one the church can turn to: Our material people want a spiritually meaningful world where there is honest talk about a lot of things, politics is one, our bodies is another. If healthcare costs tell us anything, it’s that we value something about our bodies. But spiritual traditions, Celtic Christianity for one, know the value of the body is not in the body but as the body has intercourse with the spiritual world. So I’m not just whistling Dixie here. This is relevant as well as valuable—practical sidebar over!) So the intelligence, the spiritual intelligence of the face: it’s simple. A computer cannot recognize a face faster than a baby can. A computer can beat or tie Garry Kasparov at chess. But as Dan Pink writes, “…the I-Mac computer on which I’m typing this sentence can perform a million calculations per second, far more than the fastest left brain hemisphere on the planet. But even the most powerful computers in the world can’t recognize a face with anywhere close to the speed and accuracy of my toddler son” (p. 19). If a picture is worth a thousand words, the computer can read the words about a face, but another human can get the picture. This is a spiritual dynamic. It’s more than what is seen. It’s the adding up of what is seen into what we call recognition, re-cognition, knowing again as if for the first time. Spiritual. Michael Polanyi, the philosopher, wrote of this in his book The Tacit Dimension. It’s silent knowing. And of course beyond recognition, beyond identification scanning, when we human beings “read” each other’s faces we read far more than a computer can imagine. We read for feeling. We read for values expressed. And we read for context, situation, background, foreground. A whole human situation picture. If we create a culture in church of honest transformative body talk, we will be addressing a crucial aspect of the value of life and the survival of life. Human recognition of our real, not our virtual, video-game life, is crucial for our survival. Here’s the story of the security inspector at Boston’s Logan Airport on the early morning of September 11, 2001. And as you know, all sorts of electronic screening devices were in place and many more sophisticated ones now. But here is what the security inspector said of his letting Mohamed Ata, the terrorist master mind, onto the plane. He said, “I noticed the man’s eyes. I had a funny feeling. Everything was checking out, but something said no, something was wrong. On the way home after everything had happened, and I couldn’t begin to tell you how I was feeling, I realized, I said to myself, he had the deadest eyes. He had the deadest eyes I had ever seen. I should have known. I did know. I just didn’t know what it was I knew. Recognition, naked human recognition, knowing the spirit that transpires between us face-to-face, knowing the spirit that transcends us when we meet face-to-face: this is the beginning of a whole new kind of world, self, a new kind of Christian congregation—one where we see and feel seen through our faces. And if our faces are here, our bodies are not too far behind! And if our bodies are here, then the transcendent body of Christ, also, can be here behind, above, below, and all around, all around us. Amen.
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Is Still Speaking www.stillspeaking.com |
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