Sermon: I've Got a Perfect Body

This series will be the texts of a number of sermons I've written, both delivered and undelivered. The first is one from my first thesis and that will probably otherwise never see the light of day. Enjoy.

I’ve Got a Perfect Body

(Genesis 2: 5- 9; Psalm 104: 25-35; John 20: 11-23; 1 Cor.15: 35-49)

Come, O Spirit, fill the hearts of your people, and kindle in us the fire of your love.

“I’ve got a perfect body,” sings Regina Spector.  “I’ve got a perfect body, because my eyelashes catch my sweat. Oh yes, they do. They do, they do, they do, they do.” Now I do not expect that you know this song. It is new and not particularly popular. But it is a good song. You get the startling claim that someone has a perfect body, which is rare these days. And what makes this body perfect is not that it is physically fit or beautiful. No, it’s a perfect body because it does what it is supposed to do. That’s it, nothing more. This is all it takes. And that's an elegant solution that should put many of us at ease. It should really appeal to those of us who are young and whole and well. 

I’ve got a perfect body, oh yes I do. 

But what about the rest of us? What of those whose arms and legs do not respond quite so quickly anymore? What about the aged? The infirm? The handicapped and physically disabled? What about the mentally unstable, those who neurological chemistries predispose them to certain kinds of illness? What about those people who have metal hips and knees, long-term or recurring illness? Protracted fatigue or insomnia? No, the more we think about it the fewer and fewer perfect bodies we have, even by this better definition.

Yet: I’ve got a perfect body, oh yes I do. It’s a line good enough to sing.

So maybe there’s a better definition still. Maybe there’s a perfect body that everyone might get. So let’s talk about Genesis. “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” Now that’s odd. I don’t think I look like dust, and I can tell you that you don’t either. But I do feel like dust, sometimes. I think we all do. We become irritable and irritating. We chafe, our words cut and sting. We can’t decide what to do, blown here and there by our anxiety or our frustration. We can taste the grit of insults and rumors on our tongues. From the dust we come, to the dust we shall return. Doesn’t sound too perfect.

On the other hand, here we are. Man became a living being. The Lord God breathed into our nostrils the breath of life. Sounds better. You can imagine this, can’t you? A figure kneels and leans over the man, makes that seal around the mouth and nose, and blows. Cardiovascular resuscitation! But tradition has it that this is the work of the Holy Spirit. “The Lord, the giver of life,” we say in the creed. This is it: this is what the Holy Spirit does, right here. Brings that man to life. Man became a living being – and women too, I must say.       

Breathed into life by God! Imagine that! And everybody’s in. Adam is every body. Doesn’t matter if your body’s healthy or sound, appealing or appalling. We all qualify. We’ve all been touched by God, blown into being by the Holy Spirit. Of course, we're still dusty. God did not blow us clean. So we’re still kind of dead. That’s what dust means, right? It’s dead earth, loose, infertile. “When no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up.” 

From death, life from the Lord. There is this tension. A professor once remarked that this passage means that we are divinity and dust. Whenever we feel that we are either, what we need to do is remember that we are also the other. When we feel like dust, recall that divinity, the breath of God moves within us. When we feel like divinity, you’re probably soon going to be humbled, humus, of the earth. Good advice, though it would hardly make an entire way of life.

I’ve got a perfect body. Oh yes, I do.

“When you hide your face,” says the Psalm. “they are dismayed. When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.” Dust without divinity is dead. Without breath, you can’t go on. And the thing about breathing is you have to do it again. You breathe once, you die, you exhale. You breathe twice, you live again. 

But how does one receive the breath of God?  And he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Mouth to face. Face to face. When you send forth your spirit they are created. And you renew the face of the ground. You breathe in, you breathe out. God breathes in, God breathes out: the motion of the Holy Spirit. The whole world breathes with God. In, and out. We are the face of the ground. Renewed, not just once. The Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life...gives life twice. Breathing doesn't stop. You should have been face to face with God, forever.

I’ve got a perfect body, oh yes I do.

So we’re not there yet. But I do have another candidate for the perfect body. Because there is someone who did receive life from the Spirit twice. Right? Rabonni! Mary did not recognize him. Sounds like a different body. Was it? You all know the story: put your finger here and see my hands, he tells Thomas. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. The point is not doubt but recognition. Who is Jesus after death? Where’s the body? They have taken away my Lord, Mary says. I cannot see his face, she might add. But when the doors of the house were locked, Jesus came and stood among them. And he breathes on them and says “Receive the Holy Spirit.” 

Now I have often wondered what this might have been: is he blowing out a candle or breathing on a mirror? Might have even been a kiss. Or it might have been that cardiovascular resuscitation. But you know the story: Jesus is God, breathing face to face. “Receive the Holy Spirit.” God breathes in, God breathes out. God breathes with us. The Spirit gives life, and then the Spirit gives life again. Face to face with God.

And that's not what you might expect. Receive the Holy Spirit and if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. Dust, but dust together. Dust, but dust caught up in some divine wind. Forgiveness. Forgiving is what God does. Divinity does not think that we are just dust. Jesus carries the wounds, the marks, the scars. He died. No getting out of that one. So maybe it’s our infirmities, which remind us of our deaths, that look the most like Jesus. Now there's a thought.

But it's not enough. The risen body of Jesus tells us is that death is not enough. Or, rather, that it is enough for more. The Spirit gives life, and then the Spirit gives life again. God breathes in, God breathes out. Do not hold on to me, says Jesus, because I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Ascending, borne aloft on the wind. Heavenly dust. Ashes to ashes to....what? What happens to dust after it ascends? The world breathes with God. I’m going to my Father. Face to face with God. Peace, indeed.

I’ve got a perfect body. Oh yes, I do.

So there’s your perfect body: Jesus. What is that to us? Well, we get that perfect body when we share the Eucharist. Episcopalians know this. When we share the bread, the broken bread, we become the body of believers. We chew our faith, Thomas Cranmer said. And once we become the body of believers we become the body of Jesus Christ – incarnate, crucified and risen. We are what we eat. Christians know that. We are the perfect body, because of our infirmities and insults, our dust and our burnt-out ashes. 

Hard to believe, isn’t it? No annual meeting can go all that well. So this must be a heavenly reality, one of those that started but just ain't finished yet. That's what Paul says. You do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed. The glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. So there is our body now, and that perhaps is this body, this church. Divine dust, forgiven dust. Our living, breathing glory and make no mistake. But then there is another breath. Another body, raised in glory, breathed in power, raised in spirit and in heaven and in Christ. 

So maybe in the end we'll just talk about dust that is divine. Heavenly dust, face to face with God. Dust that does not sting. Dust that is not dirt. One can hardly say. It is what we have been promised. As is the man of heaven so are those who are of heaven. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Jesus said to them ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.” Not a commandment, certainly not a condemnation. Because that's not what we need. What we need is breath, a promise from God. And a promise from God is just as good as a gift from God.  So maybe we all already are standing, just a little bit, face to face with God. Breathing with God.  

Cause enough to say, and I know you can say it with me:

I’ve got a perfect body. Oh yes, I do.

Amen

On Scripture: Jeremiah 11: 18-20

 

Jeremiah 11:18-20

It was the LORD who made it known to me, and I knew;

    then you showed me their evil deeds.

But I was like a gentle lamb

    led to the slaughter.

And I did not know it was against me

    that they devised schemes, saying,

"Let us destroy the tree with its fruit,

    let us cut him off from the land of the living,

    so that his name will no longer be remembered!"

But you, O LORD of hosts, who judge righteously,

    who try the heart and the mind,

let me see your retribution upon them,

    for to you I have committed my cause.  

How does this text baffle me? How does it accuse me?

In other words: how does this text hurt? 

I do not know where I place myself. If I'm the one who prays, then I skate along the surface of life mostly oblivious to the moral and mortal danger in which I constantly am. I do not know and cannot understand the depth of the protection of the love of God. "It was the Lord who made it known to me, and I knew." I do not know the evil lurking in the hearts of men. I do not know the unguarded thoughts of those I pass walking along the streets. Arrogantly and self-righteously, I assume that they, like me, are too civil or too fearful to physically harm another. But that I have not done such a thing does not mean that I cannot. Cut off from the land of the living, from friend and kin in kind, would I plot evil in my heart? Do I think against an other?

I am not the fruitful tree. I do not dwell in the land of the living. I will not be remembered. And I most certainly do not judge righteously. I seek my retribution; I forget the Lord. Am I vindictive? I cannot will the prosperity of others if I myself might once have gotten it. Do I kill others? I happily reside in a nation responsible for the death of thousands upon thousands of men, am complicit in the poverty of children, and do little or nothing to love even my own closest neighbor. I've dreamed, half sleeping, of murder. I've called many men fools. I've called innocents naive, and wise those corrupted by the world. Can I really call myself a lamb?

There is only one Lamb, of course. And I pray most fervently that he would save us all from the time of trial because I know that I myself would not endure it. I do not know where to place myself because I fear for myself. How does this text accuse me? It names me where I will not name myself. It wants to place me where I do not wish to go. How does one begin to answer even the language of the righteous judgement of the Lord? How does one stand beneath the knowledge the Lord would give to him?

the Curious Monk

On Hermeneutics: Meaning and Significance

In this book, E.D. Hirsch takes the difference between meaning and significance as one of his largest thematic concerns. I intuit that it is also his most correct one. Basically, meaning is what Protestants would call the "plain sense" of a text, that is to say, our best, most basic understanding of what any text might mean. Yet significance is what it means that the text means - or, to put it another way, the broader context or field of understanding of a text. So the sentence "The dog bit John" straightforwardly means something about a canine mandibly mauling a person named John. Meaning, of course, can get quite a bit more complicated than that, but this is one of the simplest cases and it happens to be what I believe most language truly does: somehow convey a sense of what is actually the case, or at least what the speaker believes to be so.

Significance, or thought-world, for Hirsch comprises the field of understanding which makes meaning or denotation possible. So the sentence "The dog bit John" in the setting of a night-club might refer to a low sort of man drunkenly chomping off the ear of our good friend - or in the context of a park, a poodle having a go at our Labrador who we for some reason we can't precisely remember happened to name John. The obvious upshot is that meaning and significance are not unrelated, and that significance, particularly, can have a great influence on meaning.


This is clear in Hirsch's most salutary example of the case of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." A puzzle, and one of interpretation's oldest knots, is what to do with irony. In the Proposal, Swift obviously does not mean what he says, but conveys what he means by saying its exact opposite. When one grasps the significance of the Proposal, its meaning becomes clear. Hirsch's contention is that where much modern hermeneutics posits the inescapability of the hermeneutic circle, where a reader re-iteratively returns to significance in light of meaning and meaning in light of significance, what actually happens is a more linear and narrowing process: slimming from an originally broad array of possible meanings, as we grasp more and more of the significance of a text, its meaning becomes more and more clear to us- a kind of hermeneutic dickering that eventually arrives at a determinable price: once we "get it" we understand that Swift does not, in fact, want the Irish poor to sell their children to the English rich for consumption on a massive scale.

Does this system of meaning and significance work for paradigms other than irony? Hirsch would have us believe it does, reflecting it on everything from denotation and connotation to whether or not literature can have intrinsic value - it can and does, he says, but only in the light of the broader ethics of a culture. And it helps Hirsch avoid hermeneutic's Two Wrong Answers. Right? It's not that Hirsch thinks the one right answer is in the text - he's clearly against the New Critics. And it's certainly not that he thinks that any interpretation is correct. The man's clearly reacting to popular relativism with this book.

It's that he thinks we can objectively get what we have in fact gotten. The price is right because we have agreed to it, ruling out all those other bad deals in the interpretive marketplace. And once that price has been set, you can't really argue that much more about it. It is what it is. And so Hirsch has given at least a clever way of thinking through many knotty contemporary problems, though Hirsch's reading of Gadamer struck me as flat-footed - I don't think they disagree as much as Hirsch thinks they do, but that is all neither here nor there. And I think he might have pulled the theory along for more miles in more different directions than it was really ready to go.

But I would love for Hirsch's paradigm to work for my own test of healing in hermeneutics - we should pray that all our interpretations heal. So when I say that, of course, I don't mean that the meaning of any particular text should heal or else we've got the wrong meaning. That would be absurd. What I'm saying is that when we "get it", our understanding of the significance of healing in all understanding would make any and all texts newly clear, in the same way that Hirsch understands irony in the case of Jonathan Swift. We would have new ground for interpretation, new weights for the valuation of texts, and new rules for the process of slimming down its possible meanings. Where I suspect Hirsch and I would disagree is that my narrowing isn't going to take it all the way down to one. Hospitals, after all, always have many rooms.

Thanks,
the Curious Monk



 

On Scripture: An Introduction

Hermeneutics is nothing if not a pragmatic art, so, as a corollary to my other work - and to generate mass, mass appeal! - I'll be interpreting scripture down in the trenches right along with my Vicar and the Revised Common Lectionary. But I'll be doing so by my own rules. Afew years ago I developed/outright stole what I called a hermeneutic of love, a series of questions that read scripture with love implicitly in mind, and based on the conversion of Saul the Pharisee in Acts. And then, because I was terrified, I never actually tried them out. Anyway, here they are, with a little bit of explanation:

 1.  “How does this text baffle me? How does it accuse me?”

To bow to the text is to fall on one's own face. It is to confess one’s limitations and one’s own prosecutorial intent. It is to see with blinding clarity how the text challenges one’s own assumptions. It is to recognize that I did not write the text, but that another full and human and different person did. To bow to the text is to to profess the limitations of one’s own understanding and the enormity of one’s own incomprehension. It is to realize that the text will leave me with questions I will never answer. So to bow before the text is to bring oneself as human, as a failed, broken, and mistaken person, to a text one does not deserve to understand. To bow to the text is to present oneself as a person needing – and thus capable of receiving – love, to confess to the limitations that make love possible, to be stopped in one's own tracks.

 

2. How does this text guide me? What is it concerned about, what are its interests?

To feel out the text is to stand up wherever we are and walk forward nonetheless. It is to accept a guiding or willing hand, to use all the resources as one's disposal. Feeling out the text, we realize that limited understanding is not non-understanding, but that we must be willing to be led. To feel out the text is to try out tools other than one's own assumptions. When we do so, we risk actually learning about the God that Scripture loves, rather than the God that we might like. But that is the joy of discovery: with senses as strange as feeling must seem to the newly blind, we grope our way forward into understanding, and might be surprised by what we find. 

3. How are these words healing me? When this text loves me, who does it love, and how?

To listen to the text heal is to listen to the message the text has been given to say. Letting the text heal me means taking it to heart, internalizing the healing hands of God which have, while I’ve been reading, caressed my own face. It means taking the text into my being not as myself but as part of someone else, God, the author, the community of people that have brought me and baptized me into the world I now share with Scripture. It is to accept the gesture of the other, of God, that removes the scales from my own eyes, to let Scripture do what family does: to touch our faces and mouth and eyes, to break bread together in the rites of daily life. To let the text heal is to take it into our own flesh, to stand under its authority as though we had been newly born, to let our new, vibrant understanding transform us to our toes. To let the text heal is to see the world anew.  

4.  How can this text heal others? How might my understanding contribute to the greater love of others, of a community? 

To release the text is relinquish control of our own understanding by giving it up to Jerusalem. When we release the text, we confess that our own understanding, our healing, our restoration, has never been for our own sake. It was always for someone else. We have only been given this text in trust, and so we give our understanding up to others. Releasing the text means that our interpretation will be interpreted, and so will we. And we will be have been incorrect in ways we could not know. And we will be misinterpreted in ways we could not possibly predict. But we bow farewell to the safety of the house of Ananias, and offer ourselves up to the streets. To release the text is to sign off on it, to let go of our interpretation and listen, once again, to what another person has to say with compassion and without fear. It is to pray that our interpretations would heal, because that is what has been done to us. When we release the text, we begin to walk the spiral of love that leads from God, to myself, to others, and back again.  

They are, I realize, damned hard questions. They are that way by design. Talk about love and people think you've gone soft, when in fact the very opposite has happened. But it's terrifying. I don't, for certain, know what I'm going to say, how personal my hermeneutic will be. 

But I hope, more than anything, to hear from you. This feature exists for you. It's purpose is you. And it cannot live forever without you. 

So I hope to see those comments. 

Thanks,

the Curious Monk

On Hermeneutics: An Introduction

I dig hermeneutics. It looks like I'm going to study hermeneutics professionally, at least for a while. This is a problem, as I often have to explain what it is. So I've developed three preemptive things to say about it, and for your sake, gentle readers, here they are.

First, hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. That's it, that's all it is. Interpretation merits study because it describes a complex, pervasive area of human experience about which there has been astoundingly little consent, especially recently. We interpret constantly, in everything from reading the looks your mother gives you to understanding scripture to deciphering that nice letter you got from your superiors, and then that other one from human resources. The noteworthy thing about interpretation is that, as far as I can tell, in practice it works out astoundingly well pretty often, for reasons that no one seems to be able to precisely say.

Second, is that there are two incredibly wrong answers to hermeneutics. The first is that my interpretation is right and your interpretation is wrong because there is only one valid interpretation for anything and because I've figured it out. In an age where we are constantly bombarded with information and its interpretation from so very many plausible and implausible sources, I do believe we have gotten somewhat better at this. I don't know very many actual people who fully believe this anymore. In some ways, getting this part right doesn't take more than basic sense and a little bit of humility.

The second wrong answer to hermeneutics, and here I'm afraid we might have actually gotten quite a bit worse, is that my interpretation is right because your interpretation is right for you and all interpretations are valid for the people who hold them. This may seem right for many passive consumers of information, but for anyone whose tried to produce actual communication, especially in written form, it should be pretty clear that this can't be the case. We can be misunderstood. And, more, we can be misunderstood in ways that make us wonder if the other person was even paying attention in the first place, that clearly contradict anything any sane person could have meant. When this happens, interpretation has failed. It has gone massively awry. Not just anything will go.

So, what is hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, to do, set between these two extremes? The best answer seems to be that some interpretations are valid, and some are not. But what could the rules for this possibly be? How are we to know which is which? One helpful hermeneutic has added that truth runs in families, that plausible interpretations, while multiple, tend to be fairly well-related kin. From my adventures in creative writing classes, this seems to be the case: though their interpretations were different in every events, a fair number of my fellow writers seemed to get the gist of what I and my stories were trying to do, a lesser number of people understood what my stories were about much better than myself, and a precious, special few seemed out to lunch entirely, probably having been drunk the night before.

So, that's one place, as an example, where hermeneutics might begin.

Last, there is one confounding problem that has plagued the discipline of hermeneutics ever since Kant, and that is the split between words and worlds. Do words necessarily mean exactly what they say? Is a rose a rose by any other name? Given that the various words for "tree" among any number of language show no real relationship to each other, the most plausible answer seems to be: well, no. Words mean by common consent.

But establishing this consent then becomes a problem, because without this linguistic property that people called realists call referentiality, there's little reason for language to work in the first place. There must be some underlying system of signification from whence all language comes, some way that language actually does connect to things, or it would never work in the first place. Their opponents, those called nominalists, contend that if such a system or super-language exists, surely we would have found or at least theoretically understood it by now, so where is it?

To this the realists rejoin that if it doesn't exist, how did you just say what you said?

Stalemate. Can hermeneutics find a mediating position to this dilemma, as I suggested that it might be beginning to do with the first? I honestly don't know. But I believe that these are the central questions of the discipline. Or, if they are not that, then at least they are the ones I'm interested in. 

So that's part of what I'll be writing about, sometimes heroically, sometimes inanely, but always as clearly and lucidly and helpfully as I can, for reasons that will probably come up in time.

Thanks,
the Curious Monk