Intricately Woven

A Sermon about Embodiment

I’ve been working this week on words to share during a worship panel (i.e. group sermon) about healing that I’ll be doing with a few other disabled folks at the Mennonite Church USA’s national gathering in a little over a week. I’ve been re-reading some of what I’ve written in the past year, and wanted to share this sermon that I preached last August on Psalm 139. There is a little overlap with a previous post, but I’d appreciate your thoughts about it as I contemplate what to share to a crowd of mostly young people on healing and embodiment as we lean into our holy createdness.

This morning I want to talk about embodiment, this miracle of creation that we all experience every day as we move through the world. But first, I’ll start with a confession. Being embodied has been hard for me to appreciate until quite recently.

In my life I have often retreated to the sanctuary of my mind. It has been a tempting practice throughout my life. Whenever I was upset, when I felt like my body was failing me, when I wasn’t sure what came next in my life—like a turtle I picked up shop from my body and moved inward. I would read and write stories and make a home inside my head whenever the world felt too perilous, whenever my body felt too painful to inhabit. The problem with this is that I was missing out on a large part of what it means to be human, what it feels like to be part of creation, a walking aspect of the earth. It’s not all bad, retreating into one’s mind. It became a sanctuary, like the chapel in the church of my childhood, all stained glass and solid stone walls, quiet and peaceful inside, full of sacred possibility. But living entirely inside one’s mind can easily become confining. It becomes harder to connect with other people and with the world around us.

A case in point. I remember when I was in college, one afternoon I went for a walk in the woods. I was ruminating on something, I can’t remember what, and hoped that time among the trees would help clear my mind. But when I got out there, I felt just as lonely as I did in my room. There was a whole gorgeous forest around me, but I couldn’t connect to it in any real way. I felt at a distance, like I was looking at a landscape but not participating in it. I had gone out into creation for comfort and companionship, but I remained stuck in my own mind. It took me a dozen years before I realized why that experience felt so isolating. I was in the midst of a beautiful cacophony of life—hundred-year-old hardwood trees with an understory of bloodroot and cranefly orchids and spicebush, crisscrossed by birds and insects and countless other small animals—but I was still stuck in my mind, unable to connect in any meaningful way with all of this life.

And this is how we are trained to see the world in our modern western culture. We are individuals passing through landscapes, but the important work, so we’ve always been told, is happening inside our heads. I was taught that the natural world is governed by the unseeing forces of evolution and geography. The only thinking is happening inside of human minds. When, all these years later, I began to see the world through the eyes of my Indigenous neighbors and as a Christian animist, I began to wake up to the thinking, feeling world that was all around me. And something else beautiful happened in the process, I began to reinhabit my own body, to appreciate my stardust, earth-soil flesh as the place of connection, the touchpoint between my own being and the countless other beings that also inhabit the earth.

It was only then that I realized by retreating into my mind, I was also separating myself from God. The Holy is not an intellectual principle or set of beliefs that we can consciously assent to. The Holy is all around us, calling to us in the sights, scents, sounds, and caresses of the created world and the human community. If I have separated myself from my body, I lose that connection with the Creator who is present in all times and places.

Embodiment was important to our spiritual ancestors who lived during the time when the Bible was being written. The Hebrew Bible is full of laws and exhortations to take care of both the land and the most vulnerable people—widows, orphans, and strangers. Jesus built upon this tradition and extended it, healing people throughout his ministry, in mind and body. This healing involved all of a person’s lived experience, not just their physical ailment but also their alienation from the family and community, and their relationship with God. For these ancient people, all of these aspects of life were interwoven, a full embodied whole of soul, mind and body that can be hard for us modern western people to comprehend.

Many of the Psalms portray embodiment in various ways, either celebrating human life or pleading for healing and deliverance. The scripture reading from this morning, Psalm 139, is perhaps the most pointed psalm about embodiment. It portrays a God that is always present with us, who formed us and exalts in our holiness.

“For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.”

Verse 15 is my favorite, the culmination of this song about our creation:

“My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”

This language of knitting and weaving in reference to our coming into being is particularly beautiful. We tend to think of pregnancy and birth as something that happens within the womb of a mother, but the psalm understands that we are also formed of the soil, “woven in the depths of the earth,” like a seed germinating. And this too is a feature of our embodied reality because every time we eat and drink and breathe, we are taking in the goodness of the earth to become part of ourselves. The elements that make up our bodies—iron, carbon, calcium, among many others—were literally formed from exploding stars early in the life of the universe. The early Christians may not have understood that we are made up of stardust, but they did have a very holistic view of embodiment, soul, body and mind bound up into every single being, with each person connected to every other in rich webs of kinship and community.

If only we still felt that way today. There are many reasons why we have forgotten this early Christian emphasis on the body as a unified whole, but learning to reconnect our spiritual health with the miracle of our physical embodiment can help shed new light on what it means to be part of the Body of Christ: connected to God, to creation, and to one another. It can also help us see the danger in categorizing bodies into “normal” and “abnormal” when we have all been created by God to be unique.

Western culture tends to see disability through the lens of loss—loss of sight, hearing, movement, or cognitive ability—but disabled bodies are simply a reflection of a diverse creation. A lack of a certain function only becomes disabling when the built or social environment is designed to exclude.

There are many different ways we experience embodiment. Our minds and our limbs all work differently. In some people this is expressed in our culture in terms of disability, but it is more correct to think about it instead as aspects of God’s diverse creation. We are all made holy and whole, “intricately woven in the depth of the earth.” Some of us might need mobility equipment to navigate the world. Others of us have minds that think in vastly different ways than what our culture considers normal. Some of us suffer greatly because of emotional or physical pain, either as a result of illness or our ableist culture that makes life difficult for people with different modes of embodiment. But none of this, none of it, is the result of sin. Sin often comes up when talking about disability because our tradition doesn’t have a great track record of valuing embodiment in general. In my mind the idea that disability or illness is the result of sin is one of the most destructive ideas perpetuated by Christians, right up there with colonialism and just war.

The truth is that humans are fragile. We are vulnerable bodies of blood and bone, making our way in a sometimes-perilous world. This isn’t to say that sin doesn’t have anything to do with it. Ableism is definitely a sin that we as a culture are steeped in. In case this term is unfamiliar, ableism is the idea that the world is made for able-bodied people within a certain range of cognitive skills and that if you happen to be one of the people who doesn’t fall into this range called “normal,” you must adapt or be left out. Ableism plays out in both small and large ways.

Ableism is assuming someone with a disability would rather be “normal” or is always seeking a cure. Ableism is asking someone you don’t know why they are using crutches, why they have a scar, why they are sitting in a wheelchair. Ableism is assuming only older people use canes, hearing aids, or need extra time to complete a task. Ableism is judging someone who parks in a disabled parking spot based on what you see or don’t see is wrong with them. Ableism is talking to someone with a disability as if they are a child or saying someone is “too young” to be disabled. I suspect all of us are guilty of at least one of these at some point in our lives.

There are, of course, the more obvious, egregious examples that are important to remember—refusing accommodations or housing based on disability, segregated schools, all the way up to eugenics and mass murder of people with disabilities in the early twentieth century. I’m hoping all of you know this already, but it’s always good to have a reminder of exactly what sin looks like when it comes to different forms of embodiment, because it’s usually of the corporate, cultural variety.

If the idea that sin is the cause of disability is false doctrine, then the beautiful miracle of incarnation points the way toward a better understanding of our holy embodiment as fragile humans. While we have inherited some not great theology on sin and disability, we are also the inheritors of a faith that is centered on the reality that God became embodied in the person of Jesus, a Palestinian Jew living under Roman occupation.

The First Nations Version of the New Testament translates the well-known passage about the incarnation in John 1:14 as the following:

“Creator’s Word became a flesh and blood human being and pitched his sacred tent among us, living as one of us. We looked upon his great beauty and saw how honorable he was, the kind of honor held only by this one Son who fully represents his Father—full of his great kindness and faith.”

Jesus is the embodied aspect of God, God “made flesh” to live among us. This means that we ought to take seriously our own embodiment. Our bodies are our places of connection to both creation and the Holy. They are the crux of our link to all of life, the earthly and spiritual interwoven into an intact whole. We are not souls inhabiting bodies, we are all of it altogether at once. Resurrection isn’t just a spiritual return, but a bodily one, for Christ and for us in the eyes of the biblical writers, who clearly thought bodies were important.

Even after Jesus was finished walking the earth, the Holy Spirit is still present with us in the created world at all times and places. The incarnation is a reminder that God is present throughout creation and throughout time and space. The world is a holy place, suffused with the presence of God, our bodies included. Our bodies are not a place of sin and brokenness. They are the place where we connect with God and with one another. Jesus walked on this earth in a body. He ate and slept and felt angry in the same ways that we do. The fact that God would take on human form means that our bodies are also holy and good.

We are inheritors of a faith centered on embodiment. God created us along with all of creation, and called it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). The original paradise in Genesis was one of humans and nature in harmony, a garden of peace and plenty. And in Revelation the final vision of the restored earth is one of similar harmony: the river of life flowing through the center of a holy city, upon whose banks grows the tree of life, producing every kind of fruit for sustenance and healing (Revelation 22:2). We are created good, embodied beings living in a sacred creation, connected to one another and beautiful in our diverse experiences of being human.

Given all of this, Christians are called to make our churches welcoming communities for all kinds of bodies—abled, disabled, neurodivergent, Deaf, blind, old, young, tired, exuberant. Communally, the way we live out our faith through worship, Christian formation, and service should reflect this beautiful diversity of creation. Who do you see in the pews on Sunday morning? Who is absent? How does the structure of our building welcome or exclude? Are our worship practices only inviting for certain types of people? It is only in paying attention to our own embodiment and welcoming the myriad ways that others are embodied that we can build communities and societies of true belonging. This is what it looks like to be the Body of Christ together, to live into an embodied faith.