What Child Is This?
November 29, 2020 • First Sunday of Advent
Readings: Parable of the pebble, the waterfall, and the moon
(https://curvingtowardthecenter.com/2020/06/26/
parable-of-the-pebble-the-waterfall-and-the-moon/)
By Meisaan Chan, Used by Permission;
The Prayer of Thanksgiving
(A New New Testament, Trans. by Hal Taussig)
Katie Reimer, guest preacher
iStock-474902269, by Zulapi
The Prayer of Thanksgiving reveals an expansive experience of the Divine. The people who uttered these words were overflowing with gratitude that God had come near to them. They repeated over and over again their delight at having knowledge of the One honored with the name of God.
And this was not just an intellectual kind of knowing. The kind of knowing described in this prayer is an intimate, physical, embodied knowing.
The people exclaim in this prayer -
“We rejoice that in the body you have made us divine through your knowledge.”
What an absolutely stunning line.
These people had experienced a thrilling and intimate encounter with God that had freed them to feel the Divine in their own bodies.
I admit I am enchanted by their words because I experience God more in my head than in my body. I think about God a lot. I think about my faith. I form ideas and theologies about the Divine.
And even when I am praying to God, I am usually asking a question, expressing a thought or exposing a struggle.
Although I have felt vitality coursing through my physical body, I have not named this kind of “aliveness” as the Spirit of God in my own flesh.
The Prayer of Thanksgiving was discovered in 1945, among 52 ancient, mostly Christian documents in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Scholars believe it dates from the 1st-3rd centuries, and was likely read at gatherings of the early Christ followers.[1]
Although these Christ followers were closer in time to Jesus than we are, we share with them a situation of coming to Jesus through the testimony and the story of others. One advantage that they have over us is that they encountered the stories of Jesus without 2,000 years of Christian history. We can learn a great deal about Jesus, or the incarnate God, from these people.
So here we are. It’s the beginning of Advent 2020.
Advent gives us a wonderful opportunity to return every year to the story of Jesus. The season brings to our minds the ancient and timeless question: Who is this child in Mary’s womb?
Today’s message will be an exploration of this question. What child is this?
As I invite you into my own journey with the story of Jesus, my hope is that there will be points of resonance with your own journey. I hope that together we can deepen our encounter with Jesus, opening ourselves more and more to the enfleshed Divine.
The story of Jesus is not for the faint of heart. It takes courage and openness and honesty to grapple with this story. But I think 2020 has prepared us well to have our worlds flipped upside down. So let’s go!
I confess that one of the more spiritually challenging things I read in seminary was a question posed by feminist theologian Mary Daly. Mary Daly asked how women could be saved by a male savior. The question literally took my breath away. It is an uncomfortable question for me, that I have sat with for many years now.
I remember the first time I heard a preacher refer to God as “She.” It was here at Church of the Village, about 8 or 9 years ago. The pastor used “She” not just once, but many times throughout the sermon, to refer to God.
I remember feeling so embarrassed and shocked that I looked down at my shoes for the rest of the service. I couldn’t even look the preacher in the eye as I left the church that day.
I had never considered God to be anything other than He. How many times throughout my life had I heard or spoken the words: “God the Father” and “Jesus the Son of God.”
And so when I came across that question posed by Mary Daly a few years after hearing God referred to as “She” for the first time, I had to do some real soul searching. By that point, I had become used to calling God “She,” and hearing God called “She” but I still could not say it out loud. It felt too strange, and even maybe wrong, to refer to God with a female pronoun.
Other feminist and womanist theologians I have read helped me make sense of Jesus’ maleness in ways that resist patriarchy.
And ancient texts like The Prayer of Thanksgiving have also helped. This prayer describes God as a “womb of all that grows.” The Prayer of Thanksgiving describes God as a “a womb pregnant with the nature of the Father.” And the Prayer of Thanksgiving describes God as the “never ending endurance of the Father who gives birth.” This kind of stunning language resonates with the passage in Genesis where we learn that both men and women were created in the image of God.
Another source that has helped me wrestle with Daly’s question has been the writing of Catholic theologian, Elizabeth Johnson, who recently retired from teaching at Fordham. Johnson brings forth the divine feminine in her writings, as she explores the Holy Spirit, otherwise known as Sophia in the Hebrew scriptures. Elizabeth Johnson brilliantly observes that Christianity has attributed so many of the same characteristics of Sophia, or the Holy Spirit, to Jesus that by the end of the 1st century, Jesus became almost the “embodiment of Sophia herself.”[2]
With all of these resources, today, I am less troubled by the maleness of Jesus, and more angry and grieved at how the story of Jesus has been co-opted by 2,000 years of patriarchy.
I am angry that the feminine divine has been intentionally and systematically erased from the Jesus story, and erased from our Christian faith tradition.
I am angry that women’s ordination in Christian churches is not universal.
I am angry that so many churches prefer a male pastor over a female one.
And I believe that all of these things are connected to the fact that 137 women globally are killed by their intimate partner or a family member every single day.[3]
I believe that these things are connected to the reality that indigenous women and girls are murdered or missing at the hands of non-Natives at alarmingly high rates, and that their plight is treated with apathy by law enforcement and society at large.[4]
I am no longer troubled by Jesus’ maleness.
But I am angered and grieved at patriarchy’s use of Jesus’ maleness to justify itself.
I am angry that someone like Mary Daly felt she had to reject the Christian faith because of how patriarchy had used Jesus’ maleness.
If humans of all gender expressions are made in the image of God, as Genesis tells us,
...and if Jesus is the Divine in the flesh - the invisible God made visible -
...then Jesus, like God, must contain all gender expressions.
This recognition is essential if we are to rejoice with the authors of The Prayer of Thanksgiving in God the Father who gives birth. In God, the womb of all that grows.
I think this expansive knowledge of God, revealed through the physical being of Jesus, is necessary for us to experience the Divine within our own bodies.
This intimate knowing that Jesus and God are within and beyond all genders is essential for us to be able to say
“We rejoice that in the body you have made us divine through your knowledge.”
So, what child is this?
This child Jesus is God the Creator, Sophia the Spirit, a fascinating mixture of the masculine and feminine, fully divine and fully human.
I invite us now to wrestle for a little bit with the related challenge of what Jesus means against the backdrop of the climate crisis we are facing. A few weeks ago, Pastor Jeff introduced us to the United Methodist Social Principles, and we have been looking at the first section, the Community of All Creation, which opens by saying:
“All creation is the Lord’s, and we are responsible for the ways in which we use and abuse it. Water, air, soil, minerals, energy resources, plants, animal life, and space are to be valued and conserved because they are God’s creation and not solely because they are useful to human beings.”[5]
Again, what I read is the opening of the United Methodist Social Principles.
In the same way that we must wrestle with the question of Jesus’ maleness, we must also wrestle with his humanness, and ask what his humanness means for non-human lives.
I believe that in the same way the Christian faith tradition has struggled to locate God in the female body, we have struggled to see the Divine in other Earth creatures as well.
Larry Rasmussen called our attention last week to the fact that human activity has led to the extinction of 70% of animal populations since 1970.
Our misuse of carbon is bringing our planet to a boil.
Plastic is killing our oceans and choking our marine life.
Humans have left over 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball in the orbit around the earth, traveling at speeds fast enough to destroy a satellite or a spaceship.[6]
We are living through a time of profound disconnection from Mother Earth.
It is here where I find Meissan Chan’s Parable of the Pebble, the Waterfall and the Moon to be particularly helpful. In this story, God incarnates as a pebble, and a waterfall and a moon, out of love and desire that these beings would know God. God longs for the entire creation to experience the divinity within themselves.
It is only the moon who realizes that God is more than just a moon. God’s incarnation as a moon gives the moon a way to access God, but God is much more expansive. God is a waterfall, also...and God is a pebble also...and God is a human male also...and God is a human female also.
As the moon recognizes the expansiveness of God, she develops the capacity to enter the fullness of God. And at the same time, she maintains her identity as a moon, and through this particular form, she learns to experience the fullness of God within herself.
For some of us, it may feel like a stretch to see the image of God in all creation, but Meisaan Chan’s poem resonates with multiple places in the New Testament.
Romans 1 notes that God’s power and nature have been, and are still being revealed through the entire creation since the beginning of time.
Colossians 1 similarly understands that the entire creation as a place where God is enfleshed, or made visible.
And Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar, who is still living and working and writing today, and has shaped so much of our contemporary progressive Christian thought. Rohr notes that creation is the first and original incarnation of God and Jesus is the second.[7] Jesus helps us to see and experience the truth that has been there from the beginning of time, as the gospel of John notes. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
From the beginning, God was enfleshed in the entire created order. All of creation bears the imprint of the Creator.
And how could it be otherwise?
Don’t the symphonies of Gustav Mahler bear the imprint of the composer?
Don’t the buildings designed by Zaha Hadid reveal the essence of the architect?
Don’t the poems of Audre Lorde hold the nature of the poet?
Water, air, soil, minerals, energy resources, plants, animal life, space, and human beings bear the image of the Creator.
All make visible the invisible God.
So who is this child, Jesus?
Jesus is God come to us in human form so that we might be able to know God. To experience God in the physical world. To experience the Divine in our own bodies.
The story of Jesus is the story of the Divine reminding us of what has been true since the beginning of creation - that all flesh bears the image of God, and that all flesh is sacred.
Let us be wary of growing smug like the pebble and the waterfall at thinking that we know the exact shape and the exact likeness of the God who comes in the form of Jesus Christ.
Can you imagine a world where we took the story of God’s incarnation in Jesus seriously?
The sight of fish choking on plastic in the oceans would not just bother us. It would be intolerable, because it would be a desecration of the Divine.
The reality of high rates of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls would not just trouble us. We would relentlessly press to expose and stop this because it would be a violation of the very being of God.
Today we opened worship with Monica Quintero and her family lighting the first Advent candle - the candle of hope.
The hope of Advent comes from the way that God’s enfleshment in the person of Jesus grows our capacity to experience God’s enfleshment in the entire creation.
The hope of Advent comes from our ability to feel God coming so close to us that we can feel the Sacred within our very bodies.
So let’s take a breath, because I’ve been speaking more to our minds than our bodies.
I want us to take a minute now to become more conscious of the Sacred who is always within and near to us.
Take a few deep breaths and notice the sensations of air coming in and out of your body.
Feel the weight of your body being supported by the chair you are sitting on - and being supported by the earth below you.
Wiggle your toes.
And wiggle your fingers.
Turn your head from left to right. From the east to the west. Lift your head up towards the sky, and down towards the earth. Up towards the sky, and down towards the earth.
And place one hand on your heart, and another hand on your belly, and take a minute to feel the Sacred within you.
The good news of Jesus Christ is the revelation that has been true since the beginning of creation - that the Divine lives within and around us. The Sacred courses through all of our bodies, and through all of creation. The story of Jesus tells us that God has come close to us, and continues to come close to us.
We all have the capacity to be as alive and expansive as those early Christ followers who wrote The Prayer of Thanksgiving.
I pray that this Advent season would deepen our connection to the Sacred within our own earthly bodies.
And I pray that this Advent season would deepen our connection to the Spirit within all of Creation.
Jesus came, and Jesus comes, that we might know and feel the fullness of God here on Earth.
This is a reason for hope.
Amen.
(c) 2020 Katie Reimer
All rights reserved.
[1] Hal Taussig, A New New Testament.
[2] Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is.
[3] https://www.un.org/en/desa/world%E2%80%99s-women-2020
[4]http://www.uihi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Missing-and-Murdered-Indigenous-Women-and-Girls-Report.pdf
[5] https://www.umc.org/en/content/social-principles-the-natural-world
[6] John Elkington, Green Swans
[7] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ.