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God:
In us. Everywhere. All the time.
Reflections on the lessons for the Third Sunday of Eastertide
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Micah 4:1-5 / Psalm 98:1-5 / I John 1:1-2:2 / Luke 24:36b-48
Across the boards - churches, civic events, lectures (especially on weeknights) -- attendance spikes when the public knows there will be refreshments. It's touching, really. Very human. Eating is about the surest sign of life for anything.
That's the core of today's gospel (Luke 24:36b-48). In comes the risen Jesus. He asks for a fish. He eats it. He's alive. And he's human. Despite the cross, he's not dead and gone. Plus, despite our inclination to make him out as some kind of wizardy-god, he's really one of us. It never fails to surprise us. But there it is nevertheless -- in every resurrection appearance recorded in the Bible, the message is that Jesus is showing off his humanity, not his divinity.
It's a really wild symbol -- a resurgent body. Not resuscitated -- as after a rescue from drowning -- but resurrected, somehow back and at it again after what can only be called death. And he says the same thing can happen to anyone. Maybe, maybe not after what a doctor would call death -- but definitely after what a poet would call death.
People have made lots of bad jokes have been made about the idea of bodies after resurrections. Like what they might look like. The one we have now? Or the one we had at 18? The English poet William Blake speculated that everyone in heaven would look as they looked at age 33, since that's how old Jesus was said to be at the time of the Biblical resurrection. I had a friend in seminary who did a lot of extra sit-ups before his 33rd birthday, just in case.
But the idea of the incarnation -- and the resurrected body the gospel talks about -- isn't about a beauty contest, at least not about what the magazines tell us is beautiful. The incarnation and the resurrection are about how much God loves life. All of it. Whole life. God isn't running a beauty contest. The gospel message is that a resurrected body looks and works like the real bodies we see around us -- not like a perfect 10. God sees the resurrection -- and wants us to see it, too -- in the lumps and bumps we have collected over our years. That's the great thing about resurrection. It can happen anytime. Does happen all the time. God loves the gnarled hands in a nursing home just as much as Josie's perfect little three-month-old fingers. God loves legs in steel braces just as much as the ones in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
Today's gospel is a real challenge to understand. We have put so very many roadblocks in the way of our seeing it. But when he asks for that fish, Jesus is saying that he has beaten out the powers of death and destruction in a real life way, not a magical way. He hasn't come back to save humanity FOR the beauty contest. He's alive again to save us FROM the beauty contest. Incarnation -- before and after the crucifixion, symbolic, literal, whatever -- is the theological concept that speaks to us about how God lives with us, in the flesh. Incarnation means "in the flesh". The gospels mean for us to notice how, in these stories, this person who is so godly is also so . . . bodily. So recognizable. He's hungry. He has scars.
We sing songs about how God lives a human life mostly at Christmas, about a baby in the manger. Those who know the end of the baby's story sing those songs amazed that the baby will go on to live a life full of choices and accidents and millions of joys and pains all smashed together. And that the baby will suffer and die. And that the divinely infused person that starts in the manger will not end on the cross, somehow -- but will go on and on for these 2000 years. And what is true about Jesus, we are invited to believe, is true about all of us, too.
Rituals are ways human beings try to embed this understanding in our hearts and our minds. Baptism and Eucharist particularly. Water and bread and wine are very bodily things. Washing, eating. It's a wonderful idea to get together regularly to ritualize the experience the disciples had in the biblical accounts of Easter: Seeing God in a body like ours -- really like ours, not just kind of like ours. That's what we have before us here this morning: A vision of God in this assembled body, in our bodies. Long years of ritual teach us to see God in all kinds of life, and that in turn helps us live all different kinds of life in godlike ways. Rituals shape people. Not in a magical instant, but over a lifetime. Without that shaping (and I do point out that the rituals of water and bread and wine are available at many kinds of tables and from many different fonts) people seem to me to remain kind of juvenile, unshaped. Unable to visualize the grandeur that surges all through lives and only takes a reasonable amount of practice to catch a glimpse of.
I am lucky. I get to see so much of that practicing going on. And it's finally starting to dawn on me how it all comes together. How splashing Josie with water this morning connects with Georgia taking bread and wine from our table to her brother-in-law just before he died. And how both those enormous rituals are present in the moments when I go out to eat Chinese food with someone I really like and in the moments when I splash water on my face in the morning and look in the mirror and wonder what in the world I am doing with my days on earth.
What's the message? The message is that God is in you and in me in the places we find ourselves living all the time. The true scope and dimension of a human life dwarfs anything we might see in any single moment or circumstance. It takes a really big worldview to understand where we are at any given time. So, even when something inside us is screaming "You're a real mess" God is saying "Not the way I see it. How about let's have another piece of fish?".
Ritual tries to teach us that a human life is not a beauty contest with the prize going to the perfect, it's a vast landscape of divinely infused time fascinating enough in even the most ordinary or decrepit moments to lure the creator of all into the midst of it.
Let me finish off by reading you a bit from a new favorite writer of mine, Anne Lamott, from of all things, an essay about trying to keep her hairdo looking "right". Or rather an essay about relaxing enough to make God a welcome and helpful guest in your life.
"In the absence of wind, rain, or humidity with a lot of mousse on hand I could get [my hair] to appear to fall just right. Water was the enemy. I'd leave the house shellacked into an illusion of effortless perfection and then after five minutes in rain or humidity I'd look like Ronald McDonald. Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you're secretly looking up to the skies not for illumination or direction but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain? Can you imagine how discouraging it was for me to live in fear of drizzle?
"Because Christianity is about water: 'Everyone that thirsts, come to the waters'. It's about baptism, for God's sake. It's about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism you agree to do something that's a little sloppy because at the same time it's also holy, and absurd. It's about surrender, giving in to things we can't control; it's a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and just get drenched.
"There's something so tender about this to me, about being willing to have your makeup wash off, your eyes tear up, your nose start to run. It's tender partly because it hearkens back to infancy, to your mother washing your face with love and lots of water, tending to you, making you clean all over again. And in the Christian experience of baptism, the hope is that when you go under and you come out, maybe a little disoriented, you haven't dragged the old [stuff] along behind you. The hope, the belief, is that a new day is upon you now. A day when you are emboldened to take God at God's word about cleanness and protection 'When you pass through deep waters I will be with you there. Rivers shall not overflow you'."
Condensed and amended for reading aloud from "Sister" in Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, 1999.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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