Manger – Peculiar Faith

We Don’t Know What’s Going On—Love Anyway

There’s a certain style in modern American visual art that always tugs on my holiday heartstrings. Examples include Currier and Ives lithographs and Norman Rockwell paintings. These easily summon fond childhood memories of Christmas, and I usually extend those memories outward into a kind of nostalgic reverie about American life more generally; as a child, I thought everyone in every country celebrated Christmas, and they did it just like we always did in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Those childhood memories conjure images of an American society that never really existed, a whole world in which everyone knew what was going on, how to behave, and looked happily toward a future of not only safety but also prosperity and comfort.

The world seems decidedly less safe today, even regularly violent. So much is unraveling, not only culturally and politically but also ecologically. I stay current with the daily news but quite often feel disoriented and have no idea what’s going on. Perhaps few, if any, ever know what’s really going on—not even scientists.

Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope revealed a set of surprisingly massive galaxies and black holes that would seem to demand a revision of standard theories about how the Universe emerged. That same telescope recently detected not just an unexpectedly massive black hole but one that appeared to be fleeing its own galaxy and leaving a trail of ejected stars in its wake, a trail approximately 200,000 light years long (that’s not supposed to happen).

Years ago, I used to think that being religious helps us to know what’s going on in the Universe. But not even with the most sophisticated instruments ever devised can tell us with any precision how stars dance through the galaxies. As English priest Martyn Percy has noted, the seasons of Advent and Christmas remind us that we simply cannot stretch our words far enough to explain or even grasp the mystery we call “God.”

Over time, I have come to realize that my faith as a Christian offers something much richer than knowledge. Religious traditions—all the stories and rituals and furniture and clothing and sanctuary spaces—religious traditions remind us that what we think is going on barely scratches the surface of reality. Beneath, within, entangled, and woven throughout the routines of our ordinary lives the divine light shines and beckons.

Yes, we have stories about angels delivering a message and about a heavenly chorus praising God during this mythical and magical Christmas season. But the point of these stories is not the extraordinary spectacle; the stories direct our attention instead to the working-class family with a pregnant teenager, and the migrant workers tending sheep, and the livestock gathered around a feeding trough.

These ordinary people with ordinary lives mark where the very presence of Creator God appears; and we must not treat those moments lightly. That’s exactly why we dress up, and sing carols, and adopt funny bodily postures in highly stylized buildings—and it’s also why Christians gather around a Table where everyone is welcome to receive physical tokens of God’s own life in the form of bread and wine—and in the wonderful parish where I am privileged to serve as a parish priest, when we say “everyone,” we mean it, no kidding. As I like to say, at All Saints’ Parish, “all” really does mean all.

Especially in the Christmas season—and in a world of festering suspicions and wary glances and divided communities—especially during Christmas, a season devoted to God’s own commitment to dwell among us in the most vulnerable flesh imaginable, this is the time to ensure that everyone, every single person, is made to feel welcome at God’s own Table.

That’s why religious faith communities must notice and name the wider cultural realities in which we live. Compelling and lifegiving forms of religion don’t just float above the fray of human communities; all the stuff of human interaction and conflict, of human joys and sorrows, of our entanglements with other animals and ecosystems—all of it is the material from which we spin the fabric of faith itself and where God is pleased to be woven into the threads of our bodily lives and relationships.

All of this is on display in the familiar story of the Nativity we hear each Christmas Eve from the Gospel according to Luke (2:1-20). The details in that story matter. Luke makes sure to tell us that the moment of nativity happened when Ceasar Augustus was the Emperor of the Roman Empire; and when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. We should note that Judea, where Bethlehem is located, was part of a larger imperial province called Syria-Palestina, and where a Roman governor supervised puppet kings like Herod. And these details can, at the very least, serve as a good reminder that our political lives as humans have always been complicated, fraught, and quite regularly terrifying—exactly where God shows up.

Just as we cannot possibly fathom what’s really going on in the “vast expanse of interstellar space,” our own lives and the lives of our neighbors are often just as perplexing. All of us live with concerns and convictions, we all harbor dreams and moments of dread, high hopes and crushing sadness about all sorts of things.

We sort through all those complexities as best we can, and we will not always agree with each other about how to sort them out, even about those things that are most vital and pressing—probably especially those. We don’t have to agree, but we must wrestle with such things together, trusting that the presence of God is with us in the struggle—out there in hilltop fields watching our sheep, or tending the livestock in a cave-like stable, or busily caring for guests in a sold-out inn, and all the while staying vigilant, not knowing when the weight of imperial Rome might come crashing down on our heads.

We don’t have to know exactly what’s going on, and we don’t have to understand perfectly how everything works before we decide to care for the needy and lonely, and to love each other fiercely and tenderly. To love each other just as God loves us, in the most ordinary stuff we can imagine in this mysteriously physical universe: the flesh of a newborn baby.

As American storyteller and former priest Brennan Manning once noted, “You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net than you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing Love of God made present in a manger.”

Christmas is not the time for explanations, no matter how clever our philosophies or theological systems; we do not gather in worship and prayer at Christmas for greater understanding or more precision in our knowledge; the grand mysteries of time and space need no parsing at the manger; and the wonderful befuddlements of human life and relationships can simply remain gloriously tangled into knots.

Let all of that be just as it is, just for now, just for a moment. These Twelve Days of Christmas invite us to hear once again the message of angels delivered to shepherds in a field, and to see an anxious and exhausted couple caring for a newborn baby—and then to marvel, with full-throated praise, or with a single tear on our cheeks, at the presence of God dwelling gently among us.

Christmas Eve and the Creaturely Flesh of God

The baby Jesus was human. More importantly still, an animal.

Most English speakers use the word “animal” for something other than human. But of course, we humans are animals, too. The Latin word anima simply means “breath.” Whatever is breathing is an animal.

This matters for the Twelve Days of Christmas, a season to celebrate God’s intimate embrace of creaturely flesh, and it matters on a planet in the throes of an ecological crisis. Christmas matters as a celebration of God’s solidarity with the whole of God’s creation and not only humans.

The Gospel according to John points us in this direction by insisting that the Word of God became flesh (John 1:14). As theologian David Clough notes, the key Greek word in that verse is not anthropos (human) but sarx (flesh), which is used elsewhere in the Christian Testament of the Bible as an inclusive term for all living things, just as writers in the Hebrew Bible used “flesh” to evoke the whole of God’s living creation.

Clough goes on to argue that the foundational Christian claim concerning the incarnation, therefore, “is not that God became a member of the species Homo sapiens, but that God took on flesh, the stuff of living creatures.”

More pointedly, Christianity does not offer an escape hatch from the material world of the flesh, as if all the gloriously messy realities of embodied life are sinful or evil (as the Christian tradition of my youth seemed to suggest). Christian faith invites instead a thoroughly materialistic spirituality.

Appreciating the material world not merely as a grand “stage” on which the human-divine drama plays out but as the location of divine encounter and the vehicle of divine grace has profound implications for how we treat all animals, human or otherwise.

We could begin by noting the mind-numbing scope of animal consumption. Conservative estimates suggest that 56 billion farmed land animals are slaughtered every year on this planet for food. That’s roughly 153 million every day, or 6 million every hour, or 106,000 every minute. These figures do not include marine animals or animals killed for sport or who die in zoos, circuses, and municipal shelters. factory_farm

(For the latest figures on animal consumption, see the online animal kill counter here, and the Animal Equality site for conditions on factory farms, as well as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. For resources on protecting the welfare of farmed animals, see CreatureKind, founded by David Clough).

How we treat other animals—whether in factory farms or on exotic hunting safaris—has a direct bearing on how we treat other humans. Feminist scholar Carol Adams noted back in the 1990s the correlation between how meat for consumption is packaged and how women’s bodies are similarly “packaged” in popular culture. Historian Thomas Laqueur analyzed early modern approaches to human sexuality that compared the “brutish” sexual acts of other animals to the “lower classes” of Europe. Womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas urges us to notice how white supremacy is maintained, in part, through the hyper-sexualization and thus “animalization” of black women and men. And these are but recent examples in a long history of dehumanizing through animalizing, as nearly every human society has done to its enemies before going to war with them.

Meanwhile, as the Apostle Paul insisted nearly 2,000 years ago, the whole creation is groaning with anticipation for the coming day of salvation (Rom. 8:19-23). Christmas marks the dawning of that eager hope, and other-than-human animals were most likely among the first witnesses of that glorious dawn.

The former Episcopal bishop of Alaska, Steve Charleston, offers an elegant reminder of that most holy night when the Word of God became creaturely flesh and of the animals (human and otherwise) who bore hopeful witness:

Now, on this day, all the animals turn, wherever they are, and look toward that place, that one place, where long ago they gathered, drawn by a wordless summons, to see the future of creation born, lying in straw, a sleeping hope, nestled safely among them. The animals know that this is the eve, the beginning. They sense the great cycle of sacred time, they know the meaning of the change to come. Now, on this day, on this eve of everything, they make ready the welcome they have prepared, since before the star above them first appeared, set alight by an unseen hand.

Kiss your spouse, hug a friend, pet your dog or cat—celebrate the flesh on this most holy night. And let us commit during these twelve days of Christmas to change the way we live with all other animals. nativity_animals_3

Cradle It — Tenderly, Fiercely, Queerly

This holy-day season offers plenty of queerness, enough to inspire some gritty hope and ignite a fleshy faith in a world that has run completely off the rails.

Do you hear what I hear? Racist taunts and misogynistic jokes and the derisive mocking of the disabled; stock market bells clanging with stratospheric heights while people huddle under highway overpasses without any home or hearth; the panicked whimpering of cattle herded toward their slaughter in filthy factory farms.

Do you see what I see? Syrian cities in rubble; sinking rafts on the Mediterranean Sea; a deadlocked American jury unable to convict; polar icecaps vanishing like morning mist; the Hijab torn from a tearful head of a Muslim, her face wracked with fear and foreboding.

Do you wonder, as I often do, what possible difference any of us can make in world such as this? I know and affirm the standard response: we need to strategize, and organize, and pull as many legislative levers as possible to yank us toward a society of peace and justice.

And still I wonder: can we avoid playing a tit-for-tat game of political power? Do we measure success by how many votes are cast? How many “losers” can we tolerate when we finally “win”?

Perhaps we need to return or begin and then stay rooted elsewhere, which this peculiar season with a cradle in it urges me to remember. The God who shows up as an infant marks a way forward, the way of the flesh – touching it tenderly, caressing it carefully, embracing it fiercely. nativity_guatemalan

How romantically naïve that sounds, if not thoroughly ludicrous. Except for this: the powerful retain their power by keeping us divided and fragmented; by telling us that some people cannot be touched much less loved; that whole populations belong behind walls, out of reach; that entire species are merely disposable for the sake of economic growth and profitability.

As a white man entangled in all the horrific machinations of white supremacy and misogyny, I’m grateful for Toni Morrison’s reminder of why a fleshy faith matters in systems of oppressive institutional power. In her novel Beloved, the character of Baby Suggs preaches to her fellow ex-slaves, urging them to love their flesh, to “love it hard”:

Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it… No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them! Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. … This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And oh my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it, and hold it up.

Queerly, to work for a better world we must first and continually cradle the flesh and cherish it – I mean, really cherish it: hug it, feed it, sing to it, cuddle it, rescue it, stand up for it, brush out its matted fur, pour a river of cleansing tears over it as we massage it, adore it, and never, ever take it for granted.

Imagine your whole family doing this as a Christmas gift, setting aside petty disagreements and all the fretting over suitable presents and showering each other with hugs and kisses.

Imagine your neighborhood, your whole circle of friends and colleagues, pausing to hold hands and rub sore shoulders and linger in a protective embrace. And then more: inviting all those “others” to join you in that arc of fleshy touch – the stranger and alien, the differently colored and accented speakers, the hungry and lonely, the despised and abandoned.

Imagine people everywhere, starting in your own cozy nook and familiar cranny, and extending across this country and around the globe honoring and worshiping the flesh – assigning worth to it, as “worship” quite literally means.

Adore the flesh that God made, just as God does. Taking unimaginable delight in this flesh, God dives headlong into this whole beautiful, poignant mess with us, landing in a cradle. And for no other reason than endless, deathless love.

If we imagine these things and do them, we might hear a heavenly chorus of angels break into song once again, probably weeping as they do, overcome and undone by the glory of God…in cherished flesh.

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