Making peace with our bodies

 

Luke 24: 36b-48
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
April 14, 2024

"Christ of the Wheelchair" by Derek Yoder
An icon of a clean-shaven Christ with short brown wavy hair sits in a wheelchair wearing a blue and red top with red trim, with a bib and a lap blanket over their legs. Christ has a halo with the Greek letters omega, omicron, and nu in lowercase ("The Being One").  There are rocks and a tree by a waterfall in the background.  Christ's left hand is extended outward, the right hand is in a gesture of blessing. On the right side of the icon are the letters IC above XC, an abbreviation for the Greek words for Jesus Christ.

First, everything I say about living in a human body comes from my own limited experience. I have not made peace with my own body; it’s more like a daily temporary peace, a détente negotiated and renegotiated. I try to remind myself every day that I am only temporarily able-bodied. I also try to remember to be thankful that I am growing older each day. Because now there are two old men that I will never meet—my father and my brother—I want to look forward to meeting the old woman I will become. And I know that is more likely to happen because I am White, I am upper-middle class, I have access to healthcare, and I have community. Our society was designed for people like me, well, almost. Because I am a cisgender woman, I am 50% more likely to receive an initial wrong diagnosis if I am having a heart attack. Also, the speculum has not changed in any significant way since the mid-1800s.



Bodies: there are days it feels like we can’t live with them but we certainly cannot live without them. I have no idea what it feels like to live with gender dysphoria, to feel like my gender does not match my body. Or body dysmorphia or an eating disorder or chronic pain. Or what it’s like to be disabled. Even though the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed almost 34 years ago, there is still a large segment of our population that believes we all should be able to fit into the dominant able-bodied, binary gender, neurotypical stereotype of being human, with the White cisgender male body as the standard or norm.



Dominant cultures make standards and norms and then try to make them universal. Anything that does not adhere to a standard or norm deviates from that standard or norm and therefore bears a stigma. Menstruation, a normal biological function, still bears a stigma, as does menopause. Transgender, non-binary, and genderfluid folx are still harassed, discriminated against, and murdered just for being themselves, even more so if they are people of color. 42.5 million disabled people in this country are still treated as other and different rather than as ordinary people trying to adapt and adjust every day just like anyone else, only more so.



Stigma comes from the Greek word for “mark, spot, or brand”. I sometimes wonder if our current fascination with tattoos comes from this. Life has marked us, changed us in some way, and we choose to bear that change in our flesh with symbols and words that are meaningful to us.



Jesus was marked by his crucifixion, by empire, injustice and violence, and after he was raised from the dead, he still bore the scars and wounds of his death, what are called stigmata. In effect, his hands and feet were impaired, his side wounded. In the resurrection he was not made perfect but he was a whole person, nonetheless. It is in this image of God’s body broken, forever changed, and yet whole that author and professor Nancy Eiesland witnessed God as disabled. She wrote, “Not an omnipotent, self-sufficient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant. [Rather] God as survivor, unpitying and forthright.” As a disabled person she recognized “the incarnate Christ in the image of those judged ‘not feasible’, ‘unemployable’, with ‘questionable quality of life.’”



What would it mean to center our faith in a disabled God? Author Nancy Mairs who lived with MS wrote, “A God who put on a body and walked about in that body and spoke to us from that body and died as that body and yet somehow did not die then or ever but lives on in our bodies which live in God. It’s not the easiest story to swallow.” Yet it’s also a compelling story because God lives in our bodies, just as they are, just as they will become, which also live in God.



In the hymn “Bring Many Names” by Brian Wren we sing words like “old, aching God”, “strong Mother God”, “young growing God”. What if our God had cancer? What if our God had a weakened immune system? What if our God has been on kidney dialysis for years? What if our God depended on a “sip-puff” wheelchair, the one quadriplegics use to be mobile? What if our God cannot hear or see or speak even though God is still speaking? How then do we listen? The idea that God engages in signs to communicate with us takes on new depth and meaning. A sip-puff wheelchair can look like resurrection.



If our unconditionally loving God is disabled, the resurrection means that envy, fear, resentment, and shame cannot reside in our bodies. Every day, sometimes every moment we learn anew what that means. We say our bodies betray us as we grow older, we resist it as much as we can, and when we reach a certain age, it can sometimes seem like that’s all we can talk about. Maybe that’s just our way of coming to grips with reality, trying to achieve some kind of peace, our own détente. All of us are heroes for having been here, in that every day we wake up, we try again to be kind, compassionate, and loving to ourselves and to our neighbor.



Somedays we will mess that up royally. We’ll call a piece of food bad or ourselves bad for eating it, telling ourselves we have to pay for it with exercise. We’ll deny ourselves grace and rest. We’ll tell ourselves things we would never say to a good friend. We’ll project our frustration onto those closest to us. We’ll assume we know why someone is behaving the way they are and base our actions on our assumptions. And yet our God, a disabled God, a God with scars and imperfections, lives within us and us in Them, together a work in “prog-mess”.



Somedays we as a species are capable of causing great pain, breaking and disabling human bodies and lives, families and whole nations. I believe one reason that is so is because we are estranged from our own bodies and segregated from the bodies of those who have been forever changed by violence and illness, some of which is hidden right in front of us. An estimated 1.3 billion people or 1 in 6 people are significantly disabled worldwide. Being disabled is part of the human experience. The disabled God calls us into solidarity and mutual care, holding all bodies together and yet each one distinct and unique, making peace with one another.



Making peace with our body, respecting our body and its complexity, is an act of resistance and liberation, and it is through our limits and impairments we also share in the fullness of God’s image. We are all fearfully and wonderfully made, in the image of God, a disabled God who offers us connection and strength through Their scars and wounds that we would know ourselves to be made whole. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com


Go forth in your tender, temporary body,
honoring the echo of the eternal in all beings,
that we might co-create a world of easeful access
and compassionate care.