Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17
The Protestant Reformation made the faith less transactional and less sacramental, centering covenant in structure, and word in worship. Despite this, the German reformer Martin Luther cautioned against preaching on one particular Sunday, Trinity Sunday, suggesting that there was nothing sensible that a pastor could say. For once, I am taking that advice. Sort of. I’m preaching, just not on the Trinity..
Besides, I am agnostic about the Trinity, or more accurately apophatic, believing humans have no business speaking about the ultimate nature of God. At best, we can describe our experiences of the holy. All else is guess work, a pebble of maybe thrown into an ocean of mystery.
Instead, let us think about bodies, given Paul’s hostility toward the flesh and Nicodemus’ confusion when Jesus starts talking about being born again.
We have all heard the trope that claims we are not bodies that have a soul, but rather are souls temporarily housed in a body. And that may be true. There are certainly enough credible accounts of supernatural weirdness for me to know that I don’t know.
What we do know is our lived experience as embodied humans, and that can be weird enough. A pregnant mother with influenza in the second trimester means an increased risk that the child will develop schizophrenia as a young adult. Adults who get strep are more likely to become hoarders. Your gut biome, if out of balance, can contribute to depression. Most of us know that a urinary tract infection can have a cognitive impact, never mind more dramatic events like traumatic brain injury or brain tumors.
It is hard to know how we are who we are when things that are not us can make us someone else. And that doesn’t even take into consideration relativity, the cognitive type rather than the quantum. It does not matter one bit if what “they” believe is lunacy if they believe it is real and operate in the world as if it is real.
There may be no such thing as government bioengineering using “chemtrails” from aircraft, but that did not stop Tennessee from outlawing them. There are no microchips in Covid-19 vaccinations, but try telling that to those who refused vaccination, risking their own lives and sometimes helping kill others in the process.
And this is just the recursive loop of “I,” of our constant re-creation of self, never mind that the body has a will and a life of its own, is an energy system coded for self-preservation, and ultimately coded for self-destruction as part of the evolutionary process.
We do not will our hearts to beat, do not manage the process of digestion, and may barely think about it once the meal is done unless it goes wrong. We do not negotiate treaties with the entire nations of bacteria that make us us. We rarely think about breathing, except when we can’t.
This weekend, “I can’t breathe” has a special resonance, for yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, a body damaged and ultimately destroyed by the slave master’s whip, for the legacy of the lash and the lynching tree are still real in our economic, social, and judicial systems, in the way policing is done in so many urban communities, a paramilitary occupation force at war with civilians.
And tomorrow, we will celebrate other destroyed bodies, an annual ritual of declaring holy those who died as American combatants in war, papering over the complexity of bad wars, unwilling soldiers, delayed deaths, and collateral casualties, as if it was all some great transaction, which is exactly how politicians, generals, and international law treats it, an acceptable ratio of dead Palestinian children for every Hamas fighter killed to preserve the political power of ethno-nationalists. The lives of those lost in war are indeed sacred, but not because they died in war.
Here we are, post-Pentecost, and the liturgical calendar says we are past the body, broken and risen and ascended, and are in the season of the Spirit, but we are bodies and sparks. And though you may have been Cleopatra in a past life, the energy system you call “me” is the only existence we can prove scientifically, sort of.
Nicodemus does not understand the words of Jesus, taking literally the language of rebirth. He will buy the materials to bury that body that is teaching him.
Paul is hostile to the body for reasons he does not name, though we can have our suspicions.
Bodies everywhere, artificially divided into categories unnatural and unholy, for nature does not know race, and God does not know gender, despite the words we have tried to put into Their mouth since men first decided Holy Mystery must be like us, creating a box for a god we create to fit in that box.
Bodies everywhere, and every one a miracle, even when they are rebelling. “O Me! O Life!” as the great gay poet writes. And whether you see a hidden hand of the holy or mutation and selective advantage, the bottom line is thumbs for us and fins for others and the song of the cicada and the clinging of the shirt to your back as you dash through an unexpected summer rainstorm.
I am not a pacifist. I understand that the world is not just daisies and butterflies, but is also tooth and claw, and among our particular species of primate, we go to war for things that are not even real, borders and race, and the children starve in Gaza and in Darfur, and the body count soars day by day. I understand the cost of appeasement, for first they came for the disabled bodies, but the gaping maw of hatred was not done as queers and Roma and Jews were beaten and gassed and burned.
I do not celebrate destroyed bodies and refuse to calculate the worth of bodies in the ways of war, and while I am thankful that the genocidal reich was stopped, I am mindful that German children died when fire fell from the sky in Dresden.
Bodies everywhere and how am I me when the wiring can go so wrong, not just the toll of aging, but the downward spiral of mental illness and addiction right outside of our door, bodies everywhere in Elmira, and we do not do what it takes to protect those broken bodies from the violence of their own broken minds.
Bodies everywhere, in the cold waters of an upstate lake a bit too early in the season, setting up tables on a June morning, sipping a cold beer with grass-stained sneakers and the smell of a freshly-mowed lawn.
Beautiful bodies, aching and scarred, new and fragile and wailing. “This is our body,” said Zen poet Gary Snyder fifty years ago. He went on:
“Drawn up crosslegged by the flames
drinking icy water,
hugging babies, kissing bellies,
Laughing on the Great Earth
Come out from the bath”
And so we, who are embodied,
who tell the story of holy mystery embodied,
who are called to care for broken bodies,
who are sometimes broken ourselves,
let us experience the body,
the goodness and miracle,
this day and always.
Amen.