Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, April 3, 2022.
“For the world we raise our voices, for the home that gives us birth;
in our joy we sing returning, home to our blue green hills of earth.”
It is a beautiful world, isn’t it? This blue green home we’ve been given, warmed by the sun, watered by snow and rain; and these days, little miracles keep popping up through the soil! It’s also a broken world, with plenty of hardship and suffering and injustice; much of that caused by humans, much of it preventable, we we would be more aware and more awake and more willing.
Our worship theme for April is “The Way of Embodiment.” Which invites us to notice that we have these bodies, these vessels that can give us trouble sometime, but without which we wouldn’t exist! Our bodies remind us that we are creatures too; that being human is both beautiful and messy. We touch someone we love, and feel a spark of connection, a tingle of pleasure; we hug a friend or family member and feel at home again. We sweat, we smell, we get wrinkled and saggy. At some point our bodies wear out, or are overcome by illness, and we did. And our bodies return to the earth; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust. Humans to humus.
People created religion because of an existential human problem: being alive and knowing we’re going to die. Good religion helps us to live on this earth, to hold the joy and the beauty, the pain and the loss. Our Christian tradition is centered on the idea that God is not distant and removed, not out there somewhere, but here, with us. That’s what our friend Jesus is meant to represent and to remind us of: the incarnational theology that God was embodied in Jesus when he walked the earth, and that we are meant to be God-bearers too.
Two thousand years of church history and human history have made things a little complicated. What the Hebrew teacher and prophet Jesus started got changed by the Roman culture that Christianity grew up in. For his time, Jesus was radically inclusive, but the church said only men could be priests. Jesus spent his ministry with the common people, touching and feeding and healing them, but over time the church became more concerned with kings and princes and power, became more regal and less down to earth. The dualism of western culture caused the church to put God up in the clouds, and split off light from dark, and heaven from hell, and the spirit from the body. Those church fathers seemed to forget the beautiful Hebrew story of creation, from the book of Genesis, when God created the heavens and the earth: “The God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”
There’s plenty of healing and liberating work to do, to make religion more human-friendly and useful again, and I hope we are part of that project here. It’s happening these days in many places and traditions. The words at the top of the order of service today are from a Roman Catholic priest named Ronald Rolheiser; his writings about Christian spirituality have helped and inspired me over the years. He lives in a religious order in Texas, and he is an earthy and alive human being, and his heart and passion are evident in his theology. Ron Rolheiser asserts, “The body is not something from which one is ever meant to escape. Rather the body is to be understood as a temple of the holy spirit, a church, a sacred place where God can come and make a home.”
We need these bodies to feel love and hurt, to experience our own strength and tenderness. I’m someone who can spend too much time in my head, but lately I’ve been learning how good it is to spend more time in my body, and to listen to it as much as I listen to my brain. Getting out for a walk under the sky, doing some exercise, or making a celebration of fixing a cup of coffee or tea—this brings me back to earth. You know this too, don’t you? How these simple physical acts can be grounding and nourishing and sustaining.
There’s a story about a child who is woken by a nightmare, and her mom hears her crying, and slips into bed with her. The mom strokes her daughter’s hair, and rubs her back, and the girl calms down, and seems to be getting sleepy, so the mom starts to go back to her own bed. But her daughter grades her and holds her tight, “Don’t go, Mommy.”
“It’s okay,” the mom says, Remember what I’ve told you. When I’m in my room, God is still with you.”
“I know,” the girl says. “But right now I need God with skin.” You parents here, do you ever imagine that’s how your children might see you? As earthy, embodied manifestations of the holy, Do you ever think of your parenting as doing God’s work in the world? I hope you do.
The day I became a parent, twenty-nine years ago tomorrow, my wife Tracey was exhausted after a long and hard labor. After holding our baby against her chest for a few minutes, each of us shedding some tears of relief, gratitude, and joy, Tracey’s physical reality kicked in. “What I really want and need right now,” she said, “is a sandwich.” And this presented a beautiful opportunity for me. One of the nurses put me in a chair, and said. “Unbutton your shirt,” and when I did, she grabbed my t-shirt at the neck and stretched it, and she took our little Will, just a few minutes old, and tucked him inside my t-shirt, his skin against mine, his little chest against mine, our faces just inches apart. And I held him there. I don’t know how long we were together and touching like that; I just know it was the most profound blessing I have ever received.
I got this sermon title, “In Praise of Skin,” from a woman named Brenda Peterson, who wrote an essay by that name. Brenda had a skin disease that doctors were unable to diagnose; she had a rash that left her skin with red marks, like chicken pox. Nothing helped her, until one day she went to see her step-grandmother, who told her:
“Your body’s skin is harder-working and more wide-open than the human heart; it’s a sad thing so see how skin gets passed over, barely touched except in sex, or sickness, or deep trouble… we pay so little mind to our skin, we might as well be living in a foreign country,” this wise grandmother said. Then she started to heal Brenda, by touching her. By massaging and caressing her skin. In time the spots went away and her skin became healthy again.
There’s a poem we read at memorial service sometimes, called “Epitaph.” Written by Merritt Malloy, it’s the voice of the deceased speaking to those of us still living. Here ae the last few lines:
You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.
Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that's left of me
is love,
Give me away.
I imagine this is what Jesus would say to us too. “When all that’s left of me is love, give me away.”
Too often religion sets itself apart from our messy, beautiful, very human lives. Too often spirituality is presented as light and airy and ethereal, but that’s not where we live! We are mortal, we come from the earth, and to the earth we will return. Aren’t we meant to practice and earthy and embodied faith? Aren’t we meant to cherish and enjoy these bodies we have been given, to get to know and to give praise for this skin we are wearing? To see it as beautiful, and a blessing?
I’m grateful for the everyday mystics who remind us that the Holy is in our midst, here to be experienced and enjoyed and share. Mystics like Peter Mayer, whose song (“Holy Now,” lines from which were the reading today) reminds us that if we are gong to meet God or the Holy anywhere, it’s in the present moment, in the flesh, in our lives. That we are invited to an expansive and life-giving spirituality:
When I was a child, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don t happen still
But now I can t keep track
Cause everything’s a miracle
Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn’t one
When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I’m swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
Everything is holy now.
That’s the invitation, my friends. To be mystics ourselves; to see the holy as here and now, in our midst, in our beautiful and broken world. How can we keep from singing?
Amen.