First Presbyterian Church
Messy Flesh
Sermon for January 4, 2003
by Pastor Susan Barnes

We will begin our scripture reading with the psalms, despite how it's listed in the bulletin. After the psalm, Mark will read from Proverbs. In psalm 147, found on page 582, God is in charge of the weather. The Canaanite God, Ba'al, was the local weather God. The psalmist is eager to show Yahweh is more powerful, and furthermore, is the power of the universe who looks on the chosen people with steadfast love. (1) Listen for the word of God as we read it together in Psalm 147:12-20.

12 Praise the LORD , O Jerusalem ! Praise your God, O Zion!
13 For he strengthens the bars of your gates; he blesses your children within you.
14 He grants peace within your borders; he fills you with the finest of wheat.
15 He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly.
16 He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes.
17 He hurls down hail like crumbs-- who can stand before his cold?
18 He sends out his word, and melts them; he makes his wind blow, and the waters flow.
19 He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and ordinances to Israel .
20 He has not dealt thus with any other nation; they do not know his ordinances. Praise the LORD !

This ends our reading of the Psalm. The word ordinance can perhaps be translated better as justice; the psalmist doesn't speak of God's regulations, but of God's working for equity and reordering power on earth.

The Book of Proverbs is part of the wisdom literature of the old testament. Wisdom is personified as a wise woman. She speaks in our text. The reading is found on page 591. Listen for the word of God as it is found in Proverbs 8:22-31.

The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was rought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth-- when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world's first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited worldand delighting in the human race.

This ends our reading from the old testament. The writer of the fourth Gospel, John, draws on the wisdom tradition of the old testament to describe who Christ is. The word on the banner in the back is the Hebrew word for wisdom, hochma. But John wrote in Greek. The Greek word for wisdom, sofia ( sophia), also has a grammatically feminine ending. Lady Wisdom was at the beginning of creation with God. The radiance of her light never ends (2) ; she reflects God's eternal light, and is the image of God's goodness, (3) and God delights in her, according to Proverbs. There's even a verse in the apocrypha that mentions wisdom with swaddling cloths. John also drew upon the Greek philosophical idea of logos logos, word. Logos is grammatically masculine, and so John calls Jesus the word, rather than the wisdom, of God. Listen for the word of God as it is found in John 1:1-18.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and ived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.'") From his fullness we have all received grace upon graceThe law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

Light is a powerful metaphor; during epiphany, the twelfth day after Christmas, we remember the light of the star that guided the magi from the east. Epiphany happens on January 6 this year. Let us listen to the choir.

The magi followed the star. Jesus' birth was of such significance that even the sky was changed. John says the word, the wisdom that was present with God at the beginning of the world, became flesh, and dwelt among us. The Greek word for flesh, sarc, sarx, means what covers our bones: skin and muscle. Sarc is the part of us that feels, hungers, hurts, and bleeds. Flesh is messy. The crucifixion was messy. Suffering is messy. But that's hard for us to put up on banners, or draw for bulletin covers, or even preach about. We don't like to admit the mess.

I was reminded of the difficulties of portraying the messiness of suffering when I saw the eight finalists' plans for the World Trade Center Memorial. The different plans are all beautiful and streamlined. I was interested in art critic Eric Gibson's response to them. He said, “Well, at least they're not ugly… There is no kitsch here or overblown sentiment, to name just two of the afflictions of contemporary memorial-making. Still, there is another problem, no less severe: The designs are horribly, horribly bland.

The still bigger problem is their deadness. The catastrophe hasn't been so much memorialized as aestheticized. The designs are so elegant, so tidy. Their formal language -- clean lines, smooth surfaces, pure forms, luminous spaces -- express order and harmony. You think back to the sights and sounds of Sept. 11 -- the lingering aftershocks of that awful day -- and the mismatch is self-evident. The proposed memorials seem so remote from all that, so sanitized, as if they are reaching for something they can't grasp.” (4)

It reminded me of a critique of church. How can we fleshly humans think we can witness to the light of God's word? Jesus came as one of us fleshly humans. The theological term is incarnation. God's word lived among us in hungering and hurting flesh, and said “Follow me.” The disciples heard Jesus speak, and fought about what he meant and who was the most important. Peter, in his letters, spoke of following in Christ's steps (5) to a foolish ignorant church. What does that look like, to follow the light, the word, and the flesh of Christ?

For some of us it means inviting our friends to church. For others, it means bringing our children to church. Writer Anne Lamott wrote about making her fourteen-year-old son go to church even thought he hates it. She was bombarded by critics who accused her of child abuse and brain-washing. Lamott responded that we live in bewildering times and a little spiritual guidance never hurt anyone. Besides, teenagers left on their own would opt out of many important things that they don't enjoy, like homework or flossing their teeth. ‘It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight-training for life.' Lamott knows God also loves teenagers who don't go to church, but such teens are deprived of seeing people who love God back. ‘Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.' She also makes her son go to the church's youth group. Youth ‘want guides,' she says, adults who ‘know how to act like an adult with a kid's heart. They want people who will sit with them and talk about the big questions'” (6)

The big questions like “How can God be? How did the universe start? Does God love us? Then why is their suffering?” Those questions don't have tidy answers.

Christians still search for some sort of response, though. We want to follow the light, but it isn't a clean process. People, as flesh, are messy.

Writer Barbara Allen writes about a lay ministry course she took in her Episcopal Church. She wrote, “ I expected the course would give me a fresh perspective on the Bible and church history. I didn't realize that it would become an experience in Christian community building.

We began with a study of Genesis and a sharing of ourselves. Every week, a different person gave a brief spiritual autobiography…. In most of the stories, my classmates explained that, regretfully, they weren't raised in Christian homes, or only had nominal church ties, so of course their lives didn't go very well until they found Christ. A typical story went like this: my parents never went to church, or just dropped us off, Dad drank, Mom did her best. Or we went to church, but it didn't really mean anything; it was just to be nice and respectable. The hardships—Dad's drinking, my parents divorcing, me feeling lonely and alienated—were mostly the result of not knowing Christ. Then, somewhere in childhood or adolescence or adulthood, the storyteller became a Christian. If only they'd been raised in a Christian home and known Christ earlier, they imagined, things would have been so much better.

There were also those in the class who had been raised in Christian homes. Their autobiographies, of course, still contained hard times, but their lives were always less traumatic than those who only accepted Christ later in life. They had happy marriages, beautiful children, and meaningful lives.

I began my autobiography by telling the class that my life didn't fit either pattern. This is probably the reason I waited until last to tell my story. My home was intensely Christian. No one beat or abused me. Yet many of my adult nightmares take place in my childhood home, where religious fundamentalism was used to cover up my parent's quarrelsome and bitter relationship. Ours was a house infused with righteousness, judgment, and an utter lack of love. In the end, my dad was a sad man, who saw the world as a dangerous and menacing place, and my mother was an angry woman whose love I never felt. …After I told the class the truth about my life, reading from the paper before me, I looked up to see horrified faces.

The class was a diverse lot—from a woman my age who received direct revelation on a regular basis, to a young woman who wasn't sure she was a Christian. We ran the gamut from far right to radically left wing. I assumed that if the group were a success, over time we would gradually come together, or at least move closer to some point near the middle, because I thought. Christian community meant consensus.

That would not be the case at all. At the end of our time together, we were no closer on doctrinal issues than we had been at the start. If anything, taking a fresh look at the Bible and church history had made us even more diverse. But somewhere along the line, we became community….

…In a weekly ‘theological reflection,' one of us told of an incident in the preceding week—usually something simple, a dream, conversation, something overheard or read—that sparked us, or sparkled up out of the ordinary….These weekly reflections leveled the playing field, allowing us to be open and vulnerable to each other.

[Also, we read] the Bible together as a group. In my earlier life, I would have dismissed the approach as ‘liberal.' Our teacher and the textbook presented various views, for instance, of the first covenant between people and God. It might have been here or there. It might have happened this way or that way, to Moses or to someone else. It could have been during this time period or another. But, as the teacher said over and over throughout the course, ‘Something happened!' Something happened so wild and powerful that it changed the course of human history, reverberating down to this circle of people seated around a table in a church library. The touch of God was upon us, a bargain had been struck, a promise made. Flick. Boom.

….So there was no neat coming together. We never agreed on any one interpretation of the Bible, one mode of baptism, or one way to be a Christian. We just agreed that a path existed between the Creator and the created, and we could worship together because we believed in that relationship and thought it supremely important.

I remember I used to think that ‘liberal' meant mushy, ill-defined, take it or leave it. A liberal Christian was accommodating of varied viewpoints because of a minimal commitment. I thought it meant cold church services where people went through the motions, put in their token offering just in case there was any truth to it, then went out and did as they pleased.

But this ‘liberal' course on the Bible and the church wasn't easy at all. I realized that if you can't take theology and trim it into certainty, you have to work very hard at living it. You have to stay in the tension, ready to rethink and listen and respect. You have to join with someone you disagree with to pray and worship and sing.

This felt like wearing clothes that fit for the first time. I could be in this course, this church, with both feet and still not agree. I am not any better aligned doctrinally with the Episcopal Church than I was with the Baptists. I've never really believed in infant baptism and see no justification for it in Scripture. But I can promise to pray for a baby being baptized and even be a godparent. I am not often enriched by the church's pomp and ceremony except once in a while, when I see some guy in a processional with a twinkle in his eye that tells me he knows exactly how silly he looks in this tall, pointy hat.

So here's how we work it out, in this course and in the church at large. We say, ‘You think that? My word! Why? Hmmm, really? I think this and here's why. You still think that? Remarkable. Well, I still think this… See you in church!” (7)

Barbara Allen thought the course would tidy things up for her, theology-wise. Instead, she learned not to mind the mess. May the wisdom of God be with us as we too, learn not to mind the mess of flesh, and learn the word and follow the light of Christ. Amen.

(1) New Interpreter's Bible, IV, p. 1269.

(2) Wisdom of Solomon (apocrypha) 7:10: I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases.

(3) Wisdom 7: 26 For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.

(4) Gibson, Eric. “Nice Try, but Try Again,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2003 .

(5) 1 Peter 2:21.

(6) Christian Century, 8/23/03 , quoted in Context, Jan. 2004, part B, p. 4.

(7) Allen, Barbara, “See You in Church” Other Side, November & December 2003, pp. 40-41.