The Wounds of Jesus: Goodness Embodied

Transcription

1 The Wounds of Jesus: Goodness Embodied Avery Smith, CCC Intern John 20 April 8, Before I move into my sermon, I m going to ask you all to do something that might be strange for you. I want to invite you to stim with me! In the autistic community, stim is short for self-stimulatory behavior the motions or sounds or actions we make in order to gain some control over our sensory input. When I am at home, you ll rarely find me sitting still I m always rocking or flapping or making strange noises or fidgeting with something textured or soft. I invite you to stand up if you are able but if you d prefer to stay seated no worries, you can stim from you seat as well! Great, now, I want you to move your body however feels good for you. Flap your hands slow or fast, bounce up and down, hum or click your tongue or slap your palms against your hips. Go ahead and stim however feels right to you, for 10 or 15 seconds. You can close your eyes if you feel nervous, cover your ears if you need to. Okay, you can sit back down if you re standing. I want a show of hands now: first, how many of you felt completely comfortable with that? How many of you were a little uncomfortable and who felt very awkward, very self conscious? If you felt awkward, I m right there with you I get very self conscious when I move my body like this in public.yet it s my natural way of being! I worry that people will judge me based off my movements, that they will stare or treat me like a child, just for doing what comes naturally. Staying still is hard for me, when I feel under-stimulated or over-stimulated by the world around me when it s too loud and crowded and the lights are too bright, or sometimes even when it s too quiet or I m just stressed about something, my natural response is to let those feelings out through my body. And when I heard what scripture I would get to preach this week, stimming was my immediate response because the joy bubbled up in me and just had to spill out somehow! It s the story of Thomas and the wounds of Jesus, one of my favorite Bible readings. It s a story that centers on the need for physicality, and on the physical body of Jesus. This is one of my favorite stories because it embraces physicality, when throughout my life I have learned, in so many different ways and from so many different sources, to hate or be ashamed of or even to fear my body. But this story has a better word. Listen for a word from God.

2 19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the [other] Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you. 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. 24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, We have seen the Lord. But he said to them, Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe. 26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you. 27 Then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe. 28 Thomas answered him, My Lord and my God! 29 Jesus said to him, Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed, lucky, are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. A word from God for the people of God. People tend to see Thomas s role in this story as a negative one he is most remembered by Christians today as doubting Thomas, and it s not meant to be an endearing nickname. To me, the story is much more interesting when we focus instead on Jesus s compassion, his understanding in the face of Thomas s need for tangible evidence before he can believe the good news of Jesus resurrection. Because yes, Jesus does say that those who do not need to see to believe are blessed a word which in Greek can also be translated as lucky, it s lucky if you don t need evidence, lucky but not necessary to being faithful but Jesus also invites the disciples to look at his wounds, even to touch them, if that is what they need to believe in this impossible event, the rising of a dead person back to life. All throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus has been using things people can touch and taste and see like water and bread, a shepherd or a gate, like his baptism in the Jordan and his washing of the disciples feet to put into words the less tangible aspects of himself. He has fed and cared for their bodies as much as their spirits because he too is human, he too knows that sometimes we need to reach out and touch the divine in order to really believe. So he holds out his hands, he offers his side, so that Thomas can see, can touch, can then proclaim My Lord and my God. This only works because Jesus still has a body. 2

3 Christianity has been deeply influenced by the dualism of Greco-Roman thought, which claims that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad, that we are most godly when we can escape the cage of bodily desires. We strip all manner of physicality from our conceptions of heaven, letting it become some abstract realm in the clouds where spirits whiz around free of their bodies. And I totally get the appeal of this vision of heaven there is a lot that I do not love about my own body. People gender me wrong because of it, for one thing; and it s susceptible to pain; and my skin and eyes and ears are overly sensitive, often leading to distress; and I absolutely hate getting sick, who doesn t? Paul, who was on top of being a faithful Jew a very Hellenized Roman citizen, enables the validation of this worldview in his frequent mentions of the body s wickedness in his letters. I won t say this view is entirely wrong it is true that the body can be used for harm, when we transform our anger or lust or envy into physical, violent deeds. But this favoring of the spiritual over the physical, glorifying the former and demonizing the latter, cannot be the whole picture not when God shaped those bodies in the Beginning and called them Good; not when Jesus rose from the dead not only spiritually but bodily. For better or worse Jesus, newly raised from the dead, defies our ideas that what comes next transcends the physical realm for pure spirit. He still has his body, a real, touchable body and what is more, it is a body that still bears all the scars and wounds that he received before he died. I imagine Jesus had the power to rise in spirit alone, so why would he keep his body, so weak and prone to tiredness, hunger, pain? Why would he keep his wounds, which would have been disabling wounds the holes in his feet hobbling his mobility and making every step excruciating, the holes in his wrists decimating his fine motor skills, the hole in his side causing internal damage beyond what we can see? Why would the God of the universe choose to keep this body, this disabled body? I think Jesus rises with his body for the sake of Thomas and all of his followers. As I said a minute ago, Jesus understands the human need for evidence we can experience with our senses. He keeps his body so that there is something for Thomas to reach out and touch. He also keeps his body so that he can keep experiencing everything that we do, the good and the bad. God so loved the world that They grafted their divinity to humanity, becoming the embodied Jesus that is not going to change now. Jesus wants to keep being part of the whole scope of human experience: 3

4 4 he wants to feel the breeze on his sweaty brow, he wants to taste bread and feel the satisfaction of a full stomach, he wants to laugh and weep and sing with friends who hug him and show their love for him through physical actions. He also keeps his body to remind us that bodies are good when God created humanity in God s image, that was not just about our spirits, it was about our entire being as embodied spirits, or inspirited bodies. If Jesus who is goodness itself retains his body, we must conclude that the myth of the body being inherently wicked is false. And what is more, a body does not need to fit our standards of perfection to be Good, to be whole. After all, Jesus s risen body is a wounded body is a disabled body. Our world categorizes bodies into better and lesser white bodies, thin bodies, cisgender bodies, men s bodies, abled bodies are explicitly or implicitly considered superior to Black and brown bodies, fat bodies, transgender bodies, women s bodies, disabled bodies. I can speak from my experience as someone with a trans, autistic body. As a trans person, society expects me to hate my body, to consider it the wrong body, a cage trapping me. And sometimes I do feel that way. There are parts of my body that cause me dysphoria and distress, that have fed my self loathing in the past and the present. And as an autistic person, society has taught me to be self conscious and even ashamed of the natural ways my body moves. Organizations like Autism Speaks, therapies like ABA, insist on Quiet Hands don t flap them around, people will stare at you and bully you and fear you! Keep them quiet at your sides, don t rock, don t hum, learn how to hold your body as neurotypically as possible, or you will never form meaningful relationships, you will never get a job, you will never fit in this world. But I am learning to flip these narratives, and the body of Jesus is helping me to do that I see how divinity fit itself inside a physical body that was not made for it, I see how that body was Jewish and Palestinian under an empire that valued Roman gentiles, I see how that body rose with scars, and how good that body was, how precious God incarnate is and then I look at my own body again. I study the parts of me that I am, as a trans person, supposed to hate, and I no longer see them as a permanent cage but as things that can grow and change. How beautiful, how incredible it is that the God who fashioned this body for me invites me to be a cocreator as it grows I can suddenly see this body as a gift rather than a curse! I can flatten my chest, I can cut my hair, I can take hormones I can join with God in shaping my outward form until it invites the people to see the real me. And I can rejoice in this body even while it s under construction I can express thankfulness for the things I would not change: for the way my lungs breathe in and out, the way my hands fold so perfectly into my partner s hands, the way my mind thinks.

5 5 In high school and most of undergrad I tried my best to play along with the quiet hands rhetoric, to keep my body still and normal until one day, I realized it was killing me. One day, I resolved to stop doing that. I think about Jesus s weird looking body with its scars and holes and I get a little bolder, get a little less afraid of looking weird. And now I have a job right here in a community that loves me; and I have a partner who is not autistic herself yet celebrates my stimming, the movements and sounds and behaviors that come naturally to this autistic body, and thus my very being has become proof that the notion that being loudly and proudly autistic will keep you from a fulfilling, love-filled life is a myth, a lie, an utter falsehood. I think Jesus kept his wounds for me. I think he kept his wounds for all of us who don t live into society s paradigm of the perfect body, and for all who have been told that they should hate their body, should punish it, should repress and avoid its natural pleasures and healthy desires. Jesus s disabled body communicates a powerful message: that disability and wholeness are not incompatible, and neither is physicality and holiness. His brown, impaired body proves that what the world calls brokenness does not need fixing to be whole after all. I think of Stephen Hawking, who passed away just a few weeks ago. How many of you saw this image or ones similar to it floating around Facebook? The image implies that now that Hawking is dead, he is finally free from his wheelchair he is finally free from his disability. Many members of the disability community, including users of wheelchairs and other mobility aids, have taken issue with this image. One advocate, Marnanel Thurman, created a new art piece in response. The image is not meant to minimize the difficulties that Hawking s ALS brought to his life. Rather, it is meant to clarify that the wheelchair was a tool that eased those difficulties the idea that Hawking was wheelchair bound is absurd when it is what allowed him to move around. image by Mitchell Toy, image by Marnanel Thurman, / /?type=3&theater

6 6 The same thing goes for Hawking s augmentative communication device. Hawking made that computer s voice his own, becoming so fond of it that in later years when less robotic sounding computer voices became available he declined changing from the robotic voice that he d proudly trademarked. After all, he said, My old system worked well and I wrote five books with it, including A Brief History Of Time. 1 He did not need a new voice; nor did he need an abled body to live a fulfilling and fruitful life. Hawking was not the great scientist he was in spite of his impairments but with them. Keah Brown, a writer with cerebral palsy, wrote an article soon after Hawking s death in which she asked, Why is everyone so eager to erase his disability in discussions of his life s work? Odds are, it's because disability makes our society uncomfortable. 2 It is true we are uncomfortable with disability. We avoid eye contact with a person in a wheelchair; we stare at the person who rocks and talks to themself; we avoid conversations with people who use alternative communication devices because we have not normalized these things and we don t know how to behave around such people. I think a part of the discomfort is our discomfort at being reminded that we all depend on one another. Many people with disabilities have unique needs and require unique care, and seeing that interdependence might remind us of how we too depend on others, that we cannot sustain ourselves. In her book The Disabled God, Nancy Eisland applies this need for care to God incarnate. The wounds Jesus sustained would have required the care of others if he had not ascended to Heaven soon after his rising, I imagine Jesus may have fashioned himself a cane or leaned on friends to get around on his impaired feet. He would have sought his mother s comfort in the face of chronic pain. Of course, Jesus needed care before he was disabled too he was born an infant as vulnerable as any of us; he got thirsty and depended on a Samaritan woman for a drink. But the care he would have required post-resurrection is more obvious to us, and this is the interdependence that Eisland emphasizes in her book, arguing that it offers us a new conception of what power means: she says, For many people with disabilities, mutual care is a matter of survival. To posit a Jesus Christ who needs care and mutuality as essential to human-divine survival does not symbolize either humanity or divinity as powerless. Instead it debunks the myth of individualism, in which transcendence means breaking free of encumbrances and needing nobody (103). This is the last thing Jesus teaches us by keeping his physical, disabled body upon rising: in these bodies so prone to injury and hunger, none of us can get by alone

7 Regardless of age or ability status, gender or skillset, we all rely on one another to survive and this is not weakness! Jesus teaches us that instead, this interdependence is a gift: we feed one another, we wash each other s feet, and in this mutual support we find love and strength and everything else we need to live into abundance. My dear friends, I don t expect this sermon to completely transform whatever loathing or fear you may hold for your body into love. After a lifetime of being told by magazines or priests, parents or peers that something about your body what it desires, what it looks like, how it functions is wrong, it would be a miracle indeed to be able to shrug off those messages in the span of 20 minutes. But I do hope that this sermon, this story of the resurrected Jesus keeping his marginalized and impaired body, will help all of us accept a few things: First, that your body is Good. Maybe you want parts of it to be different, and that is fine but regardless of whether or not it ever does change, it is good right here and now, it is whole and it is holy right here and now, inherently and irrevocably. Second, that the bodies different from yours are also Good, and that all of us join into a Body of Christ that is Black, Latinx, Palestinian, that is disabled, that is queer that the Body of Christ is all the things that our culture tries to tell us are lesser or broken or wrong. And finally, it is only when we learn to depend on one another, and to celebrate all these bodies not to look past their differences or pretend that bodies don t matter that we will live into the abundance that is the future of the Body of Christ, and that we will gain a fuller vision of the Creator in whose image all of us embodied spirits & inspirited bodies are made. Thanks be to the God who became one of us and, in becoming a vulnerable human, showed us the power and goodness in that vulnerability. Amen. 7