Practice incarnation

 

1 Corinthians 3: 1-9
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
February 12, 2023

Photo of me at the top of Brins Mesa trail, Sedona, AZ. I'm wearing a light blue button down camp shirt, light brown cropped cargo pants, and a black and white keffiyeh around my neck. I'm standing on dry red earth, surrounded by sagebrush and large red rock monuments in the background,
and clear blue sky.

It was the last hike of my time spent in Sedona, AZ. I had my backpack with a water bottle, a snack, and my Native wood flutes tucked safely inside. I had a hiking guide and a map. Since I was hiking alone I also had one hiking stick as opposed to two. With one I could be more nimble should I need to defend myself. Yes, this is how someone of my age, gender, and physical ability might think before heading out to hike on an unknown trail. I figured it would be foolhardy not to.



But the thought of possible injury wasn’t in the front of my mind. The hike was rated easy to moderate. This trail was hiked by hundreds of people every year. The way up to the top of the mesa and then down again had been made long before I got there. The trail had been carved by rainfall year after year but in the early spring it was a dry wash filled with red rocks. I had made it to the top without any trouble. Going down I had about 100 feet of those red rocks and then it would be smooth sailing on packed red earth.



It would have been nice to have a hand down, a shoulder to lean on, someone a little taller, a little stronger but it was just me and my hiking stick. Just when I thought I was going to make it down unscathed, I slipped on one of the dust-covered rocks. I tried to steady myself with my hiking stick in one hand but reached out instinctively with the other for balance. My left hand briefly grazed one of the prickly pear cacti growing profusely on either side of the trail but it was long enough for a dozen or so needles to embed themselves in the palm of my hand.



It would have been nice to have someone there to pull the needles out, to help me down the rest of the trail, but it was just me and my hiking stick. So, I removed the larger needles, the ones I could see. As I made my way down the trail, I had to keep my hand open because there were tiny yellow spikes in the creases, only a millimeter or two tall, that would have to wait for a pair of tweezers.



I made it to the car and then drove one-handed into town and straight to the CVS, bought some tweezers, went back out to the car, and tried to remove them on my own, but they were just too small to see. I went back inside the store to the pharmacy counter to see if they had one of those lamps with a large magnifying glass. I sheepishly asked the pharmacy tech if they could help me. Now that I had help all around me, I felt silly asking for it. Turns out, it had been a nothing burger kind of day in the store and the tech was all too happy to help me.



We human beings are complicated when it comes to wisdom and figuring things out. Sometimes we rely heavily on the wisdom of others to help us find our way, especially if they are eloquent, published, inspirational, and most of all, confident and convincing. Other times we rely solely on our own wisdom and experience, sometimes stubbornly digging in our heels to the exclusion of all else. Then there are the moments we get to impart our wisdom to others, when we’re asked to show people the way, when we’re looked to as the professional or the one who has some answers. And the thread that connects it all is belonging. No matter what we’ve figured out or if we have questions, we still want to belong to community and for community to belong to us.



In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul is all this and more. His beloved church is quarreling and he’s part of the reason why. Some people are for Paul, others for Apollos. He’s trying to level the playing field, declaring that we are all servants of God, and yet he also likens them to infants who can only handle baby food when it comes to the truth. Maybe they haven’t had an experience of the risen Christ like Paul, maybe they can’t preach like Apollos, but these Corinthians are not newcomers to human beings living in community in the praise of God. It appears they don’t trust themselves nor are they trusted to discern the truth about Jesus. So, they are choosing teams, wanting to be on the winning side, attaching themselves to the cult of personality, but all they are accomplishing is fracturing the one Body to which they were called to be community.



In our culture, we consign a good deal of power and authority to professional theologians, people who study the nature of God, religious truth, and the questions that come with that. Why is it that we are more likely to entrust others to show us the way on a path that has been well-traveled before us? Episcopal priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor said, “The body makes theologians of us all.” We’re all theologians by virtue of the fact that it is in our bodies that we experience whatever it is we call God.



Perhaps one reason we desire a guide is that the more difficult work beyond figuring out the way to live is to then embody that way to live, to practice incarnation. It can be so much simpler to admire someone like Jesus rather than try to live like him. On the other hand, for an increasingly disturbing amount of people it can be so much simpler to follow a preacher, or politician, or entrepreneur, or pop culture star, or tech guru than to think for oneself, to follow the mob rather than risk falling out of community.



What does your body tell you about God? Does God judge how much you weigh, the shape of your body? Does God love your gender and how you express your gender, no matter what your gender is? Does your God know pain and suffering, grief and exhaustion? Does your God bless pleasure and joy, laughter and laugh lines?



What would it mean for your God to be disabled? What would it mean if your God was chronically depressed, lived with anxiety? What would it mean if your God was incarcerated? What if your God took drugs? What if your God lives on the streets? What if your God is traumatized? What if your God’s ancestors were enslaved, forced off their land? What if your God was human as much as anything else? How would we worship, embody such a God? How would we practice incarnation? It’s not so much does God get us but do we get God? Do we get each other?



When the most vulnerable of bodies are liberated, there are always those who will seek to control them because of power and greed and fear. When bodies are controlled, it is much harder to practice incarnation, to embody freedom, compassion, justice, kindness, both for the ones being controlled and the ones doing the controlling. In everything we do we are a part of a body of some kind: the body politic, corporations, families, community. Church is the Body in which we open our lives to the radical solidarity of a God who took on flesh, the radical idea that all flesh is sacred and to then live that way.



So, every day, practice incarnation. Listen to your body and what it is telling you about God, about what is good and holy and true in you. Maybe your God is hungry. Maybe your God needs rest. Maybe your God is thirsty for justice. Then go listen to some people whose bodies are not like yours, listen to the God embodied, enfleshed in them. Dig in God’s dirt. Feel the warmth of God’s light. Inhale the breath of God’s lungs. Taste and see the goodness, the abundance. This is how we experience God. We are God’s body. We are Love with skin on it.

Poem by Cynthia E. Robinson entitled "An Altar of Bones"
Epigraph: "It will not out of the flesh, that's bred in the bone."
J. Heywood, Dialogue of Proverbs, 1546, II. viii. K2

Moonlit thanks
Paper joy
We are an altar of bones.

Put on that fragile flesh,
then wear it well.

For Love invites a life
fully inhabited.

Prophesy this:

The Incarnation is the Resurrection.

The Resurrection is the Incarnation.

Benediction – enfleshed.com


May the Holy Wisdom of our bodies guide us, like a moonbeam,
towards gentleness and liberation.

For, no matter the relationship we have with our bodies,
the Living God deems us blessed.

Go with God,
who expresses Herself through us.