Loving every body

1 Kings 21:1-10, (11-14), 15-21a
Psalm 5:1-8
Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3

Along with some other members of St. John’s I spent last week up at the Bishop’s Ranch, near Healdsburg, at an educational program of our diocese called the College for Congregational Development.  The purpose of the vestry in sending us there was to move our parish closer to one of our strategic goals, which is to strengthen the capacity of all of our leaders, to help our various ministries, groups and committees, and the whole parish organization, to work together more effectively so that we can become more and more of what God is calling us to be. 

The week was the beginning of a two-year program, which commits the participants to a substantial reading list of books, a second residential intensive a year from now, and projects to design and carry out, complete with written reports, and a final exam.  We followed an intensive schedule of reading, presentations, small group learning labs, and project planning that began with Morning Prayer at 7:30 a.m. and ended with compline at 9 o’clock at night.  We worked on facilitation and group process skills and conceptual models of organizational structures, and of change, conflict, and even spiritual transformation within congregations.  We even learned models for human mental functions and how they operate differently according to personality type.  We had completed in advance a personality assessment tool that is widely used in universities and in corporate America, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and on Tuesday we received the results, which identified us with one of 16 different personality types, and told us how we prefer to interact with others, and what are our areas of strength, in what perceive, and how we make decisions and deal with conflict.

There’s a whole theory of mental functioning, that lies behind this system, and it was while one of the workshop trainers was trying to explain some of that to us, that one of my clergy colleagues in the diocese asked a question that had also been nagging at me.  In the course of her presentation, the trainer had said that these were the modes of “normal” mental functioning, and the types of “normal” personality, and so on.  So when it came time for questions, this priest, who happens to be a woman, pointed this out and asked “but what if you’re not normal?”   The trainer gave a sort of an answer and then quickly moved on, but the question is not a frivolous one.  It points to something essentially important about human beings, and also about the church.  

Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to borrow ideas and approaches from the business world and the social sciences to help us do the work of the church more effectively.  It is okay to talk about forces and dynamics, about data and feedback, about structures and systems and normal functioning.   But the Christian understanding of human beings is that our mental functioning, and our church organizations, are grounded in bodies.  And bodies can get out whack in all kinds of ways: from congenital conditions to senile dementia, from brain tumors and head injuries to autism and schizophrenia, from post-traumatic stress to clinical depression to alcoholism, things happen to our bodies that affect our minds, and even change our personalities. 

In the business world, if a person has a body that does not function as the organization needs it to, because he or she cannot effectively count beans, or produce widgets, or what have you, the manager will “let” that person “go” or never invite him or her to work there in the first place.  But as Christians we don’t have that option.  Not if we are sincere about following Jesus.  Because the gospels tell us stories, again and again, about people whose bodies, or minds and behavior, were not normal in the eyes of their neighbors.  These people came to Jesus looking for help and he welcomed them.  He told them that their faith in him had made them well, and sent them away in peace. 

Today’s story from the Gospel of Luke reminds us that this brought Jesus into conflict with his religious contemporaries.  When Simon the Pharisee decides that Jesus must not really be a prophet, it is not because he disagrees with him about theological ideas, or ethical principles.  Simon has second thoughts about Jesus because he lets a woman touch him.  It wasn’t normal for Jesus, a devout Jewish man, to let a woman who was not his wife or a close female relative touch his body, let alone to bathe his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair.  What makes it worse is that this woman is notorious for her sins, presumably sins of a sexual nature, which made her body a doubly potent source of contamination.  But instead of pushing her away, refusing to admit her into his company, Jesus accepts her lavishly inappropriate gestures of repentance and gratitude and love.  He repays her with words of respect and forgiveness, the forgiveness that makes her body touchable again.

Now Jesus didn’t always just heal people and then send them away.  Sometimes he called them to be a part of his mission.  In his classic text, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following:

“A truth, a doctrine, or a religion needs no space for itself.  They are disembodied entities.  They are heard, learned, and apprehended, and that is all.  But the incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living people who will follow him.  That is why he called his disciples into a literal, bodily following, and thus made his fellowship with them a visible reality.”

We are used to thinking of the calling of disciples as a manly sort of business.  Peter and Andrew and James and John are by the Sea of Galilee mending their nets, when Jesus walks by and says “Come, follow me,” and they unhesitatingly drop everything and go after him.  They go to be leaders, apostles of the kingdom and fishers of men.  But today’s passage in Luke reminds us that sometimes the calling of a disciple is not recruitment for a brave and noble mission.  Sometimes it begins as a desperate plea for relief from torment.  Mary Magdalene must have been seriously deranged, for Jesus to have cast out seven demons from her.  Still, in its own way, coming out of the shadows of disgrace and untouchability to seek healing and restoration to community is just as heroic, takes just as much courage, and faith, as that other kind of following.  

And Luke wants us to see, with Bonhoeffer that, from the beginning, our fellowship with the Incarnate Son of God has been embodied in a visible reality, a community.  In the Episcopal Church, the core of our identity is continuity with the first community of those that Jesus of Nazareth called to follow him.  Every time we add a new member to the church in baptism, the priest or bishop asks “will you continue in the apostles’ fellowship?” and the congregation says, “I will with God’s help.”  After the rite is complete, the congregation greets the newly baptized, saying “we receive you into the household of God.”  Like any other household this visible reality requires managing.  It needs leadership.  But sometimes leadership looks less like having great ideas and telling others what to do and more like noticing what other people need, what are the broken pieces that need mending and the loose ends that need tying.  According to Luke it was the women, who followed because they had been sick and became well, who first exercised this leadership in the church.  We can’t forget that it was they who obtained the spices needed to prepare a body for burial, they whose sorrow and need for a final, physical demonstration of love led them to Jesus’ tomb. 

And if this it is a household its members are a family.  But a new kind of family, one united not by of genetic inheritance or even by their natural love for each other, but by the grace of God.  Just as we don’t get to choose who we will have as our parents, or our brothers or sisters, we don’t get to choose the people whom the incarnate Son of God Christ calls into fellowship with us.  We don’t get to set criteria of eligibility, or send away the family members who don’t meet our standard of past history, education, or experience.  And there is no right kind of body, no “normal” height or weight or sex or color of the skin, but one body, crucified and raised in glory, into which all are called by the grace and mercy of God.  

Holy Eating

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a
Psalm 51:1-13
Ephesians 4:1-16
John 6:24-35

In May I drove up to Bishop’s Ranch, which is an Episcopal retreat outside of Healdsburg, for a conference.  I left my car at the lower end of the parking lot and found a path that went the back way up the little hill to the conference center, and when I came out of the trees at top I found a remarkable sight.    There, as expected, was the grand vista across the Russian River valley to Mt. St. Helena, but at my feet, growing on the side of the hill in a small patch about the size of this room, was a beautiful stand of grain.  It stood dense and tall and free of weeds.  The pale gray-green ears were already fully-formed, and rippled gently in the breeze.  I stopped in my tracks, gazing with admiration.  Also curiosity.  There was a little hand-lettered sign posted there, that said “Heirloom Sonora wheat,” but it gave no indication as to who had planted it, or why.

I passed the wheat patch repeatedly over the next couple of days, on the way to and from my car.  I meant to ask one of the ranch staff to tell me more about it, but I never got around to it, and the conference ended with me none the wiser.  In fact I pretty much forgot about it until the week before last, when I got a phone call that cleared up the mystery.  It was from Elizabeth DeRuff, an Episcopal priest friend whom I last saw almost five years ago when she came here for the service formally installing me as Priest-in-Charge of St. John’s.  We hadn’t gotten much of a chance to talk at that event, so Elizabeth began the call by catching me up a little on what she’s been doing.  

She told me that in the years since I knew her at St. Gregory’s Church in San Francisco, she had become passionately interested in sustainable agriculture.  She tried for a while to set up an educational farm in Marin County, where she lives.  But some developers outbid her for the land she wanted, and in the meantime she became more and more focused on questions about bread, and the wheat that it is made of.  She was calling me, it turned out, to see if I would like to come up to Bishop’s Ranch last Saturday to help harvest her first crop of wheat.  I said I didn’t think I could make it on such short notice, and then she asked me if my congregation in Petaluma might like to have a share of the flour once they’d threshed the grain and ground it in a stone mill.

 Because Elizabeth’s purpose is not just to play wheat farmer.  She planted her crop at Bishop’s Ranch because Episcopalians from all over the country meet there, and she wants to get church communities to start to think more deeply about the bread that we place on our altar tables every Sunday.  We put it there in the climactic act of our weekly offering of worship.  We invoke the Holy Spirit over it and proclaim it to be the gift of God for the People of God, and the Body of Christ.  We eat it together to experience the life-giving truth of our communion with God and with each other.   

And I could go on and on, as sacramental theologians have done for centuries, about the symbolic significance of this bread and the ritual by which we eat it.  But what Elizabeth is asking is how it might deepen our engagement with the symbol if we thought about this bread as food.  She’s asking how much more nourishment it might give to our souls if we knew where it came from and how it is made.  She’s asking what difference it would make if we experienced this holy eating not as a separate species from the eating we do three times a day, every day, but as its supreme embodiment. 

Now, we’ve already been engaging with these questions here at St. John’s.  I arrived at this church five years ago yesterday, and I hadn’t been here more than a couple of months before Susan Hadenfeldt approached me about using homemade bread for communion in place of commercially-produced wafers.  So for almost five years we’ve been worshipping with bread that Susan and others make by hand in our own church kitchen.  If you’d come by our office last Wednesday morning you would have smelled it baking. 

 It’s not always consistent in the size or shape of the loaves, or their thickness or texture.   Sometimes it’s perfect, but sometimes it’s too dry and crumbly, or too floury, or too hard.  It takes time to break it up, and it’s difficult to get the size of the pieces just right, so there’s enough for everyone but not too much left over. 

It would certainly be more convenient to just use the little wafers that you buy from the church supply company, which are stamped out by a machine so they’re perfectly uniform.   They keep for months, and you just count out the exact number you need and put the rest back on the shelf.  But convenience isn’t the highest value in the Christian religion.  That variable, perishable homemade bread speaks to what is most precious and eternal in a way that those dry little wafers just don’t.  It’s a little like the difference between getting a Hallmark Card for your Birthday and one your child made herself. 
        

On Elizabeth DeRuff’s website, whatsupwithwheat.com, I found this quotation from the Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry: “Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”

This is as good a description of the Holy Eucharist as you could ask for.  The Eucharist is an enactment of connection, an experience and celebration of dependence and gratitude.  And it is meant to be pleasurable, in the fullest sense of the word.  But almost hidden in Berry’s very apt description is a critique of how our culture has diminished the pleasure of eating.  It has reduced it to a few simple considerations that are flatly utilitarian: food, we have come to believe, should be quick and convenient to prepare; it should be pre-packaged in standardized individual portions; and it should be cheap.  We have come to see eating as the equivalent of putting fuel in a machine, and that the system that does this most efficiently is the best. 

Berry sums up this attitude toward eating in a single word—ignorance.  More often than not, this ignorance covers up ugly truths about how our food comes to us—truths about the erosion and compaction and sterilization of the soil, about the overuse of petrochemicals and the depletion and pollution of groundwater, about the collapse of genetic diversity, and the inhumane treatment of animals, and the over-fishing of oceans, about the exploitation of migrant labor.  But we are also ignorant of what is beautiful about our food, and the whole fabric of complexly interwoven relationships that put it on our plates—relationships that are evolutionary and historical, familial and social, economic and ecological.  We live at a time when there is a growing hunger to remake those connections, to begin to re-weave the fabric of culture and nature that holds us in life.  And why shouldn’t Christian churches, with our focus on holy food, be at the center of this process of healing? 

In church we enact our interconnectedness, we celebrate our dependence and gratitude, with a symbolic meal of bread.  It can only enhance our experience of mystery to know where that bread came from, and what was the true cost of producing it, in water and soil and energy, in time, and labor, and love.  It matters whether reverence came into the picture only at the moment that bread was placed upon the altar, or whether the whole process of ploughing and sowing, cultivation and harvest, of threshing and milling, of mixing and kneading and baking was, in some sense, an act of worship, of which our ritual blessing and breaking, our taking and eating, is the consummation and the crown.  Because when we eat with the consciousness of just how precious and miraculous this sacramental food really is, we receive the gift, not merely of a piece of bread, but of the love and mercy of God that gives life to the world.