2014 Theme | The Human Body and the Body of Christ
by Dorothy Bass
After months of discerning and planning, and weeks of reading and anticipating, here we are, in the flesh. More people have worked to get our bodies here and to arrange for us to be housed and fed than others have done to prepare the program. That’s how it is for us earth creatures, born of woman, dependent on daily bread, vulnerable to physical harm. We have bodies, and our bodies must be nourished and sheltered. Indeed—and this is the delightful paradox—even more than we have bodies, we are bodies. We can’t think or talk about this theme without inhabiting it: just naming it sets our tongues in motion and our eardrums vibrating. The ideas we’ll discuss depend at least in part on neural activity that takes place in the meat between our ears.
Every Christian congregation holds the knowledge that flesh matters deep in its bones. This knowledge is honed and expressed in the sounds and gestures of bodies at worship, as we share a meal, wash those who are new to life in Christ, anoint one another with oil, praise God or raise supplications and lamentations with the breath of our lungs, and lock eyes, clasp hands or hug in grateful response to God’s mercy and peace. The knowledge that flesh matters also shapes the acts of care and service that are so important to congregational life.
But there’s more to this knowledge that congregations bear. Because we’ve met God enfleshed in Jesus, we know not just that bodies matter, but how they matter, and for what. Embodiment is a site of the sacred, and if we attend to Jesus’ body we see what that looks like. It looks like an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, utterly dependent on caregivers and utterly vulnerable to the violence of a jealous king. It looks like a young man drinking wine at a wedding and asking for water at a well; scooping up some dirt, spitting into his hand, and making healing mud for a blind man’s eyes; feeding multitudes and inviting himself to dinner at an outcast’s home; washing feet. It looks like a teacher receiving the tearful kisses of a woman of the city early in his ministry and the guilty kiss of a friend at the end. It looks like a convict bound, beaten, stripped of clothing, and crucified. It looks like a body in death, wrapped in spices and linen for burial. And it looks like a risen body that shows forth God’s new creation, breathing peace on those who huddle in fear, the wounds still present in hands and side and feet.
Looking through Jesus’s body, we see that not only our own bodies matter, or only those bodies that are fair, and able, and culturally approved. Instead, we see the preciousness of each and of all. And looking through Jesus’s body, we also see the frailty and fragility of all these bodies that matter so much, so dearly.
Every Christian congregation knows these things in its bones and affirms them in its worship and in its living. And yet … most of the actual congregations I’ve known are deeply uncomfortable with embodiment in one way or another—disturbed by the differences bodies make visible; overwhelmed by the urgent needs of their own or others’ bodies; frightened by pain and by death; or simply convinced that other things—money, ideals, decorum—matter more. Some bodies are idolized while others are disdained, excluded, ignored, damaged. Look at the newspaper, look around your own congregation, and you will know whose bodies these are.
Our theme statement speaks of “the human body.” (This is rather grand and abstract; could it be a textbook title?) In fact, there is no such thing as the human body … there are just lots and lots of human bodies, each one unique. Our statement also lifts up Paul’s image of the church as “the body of Christ”—one of the most powerful images we have of the vitality and interdependence of the community of Christ-followers and of our unity with him and one another. In a sense, this “body” does not exist as a singular thing either … well, perhaps it does eschatologically, by promise and in hope, but remember that Paul was advocating this model to a congregation riven with divisions and not acting like a united body at all. The bodies of Christ to which we belong, like our human bodies, bear wounds and disabilities; they show the effects of stress and overindulgence. Here, too, some are more honored than others, and each one is unique.
Embodiment is a condition common to all. At the same time, embodiment is a stamp of irreducible particularity: here I am, here you are, this one, that one, not another. You know this as you minister—as you pray at the bedside of a particular sufferer, as you counsel a particular mourner, as you work with the voices you actually have in the choir, as you attend to the concrete specificity of the people among whom your own worship and living become incarnate in and for the world.
Those of us who have been planning this seminar are amazed at the wealth of particularities—the rich variety of unique bodies of experience and imagination—that the seven teams bring. We hope you will let your congregation’s unique charism shine, and that you will keep your home places in your hearts and minds, and in our conversation. Remember the hymns and songs sounded with the breath of that particular body. Visualize the specific faces and feet and hands and torsos of the people who are covering for you while you are away and who will greet you when you return. Ponder those who suffer in your community, within or beyond the church’s boundaries, and help us all to lift them up in prayer. Recall the smells that rise from the street in front of your house of worship, and from the latte stands, dinner tables, and soup kitchens to which worshippers disperse. Remember what you most love about the earthy particularity of the body of Christ that you know best—and also what you find difficult.
I also hope you will come to care for the home places of your new friends and colleagues here. I know you will learn from one another’s creativity—and probably from one another’s mistakes as well.
Given the encompassing character of our theme, it’s easy to imagine many different congregations and issues in ministry that could broaden and deepen our perspectives on the human body and the body of Christ. We have only seven—a small number, but also one with rich biblical resonance! Each one is unique, and uniquely valuable—and among you, you are exploring matters of great interest, and great urgency, to the wider church.
You are making the suffering that exists in the world and in your communities more visible—not shying away from it as many cultural forces would have you do—and you are doing this in the midst of bold and honest ministry to those in need.
A church that bears the name of the mother of Jesus lifts up embodied love at the extremes of hope and loss by placing two images of Mary embracing her son—newborn and at his death—at the intersection where people enter worship, and where they go out again to lives of service and justice.
A congregation already adept at a form of music that was “birthed in experiences of oppression, deprivation, and brokenness”—jazz—is creating liturgies that aim to make God’s healing and forgiveness accessible to those experiencing brokenness of physical body, brokenness of loss, brokenness of spirit, and brokenness of relationship.
You are breaking down barriers of embodied difference through your creativity and thoughtfulness in shaping the church’s song and celebrations.
The people of St. Nicholas Catholic Parish have learned to sing by heart—and now they are having their hearts expanded as they learn to do this in ways that honor and include both English speakers and Spanish speakers. Sensing a growing need for a bilingual expression of their embodiment as a Christian community, they are creating texts and settings that “encourage our community to sing whole-heartedly with one voice as one body, and to seek justice through unity.”
The vision of St. Paul and the Redeemer Episcopal Church is to become a community that mirrors the radical hospitality of Jesus. While cherishing wholehearted participation in music and worship that embodies the best in its own tradition, this congregation is also stretching to honor and incorporate the gifts of many musical traditions, partly by creating festivals that introduce or deepen engagement with some of these—centered in worship, spilling beyond it, open to all age groups, reaching out to neighbors as well.
You are trying to get people out of their heads. From within traditions that have prized words and decorum more than movement, smells, feelings, and color, you are advocating for and experimenting with liturgical forms that engage the whole person.
On Long Island, a congregation of the United Church of Christ says “Let Wonder Be Reborn.”
In Minnesota, a Lutheran congregation that is “a home for hungry minds and souls” encourages more embodied worship and a more embodied understanding of Christian faith itself. They are noticing “children’s bodied ways of worshipping and knowing,” and they are reaching out to adults who are not so much unchurched as dechurched, in unique contemplative services that draw on Celtic and Nordic traditions.
You are grappling with questions about the connections of embodied persons to one another in a changing culture.
In Madison, Wisconsin, a congregation near the university is wondering how to understand and serve faithfully in a context where community happens both face to face and through digital media. What are worshiping congregations to make of changing patterns of communication and relationship? Even to state the question in an open and neutral way is difficult: we so easily suspect one another of being Luddites on the one hand or uncritical adopters on the other. But this is a question being raised in every church council in the land. Maybe we can shed some light on it, together, for the sake of our own congregations and many others.
We are a small company, each with our own distinctive foibles and gifts, but the questions we’ll be exploring are questions that affect the whole church. You come from particular bodies, each unique. But here, mysteriously, we will also become a new body. In this seminar, we will not only talk about worship. We will also worship—not as an object lesson, but because we need to bring the matters that concern us, and we need to bring our very selves, into the challenging, gracious presence of God. As we explore embodiment, we will look at the world, again and again, through the body of Jesus. We will renew our hope in the promise that we are Christ’s body in and for this world. We will lift suffering bodies to God in prayer. And we will worship God with praise and thanksgiving—for the God-given life of all creation; for the reconciling life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and for the new life the Spirit continues to blow into the communities represented at the seminar and also into other communities all over this blessed, beautiful earth. May God bless our conversations here, and may God bless the congregations from which we have come and to which we shall return.