A Body Of...

A quote from Margaret Cho:

“If you are a woman, if you're a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person od intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world.

 

...And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way or else you're worthless. You know when you look in the mirror and you think 'oh, I'm so fat, I'm so old, I'm so ugly', don't you know, that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising, magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around creme that doesn't turn around shit.

 

When you don't have self-esteem you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you really wanna go for, you will hesitate to ask for a raise, you will hesitate to call yourself an American, you will hesitate to report a rape, you will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote, you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution and our revolution is long overdue.”

I’ve been trying to write about the complicated relationship I (and many people) have with body image, self-love, healing, and transformation.  You see, if there is anything I profess as a Christian, it is that Christ offers deliverance from bondage and transformation into new life.  Yet this is something I have struggled to embrace all my life.

 

My awareness of this has never waned but it has been heightened in the past few years because I’ve watched my wife lose about 100 pounds and experience a transformation from carrying body fat as a shield to loving every ounce of herself as an expression of her life.  I envy her experience.  I wish I too could experience that. (I do not want to oversimplify her experience as I know she still struggles every day.  Nevertheless, she has accomplished a great deal of growth and transformation.)

 

Another reason my struggle to embrace my body and experience healing has been especially obvious as of late is that I’ve grown increasingly defensive for my wife.  As she lost weight, people would walk up to her and in all good nature tell her, “you look so good” and “you look beautiful.”  While I recognize that they mean to be encouraging and supportive, the unspoken message of “you weren’t beautiful of good enough before” remains. 

 

My blood boils for her, me, and all who struggle with body image when this happens.  The common experience that my wife and I share is that of using our bodies as a shield of protection.  In similar ways, we have dieted for acceptance, eaten to push away pain, and loathed our bodies for all they pain and struggle they represent.  I still do. 

 

But she doesn’t.  She has finally found the combination of space, support, and love to look at her body one ounce at a time and love the way it has been a protector for her, grieve the past, and transform it into a new creation.  It’s been so beautiful to watch.  Truly, there aren’t words for how life filled and hope giving her journey has been and it’s not over yet.  I am grateful and honored to be a witness and sharer in this journey.

 

But where does all this leave me?  I still find myself in the despair of pain from a childhood that should have destroyed me, depression that won’t stop haunting me, and a body so full of scars seen and unseen that I can barely stand to look at it on most days.  I want what my wife has.  I want that deliverance and transformation that I so deeply believe Christ offers.  Yet, I’ve never experienced that combination of emotional space, physical energy, and external support that it takes to sustain such a life changing, transformation.  Will I ever?  I don’t know but I hope so.

National Coming Out Day... Again

Tomorrow is National Coming Out Day and it always puts me in a pensive mood. I think back on the years of my life when coming out was a constant strain due to fear of actual and perceived discrimination and violence. I also reflect on the privilege that I have now as I work for a company that has progressive policies and live in a city where being a lesbian makes me just one in a crowd of… well… all...

kinds of people. Most especially I find myself reflecting on those who still struggle to find safety, acceptance, and love in a world that can be hostile to someone who is struggling to find their way.

I applaud and honor all those who stand with courage to claim their sexuality today and every day. All of us who have and will come out find hope in one another. But trust me when I tell you that I want you to be more to me than the “gay couple down the street” or the “straight ally upstairs.” And I hope I’m more to you. As Pollyanna as it may seem, I still long for a day when I can just be Lavender rather than “the lesbian chaplain” or “the dyke next door.” The fact of the matter is that my sexuality has always felt like an exaggerated element of my life because I had to work so hard to protect it from others. It became a larger detail than what I do for a living or how I treat people. I understand that we are people of labels and categories. We’ve been at it since the day God commissioned Adam to name the animals. Nevertheless, I wish my label was related to the content of my character rather than my sexuality, race, gender, class, education, or age.

On this National Coming Out Day, I pay tribute to all those who stand up for who they are. I also grieve for those who still struggle. And most especially I hope for a day when the quality of our love is of greater importance than who we love.

Risen and Still Rising

Easter Sunday - Risen and Still Rising <–- Audio file link - A sermon based upon Matthew 28:1-10

Good morning and welcome to the resurrection! I’ve you’ve not been with us all week, you’ve missed the celebration of a remarkable life in Jesus on Palm Sunday. On Maundy Thursday we heard the call of Jesus to be servants to one another and make deeper relationships with one another even in the midst of difficulty. Good Friday, watched in horror as those in religious and political power used their authority to have him brutalized and killed. And Yesterday, we sat vigil in prayer grieving and still reeling from the horror. And this morning at sunrise, we greeted the empty tomb where we saw that Christ seeks to involve us in his resurrection and does so with grace and compassion.

But now, we are in the thick of it all. Jesus is risen. Mary and Mary have the task of telling others. And Jesus even comes to them personally to tell them that he will come to them in Galilee. In each of the Gospels, this story unfolds slightly differently but they all have certain things in common. Christ promises to reveal himself again and does.

So, what do we make of all this? I think the first thing that must be said is that we have a hard time making sense of resurrection. It’s no wonder people both inside and outside of the church fight over whether it’s a myth or real event or even a hoax. But not understanding isn’t the real problem here.

What I think what bears scrutiny is why is it we have such a hard time wrapping our minds around resurrection? If we could understand, we wouldn’t have such difficulty figuring out what it means to our faith. And I’m not talking about skeptics. I’m talking about people of earnest faith who believe that the resurrection is a gift from God to all people. And I am willing to bet that most of us in this room have a hard time with it in some way or we have at some point.

We have a hard time with it because it’s so often beyond our common experience. I mean we struggle to conquer the little habits and “lesser sins” in our lives so how can we truly connect to a story of a risen Christ who crushed sin and suffering? We try. We try a lot and we work hard to make sense of it but at the end of the day, we find ourselves struggling with the same old flaws and sorrows. So, if Jesus was raised as a triumph over death and suffering, why do we struggle so much to experience it ourselves?

And that’s where we’ll start today. This morning in the sunrise service, we looked at how Christ approaches us in resurrection. We said that even when we don’t understand or can’t recognize Christ in our midst, Christ is faithful and reaches to us, and calls us forward with grace and compassion. But it’s just still so hard to see him and internalize what he has to offer.

Maybe that’s just it. Maybe we don’t understand what he’s offering for us to receive it. Maybe we need to expand our understanding of what resurrection is if we’re going to experience it more fully and with less doubt and despair.

So what is resurrection? Well, it is a raising of a body from the dead. The bible offers many stories of such events. But it’s more than just that. In Jesus’ case, it’s the raising and being made whole after being violated and brutalized by those in power. Jesus’ death and resurrection is an event of triumph and says that those who would try to squash the truth and life cannot succeed! The truth and life found in God’s love are so abundant that they live on and on and on.

So another thing we need to hear about resurrection in Christ is that it’s ongoing. Now, ongoing can mean different things. It can mean that something changed and that change still holds or it could also mean that something started changing and the process of change is still happening. I raise this distinction because I think it has bearing on why we have such a hard time internalizing Christ’s resurrection and what that ongoing resurrection means in our own lives.

I think the tension between Christ’s resurrection and our own difficulty understanding it is because Christ’s resurrection is one where something changed and it will always be that way for him. However, because we still live in the brokenness of the world, our experience of resurrection is one where a change starts to take hold in our lives but it’s a process that doesn’t come to completion until we’re fully in God’s loving arms.

So, what am I getting at? Well, I think it means that when we look upon the raised Christ, we really should be in awe because what has happened and is still happening in him is amazing and beyond our reach to fully comprehend in this time and place. We only catch glimpses of it through the body of Christ in the world. The reason the body of Christ functions with such mystery and wonder and beauty is because it’s purity is beyond our reach even though we participate in it as we are.

But this also means that we are a people both fully redeemed and still being refined. We are in the process of resurrection and it’s an ongoing venture that takes time and work. Our savior serves as a model while we’re fast at work trying to put the pieces together.

In the reformed tradition, we say that we are always both “being and becoming.” I always liked that phrase. It says that we are God’s beloved children as we are and more than adequate yet we have far more we could become here and now if we’ll be open to the pathway of resurrection.

But what does this really mean to us? Well, I suspect that we are our own barriers to experiencing resurrection more than anything else. Because we are not experiencing the one time miraculous event of Jesus but rather a process of resurrection, we don’t see the bigger picture of what is going on in our lives. We lose patience or faith or energy or hope. And, simply put I think we have to have grace and love for ourselves here and now just like God does. And if we have grace and love for ourselves and others, we’ll hear the calling to grow further in the body of Christ and continue becoming that fully resurrected spirit in Christ.

But what does it really mean? It means that we all have those places we struggle, those flaws that haunt us. We all have wounds from experiences that have not healed and continue to make us vulnerable to reacting out of pain and fear. Those are the things we must have grace and compassion for in ourselves. God already does. But do we?

When we struggle with depression or other ailments of the mind and spirit, how gentle are we with ourselves? When the pain and fear that illness bring takes hold on us, do we stay open to the love that the body of Christ offers? When our security is threatened, do we keep our hearts open? When lose someone, do we let ourselves be vulnerable? When we fall on our face over and over and over again with the same struggle whether it’s dishonoring our body or having a self-centered spirit, do we keep looking to God or do we condemn ourselves, denying our value and worth in God’s eyes. And when the unknown is in our midst, do we stop to see if it might be Christ or do we look away in fear?

Do you want to know what Christ’s ongoing resurrection looks like? Ongoing resurrection is the person who bears the pain of an abusive past or maybe even the present and still gets up with hope that healing can happen. Resurrection is the person with cancer who says I’ll not go through this alone because the healing I find in those who love me equals or exceeds the healing I get from these treatments. Resurrection is the family that keeps growing and changing and dealing with everything that comes up because being a family is hard and takes daily renewal. Resurrection is the person who loses a loved one and honors the love they shared by carrying that love forward and sharing it with others.

Do you want to see the face of resurrection? Look around this room. Look at the faces of people around you. Look at this group of people who have lost several pastors in 10 years and been betrayed and wounded yet you still come here with faith and hope in the living Christ. Hope that healing will be yours. And faith that it’s not the pastor that makes this church, but the people. That, my friends is resurrection lived. It’s lived in a process that has ups and downs but new life woven into every part of it.

Sisters and brothers, resurrection is loving and hoping and living in the face of the brokenness. It is knowing that the risen Christ will keep working through and around us. It is being both redeemed and still being refined, being and becoming. Each and every day, we are taking part in the process of resurrection and new life

As we go from here celebrating our risen Lord, may we also seek and take part in the ways Christ is healing our lives into resurrected glory. May we claim God’s love and healing so that we can experience it. And may we live the resurrection each and every day. Amen.

What Kind of Love is This?

Maundy Thursday - Sermon based upon John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Good evening. We are half way through Holy Week and everything is about to start changing rapidly. But we need not get ahead of ourselves. The story of Holy Week plays out bit at a time. Jesus’ life, just like ours, isn’t just a matter of the big moments. His life is about the whole story of it and the way it fits together. We can’t understand the excitement of Palm Sunday if we don’t first know why Jesus is exciting to be around. We can’t appreciate the intimacy of Maundy Thursday if we don’t take the time to examine the quality of Jesus’ relationships. The horror of Good Friday might make for a Hollywood film but it’s real importance is in knowing why the people close to Jesus are still there. And the story of Easter only reaches its full glory if we pull together the context of why Jesus was raised and what it would mean.

So for right now, here we are in one of the most intimate times Jesus shares and it’s a story worth spending time in because we get to see the quality of love Jesus shares with those close to him. What kind of love is this that Jesus shares? What kind of love is it that he wants others to cultivate and live?

Well, this passage starts with Jesus sharing a meal with his friends. This doesn’t seem odd to us because Jesus eats with people throughout his ministry. But just because it’s common, doesn’t mean that it isn’t deeply special. It is incredibly special.

Meals like Jesus shared were served family style… you know, the kind were we dip from the same bowls and have to be conscientious of how much we take because there are those at the end of the table yet to be served. They’re the kind of meals that if we’re in tune with those around us, we save that last roll for Jim because he loves them or we make sure Karen gets seconds because she had to skip lunch today to take her child to the doctor. Table fellowship is a truly intimate thing.

You know, I was blessed to be raised by my grandmother where we had meals at the table with no TV or other distractions. It was not just about sharing of food. It was about sharing of time. We talked about what was important to us and were blessed to know about one another’s lives. Most families today don’t share that time and I worry that we’re missing out on something special. But I don’t think that’s the only way to share and be in touch with each other. For example, if you want to get most teenagers to talk with you, drive somewhere 45 minutes away. That seems to be just the right amount of time to get into what needs to be said.

Anyway, the point I want to get to is that Jesus valued the people around him so he shared meals with them so that they could have truly meaningful time away from the hustle and bustle of their outward lives. What kind of love is this? It’s one that values the people around him.

The next thing we see is Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and friends. Now, let’s pause for a moment here to look at the context of what’s going on since foot washing isn’t a common practice in our culture.

We’re talking about a culture where clean water was scarce so bathing was a rare occurrence because it was more healthy to save the clean water for drinking than use it up bathing. But because this was a dusty, arid land, where the feet and legs would get caked on sand and dirt which carried sand fleas, foot washing was customary when you entered someone’s house or retired for the evening meal and bedtime. If a family had servants, the servants washed the feet of the family because it was considered a humble job. If the family did not, the person with least standing such as daughters washed the feet of others as they entered.

So from a modern perspective, the job of foot washing is something we would regard as below most any role or job. Really, in our culture, I can’t think of such a servant position. But what we need to know is that for Jesus to get on his hands and knees to do such a thing is an act of true humility and servant hood. So, what kind of love is this? It’s one that values service to others over being served.

Next, we have an exchange between Peter and Jesus about why Jesus is doing this. Jesus confirms what we’ve already recognized about service. But let’s reread part of this passage:

Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him.

I always find 2 things remarkable about this exchange. First, when Peter wants more than his share, Jesus responds with an understanding reply rather than a shaming comment. The second thing is that Jesus already knew someone would betray him yet stayed in relationship with Judas rather than kicking him to the curb.

In our culture we are quick to judge, condemn, and belittle others for their faults. But Jesus knew that the only way to grow through our faults and mistakes is in the safety of relationship, not the cutting off of relationship. What kind of love is this? One that embraces people for where they are rather than condemning them for what they haven’t yet become.

Next we hear the sum of the Christian life. The passage reads:

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

Any good teacher knows that if you want someone to learn something, you have to present it in multiple ways. Jesus teaches by example in his deeds but he goes a step further and shares explicitly what the teaching is. He wants them to truly internalize what the message is and live it out, a life of service, connection, and a living body of Christ. What kind of love is this? One that wants others to grow, thrive, and become who God created them to be.

Sisters and brothers, we encounter Jesus tonight at his most intimate. He has shared with his disciples and us what he thinks is important. He knows he’ll soon be betrayed and will die but rather than retreat, he stays with those he loves. What kind of love is this? It’s one that values the people around him. It’s one that values service to others over being served. One that embraces people for where they are rather than condemning them for what they haven’t yet become. One that wants others to grow, thrive, and become who God created them to be.

As we move from this time and soon enter the garden where Jesus will be arrested, my prayer is that we never forget what kind of love this is and our calling to live it out. As Jesus said, “If [we] know these things, [we] are blessed if [we] do them. Amen.