Sacred Bodies: Word Made Flesh
Scripture: Matthew 1: 1-11
An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.
And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon.
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This scripture is not great, particularly for reading in church…especially on Christmas Eve. The Gospel of John, now that’s a good way to start a Christmas Eve sermon! It is epic, rather akin to the start of the original Star Wars…picture it words flashing across the screen…and the Word was with God and the Word was God, printed in the boldness to match until it scrolls down further: and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. The word became flesh: that is poetry! That is powerful! God embodied, flesh is sacred and divine even - now that is the way to start a Christmas Eve sermon!
But the Gospel of Matthew takes a different route, and to us it may just sound like a bunch of names. But I think it gets to the heart of what ‘word made flesh’ means. It is filled with a wild cast of characters. From the very start, they are perfectly imperfect. Abraham and his wife, Sarah, are faithful and make mistakes; they are cruel to Hagar; Abraham nearly sacrifices his own son; they laugh at God’s promise. Jacob wrestled with God, tricked his brother out of his birthright, had 12 sons who sold one of their own brothers into slavery and yet, was transformed into Israel, sharing a name for a whole people to follow. This is the word made flesh - a litany of messy people. There’s Tamar, who tricked her father-in-law to conceive a child, and Rahab, a sex worker who helped the people of Israel in their conquest of the Promised Land. There’s Ruth, an outsider who clung to her mother-in-law, Naomi, when she should have gone off and married into a new family. Ruth finds a way out of no way by seducing Boaz (the Bible says she uncovered his feet and, hint - that is not all!). Ruth, this outsider in love with her mother-in-law beyond all reason is word made flesh and King David’s Grandma. David’s father was named Jessie, the man who didn’t even invite David to meet the prophet when he came looking for the next King. Like Cinderella’s step mother, he seemed shocked that the prophet would be considering his youngest boy, and yet that is exactly the one called to the messy work of leadership in the kingdom of Israel. David was both great and terrible: he sang both praise and apology. The greatest king of Israel’s history was completely imperfect: that’s word made flesh. This litany names King David and his son Solomon in the worst possible way; it points out in front of God and everyone David’s affair and possible assault by saying “Wife of Uriah” rather than Bathsheba.
Word made flesh: messy, imperfect, hopeful people all of them. Great and terrible, cruel and kind. It is like the author of the Gospel of Matthew thought, let’s find all the skeletons and put them out as decorations for Christmas. Nobody does that! That’s why I think we need the Scriptures from both Matthew and John. Matthew gives John’s poetry some flesh. We have a theology of Incarnation, God incarnate, God embodied, and God with us, in us and through us. This season anchors us in it, the sacredness of the body, the dignity of our flesh, and our bodies as vessels of the divine. I find this delightful and challenging, because for most of history, we Christians have really struggled with flesh. We have often set up a spectrum, and flesh never comes out with a high rating on that scale. The spirit, that’s where it’s at or maybe where God is at. We place the spirit on one side and the flesh on the other. We say things like the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. The spirit is good and lovely and godly and the flesh is terrible and nasty and prone to all sorts of problems. We took Paul’s grappling with his own turning toward God and the Early Church father’s anxiety about bodies and rather than grappling with word made flesh we became much more comfortable with policing bodies. We decided certain bodies are better or more valuable, certain bodies get a big palace and other bodies can scrape by and eat the crumbs from the table. We decided what bodies can touch each other and when they can touch each other; you know if they meet the requirements and fill out these forms. And some bodies are to holy to touch other bodies; while other bodies don’t even get to choose, at least not really. Word made flesh is the heart of our faith, and yet we got into the business of managing flesh because it makes us so nervous.
It makes sense that the earliest debates among Christians were about Jesus and his flesh: just how fleshy is he? In fact, one of the first theologies deemed a heresy (I don’t often like using that word, at least not lightly) proposed Jesus to be not much flesh at all, sort of emerging fully formed and perfect, more Athena than baby in a manager. Word made flesh is so hard for us that we much prefer Jesus to descend fully formed and perfect. We love superheroes, and it would make sense to us if Jesus was more Superman, than man, perhaps from some other planet that really loved people. We could get his compassion and love of justice if he were Wonder Woman’s cousin, some other type of being, or if he was bitten by a spider that made him a fantastic healer and caretaker of people. Because if he is super and not flesh, then he isn’t so hard to follow, and we can make excuses all day long. Incarnation asks too much of us. Word made flesh means bodies are sacred and we are typically not so good at loving our own bodies, let alone the bodies of others. We get weird about our bodies, nervous about their size and shape, we feed them too much and too little or only certain things. Word made flesh asks us to love and we struggle to love our flesh. We are the only creatures on God’s green earth with mass graves and mass incarceration. We are the only creatures marching people into death camps, starving, enslaving, and exploiting, and we are the only creatures with mass shootings and weapons of mass destruction.
Christmas speaks everything to the contrary - bodies are sacred. Word made flesh means everything must change and asks us the hardest ask of all: to be a part of it. Word made flesh means our hands and hearts are called to make ‘earth as it is in heaven.’ Christmas asks us to see as God sees, to look at faces down the street and around the globe as sacred. Christmas asks us to hear God, in the sounds of a baby crying and a toddler giggling; in the greetings of loved ones and the tongues we don’t even know. Christmas says to touch; flesh is important. We know this from birth. Babies need skin to skin contact. One of the ladies we visited in the nursing home at First Church had a person she hugged every day at lunch. They knew they needed human touch and they made it happen; they committed to it. There is a story of a nurse in the height of the AIDS crisis, when fear and hate trapped scientific reason. She chose to care for the man all of her nurses had labeled as nasty and mean. Entering his room, she was overcome with intuition to take off her gloves. And she touched him. She had been the first person to touch him in a long time, none of the of the doctors, none of the nurses had touched him, his parents left him to die alone. This nurse, her hands changed everything. She stayed in his room all night listening, being present, giving him a human heart, honoring his flesh, touching him. And he died the next day, one more tender moment of peace and one more tender touch honoring his flesh as sacred.
Word made flesh. God incarnate sings out love, love, love. Love your being, love your body. Love. Love others, see them as sacred, hear their songs of hope and honor their being. Flesh is sacred. The word made flesh asks us, calls us, and requires us to love. May we have the courage. Amen.