“Miracles” by Walt Whitman
Acts 1:1-11
SERMON “Body Electric”
I have never completely understood how Walt Whitman not only survived the mid-19th century, but indeed thrived, becoming one of the greatest American voices of his age.
I mean, he might have had many of the marks of privilege in his age and ours: white, male, nominally Christian, but he was absolutely queer, and not even in the “Is he or isn’t he?” heavily coded way of that time.
You do not need a degree in literature and an unpublished dissertation to figure out what he means in “We two boys, together clinging, one the other never leaving,” and he had what we once euphemistically called “longtime companions.”
Whitman not only thrived as queer man in 19th century America, his lifelong project, the always growing “Leaves of Grass,” became a sort of catalog of the American experience, at least as much of it as he could understand. He took in all he perceived of democracy and labor and land.
His voice was always his distinctive voice, but when he sang the body electric, he aspired to sing of women’s bodies and children’s bodies too, the bodies of men and of the elderly.
Sadly, he also wrote powerful verse about the fallen body of Abraham Lincoln, assassinated by a white supremacist, in “O Captain! My Captain!” Lincoln and Whitman would grieve to see the United States in the hands of a post-Constitutional White Supremacist government after both witnessed first hand the broken bodies of those who fought to expand the definition of American and preserve the union.
It is the fallen brown body of Jesus with which we must deal this morning. And honestly, I am not interested in the unanswerable question of what really happened. We know things that First Century Judeans did not know, like what happens when you go up… no pearly gates, just the cold vacuum of space, Space X junk, heavenly bodies, and the still mysterious dark matter… maybe, because we aren’t always as smart as we think we are.
Those who wish to strip all mystery and magic from the world may view the ascension as a crass fabrication, one part of a long con. I view it as a necessary theological move, the creation of a king-less Christianity.
The ancients often confused earthly power with divine power, considered rulers to be gods, if not during their lives, certainly after their death. This isn’t just Gilgamesh, more than a thousand years before Jesus, but Pharaohs and Caesars, even during the lifetime of Jesus, a deified Augustus, Tiberius the son of the god Augustus on the throne when Jesus was crucified.
And since earthly power often went to the most violent, the most ruthless of warlords, the divine all too often was conflated with violence, capricious gods who killed enemies and followers alike.
The Jewish religious trajectory was an outlier in that context. At no point did it equate a human king with God. In fact, the greatest king in the political history of the Jewish people, King David, is viewed as deeply flawed, a usurper, rapist, and murderer.
Not only was God not an actual human sitting on a pile of skulls, God was not even to be depicted as human or creaturely. While other cultures in the region had idols, large and small, invested with some amount of magic, Jews had an empty room in their Temple, albeit one restricted to the High Priest.
And while the voting cardinals of the Roman communion recently met under the masterwork that is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, we must acknowledge that the image of God as a giant white man in the sky is a graven image, prohibited in the Ten Commandments, and one that reduces God to one sort of human out of the many sorts of humans, no longer present in the teeming throngs of Whitman’s America or the Jewish Diaspora we will encounter next Sunday on Pentecost, but only in white men.
It is no wonder that Jews, who had engaged in centuries of religious innovation and hopeful construction took offense at Christian claims that Jesus was a physical presence of God in human form.
Apocalyptic thinking, the subject of last week’s sermon, expected a Son of Man, better translated as an archetypal “Human One,” to usher in a re-creation that included a New Jerusalem and an earthly kingdom ruled by God.
More concrete was the idea that a new folk-hero warlord would rise up and rebel against Roman colonialism and brutality, as happened briefly in the Second Century B.C.E., restoring an independent Jewish homeland, ruling as a warrior-king. And while this “messianic expectation” was not as widespread or powerful as scholars sometimes claim, it remained a powerful current throughout the Jewish prophetic tradition, and in the aspirations of groups like the Essenes.
Jesus is the opposite of the warrior king. He proclaims the kingdom, sure, just not that kind of kingdom. Because in that kind of kingdom, the king is responsible. And in the kingdom that Jesus proclaims, the kin-dom of God…
Wait for it…
We are responsible.
You are responsible.
Caesars come and go, some good, some bad, some with good intentions, some sociopaths filled with rage. We might be in that kingdom, but as Paul reminds us, we are not of it. We operate in a parallel world.
Just like that democracy Walt Whitman cataloged, in the Kin-dom of love, there are no kings, or maybe a billion kings and queens. I’ve certainly known plenty of queens in my time.
And true power is not violence. Violence is weakness. Power is love, creativity, and healing.
Just a few weeks ago, the disciples were expecting Jesus to change the world. And he did.
They saw him brutally tortured and murdered, a scapegoat destroyed in the machinery of empire and greed.
They saw his body carried off by well-intentioned secret followers.
But the grave could not hold a love so powerful it could make the broken feel whole, a message so powerful we’re still talking about it, still answering his call to see and serve the least among us.
And as misogynists and racists claim the moment, we sing the body electric and eclectic, the body that sweats and dreams and dances, beyond race and gender, punk pink hair and perfect little black dresses, chaps and a Stetson, and a summer tan, if it will ever stop raining.
We sing of the real America, and the real realm of God, no king, just kin, just me, and just uncontrollable miraculous you. Amen.