All Body, All the Time

Sermon

The first time I remember reading today’s Colossians passage was on September 11, 2001. It was my quiet time, and I had just read and was puzzling over “in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body.” My husband interrupted my quiet time to tell me about the Twin Towers and the plane that went down in Pennsylvania instead of hitting the Pentagon. It was like the passengers’ decision to overpower the hijackers embodied Paul’s thing about completing in his flesh Christ’s afflictions.

In my years of preaching, I’ve been able to successfully avoid this passage, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to eavesdrop on any conversation it might have with the world we are now living in. This world of racism protests, pandemic, political upheaval, economic downturn. What could be more appropriate than to unpack what it means to “complete (in our own bodies) the afflictions” of the One who died on the cross. Any other preaching opp, and I might have worked up a head of steam about the Greek dualism that believed the body is worthless and spirit is everything. How fascinating to put together our current world with Paul’s. I try to imagine this writer’s context as he claims that following Jesus is not about having right ideas, it’s about putting one’s body on the line in his name. Like those folks on the plane hijacked to crash into the Pentagon. They knew they were going to crash no matter what, so instead of decrying the immorality of plane hijacking, or the attack on their country, they chose instead to act and thus deprive the hijackers of a symbolic gesture. It’s all body, all the time.

Our Buddhist friends tell us that life is suffering. The Message paraphrases Colossians like this: “There’s a lot of suffering to be entered into in this world—the kind of suffering Christ takes on.” He sounds a tiny bit defensive applying it to himself, as if responding to those who sneer, “If you’re so right, if you’re really God’s mouthpiece, how come you’re on death row?” As his response, the writer makes an obvious allusion to following the executed Jesus literally, with the exception that Jesus’s execution was too quick, from trial to cross, for him to spend any time on death row, whereas Paul languished for years.

Death row is on my mind this week, having watched Just Mercy. The movie recounts the true story of attorney Bryan Stevenson’s justice work on behalf of death row inmates in Alabama. Besides beautiful statements about justice, hope, and mercy, the film opens a window into the lived experience of being Black in our country’s judicial system. It’s a state of being which means, as one character says, you are “guilty from the moment you’re born.” All body, all the time.

As a spiritual director, I’ve been hearing a lot about suffering these days. My directees are trying to make sense of the suffering they see and experience. The writer of Colossians wants his readers to know that it isn’t about “suffering for the sake of suffering,” as if being miserable

is what makes us holy. Suffering, he wants them to understand, is a way to enter into God’s glory. My directees want to know what God’s role is in suffering, what is expected of them under the circumstances, ways to alleviate the suffering of others or ascribe meaning to anyone’s suffering. The metaphor that has been coming up a lot in these conversations is that of a caterpillar.

You may remember from biology class that a caterpillar doesn’t end its life looking the way it does as it begins life. A caterpillar spends a season eating, stocking up energy for its next task, which is to find an appropriate place to spin a cocoon. From within its squishy, worm-like body, the caterpillar somehow finds the resources to spin a long thread to wrap around its body like a blanket. And then the caterpillar dissolves. This is no time-lapse transmogrification to butterfly-dom. This is DNA soup. Without adding anything from outside, and with nothing left over, the genetic material inside that cocoon re-knits itself, only this time it’s not worm-y. The soup develops into the classic insect body of head, thorax, and abdomen. Six articulated legs poke from the body. Compound eyes and antennae manifest. And then—wing buds sprout. That cocoon, previously retaining a primordial soup, now contains a distinct form. Same genetic material, just not the same body. When the cocoon splits, what struggles to pull itself out over a period of several hours, is a pitiful, soggy mess. Eventually, if you haven’t exerted a misguided attempt to help, a butterfly comes into being, wings and all.

Maybe that’s a good metaphor for what is happening to us now. Maybe we’re in the messy slough time of caterpillar soup, waiting on the miracle that will give us the juice we need to split what binds us, in order to struggle forth with wings. It’s a hard, terrible thing to have to be undone like this, but as Richard Rohr puts it, “the pattern of transformation is always death transformed, not death avoided.” He sees the chaos of our times this way: “There is something essential that we only know by dying. … Something dies but something new is born—which is why the chaos of our times is, in a strange way, a sign of hope … Breakdown can be break through if we recognize a new pattern of life struggling to emerge.”

Someone attending a recent book discussion with me reflected on some of Rohr’s thinking with an insight about her own experience of the Black Lives Matter movement. She wondered if the movement might be the Christ at work, teaching us our collectivity—as Paul would say, teaching us how we are the Body of Christ together. We are more than individuals, this friend said, as she noted that the most important thing she is learning from Black Lives Matter is the insight that we are institutions as well as individuals.

Entering into suffering with others is about solidarity, about compassion. It’s with-ness, both with Christ and with others in creation. Dante Stewart, a writer with Sojourners, differentiates solidarity from sympathy. “Sympathy,” he writes “feels bad about a situation. Solidarity joins in as a co-laborer to change the situation. Sympathy calls for love without risk. Solidarity calls for risk as love. Sympathy centers the comfort and timetable of those who benefit from a system of difference. Solidarity calls for a revolution of value in a system in which we build a loving and

just common life together.” Putting your body on the line for the sake of another. All body, all the time.

Maybe the COVID-19 quarantine can be our spiritual practice as we live into the changes we’re all experiencing. What if we used this as a time to slow down, educate ourselves, do some soul-searching about our institutions and privileges, listen to the call of the Body-ness of Christ on our lives. Morgan Housel, formerly with The Wall Street Journal, now blogging with The Collaborative Fund, suggests we define our permanent assumptions. When everything is happening so quickly, he wonders, how else can we make sense of our world and future? “It’s not inconsistent,” he says, “to have no view about the future path of some things but unwavering views about the path of others.” The usefulness of knowing your permanent assumptions, he says, is that “when the world is a dark cloud of uncertainty … those permanent assumptions tend to be what matter most.” His example is Amazon, an organization that can attribute a great deal of its success to a business strategy built around some permanent assumptions Jeff Bezos noted: people are never going to say, “Charge me more for your products!” and “Take your time delivering my stuff.” Permanent assumptions, Housel says, are things you know are so true, you can afford to put a lot of energy into them. Bryan Stevenson (of Just Mercy fame) has some permanent assumptions of his own, although doesn’t call them that. This is his character’s speech from the end of the movie (I heard him say the same thing on a TED Talk from 2012):

“Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”

The writer of Colossians has a few permanent assumptions of his own, and he uses a lot of words to say them. The Message sums them up as, “Christ is in you.” And we live into that, he says, not by having right beliefs but with our bodies. By our actions. It’s all body, all the time.