Month: March 2023

A Mind Set in Flesh

Why does Paul hate flesh?

Ezekiel’s “dry bones” always set my mind on the past. College was difficult, coinciding with my first appearance of bipolar depression. There wasn’t a name for it yet, let alone good treatment. I suffered for years before dropping out. It wasn’t until seminary that I finally found competent medical help.

Back then, music lifted my suffering. I got involved however I could, including assisting with the local youth symphony. One semester, we performed Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. It’s a memory of joy from a time long gone—a dear one that rings in my ears when Ezekiel rattles his own ancient fossils.

The prophet proclaims a fleshly image. Bones hear God’s presence and then are covered with flesh. And then again, filled with Spirit. Like the human-dust in Genesis 2 that needs God’s breath to live, flesh is not enough. Is that why Paul complains about flesh?

But Lazarus, too, is a fleshly creature. “Come out,” Jesus cries! And Lazarus does, out of hiding, into the celebration, strides like a debutante into the banquet that is life. His body–his FLESHLY body–still wrapped in the clothes of death, is filled with Spirit and life.

Paul says, “You are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” But he is wrong. We are human; we are flesh. So is the second person of the Godly Three. And it is very good.

But Paul has a point. In college, I was trapped in misbehaving flesh. The musical Spirit let me breathe, occasionally, in those years.

Today, I am on a bench, waiting for colleagues to drive me to an obscure Andean village to hear adult theology students present their learning. Not the typical career for a twice college dropout. I wait in a busy public transit station, with too many people waiting to get into the city below. Tired faces, hopeless, visibly trapped by poverty and abuse in this land where poverty and abuse are epidemic.

But, in these villages where resources are scarce, where time and flesh go to die, I encounter joy unexpected, revealing God’s grace unbidden.

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” Paul’s—and God’s—concern for us is our flesh. Our mortal bodies will be raised by the Spirit. Is Paul talking about more than just us? If we are beings of Spirit, do we bring Spirit to the flesh around us? Are we whose bones were once dry, now called to resurrect dead Lazarus, to speak to dry bones, to proclaim incarnation?

Spirit is useless without flesh. Flesh is dead without Spirit. This is why Christ had to be both. May you know the Spirit in our Flesh, and as we share it with others, may your Flesh dance.

A couple of weeks ago, I preached at one of our ecumenical Lenten services, and I talked about the power of hymnody. We sang “Just as I Am” together, raising our voices together for the first time since the pandemic began. With nearly one hundred people in a small sanctuary singing together, I felt it in my bones. And I felt my emotions rising along with my voice. 

Music has this way of holding the breadth of human emotion and experience. And tapping into it, when we struggle to find the words to hold it ourselves.

I tend to find myself turning to the Psalms in the tough times (and the good as well). Like music and hymnody, the Psalms contain and preserve the breadth of human emotion and the range of the human experience of the divine. The Psalms challenge. The Psalms comfort. The Psalms inspire. The Psalms engage. They encourage wrestling with God and with the realities of real lived life. The Psalms both utter feelings of God’s forsakenness and trust that those feelings can never turn God away.

This Sunday, Psalm 23 is the appointed Psalm. My favorite translation of the Psalm comes from Robert Alter. He has this way of being accurate with his translations while keeping the feel of the Hebrew – no easy task. I can feel this one in my bones, at the core of me. 
The Lord is my shepherd,
                        I shall not want. 
            In grass meadows He makes me lie down,
                        by quiet waters guides me.
            My life He brings back. 
            He leads me on pathways of justice 
                        For his name’s sake. 
            Though I walk in the vale of death’s shadow,
                        I fear no harm,
                                    For You are with me.
            Your rod and your staff – 
                        It is they that console me. 
            You set out a table before me
                        In the face of my foes. 
            You moisten my head with oil.
                        My cup overflows.
            Let goodness and kindness pursue me 
                        all the days of my life.
            And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
                        for many long days.
[Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 78-80.]

In this text, I find a God who has this stubborn will for life. In God, we find life where death surrounds and closes in. God desires for goodness and kindness that pursue us all the days of our lives.

As Christians, we believe that God doubles down on that will for abundant life for us and all of creation. In becoming human, in living, in dying, in rising, in the person of Jesus, God takes a stand. 

We stand in the shadow of the cross trusting that because in Jesus, God has been there, because in Jesus, God uttered the words “my God my God, why have you forsaken me” we are not alone. We have the promise that God is with us as God godself experiences the vale of death’s shadow on the cross.

Living on this side of Easter, we also stand at the empty tomb. In the resurrection, we have the promise that the worst thing isn’t the last thing. We have the promise with the God made known in Jesus that not even the vale of death’s shadow will have the final word.

Isaac Villegas, in a Christian Century article, puts it this way: “That’s what the gospel is all about: that God makes room for eternal life to grow, for divine love to multiply even in the worst conditions, even in the valley of the shadow of death. The hope of Easter is that not even crucifixion can put an end to God’s work of making space for life in the world. God turns a grave into a place for new birth. God is stubborn for hope, stubborn for life.” [Isaac S. Villegas, “April 26, Fourth Sunday of Easter: Psalm 23,” The Christian Century, April 14, 2015. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2015-03/april-26-fourth-sunday-easter]

As a recently “out” queer pastor, I have to trust in God’s hope for life, despite the world that tries to bring about death for us. 

Pulpits that were open to me last year in that ministerium group are now closed to me. In the ELCA, I know my next call process will be even more difficult than the one for my current one was. I have to be conscious of where I hold my wife’s hand in public. I don’t always know where I will hit those moments when the world tells me that I shouldn’t exist – at least as my full authentic self. I must lean into the promise, “you are with me.” 

As the world targets drag queens, queer youth, trans & non-binary folks – all too often with the real threat of death – I must lean into the promise, “my life [my God] brings back.” This is not what God hopes or dreams for, and I have to believe that God’s stubborn hope for life will make a way out of death’s shadow. 

My prayer is that the divine love will multiply and that God will continue to make space for life, that the pathways of justice will be made known. For us. Now. My prayer is that we’ll see the death-dealing ways of the world – racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. – make way for the restoration of life abundant. 
 

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

This selection from Jeremiah 31:31-34 is one of the most well-known and widely celebrated texts that speak about God preparing to do a new thing. And these words are often seen by Christians not only as a prophetic message for the nations of Israel and Judah, but also a message about the coming Messiah, who will give us a message of salvation through faith, rather than through works of the Law.

That’s all wonderfully theological, but let’s step back and ask a simple question: What is the context of this message?

The truth is that, as with most prophetic texts that speak of future hope, this message is delivered in a time of difficulty, and perhaps even despair. And messages like this one from Jeremiah have a long history in the story of God’s people. Consider for a moment the Law itself, which Jeremiah references. When did God make this covenant with God’s people? It was after a generation or more of slavery in Egypt. God’s people were forced into labor by a pharaoh who despised their very existence, and it was after God liberated them and they were a broken and homeless people, wandering in the desert, that God first made a covenant with them and promised that if they kept these laws- that if they lived in true relationship with God and one another-the Lord would be their God and they would be God’s people.

God did a new thing and gave hope to God’s chosen people in a time of change and uncertainty, and the people to whom Jeremiah speaks and writes are living in a no less uncertain time. Those who would have first heard Jeremiah’s words were a people that had been conquered, displaced, and oppressed. The northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E. and the southern kingdom of Judah to the Babylonians in 587 C.E. So, effectively, God’s people have lost their ancestral home. They have been taken away to live in diaspora- communities scattered across a foreign empire, and I’d say it’s a safe bet that many of them thought God had abandoned them.

This sense of loss and abandonment, of wandering lost and homeless in the wilderness, is one that hits awfully close to home for some in the LGBTQ+ community. How many have been pushed away or abused by their families? How many have been kicked out of their familial home? How many have been made to feel, time and again, like God has forgotten or abandoned them? How many have felt hopelessness and despair at the way their families of origin have treated them, nevertheless how those who claimed to be their family of faith behaved toward them?

Yet we see, if we read on through Jeremiah, that our God is not a God who abandons a chosen people. To God’s people, scattered across the ancient Near East, the Lord says, “Behold, I am about to do a new thing.”The covenant that I made with your ancestors is still a promise for you, but this covenant with its laws and prescriptions will no longer be an external thing. I will write my law in your hearts so that you will not simply live according to the covenant, but the covenant will live within you and will be a part of who you are. I will be your God and you will be my people, and it will be an inherent fact of your existence. And in this, nothing will come between us or break the bond that we have.

And we know that God’s promise does not end there, for God sent his only Son into the world to teach us God’s word, to die for our redemption, and to conquer death itself in his resurrection. And through Jesus Christ, God grants us salvation by faith, which is God’s gift to us according to God’s grace. Because we are the people of God- wherever we are on the sexuality spectrum, regardless of our skin tone or our ancestral roots, no matter our gender expression- God has written God’s law of love in our hearts through faith. How much more, then, can we expect to receive God’s promises: “I will be your God and you will be my people,” and “Behold, I am doing a new thing?”

That said, it feels like we’ve waited a long time for this “new thing” to occur. For two thousand years, members of the LGBTQ+ community in the Church have felt like change might never come; like the Church would never truly internalize and live out God’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” when it came to us. Yet God has continued to promise, “I will do a new thing” – for we are part of God’s chosen people. Even in the face of discrimination, adversity, and hate, God has continued to proclaim, “You are my beloved children. I will be your God, and you will be my people.” Many have tried to drown out the voice of God with their own words of prejudice, but God’s promise has never been erased. 

And now is the time. God is doing something new. God is calling us and empowering us to be the living and active presence of the Good News of Jesus Christ in the world, just as we are, just as God has created us and gifted us to be. God is calling us into a deeper relationship with God and is sending us out to invite others to join us in that communal relationship. God is showing us the way, even in the face of adversity and hate. We only need believe God’s promise and let God open our eyes, our ears, our minds, and our hearts to the new thing that God is doing, so that even the haters will be forced to see with their own eyes how God is doing a new thing through us and through the whole LGBTQ+ community.