Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

The First Sunday After Christmas 2007
The Word Became Flesh
Deacon Richard Buhrer

From novelist Neal Cunningham:

“The sultan has an Oxford accent with traces of garlic and red pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes. The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition…. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus greased ball joints…. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.”[1]

Not a pretty picture, eh?

The idea that God has come in the flesh was a great stumbling block to many people in the early centuries of the church. In our time, too, I think it is a challenge to us to fully affirm and embrace the humanity of Jesus. In the Creed, week in and week out, we say, “For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and was made man.” We even bow when we say these words, but how comfortable are we with what they mean? God was so attracted to, so utterly interested in what it was like to be a human being, that she wanted to have the experience for herself. In the movie Dogma, Alanis Morrisette plays God who is dabbling , yet again, at incarnation and becomes trapped in the body of an elderly Jewish American man who is in the hospital on life support. In Her absence, a pair of rebellious angels hatch a fiendish plot to overthrow God and unmake the universe. She is at last liberated from the body she has chosen by two of the heroes in the story unplugging the man’s ventilator. God then appears in the midst of the crisis but is distracted from the carnage at hand by the odor of flowers. She starts turning summersaults on a new mown lawn.

The tradition goes that this was the reason for the rebellion of Lucifer: God showed him the future incarnation of the Word and the idea was so repugnant to Lucifer, “that proud sprite,” that he cast himself out of heaven. Is the idea, at some level, repugnant to us? If this is how God feels about being human, how are we to respond?

There is no simple answer, no one easy recipe for this. The Incarnation changes everything. Everything about us, everything about humanness is not only good in itself but now divine at its core: our desires, our longings, our weakness, our strength, our hungers, our needs, our feelings, and even our anger and aggressiveness. God relishes all of these things. He relishes them so much that, He whom the universe cannot contain, being made human, shut himself up within the Virgin’s womb. We are left to relish and cherish everything human because humanness is now the way to God. How are we to put this into practice?

First, the Anglo-Catholic ethos that we participate in here is a means of realizing this: we seek to worship God with beauty, sensual delights (like the odor of incense and the taste of wine), and with our bodies: sitting, standing, kneeling, bowing, embracing one another. At the foot of the altar, singing the entrance hymn, lately, I have had the sense lately that we are participating in the cosmic worship of the One seated on the throne and of the Lamb, surrounded by the twenty-four elders and the unnumbered choirs of saints and angels, all singing: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD.” But we are doing this and are meant to do this, as embodied beings.

Second, the separation of soul and body, that we take for granted, is really not a biblical idea: it is a holdover from ancient Greek philosophy. In the languages of the Bible, soul and body are equivalents (in the mathematical sense): though not exactly equal, each encompasses and stands for the other. Human being is one thing; it is not two things, however much we have been taught to think that religion is about the soul only and at odds with the body.

So we need to work to unlearn this dichotomy in our thinking and living. We need to repent of the shame and disgust with our bodies that we have been so studiously taught since our infancy. From the first time we discovered what an interesting experience it was to run our fingers through the contents of our dirty diapers and met the disgust in our mothers’ faces to the last time we saw a commercial (for cosmetics, hair replacement, deodorant, toothpaste mouthwash, or whatever), we have been and are being taught to despise our own flesh

Third, we need to learn not to turn our back on our own flesh. As the prophet Isaiah puts it: “… loose the bonds of injustice, …  undo the thongs of the yoke, … let the oppressed go free, and … break every yoke…. share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, … cover them, [do not] hide yourself from your own kin?”[2]

In a column published in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2005, Fr. Giles Fraser, a priest in the Church of England, tells this story[3]: In 2002, the Catholic League of America objected strongly to an exhibition of a Catalan nativity set in Napa, California. The set included the "caganer," a traditional Catalan figurine. Anyone know what kaka means in Italian or Spanish? The Caganer is a pot bellied, appealingly ugly little peasant who is portrayed squatting in the corner of the Christmas stable, trousers around his ankles. The Catholic League was, understandably enough, somewhat offended “by the presence of a defecating peasant in the holy stable.”

Again to quote Fr. Fraser: “What it didn't appreciate, however, is that the Christmas story is supposed to be offensive, and that the caganer is a reminder of the theological revolution that scandalized sophisticated opinion of the first few centuries of the Christian era: that God became human, that the sacred was no longer to be protected from the profane.”

Even though I love our nativity set, I have never known a woman after giving birth who could kneel with composed adoration (however much she might feel it) as our Lady is portrayed here. Mary was probably lying down exhausted on a pile of clean straw with Jesus nestled against her breast. The stable, already soiled by manure, was further fouled by amniotic fluid, blood and the holy placenta.  Jesus would have been covered with vernix caeseosa, the white cheesy substance coating the skin of newborns to protect them from the aquatic environment of the womb. Joseph would have had to wash the baby and clean up the stable to make Mary and her baby comfortable. We kitsch up our images of the stable at Bethlehem:

Kitsch is a Yiddish word that has come to mean pretentious bad taste in art. Christmas is resplendent with kitsch (and I for one rather enjoy it). But Czech novelist, Milan Kundera sees kitsch as a much more dangerous and destructive force in the world[4]. He sees kitsch, the effort to make everything nice and pretty, as the cause of the ghetto and the crematorium: the effort to eradicate, remove or conceal everything that is kaka about human experience.

As Fr. Fraser puts it: “Orthodoxy turns out to be vastly … radical; it refuses to separate the divine from material reality. God is born in a stable. The divine is re-imagined, not as existing in some pristine isolation, but among the [kaka] of the world. The temptation to disassociate the divine from material reality marks the beginnings of kitsch. For, once unhitched from the divine, the complexity of the world can be too easily bypassed and ignored. The orthodox formulation of the incarnation allows no way of avoiding politics, food, sex or money. Nor, as the Christian story of God goes on to make horribly clear, does it offer a way of avoiding suffering and death.”