Waking Up to the One Body

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 19th Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” writes the naturalist John Muir in his book My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), “We find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Look deeply, in other words, and all you find is a web of interconnections, with no-thing standing alone, independent, self-sufficient. A cup of tea contains not just the clouds, but the entire cosmos. One sip and we drink the entire universe down. This web of interconnectedness, knowing everything as participating in the one body, as “in Christ,” and living from what the Psalmist calls the “level ground” is what it means to inhabit a sacramental universe--a world where earth, wind, sun, moon, stars are kith and kin, “Brother” and “Sister” as St. Francis hymns in his “Canticle of the Sun.” Each thing, each person, not just good as a means to an end, but good in itself, and of itself.

Our passage from Genesis begins with the Lord God saying, “It is not good that man should be alone.” Human beings are made for relationship, and so God forms the animals out of the same ground (notice) from which God formed the first human. And God delights in man’s naming of the animals--not as an act of mere taxonomy or classification--but as a means of establishing an intimate connection, a sacramental bond between human beings and the natural world: not “bird” but “Black-capped Chickadee”; not “tree” but “Cottonwood”; not “grass” but “Indian Rice Grass,” “Blue Gramma,” “Little Bluestem.” Words, names, as portals to presence. It is not just man and woman whom God intends to be “one flesh”--it is all of creation, seen, celebrated, honored, and reverenced as a divine dance of love, a jig of mutuality and relationship, a partnership in which each retains its unrepeatable uniqueness and knows itself as only the dance at the same time.

The Christian story, then, begins with this story of original unity, original blessing, original “one fleshness” where everything is pronounced “good” and “very good.” Exile, the Fall, serpents, flaming swords, bruised heels, sweaty brows, and labor pains come later. Sin is highly unoriginal. The world we live in is characterized by the divorce from this orignial mutuality, partnership, and primordial peaceableness which God intended for creation. The work of reconciliation is not so much imposing order on chaotically fragmented bits and pieces, but restoring creation and human relationships to their basic goodness. It is the dawning of a new ethic born of seeing ourselves, the world, and all of creation with the same eyes with which God sees us.

When Jesus speaks of “divorce,” he’s not advocating staying in an abusive relationship, or remaining in a marriage that has become spiritually dead and actually hinders the mutual flourishing of the two partners. He’s not speaking of a young couple married so young that suddenly after fifteen years they are two totally different people who don’t belong together. He’s pointing to something much, much deeper--the rupture, the split, the fracture, the divorce between human beings and God, between tribes of people huddled up against other tribes, between human beings and the natural world. Adultery in this sense happens any time I deny, or act from a place that denies my marriage to Christ in love, my bondedness to my neighbor, my interconnection with the good earth. 

It’s hard not to see the polarized political situation in which we live as something akin to a bad divorce. “Us” and “Them” played out on every level. Bipartisanship, working across the aisle, pragmatic compromise, are really half-measures. What is really required is a profound shift in how we view the other. We need to “leave father and mother and be joined…. The two shall become one flesh.” Again, this isn’t simply about what happens in the sacrament of marriage, it’s pointing to the sacramental bond that has been established between God and all of creation and our role as followers of Jesus to be repairers of the breach. And what’s the breach? Take your pick--rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, male and female, republican and democrat, human beings and the natural world. Divorce, divorce, divorce. My vow of implicated solidarity, of becoming one flesh, broken at every turn. 

I used to think that the “sinful and adulterous generation” of which Jesus speaks in the Gospels referred to those who failed to recognize God incarnate walking and talking, sweating and sneezing and snoring, breaking bread, healing, dying and rising right under their noses while they pined away for their imagined idea of a Messiah. Now I see that anywhere there is a falling away from brotherhood, sisterhood, siblinghood in any aspect of life… there, right there, is adultery, a broken bond of love. Hardness of heart, a stony Herod heart, where God calls, yearns, cries out for a heart of tender flesh, the heart of vastness and boundless compassion as wide as the world. Love your enemies. Stand with the least of these.

So what is to be done? How to bridge the chasm? How to keep our vow, honor our sacred bond? Well, Jesus’ program is lacking in specifics. In the face of social, political, economic, and environmental divorce, Jesus indignantly grabs a little child whom the disciples were trying to shoosh and chase away and sets it in their midst. “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Huh? That’s the answer to structural inequality, systemic racism, a widening gap between rich and poor and a vanishing middle class? That’s the answer to climate change and mass extinction? A little child? Come on, Jesus, give us something to work with!

When we pause for a moment, however, things start to swim into focus. Jesus is doing a couple of different things at once. First, he’s saying: You see this thing you want to chase away, deny, and silence? In that very one is your salvation. In that very brother, sister, sibling is the kingdom of God waiting for your welcome, your yes, your “I do,” your embrace. The person you want to erase, exclude, forget about, or teach some proper manners to, as they are and just as they are, is who will save you from the millstones, fires, and worms, of divorce and separation and twoness. See that you are one flesh. Bless that other, and be blessed by that other. And in that mutual blessing wake up to discover that you are both always already seated and blessed in Jesus’ lap.

Second, Jesus is saying that there is something about how the little child is that models for us the way forward. I know, I know, this seems like a stretch for parents of young children who have spent the last 19 months in various forms of lockdown, quarantine, no school, zoom school, and hand-wringing over something as ordinary as eating out for once, or going to the community pool. But children, like those beautiful losers in the beatitudes, are models for us of the dead-end of self-succificency. They model for us a healthy receptivity, relationality, and dependence that is quickly schooled out of us as 21st century go-it- alone bootstrappers in a consumer culture where happiness is touted as getting and spending. They “receive the kingdom of God,” Jesus tells us. They don’t think their way to it. They don’t do their way to it. They don’t acquire their way to it. They’re open-handed open spaces where God happens like those fishermen who dropped their names and their nets. 

Jesus tells us that that openness, receptivity, wonder, awe, and harmony of the child (at least in this idealized sense) is the beginning of the repairing of the breach. Childlikeness means the dropping away of separation, fidelity to the world just as it is before we think in terms of us and them, good or bad, means and ends, cost or benefit. It’s the delight in the butterfly before reaching for the net, the formaldehyde, and the pins to fix its wings under glass. 

This ability to see beyond labels, to set out into the deep water and see beyond divorced twoness is the effervescent reality “deep down things” of each encounter, is what we acclimate ourselves to in the life of daily prayer, dwelling on scripture, weekly worship in community, and serving others in the spirit of self-forgetful love. We learn to see, to be, to discover our true selves in the unquenchable love of God and be that love for others. You remember Thomas Merton speaking of waking up to recognition of interconnection, infinite okness, and original blessing in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation… Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. 

Leave the world of two. Wake up to the one body. Suddenly members of one another--I am yours and you are mine--the only thing that remains is for us to say “I do”--to God, to one another, to birds of the air and the creeping and crawling things of the earth with childlike playfulness and wonder. The breach repaired one “I do” at a time. I awake from self-centered slumber to find myself carried to heaven in the arms of my forgiven enemy.