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God’s Love Language: Incarnation (An Advent Sermon)

Preacher’s Commentary: I found this sermon from 2016 recently and I’m touched by the choppy, stumbling quality of it. I had been sick with a flu bug but I also was still reeling from the election of D. Trump as president. Sadly, there are just as many devastating images of desecrated bodies in the news in Advent of 2018. If I was delivering this sermon again this year I would certainly reference the toddlers in diapers being gassed at our border.  I might include beautiful young Sandra Parks dying of a gunshot wound and saying, “Mama, I’m shot.” I’m sure you can add your own simiilarly distressing examples.  – VW

 

Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn on December 18. 2016

I got hit with a flu bug this week and Thursday found me too weak to do anything but lie on the couch in a blanket and click on news articles on my iPad. I read the news most every day but not like this; not without doing anything else all day but drinking tea.

And as I clicked and read words, what  I saw was bodies. What I realized with startling intensity was that everything I was reading was about human bodies locked in internal and literal combat, fighting, suffering, loving, yearning, surviving, dying.

I saw Aleppo. I watched videos sent by people who looked into the camera and asked me not to forget them, and I will not. I will not forget them. I will not forget that they were able to speak to all of us through the miracle of technology as bombs whistled through the air in the background. I know some of them may have been Islamist extremists, what we would call terrorists. Still, I will not forget them. I will not forget their eyes.

I will not forget their children who deserved a lifetime of their own.

I saw that among these bodies in crisis there was care and courage and love. And I knew that there was grace even there because there is no place where grace is not.

And I saw a judge in Texas overturning a law that required women to provide funerals for their fetuses. I saw the reproductive freedom fighters celebrating this tiny concession to the autonomy of women’s bodies. And I saw that women’s bodies were full of grace, and that they should not be subjected to government control, or anyone’s control.

I saw human bodies – Native American women, men, transpeople and youth – shivering with cold — in Standing Rock and in Flint, MI, where they had put their bodies on the line in the fight, to be able to have unpoisonous water to drink and to bathe in, and to cook with and add to their children’s oatmeal in the morning. I affirmed with them that every body – EVERY BODY — has the inalienable, basic human right to eat and drink good food and water.

I remembered the bodies of Philando Castilo and Sandra Bland and so many other people of color, loved and alive before the bullets of police officers and the  travesty of the American criminal justice system laid them down forever.

And right here, in our community, I saw people lined up in the snow to be fed by soup kitchens like My Brother’s Table in Lynn, where so many of us from this church gathered yesterday. Our bodies chopped and diced and cooked and served and cleaned and poured coffee and sat and listened to other bodies, all sharing one warm room on one cold day.

I saw journalist’s bodies being handcuffed and physically removed from the North Carolina legislature for exercising their constitutional rights, and it occurred to me that it is not an accident that we use the same word for vigorous activity as we do for the practice of democracy: we exercise it.

I saw that we are in a time that will require us, as far as we are able, to bring our actual bodies to places of injustice as often as we can, because nothing makes an issue so real and so relevant as when human beings flood the scene with their incarnate, sacred presence. “Gathered here in one strong body” does not refer to muscles. It refers to soul strength.

I saw the human drama play out on a small screen from a couch and I fully encountered the power and vulnerability and sanctity of the human body and its perennial struggles.  Witnesses the evil and savagery that is also part of human nature,  I covered my head with a warm hat and I prayed. How easy it is to live in my head. How easy it is to worship a transcendent God and forget that the central sacred story of this season is about God wanting and choosing to be born one of us, this savage and this beautiful and this powerful and this vulnerable.

There is a book called the Five Love Languages, whose author, Gary Chapman, says the five love languages we all have are Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service And Physical Touch.

         I saw most especially this past week that God’s love language is Incarnation.

         Whatever our quibbles with the supernatural elements of the Christmas story, I hope our skepticism can live side by side with a reverent appreciation for why this story has mattered so profoundly to human beings across such a long period of time and has spread to so many different lands: because it is a story about God actually choosing to be in this mess with us, as one of us.  not above, not observing from a cloud, but with us.  Emanu -El means God with us.

As vulnerable as any of us, and more vulnerable than many of us.

“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place *while Quirinius was governor of Syria.*

And everyone went to their own town to register.”

Did you notice that? Syria.

And everyone went to their own town to register. Some things never change.

I have wondered for a long time about the teaching that we are made in God’s image. What could that mean?

I have long assumed it meant that our consciousness itself, our awareness of being alive itself, is a god-like attribute. I had assumed it meant that our capacity to wonder, and to feel awe, and to care that we are alive and to love other people and creation while we are alive – I thought that was the godly thing about us.

But this week.

This week. These times. These days.

Those babies in the rubble in East Aleppo. That tiny body washed up on the shore in Turkey. The miracle of consciousness is most ungodly if we do not create and protect a world where it is accepted and honored that the holy of holies resides in all living beings.

As we live in Advent hope of the coming of that world, we must remember that the Christmas story, the “Jesus event,” as we sometimes call it, is a story about holiness being present in one child and in all bodies, but also being present in all of human experience.

Try to accept that. It is not easy.

You, and me, and our strength and aches and pains as we age – our delicate impermanence.

  • our children downstairs making crafts and running around, — you, wheeling into coffee hour
  • and pulling into the parking lot,
  • you on your knees bathing a frail elder whom you love, and you shopping for cookie fixings,
  • and you scooping up mashed potatoes on a plate and smiling at someone in the line who hasn’t had any one smile at them for days,

And you, losing your physical powers but still fiercely in love with the world and wanting to help,

And you recovering from pneumonia,

and you learning how to walk

and you having your diaper changed,

and you, asleep and waking and breathing and in every moment that the miracle of creation surges through you…

this is God’s love language.

You are the instrument.

The holiness at the heart of being that stitched you together in your mother’s womb did not leave you then and has not left you for one second since you wailed your first cry into the world.

Emanuel. God is with us. If only the world knew how to appropriately respond to that.

 

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A Charge To The Congregation

Given to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading, MA

The Installation of Rev. Hank Istvan Peirce

March 8 2018

It is good to be back with this congregation. Twenty-one years ago, and freshly ordained, I was your summer minister. I had a wonderful experience. Thank you for launching me into parish ministry with so much joy and support.

It falls to me to Charge the Congregation this afternoon, as one of the last elements to the liturgy we call the Installation of the Minister. It seems worthwhile to point out that what is for us today a happy and unworried occasion was for those who founded the Congregational Way a more solemn and even somewhat anxious ceremony, as those Separatists whom we today know as our “Puritan forebears” were persecuted by the Church of England for their rejection of the bishop’s authority to assign clergy to their congregations. This is a sore point in our history but as you can see from the presence of Episcopal clergy here this afternoon, we have worked it all out.

Those who established congregational polity in the 17th century wanted to see to it that the local congregation, gathered by a covenant made between themselves and their God, had the right to call their own minister and to covenant with that person to walk “in God’s ways as known and to be made known,” as they often said in their covenants.” For this innovation they were persecuted, imprisoned and in some cases executed.

Remember that when you are having a brownie in the parish hall later.

You, the congregation, own the church. This is not just a polite compliment; you literally own the property and are the stewards of all your assets. The minister is not. You, the congregation, also run the church. I am fond of reminding my own congregation that church is one of the only institutions for which the members pay for everything and do all the work.

There is no punchline. That is the punchline.

I exaggerate a bit on this point but I do it in order to make a corrective to the tendency for people to speak about their church by referencing the Minister. Sometimes I will run into parishioners in the grocery store and they will say, “I haven’t come to one of your sermons in so long!” I respond, “You haven’t attended worship? The community misses you.” I notice that your church website lists this event as “Rev. Hank’s Installation.” This is not quite right: it is YOUR installation, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading. This guy is one of the thirty-two clergypersons whom you, the church of the past and the church today, have found worthy to serve as minister among you. It is not Hank’s Installation, it is yours. By the authority vested in you by the congregational tradition, you can uninstall him any time.  The power rests with you, the community.  (sung) “The people have the power!”

Therefore I charge you to be the church, and to support the minister in being the minister – no more, no less.

The Minister’s job is to support the congregation in living into the mission which it sets out for itself, in discernment among its members, its history, the demands of the current moment (which are profound and urgent), and its God. There will never be unanimous agreement about what this mission should exactly be; do not let that stop you. I charge you to expect your minister to hold before you the vision and mission which guides and commands you. Expect him to preach it well, with evidence of deep attention to ancient and historical sources of wisdom, contemporary scholarship and the Scripture of your shared lives. Expect him to support your vision and mission in programming, prayer and pastoral work, and to be your chief teaching elder in connecting that mission to our Unitarian Universalist theological tradition.

I charge you each to take your own ministry seriously and to work faithfully in partnership with your settled minister. How can you be a healer, a helper, a lay pastor, a peaceful presence within the church?

In this effort, be ye direct communicators with one another. Remember that in congregational life, a triangle is a problematic shape. Do not talk about your minister, talk to him. And do the same for each other. Relationship is perhaps our most significant spiritual practice in Unitarian Universalism. It is a hard, time-consuming and it not always successful one. Remember that much of the work your minister spends time doing is attending to relationships and to process, which is invisible to the eye and noticed mostly in its absence or neglect. Rev. Hank has not been called here to keep everyone happy, but to help the church to remain faithful.

I have a special charge for you because you have called a special minister to serve you. I charge you to be aware that Hank Peirce is a minister to ministers, and is dear to many of us who are, like you, finding our hearts sore and our spirits sometimes inconsolable over the ugliness of the present moment in America, and across the planet.  I selfishly ask you – on behalf of a strained, sarcastic, and at the moment highly dysfunctional and hurting clergy cohort to be a good ministry setting for Hank because we need his heart. Hank is the lead elephant to whom many of us in this circus attach our trunks as we try to stay together. We need his spirit to be strong.

In the end, we all need each other. May this installation be an outward sign of an inward commitment not just to your new minister (and his wise and wonderful wife and daughters), but to one another, to your covenant, to the greater good that calls all of us out from our aloneness and fear and into engagement in the world, in the name of Love.

 

 

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Missing Ears

I wrote this for the Wednesday Word, a weekly column sent to members and friends of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship. You can learn more about us here.

 

I noticed a christological debate being waged on my Twitter feed recently; in-fighting among liberal and conservative evangelicals. It was the same arguments that Christians have been having for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years (you’d think by now we would have found something more important to talk about):  Jesus is a godly man! No, Jesus is the Son of God Himself! Jesus is a social justice prophet! No, Jesus is the agent of your salvation! Jesus is this-or-that and if you say he was not, you are not a real Christian.

Since it was not my fight this time, I could just observe the way that the Body of Christ manages to fight like weasels in a gunnesack for supremacy and righteousness in almost exactly the same way as did the original disciples. You would think Jesus, and then Paul, had not left us specific instructions about how stupid and wasteful is that exercise, but we are a persistently ridiculous community. Just for fun I checked to see what Jesus himself had to say on Twitter – there is a very funny account by someone with a talent for interpreting the gospel in contemporary terms tweeting as “@JesusofNaz316” – but the account didn’t wade into this fray. The latest tweet from Jesus of Naz says, “The greatest among you must be your barista.” Whoever you are, JesusofNaz216, thank you for your ministry.

Jesus was not a fighter, as we know. He was a healer, and it is his ministry of healing miracles that I seldom hear about lately as Christians bash each other around arguing whether to worship and follow Jesus Christ the social justice warrior or Jesus Christ the agent of personal salvation in this agonized moment in America.

Jesus was a healer. Jesus spit in his hands and laid them on a blind man’s eyes and the man could henceforth see. Jesus passed by ten lepers on the road and they were cured. A woman plagued by a chronic menstrual flow reached for Jesus and the mere touch of his garment healed her. What all of these people had in common was that they wanted to be healed and they had enough humility, desperation and faith to receive healing. Christians who think that it’s someone else who needs to be fixed and healed scare me. They’re standing in the wrong line and walking the wrong road where Jesus is not passing by.

What is for me Jesus’ most startling healing happens at his moment of crisis and the fulfillment of Judas’ betrayal. The New International Version reports this moment in Luke 22:

7 While he was still speaking a crowd came up, and the man who was called Judas, one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him,48 but Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”

49 When Jesus’ followers saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” 50 And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear.

51 But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And he touched the man’s ear and healed him.

Jesus is a healer. Even in the midst of a chaotic fracas that threatens his safety and during which he may have had an opportunity to take up arms in his own defense or flee, Jesus notices that violence has caused a wound to someone in his proximity and he stops what he is doing to heal it. Perhaps he pulls himself away from guards who are trying to detain him. Perhaps he has been knocked down and has to pull himself to his feet to get to the bleeding slave. Perhaps he has to wrest himself from the protective embrace of his disciples who are trying to spirit him away to safety. That detail is lost to us, but the healing is not, nor is the symbolic message contained in the fact that it is an ear – the incarnate symbol of listening – that Jesus makes whole in this moment of danger.  If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.

The christological bickerings that besets the Church universal are mostly egotistical indulgences that have very little to do with discipleship even as they mimic the dumb questions and propositions argued the original twelve, and which Jesus roundly mocked and chastised. As we walk the path of Lent to the Cross, let us listen to Jesus together, listen for his word, and humbly implore him to reattach our own ears and the ears of our opponents where they have been amputated by violent and rancorous debate.

The peace of Christ be with you.