God with Skin On

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Just as his first listeners had a hard time with what Jesus said, even today his words may seem difficult, if not gross. It will get yet more graphic next Sunday when you will hear Jesus declaring this: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” We know he is not advocating cannibalism, but still…Christ’s words give us pause. What was he talking about?

Here’s a story to get us started in our exploration of his words. A terrified four year old woke up in night convinced that in the darkness monsters were waiting to grab her. She ran to her parent’s bedroom, wailing in fear. Her mother calmed her down, and taking her hand, led her back to her room, and tried to comfort the child by saying, “You don’t need to be afraid, you’re not alone here. God is in the room with you.” And the child replied, “I know that God is here, but I need someone in this room who has some skin!”

Perhaps then, we could think of Jesus as God with skin on. John’s gospel insists that the Word (that is the Second Person of the Trinity by whom and through whom all things were made) became flesh (in Greek, the word is sarx). Sarx is more than a matter of, say, meat. Sarx is a word for the human condition, a plunge into and acceptance of humanity just as humanity was and still is: entering flesh and blood, to be sure, but beyond that taking on the glorious things humanity accomplishes with awesome intelligence and creativity, and the nastiness, cruelty, hypocrisy, immorality, and arrogance, we practice in utterly godlessness ways. The whole plateful—or the whole loaf—of the human condition, all wrapped up in Christ, deeply accepted by him: that is what we are also asked to accept--to stomach.

Jesus’ early critics could not swallow the concept of God in a real flesh and blood human being. They began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” In other words, “Hey, we know his family and his background. Sure, we see that he is a gifted speaker and leader—but come on, he is not a Messiah, not some kind of god. He is just like us.”

Unlike his first critics, we church folks find that we can believe that Jesus embodied the eternal Christ, the Word, the Second person of the Trinity, and we find in his life and teaching great hope and wisdom. What may be harder for us to swallow is that after Jesus suffered, died, was buried, rose again and ascended into heaven the Christ plunged into the human condition all the more. In giving up the body of one man, the resurrection life of the Christ is now extended and present through time and space in the church, which, as St. Paul so clearly taught, is the body of Christ. In other words, the actual church, the gatherings of the faithful everywhere, like here, right now, is God present with skin on. For many people then and now, that, too, is hard to swallow! Too much sarx!

The very, very incarnational “sarxy” quality of the church as the body of the resurrected Christ leads present day outsiders and sometimes even we insiders rather to conclude of any ordinary congregation: “Hey, I know what I’m like and I know what other members are like—not exactly very Christ-like most of the time! How can we be the skin of God, how can we literally be the body of Christ?” We put Christ on a pedestal, pure and above all ordinary human stuff. Yet the gospel says, Christ is in precisely the all too human stuff.

The gospel calls us to be honest. The actual human condition—both the faithfulness and the rebellious sarx motivated behaviors—is inescapably present in the very real church which, as Luther so brilliantly stated, is always and everywhere the gathering of people who are simultaneously saints and sinners. For that reason anyone who’s been with the church for any time at all knows that it simply a fantasy that if you join a congregation you are going to live happily ever after. To quote Luther, “This is most certainly true!”

The problem is, it’s the ordinary sins and failings of the church that draws too much of our attention, instead of the faithful ministries and mission and compassion God’s people practice everyday. Dwelling on the dark side may cloud our perception of that deeper life—which prompted one smart aleck, to say in a moment deep cynicism: “The church would be great if weren’t for the people!”

The truth is this: if we want God, want Christ, then we must not only join the church, but we must also come to accept it as it is and, especially when things get rough, what can sometimes be the hardest thing of all: stay in the church, when everything inside us cries out, “I’ve had enough! I just can’t stand this anymore!”

But the church is always something both incredibly glorious and incredibly damaged. There never has been and never will be on this earth a perfect church, a problem free church, a church with no hypocrites, a church where no one is ever mean or nasty or gets hurt.

Even so, if we’re here, it’s because God has drawn us here, and the Holy Spirit has made us parts of the body of Christ. We journey and serve together, both wonderfully and imperfectly. In this sarx, in this our altogether human condition, this common-union becomes a loaf of the bread of heaven, fragrant with Christ’s resurrection. In this church we are forever joined to Christ, and in him we die and rise to new life daily—broken again and again to be offered as nourishment, hope, and Life for the world.

If we can swallow that, if we accept as reality that Christ is truly present because we sinner-saints are present, then by God’s grace we truly taste the bread of life—this sarx of the Christ. Then during the communion, hearing the words, “This is my body, given for you; this is my blood, shed for you,” we may look around and see, feel, and know that beyond the signs of the bread and the wine, are the bodies, faces, hands, feet, and voices in which God dwells. God present with skin on. Here and now and always--until the last day.

Meditation on Christ’s words: whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood will have eternal life.

Christ, why this cannibalism? Do I really have to eat you? Your words are offensive and disgusting: eating your flesh, drinking your blood.

I confess that my inclination is to spiritualize what you ask for. Let's make this about believing the right things about you, or about the pursuit of some sort of warm religious experience of union and bliss. Show me a pathway away from your flesh and blood. Show me an escape from the human condition you entered. Show me how to avoid the sweaty, stinky, bad-breathed, farting, hard-faced, arm-crossed chests of the people who are your body. Show me a way to escape from the homeless with their signs at the freeway exits; the gangsters driving their booming cars; this aging body; the moldering grave; the death of those I love and those I fear; the horror and brutality of the murderous human condition: from your tortured corpus on the Cross.

But, you say, "I am the bread of life." You call me to open the mouth of mind and heart wide, to take in and chew on the realities of the human condition you entered and loved and saved. Eat my flesh! Take all this in, swallow it, digest it, excrete that which is mere waste, and live on the rest.

Christ, if the only escape from you and all that you entered is soul death, then give me the grace and courage to eat--your flesh, the flesh of us all. Eating you, I chew on eternal life.

The Truth Shall Make Us Free

We know that torture was done in the name of the United States of America.

But we don't know enough yet, not if we want to be set free from evil that, corporately, we did.

I am seeing the need for the very opposite of the usual politicized hunt for convenient scapegoats. I look for our president and other leaders, both political and religious, to find ways for the citizens of the United States of America to know who did what and when. We don't need to hear justifications or excuses. And though there probably need to be prosecutions (since we are under the rule of the law), pointing fingers of blame as though any of us are thereby exonerated, will not get us where we need to go.

We the people had hears but we didn't hear;
we had eyes, but we didn't see;
we had voices, and we were silent.

If that weren't the truth, the atrocities of the torture would not have been allowed. Now we must hear, see, and find our voices once again.

We the people must be led to face the truth head on, accept corporate responsibility for the evil done, and allow ourselves to be led to lament and I pray, humility. Only in this way will we as a people grow into maturity.

Mature people know: only the truth, the whole truth, the real truth, unadorned with pieties and excuses, can set us free.

The Head and the Body are One

Taking direction from St. Paul, it is common to claim that Christ (crucified and risen) is the head of the church, his body--a very organic, biological metaphor.

Some theologians assert that as the body of Christ, the church is the presence of God on earth. Considering that the church is most definitely a slow-moving, often curmudgeonly, and frequently sinful and fractious entity, claiming it is the presence of God (or the risen Christ) can seem daring, if not blasphemous.

I think of the statement the New Testament character Nathanael (John 1) made when excited friends had announced to him that they had found the Messiah (the Christ), "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?!"

Often those in the first bloom of their welcome into the Church are thrilled. Later, disillusionment may set in, as the sorry reality of congregational life seems anything but the presence of God.

But the Apostle Paul, dealing with his troubled congregations kept seeing them as, and naming them as, the body of Christ. Most remarkable.

What if we look at things this way: the head is the seat of consciousness, of will, or intention, of setting direction. True, the head, that is the brain, is most definitely also body, but body with a special function, and a wise head will pay attention to body language.

The body (the church) in all its various parts and expressions will do well do recall, as best each part can, that the head is greater consciousness, knows more of what the realities are, knows what the overall plan is, and directs the body--not the other way around.

Mini versions of this metaphorical example can be pondered: parents and children share a common flesh and family structure, but parents always (one hopes) know more about the overall scope of the world and helpful and necessary responses to it. Another example: anyone who's ever held a key leadership position in an organization, especially a large organization is in some sense the "head" of the organization, and knows more about (has a greater conscious awareness of) the issues, policies, and politics inherent in that organization--and may be privy to some aspects of the organizational life that much be carrried quietly and not shared with everyone).

So with Christ as the head of the church. Our faith is not in our believing, but in the faithfulness, wisdom, and purposes of Christ, whose vision and consciousness of the whole picture (even the cosmos) so far exceeds ours that humility is our only wise option. Wise also to live trusting that the head, the Christ, pays constant attention to the pains, moods, dysfunctions, illnesses, efforts, sorrows and joys of the body, and leads it forward in helpful, healthful ways, even when it sometimes is a painful thing.

Nazareth is the incarnation of the Christ into real humanity in real time and in full reality, just as it is, with a future yet unseen.

In these trying times, try Psalm 73

Outrage and anger toward the smart guys at the top.

Worry and anxiety in the loss of job, home.

Rage, rage, rage.

But is that the best we can do?

Read Psalm 73 for a profoundly helpful piece of spiritual direction.

For a real hoot, read it in Eugene Peterson's The Message.

Ponder.

What if there were no malls?

I am thinking of something that I believe Harvey Cox suggested sometime ago: the real religion of at least the western world (and now, perhaps more globally) is money.

If that is the case, then malls, especially the newer ones, are the cathedrals to the great god money. Jesus warned us about “mammon”, asserting that one cannot worship both the real God and mammon (projected as a god with the inherent powers and blessing of money, wealth, shadowed by greed and avarice and dedication to piling up ever more).

Consider then our existence in 21^st century if there were no malls. What would people do? What would we do if we lacked the pilgrimages of shopping? How would we spend our time on Sunday afternoons—or mornings for that matter?

Our lives are so intertwined with the economic system—including the ever-present hype of advertising—that we would have a hard time figuring how to live without it. Our purpose and self-image are produced and given purpose by it; or, if our circumstances are not affluent, we may rage against the weight of oppression and marginalization we experience.

Whether well-off or poor, the warning in this scenario is the great danger of becoming utterly lost in a wilderness of human invention, slyly encouraged by the "god" mammon: the system of this world. We become lost in the sense of having lost our way, and our true life and true community, because even though some of us still show up for "church", in daily life we've forsaken the mystery of the Divine One who is the heart of everything.

We can turn around and head back home! In this time of economic convulsion, of mammon's shock and awe, there is the possibility for more than outrage and hand-wringing and despair:

“Return to the Lord your God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…”

Quadrinity?!

In his work on Quadratos (a made up word, signifying something fourfold) Alexander Shaia brings to our attention that it is no accident of history that the canon of the Scriptures includes four gospels. He notes that from ancient times the fourfoldness of creation and of the work of God was self-evident. Indeed, Irenaeus insisted that there must be four gospels, exactly, because this is how God works: the divine pattern is always fourfold.

Pondering this the other day I was thinking, how odd then, that Christians developed the doctrine of the Trinity! Why not a "quadrinity"? But no, the long tradition of the church insists on the one-in-threeness of the divine mystery.

Then I thought about Rublev's famous icon of the Trinity. Many have commented on how the figures in the icon are clearly in communication with one another, and yet the figures are arranged in a way that faces outward toward the viewer--an openness, an invitation, a sense of welcome. Thus the pray-ers of the icon are invited into communion with the Holy Three. The deep koinonia of the Trinity becomes a gift to us all.

If so, then those who pray the icon, i.e., the church, complete the Trinity. And thus the Trinity becomes "quadrinity", now and forever. Amen.

Prayer, Psalms, Openness to the mystery of God

Prayer is many things:asking, begging, pleading, lamenting, cursing, praising, thanking, murmured or shouted into the great mystery called God.

The Psalms model the diversity of prayer, and, it occurred to me today, something more. For all their variety of expression, the Psalms share not only a sense of divine reality, they also share an evident openness to God. Their honesty (so very human) is shocking to some of our pious notions about what prayer should or should not be. But such is their openness. It is as though praying like a psalmist is a matter of a no-secrets radical openness. After all, God already is well aware of everything anyway, so why not let your guard down and get real!

Such (radical) prayer is less about requesting this or that of God, and more a matter of baring one's soul with a sense of God's mysteriously reliable and merciful presence, and that presence in and of itself is worth everything, is what fills the "hole in the soul."

"As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God." (Ps. 42)

The Cross and Jesus' Other Friends

The Christ asks his church to take up its cross and follow--him.

The Cross is his inevitable way. Not a pretty picture. Not prosperity gospel. Not good times all around always.

One cross is already visible, and we are tempted to drop it: a disenfranchised religion, struggling along into the post-modern world where most everyone is suspicious of any one who too strongly holds on to anything. Triumphalism is futile and foolish. A good worship service alone, as the prophets made clear long ago, is not necessarily pleasing to God.

The issue: to let go of our "life" in order to find it, that is, to actually receive the life of the Christ. Our illusions and delusions about our churchly life, our piety, our righteousness, our being better than "those others"--all this must go, because of course the worst kept secret in the world is that no one in the church--any church--is better than "those others."

Here is a hint for us. Christ is not captive to the church buts gazes upon us through the eyes of the panhandler, the homeless kids, the shy visitor to our congregations, the old person mostly forgotten in the nursing home, the stranger, the immigrants, the employee in the next cubicle over whose life, one overhears too many times, is clearly a living hell.

Those who would follow Christ must risk taking up the cross of non-judgment, welcome and mercy, and stumble after him right into the messy unfamiliar existences of his other beloved friends--our neighbors.

That's the issue for the church--Jesus' other friends. Seek, invite, and gather a community like that, and having our lost our life, we've found it.

Look what happens to God's Beloved

The First Sunday Lent tells the story: Jesus is baptized. The "beloved" one is then driven into the wilderness to meet Satan and the wild beasts.

This is Jesus as the scapegoat, the sinner-bearer. The rest of the gospel is perhaps an unfolding narrative of temptation at every juncture of Jesus' mission and ministry. Lauded by the common folk, Jesus met the "wild beasts": hated by the authorities who steadfastly opposed both his methods and his teaching of the Kingdom of God. Finally comes Holy Week and the Cross. Mocked, whipped, spit upon, jeered, and duly executed. The beasts of power and authority licked their chops, and then, satiated, padded off to their dens, believing themselves secure in their positions and rectitude.

Jesus suffering is what happens to God's "beloved." I doubt that most of us are really ready for this. And only the insane among us will consider themselves Christ. But it is not insane to believe in the church as the body of Christ. And if the body of Christ, then the church as community can and should expect to suffer as Jesus suffered--but that God-born suffering will happen only when and where the church is intent on living its corporate life as Jesus lived his: steadfastly on the side of the poor, the outcast, the marginalized. Criticizing the powers that rule us. Naming oppression for what it is for the sake of announcing and living into the coming reign of God.

The beloved of God--the body of Christ--will do such things. And perhaps more. Quietude in the church is not necessary a virtue. It is often the greatest of sins, when, for fear of losing face, position, or experiencing conflict, the church remains silent at precisely those points where it ought to speak--and act.

A child on Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

The procession up to receive the imposition of ashes.
The movement back to our pews,
dark, messy crosses thumbed on our foreheads.

Down the aisle returns the crossed mother with her child,
Less than two years old,
The solemn smudge on her little forehead, too.
She too had heard the words:
"Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."
What did she understand of that?
What did I understand of that?

Seeing her, my heart ached.

We are united in the great sorrow and suffering of being human.
Along the way, she will suffer.
Long after I am dead and gone,
She too will die.

Yet her eyes sparkled,
Her smile beamed benediction across the gathering.
I remembered the ancient words:
"If we have been united with him in a death like his,
We will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his."

We live the cross,
But ineffable is the joy of the saints.

Ash Wednesday and Lent

Today, Ash Wednesday, will mean many Christians "giving up something for Lent." In addition, some will also choose to add into their lives a specific intention to do something positive for others. Both can be very healthy for Christians and Christian congregations, especially if such discipline is followed for the sake of the community.

Consider a text appointed for this day--Isaiah 58, in which the prophet gives voice to God's desire for shalom in the context of real life community. After mocking the practices of the outwardly pious, come these words (CEV translation):
I'll tell you what it really means to worship the Lord.
Remove the chains of prisoners who are chained unjustly.
Free those who are abused.
Share your food with everyone who is hungry;
Share your home with the poor and the homeless.
Give clothes to those in need;
Don't turn away your relatives.

All of this is about God's cry for shalom in the real world of human community. It is at heart linked with the way of the Christ and I would say is the great heart at the core of any religion.

Alexander Shaia (www.quadratos.com) asks us to consider that such a larger Lent was the practice of the early church: Lent as a yearly retreat for congregations, during which they examined their lives together, sought forgiveness and reconcilation and scrutinized their ministries and mission to the world in the light of the way of the Christ.

What if Christian congregations found the courage to reform Lent that way now? Then, instead of wallowing in the dismal examination of personal sins and neuroses, or the unhealthy cult of individualism ("Jesus and me"), congregations would be asked to consider together how well their aim to serve as the body of Christ in their particular neighborhoods and communities lived up to their intentions. Such a metric, fleshed out in the particulars of the congregations real life would mean forgiveness and reconciliation among themselves, and renewal and rededication to their mission. After all that, Easter would mean a renewed and renewing celebration of the presence of the risen One now more consciously known among them. It would be a discovery again of what it really means to worship the LORD.