“Our Mission: The Queer Body of Christ”

“Our Mission: The Queer Body of Christ”

Sermon for MCC New Haven

January 27^th 2013

Rev. Brian Hutchison, M.Div.

Texts:

1 Corinthians 12: 12-26

Luke 4:14-21

A selection from gay 19^th century poet Walt Whitman’s

Leaves of Grass: “I Sing the Body Electric.”

“I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man?
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all, in all nations and times all over the earth?

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,

…

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,
Man's, woman's, child, youth's, wife's, husband's, mother's, father's, young man's, young woman's poems,
…

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!”

I encourage you to look up the full text of this poem and read it in its entirety. Walt Whitman so beautifully expresses the beauty and goodness he sees in the human body. (And he goes into detail about almost every part of the body, and I do mean EVERY part.)

In our post-Puritan society, we still hold onto a lot of baggage concerning bodies. As a culture, I am sad to say the United States is “body-negative.” Though we have largely embraced the free-love mentality of the 1960s and sex symbols are everywhere in the media, we have not as a culture embraced our bodies as good, holy vessels that have great potential for good, holy experience.

I think it is fitting that the Apostle Paul uses the analogy of the body for understanding the way the church should function. Each human body, even with what we call faults, disabilities, flaws, and undesirable traits, is beautifully and wonderfully made. We give no glory to God when we say things like, “At least he’s beautiful on the inside.” Even those who have been badly burned or scarred carry beauty with their bodies.

Paul tells us that each one of us is a member of the Body of Christ. And each member of the body has a purpose that is no lesser than the others. We are diverse, but in our diversity we have strength, as the body has integrity. Most people have hands that allow us to do many things, but the body cannot be all hands (can you imagine what that would look like?). Most people have eyes that allow us to see and through them know what we are doing. But we could not function as a blob of eyeballs! So it is with the Body of Christ. We truly need one another.

Give some time today and this week to ask yourself which body part your life most resembles. (I know where some of your minds went!) Are you a foot that helps the body to travel softly across the earth? Are you an eye that gives vision for the church? Are you an ear that listens for truth and takes it in? Are you the loins that help the church to procreate? Are you the birth canal that delivers God into the world each day?

Embracing each part of the body as a blessing from God is being “body-positive,” and that is part of the identity of MCC. I have told congregations before that MCC is the third breast of the body: giving nourishing milk to the world, but so unexpected!

The global Body of Christ is a queer body. Like our queer bodies, it experiences violence. Its parts are so different, yet somehow fit together. They have different beliefs and values and yet all claim to follow in the Way of Christ. Some parts are ill and some parts are well. Some parts are old and some parts are new. The jury is still out on whether some parts are implants (and by that, I mean churches that have a message of hate). But somehow, this body has moved forward through two thousand years of history.

Since the early 1980s, in MCC we have declared to the world that the Body of Christ is HIV-positive, that the Body of Christ has AIDS. Thirty-two years later, this is sadly still true. Today, more than 34 million same-gender-loving and heterosexual people around the world are living with HIV. And all are children of God. An illness does not disqualify anyone from being a member of the Body of Christ, amen?

Jesus cared about bodies. He proclaimed in our reading today from the Gospel of Luke, quoting the Prophet Isaiah “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because [She] has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. [She] has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” In reading this scripture, Jesus was telling those in his home town of Nazareth that he was taking this passage seriously, that his mission was to do exactly as it said.

Part one of Jesus’ mission is to bring good news to the poor. Take a look at the front of your bulletin or at the poster in front of me. This picture is called “Patrono De Los Desperados” or “Patron of the Desperate Ones” by Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo. No, this is not just a picture of Jesus, and it is not a picture of Marjorie the Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock :). Ocampo has presented in this artwork his vision of the Body of Christ. It is made up of women and men (and even a dog) who scavenge for food and belongings among the garbage. This Body of Christ is not cleaned up. It has no façade. It is a true face of Christ, composed of those on the margins of society, the “least of these.” Jesus and Ocampo remind us that the poor are part of our body.

Part two of Jesus’ mission is to proclaim release to the captives. We remember today all those who are kept prisoner illegally, those who are part of a worldwide pandemic of human trafficking, and those who are in prison for their crimes. The raw truth of the corrections system in the United States is shocking. Hear this carefully.

The US has the highest number of people incarcerated in the world. As of the last census in 2010, 2,266,800 people, almost 1% of the population is in prison. Two percent more are on parole. This fact alone is shocking, but what is even more shocking is the disproportionate number of people of color in prison. Forty percent are African American, though African Americans make up only 12.6% of the total population. Twenty-one percent are Hispanic, though Hispanics only make up 16.4% of the total population. People of European descent make up 34.7% of prisons, but they comprise 72.4% of the total population. Some conclude from these statistics that people of color are just more likely to be criminals. But I cannot accept that as truth. What I see beyond these statistics is gross injustice. People of color are struggling in this country out of a history of racism. And so instead of putting them in the fields as slaves as was once legal, they are put behind bars.

Now don’t hear me wrong. I am not saying that those who commit crimes should not be brought to justice. What I am saying is that systemic oppression is pushing these folks into prisons. Spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson says, “We see criminals as guilty and seek to punish them. But whatever we do to others, we are doing to ourselves. Statistics painfully prove that our prisons are schools for crime; a vast number of crimes are committed by people who have already spent time in prison. In punishing others, we end up punishing ourselves. Does that mean we’re to forgive a rapist, tell him we know he just had a bad day and send him home? Of course not. We’re to ask for a miracle. A miracle here would be a shift from perceiving prisons as houses of punishment to perceiving them as houses of rehabilitation. When we consciously change their purpose from fear to love, we release infinite possibilities of healing.[1]”

Crime in our nation is a complicated thing to tackle. But there are steps that can be taken now, and we are called as the Body of Christ to advocate for them. Especially with gun law reform in the news right now, the time is ripe for a plentiful harvest. We can stop violence as Christ calls us to do. We just must act together as a society with the Mind of Christ.

Poet Kahlil Gibran reminds us, “Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world. But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also… You are the way and the wayfarers. And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone. Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.”

We all have the negative potential to commit misdeeds and crimes. And we all also have the collective responsibility to ensure that “stumbling stones” are removed so that those who come after us will have a lesser chance of stumbling.

Bishop Oscar Romero gives us our charge today in his poem titled The Long View. Listen to the words and find liberation:

“It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The kingdom [of God] is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying that
the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

That is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and
there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.”

         Church, we know that there is so much in our world that is upside-down. Jesus knew that of his world too. Jesus didn’t single-handedly stop global evil in his ministry 2000 years ago. Many terrible things have happened over that time. But he did give us tools to work with, truths to live by, and the Holy Spirit to lead us. And as we boldly live by these truths through our beautiful bodies, knowing with every fiber of our beings that we are made in the image and likeness of God, we can work miracles.

         Together, let’s worry less about how we should worship in church and be concerned more about how we should worship God through service. Let’s worry less about what we get and be concerned more about what we can give. Let’s worry less about how others have done us wrong and be concerned more about how we can better treat others with love. We are the queer Body of Christ and we have a mission to live out. With these frail, vulnerable, fallible, transitory, beautiful bodies, we can, with God’s help. Amen.

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[1] Williamson, Marianne. A Return to Love, 86.