Holy Name – Peculiar Faith

An Earthy Jesus for a Heavenly Christmas

Happy Feast of the Circumcision—for those who celebrate!

January 1 on the liturgical calendar is the eighth day of Christmas and thus the day the infant Jesus would have been circumcised and officially named. The gospel writer Luke mentions this moment explicitly (2:15-21), a rather bloody and painful reminder of the baby’s genuine humanity (which our modern calendars have tidied up considerably by referring to this day as the Feast of the Holy Name).

What seems even tidier still is the so-called “prologue” of John’s account of the Gospel (1:1-18), which many Christians heard during worship yesterday, on the first Sunday after Christmas. We might expect on such a day to hear a bit more about Mary and Joseph, or angels and shepherds, or the manger in Bethlehem. Most of us don’t expect metaphysical rhapsodies on a cosmic scale, but that’s exactly what passes for a “nativity story” in John—and I’m grateful we hear it every year in this season.

I have come to a deep appreciation of John’s Prologue over the years, mostly for how it helps me to break some visual habits and expand how I think about God and Jesus. Here are just three of those “expansions” and why I think they matter.

First, John’s Prologue leads me to question some of the longstanding spatial images of my Christian faith. I’m guessing everyone has ways of depicting and visualizing such things, and most of us probably and usually picture God residing above us in Heaven while we reside here below on Earth.

This distinctively vertical and hierarchical sense of our relationship with God is frequently depicted with a ladder—we’re on the bottom rung with all the earthy things while God is on the top rung with heavenly things.

Thinking vertically and up is not somehow “wrong” but it is quite limiting. I think John invites us to think horizontally and out: God as the very ground and foundation of life, of everything that exists, through whose Word all things come into being; we are at all times and everywhere supported and encompassed by the presence of God.

I’m especially fond of an image for this suggested by theologian Rita Nakashima Brock, which also works quite wonderfully along the shores of a great lake, where I presently live. Imagine gently rolling swells undulating across a vast body of water, always present, always moving; picture the breeze picking up and a white cap appearing on top of a large wave.

That wind is the Holy Spirit, and that whitecap is Jesus, who makes that mighty but quiet undercurrent of God’s presence visible.

That first “expansion” leads quickly to the second, especially when I’m tempted to think of Jesus as the member of a divine “committee” who gets sent down to Earth from Heaven. I wonder if anyone in the modern world has managed to escape that image—it’s very common, perpetuated by more than a few phrases in Christian liturgies and creeds, and also nowhere to be found in the Prologue to John’s gospel.

John draws our attention instead to what he calls the Logos, or the Word of God, which was with God from all time and forever, and this Word is the very means by which God creates everything there is.

This divine creative Word, John says, becomes flesh, fully united to the human person called Jesus. And here again I need to interrupt my own Marvel comic-book brain and resist thinking of Jesus as some kind of demi-god like Zeus or Thor stepping off his throne and coming down to Earth.

John’s Jesus is a fully human being of earth, and also full of grace and truth, fully united to the divine Logos, the creative Word of God.

All of this leads to the third expansion from John’s Prologue, which has been truly life-changing for me, and it takes a bit of Greek to get there.

When John declares that the Word of God dwelled or lived among us, he does not use the Greek word andros, for “man”; he does not even use the Greek word anthropos, which can be translated as “human.” Instead, John writes, the Word became sarx—the Greek word for “flesh.”

What sounds at first like a wild assertion—the Word in Flesh—finds some traction with modern anthropologists, who suggest that human language began with bodily postures and physical gestures. Speech came along later as a way to connect those postures and gestures together into sentences and paragraphs.

While I enjoy tending carefully to crafting an artful turn of phrase as a writer, our primary means of communication as human beings is actually with our bodies; and this is also true, as John seems to say, for God.

Theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid was fond of saying that when God wants to speak, when God really wants to be clear, God does so with bodies.

In a world of books (a world I love to dwell in, let me be quick to note) I must constantly remember that the Word of God does not become a concept, or a proposition, or an argument, or abstract rationality; the Word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us.

What matters about Jesus is not that he is a man, nor even that he is human, but that he is mortal flesh, just like us—just like the very first human made from dirt and breathed into life by the Spirit; just like every other creature of God made from the stuff of Earth and animated by the breath of God; just like dogs and cats, squirrels and seagulls, dolphins and whales.

I suppose we could have guessed this, but most of us didn’t: the Messiah we’ve needed all along is made from mud—just like every other mortal being of flesh. And Luke tries to make the same point with wounded genitals when the baby gets a name.

But does any of this matter? I mean, really matter? I think it does.

The world is feeling pretty wobbly these days, and quite a lot of it seems to be unraveling. Decades-long trends in American society have so distorted the Gospel that Christian faith seems hardly poised with any help at all for such a tenuous time as this.

So perhaps we need to add a new carol in our Christmas repertoire, and sing it like our lives depend on it (because I think they do).

Here’s your challenge, poets and composers, to make something singable from this: Christian faith is not an escape hatch from this world into some other world. The birth of Jesus is not a divine rescue mission; it’s a divine embrace, the Lover in full and intimate communion with the Beloved.

In that light, that great light of the Gospel, Christian faith invites us to live fully in this world, confident that God is dwelling with us—as the unshakable ground of our existence, animating us with a lively creativity, and loving us through the bodies of our companions, of all species.

Telling the Christmas story like that doesn’t matter for some finger-wagging morality about how we ought to live; I think I matters for how we truly want to live: as people fully-rooted in this precious Earth and building divinely-inspired communities of compassion, living and giving everything we’ve got for a world of peace, with justice.

The Jewishness of Jesus for a New Year of Courage

January 1, New Year’s Day, repeatedly blinks and flashes on the secular calendar like a giant reset button. It’s the opportunity and the invitation to start over and start fresh.

On the Christian calendar, this day sits roughly in the middle of the twelve-day Christmas season – roughly for more than one reason. In some traditions, this day is celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision. This is, after all, the eighth day of Christmas, and Jewish male children are circumcised and receive their names eight days after birth.

Most contemporary liturgical calendars, however, call this day something else; they obscure that genital wounding by calling it instead the “Feast of the Holy Name.”

Well, that got tidied up pretty quickly…

I have to wonder: Does renaming this day reflect an ongoing discomfort with the genitals of Jesus or even acknowledging he had genitals at all or about human sexuality more generally or perhaps how easily bodies can be wounded? Probably a bit of each.

This somewhat peculiar moment in Jesus’ life seems particularly appropriate as we enter a new year in a deeply divided and anxious country. It matters to suppose that the divine Word of God is manifest not only in all the peculiar things specific to a particular human body but also in all the complex and fleshy entanglements of a human society.

Circumcision, as early Christians argued, confirmed the genuine humanity of Jesus, but it did more than this; it marked – quite literally carved – a boundary of identity, specifically a Jewish male identity in a province of the Roman Empire.

As theologian Graham Ward puts it, theology always entails a “cultural politics.”*

But we need to say far more than that and much more directly: it’s a cultural politics that comes with a wounding of the flesh.

As we’ve been seeing for some time now, a renewed wave of identity politics is sweeping across this country, fueling a severe fragmentation of our society, revealing painful wounds and old scars that many carry on their own bodies.

Two of the more recent examples: plans are underway for a neo-Nazi march in a small town in Montana later this month, quite specifically targeting the town’s Jewish residents. And this past week, in Chandler, Arizona, a Jewish family erected a menorah on their front lawn – this being the season of Chanukah – and someone refashioned it into a swastika.

These hostile if not hateful sentiments are not new, but their expressions are newly visible in a cultural climate that now seems so much more tolerant of these things than it ever should be.

We must not let this become normal.

Given the shameful history of Christian anti-Semitism, there has never been a good time to brush aside the Jewishness of Jesus – erasing circumcision from the name of a Christian feast day risks doing precisely that. But we need to say much more than that given the cultural climate right now in the United States.

Christians need to be proactive and vocal about our indebtedness to Judaism, about our ancient though certainly contested kinship with Jews, about the people of Israel living under the first-century imperial occupation of Rome as the very location for God to dive headlong into the beautiful and messy poignancy and bloody cultural politics of human life.

This is, I believe, just the beginning of the kind of courageous witness Christian communities will need to offer in the weeks and months ahead – about ethnicity, about race, about religion, about sexuality and gender – all the intertwined complexities of what it means to be human together and in which the Word of God was and is pleased to dwell, in the flesh.

The familiarity of these seasonal stories at this time of year might still inspire us for the challenging work ahead, especially if we hear these stories in all their scandalous peculiarity. Later this week we’ll celebrate the Epiphany – Persian astrologers presenting extravagant gifts to a Jewish baby born in poverty. It’s hard to imagine a more counter-cultural story for this American moment.

It has always mattered and it’s soon going to matter quite directly for Christians to insist that bodies matter. And I believe the present moment demands as much specificity as possible in our insistence – no mere embrace of bodies in general or some abstract theory of the goodness of embodiment will do. As a short list, we must insist on this:

Black flesh and bodies matter.
The flesh and bodies of migrants and refugees matter.
The flesh and body matter of the eight-year old transgender boy who was just kicked out of the cub scouts.
The flesh and bodies of the Native Americans at Standing Rock matter as they seek to protect the flesh and body of Earth.
The flesh and bodies of other-than-human animals with whom we share this planet, they matter, too, as equally the cause of God’s ceaseless delight – they, after all, were among the very first witnesses of Jesus’ birth in a barn.

I return to the Eucharistic Table week after week in my little Episcopal Church for many reasons. One of them is to find the courage to love in a world of hate, and to remember (again and again and again) that my own flesh and body matter.

In many ways, the Eucharist is my weekly “reset button” for my own life, starting over and starting fresh by encountering divine love once again in the flesh.

Perhaps on this Feast of the Holy Name we can reset the calendar by remembering the holy names God uses for us, for all of us – names like Delightful, Cherished, Beloved.

* Graham Ward, “On the Politics of Embodiment and the Mystery of All Flesh,” in The Sexual Theologian, edited by Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood

The Eighth Day: Bloody Memories and Hopeful Futures

How do you celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision? That’s what this day used to be called, this eighth of the twelve days of Christmas. Most Christians now know this day instead as the Feast of the Holy Name, celebrated on January 1^st.

The contemporary liturgical language certainly sounds a bit more palatable for New Year’s festivities. But I think it’s a mistake to cover over the bloody wounding that accompanies the giving of a name — the violence that always attends carving out identities in social systems.

Following ancient Israelite custom, Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, which Luke’s gospel account mentions explicitly (Lk 2:21). January 1^st falls on the eighth day of the Christmas season, and thus the rather odd religious commemoration on what just happens to be the first day of a new year on the secular calendar.

Perhaps this new year conjunction is just odd enough to provoke some serious reflection on why any of this matters.

British theologian Graham Ward has noted that the circumcision of Jesus marked a boundary of identity, specifically a Jewish male identity. This is just one among many reasons, as Ward puts it, to remember that theology always entails a “cultural politics.” (Go here for a link to Ward’s essay.)

Ward’s language, though, is still a bit too tame. As nearly everyone realizes, the politics of culture in the modern West always involve finding ourselves classified and categorized in social identities. These identities exhibit multiple features and characteristics, but they are always gendered and racialized. There is, in other words, no such thing as “generic humanity.” We are always already racially gendered – and this happens mostly through acts of wounding and violence.

Less abstractly, what identity means today in the U.S. depends on: a) whether one fears being raped and then being blamed for it; and/or b) whether one can drive a car, shop in a store, or walk down a street without raising suspicion among law enforcement officials – or ending up dead.

More simply still: If you are not marked as “white” or “male,” then who you are emerges through wounds and violence. And just there, God shows up – colored and wounded.

Christmas, after all, proclaims a God who chooses to identify with all of us on a path marked by blood. The blood of childbirth, yes, and yet more blood in wounded genitals, and still more as a criminal executed by imperial power on a cross. God takes up residence with us in all that bloody mess.

That’s why I fret over the erasure of genital blood on this “Feast of the Holy Name.” Does that liturgical shift reflect an ongoing discomfort with Jesus’s genitals or a subtle denial of wounded bodies? Probably a bit of both, which carries implications for all the sexually and racially scarred bodies populating our communities and sitting in the pews of our churches.

Well, so what? (And that’s probably the best question to ask about any theological reflection.)

Among the many possible responses to that question, I’m rather intrigued right now by the number eight. While I’m not particularly enamored with numerology, those who are note several significant features of “eight”: it’s the number of people saved on Noah’s ark (1 Peter 3:20); it’s the evocation of perfection in some Chinese traditions; Pythagoreans associate eight with love and friendship; some ancient Egyptians considered eight the number of cosmic order and perfection; flipped on its side, 8 is the mathematical symbol of infinity.

Most of all, I’m fascinated by Augustine’s fifth century speculation. For him, the “Eighth Day” is the day of the promised new creation, the glorious “what next?” that follows the seven days of divine creation in Genesis. For Augustine, the Eighth Day promise is signaled and sealed by the resurrection of Jesus on Easter morning.

On this eighth day of Christmas, I’m clinging to Augustine’s imaginative proposal. In the midst of so many bloody memories – not least, those incarnated in the bodies of Michael Brown and Eric Garner – Christmas invites a radical, even illogical hope for the future. Not in spite of our bloody awful memories but in the midst of all of them. God appears among us, from the very beginning, as wounded and scarred, enticing us to live differently.

For Christians, January 1^st is always stained with blood. God chooses to reside right there, in our bloody memories. And right there, not somewhere else, God seeks to give birth to hopeful futures. midwife

Let’s be the midwife in 2015.