Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seeyouonsunday/videos/1510067133218258 and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3CaWtr_xvY
I’m going to start with someone else’s introduction of the author of our theme.
Cole Arthur Riley grew up in a house full of personalities that she describes as loud and funny, but as a kid, as loved as she felt, she kept her voice from others. In fact, Cole barely spoke until she was 7. Still, her dad kept finding ways to, as she described, bribe her to share her voice and nurture her creative impulse, often in writing, from poems to stories and beyond. As she grew into herself, she developed a dual passion for contemplative spirituality, and also the work of writers, like Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Thomas Merton, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou. Over time, her lens on spirituality yearned for a more expansive expression, one that embodied more of her lived experience as a Black, queer woman, who’d also find herself living with an autoimmune disease that manifested in illness, pain, and uncertainty.
Cole was drawn to liturgy and began to write her own blended prayer-meets-poetry, informed by her, unique experience of life, faith, love, creativity, harm, inequity, and justice. She began sharing these modern liturgies on Instagram under the moniker, Black Liturgies, which she describes as a space for Black spiritual words of liberation, lament, rage, and rest. The project quickly grew into a global phenomenon, with deep resonance far beyond her original intended audience, and led to her debut book, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us, which explores some of the most urgent questions of life, identity, and faith: How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive? How do we honor, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit? How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest? In this stunning work, Cole invites us to descend into our own stories, examine our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair, and find that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it. https://pocket.co/share/518d6c79-0705-451d-8136-0c1e15ac229e
Cole Arthur Riley’s begins with the premise, we can’t separate our body from our minds and our souls and our worship and our being. But what it means to be human is the fullness of all of our parts integrated with each other. The goal is embodiment, our whole self our whole being; are flesh my soul feeling blood synapses nerves. And that when we present ourselves to the world we are not just a body or we are not just a mind they’re not just spirit or feelings; we are all of those pieces. When we pray, when we worship when we write we are all of our parts and all of our history. And she wrote black liturgies because for so long, for so much of church history the prayers the liturgy the work of the people in the church was written by powerful white men, and they was liturgies are still used and many in many churches today. So it becomes important to have prayers liturgy from voices of other people.
Cole wrote in an article:
I receive many earnest messages from nervous white people asking if it’s okay for them to be in the space. If it’s okay for them to share my words. Most often, I answer this question with a question: “Can you be present in this space without centering whiteness?” For the rare white person who is aware of their bodies and histories and interior worlds, the space can serve as practice in a sacred decentering. Liturgy is a very subtle form for solidarity. When every word isn’t for you, when you come upon a phrase that doesn’t immediately resonate, or even make sense to you, liturgy asks us to remain. To remain in the words. To be present to their grief, their rage, their desire. And partake in their particularity without needing the words to be about you. It’s a kind of presence I’m not quick to sneer at. https://pocket.co/share/fd4d66ba-f988-4949-aaad-c2d0546cc86b
Female black queer and with a chronic illness, Cole’s is a body that is historically, and to present day, dismissed, sexualized, diminished, owned, and abused. And ways I can Only Imagine.
And I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m minimizing the experience of the intersections but Cole lives at and many others but also, many of us live in bodies that deviate from the norm, from the bodies that wrote the Liturgy and the theology, from those who will argue the body doesn’t matter because they assume theirs is the standard. Yet few fit the perfect Norm body.
Bodies that are too woman, too feminine, too masculine, too young, too old, too skinny, too fat, too brown, too dark, too pale, too bent, too damaged, too broken.
Many of us disassociate ourselves from our bodies. Our empires of this world, tell us our body and mind are separate and and neither are enough–and they can sell us what we need to be better. Even our Christian tradition has carried more Plato than Christ. For Plato the body was going to die and so the body was not in any way as important as the immortal soul. Paul was a Roman trained in Greek philosophy as much as he was trained in Torah. Paul tells us regularly that the flesh is evil and yes that means the desires of the flesh or the things that are uncontrollable but they are coming from the body. The body is separate from the mind and the soul. And there are many who took this to an extreme Christian gnosticism would go as far as denying the bodiliness of Jesus. And there are many Aesthetics throughout history who have deny the needs and the care of the body for the well-being of their spirit.
And then we have Jesus. Who lived in the tradition of the god whose very first Act was embodiment. Who made light to watch as the world was embodied to see the beauty as it was created. Who came embodied incarnate in Jesus and lived embodied with all of the things that a body brings with being human among other bodies. Who taught his disciples that the central acts of this tradition we’re going to be washing the body and eating. Not only that the tradition of consuming his body metaphorically.
It is good practice when it comes to preaching to for the preacher to be personal and vague at the same time. Tell stories that are amusing but don’t really say anything, to be detached from the experience so the emotions aren’t raw. And despite how I feel about it, I am a public figure, whose body is on display at least once a week. And so every item of clothing I put on is strategically there to say something or to not say something about who I am. And to give you the least amount of opportunity to say anything negative about what I’m wearing or my body. Women in Ministry have heard all kinds of things about their bodies without losing weight or gaining weight and how their clothes are inappropriate given either of those, about pregnancy and about sex. Honestly, it’s why so many of us wear a robe so much of the year. Our male colleagues don’t have the same experience.
And I took a few minutes this week to ride a few words about what I feel about my body and it wasn’t great. It was pretty judgmental and cruel and not anything I would say about someone I loved. My body isn’t living out to the standards that I hold for it that is to function or look like it did when I was 16 or 25 or even 30. So maybe it’s easier to just stay disconnected and drag my body through the world with me. And tell of course it gets to the point and it tells me that we’ve done too much when I spend 3 hours laying on a heating pad trying to get the tension out of my shoulders not from any physical labor I have done but from the weight that my mind has placed upon them to carry.
It has been a long time since I sat alone with my body maybe years maybe since the last time I felt at home and comfortable in this in this body. On most days I don’t affirm the Dignity of the body that walked across the stage to receive my diplomas and marched in protest, swam and danced, carried my nieces and baptized babies, that held my grandmother’s hand as she died, has touched ancient sacred places and connected with the generations who held it sacred to, I took the brunt when I was so heartbroken I didn’t want to feel and then desperate to feel anything at all, that recovered from sprained ankles and a fractured wrist, bruised knees and stubbed toes, that holds my Stress and Anxiety when my mind can’t process it yet, but digs holes and builds patios, that process is my food and oxygenates my blood and bends at the right places still and heals. And still I tell it it is not enough,
I don’t offer dignity to my body, the respect, the kindness, the glory that is a body made in the image of God. That is a little less than the immortal angels; that Jesus saw fit to feed each and everyone the same until they were full regardless of their money or their wealth or their gender or their age, the Hue of brown in their skin. The feeding of the 5000 wasn’t just a miracle of food but an active dignity that stomachs needed to be filled and all stomachs need to be filled the same. That was an act of affirming the Dignity of all people. That their stomachs and their heads and their hearts through the food and the teaching and the Community of Christ integrated the people and offered the wholeness and dignity that we so often deny ourselves. There is a reason that the people who are the church are called the Body of Christ.
Our bodies matter.
We don’t just take bodies through life with us, they aren’t less than the knowledge we’ve gained or the thoughts we have. They aren’t evil and our minds and spirits have to counter them. Our bodies are part of what makes us human, bear God’s image, are how we worship God, are how we move through this world, are how we love this world. And maybe, your body isn’t what you want it to be, or isn’t what it once was, maybe you were never able to move through the world like others do. But your body is part of you, and part of the body of Christ, and we can learn from each other’s experiences in our bodies, we can hear stories and see and notice, we can be seen and see others, be known and know others. To know ourselves, to offer blessing and affirm dignity to ourselves every day, even as our bodies don’t look or move or feel like they did, or we want, but to offer gratitude for this day, for the days that brought us here, to know our bodies and be known by each other.