Reflections...

Good morning, Kowloon Union. My flight arrived five hours ago. On this occasion of returning to a city that is at once so familiar and yet so profoundly changed, it is a gift to come here as my first stop. More than a decade ago, in my senior year in college, I visited Kowloon Union after hearing rumors of its wonderful inclusiveness. Coming here as a wide-eyed new Christian, secluded in a Southern Baptist circle, the beauty of this community was a shot of light. Now, more than a decade later, this moment feels like a homecoming. So, I want to use my time to report what I have learned all these years being away from home, to give an account of the hope that is still in me (1 Peter 3:15).

The Gospel we heard today, on hypocrisy, when not used in an anti-Semitic, supersessionist way, is a reminder that our prolonged membership in a religious tradition does not guarantee the correct perception of God. We can easily misrecognize God. The Christian Bible is filled with stories about such misrecognitions. Jesus can be walking on the water and be mistaken as a ghost. After the resurrection, you can be seeking him in tears, with a broken heart, and you won’t know that he stands right before you, until he calls you, by name.

The two appointed scriptural readings today are particularly helpful for clarifying the two ways in which I have misrecognized God. So, count what I am about to say as a confession in two steps. 

We just heard the Psalmist cry: “Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?” Without any theological resolution, without any vindicating turn of events, except an expression of trusting in God’s faithful care, the Psalmist declares: “I will go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the lyre.” This abrupt turn from lament to hope has long been a staple in Christian spiritual literature. The Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is known for the famous line “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” wrote a lesser-known poem during a period of melancholia. The poem began by protesting: “Why do sinners’ ways prosper?” The protest resolves itself with a plea: “My God, O lord of life, send my roots rain.”[1]

 In my early years of faith, I did not appreciate these messy cries of protest and lament. I preferred a God of neat systems and closed metaphysics. “The God of philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Issac.”[2]That was my first misrecognition, aligning my desire too closely with the ambitions of the academy. The hall of higher learning often maintains a hierarchy that favors contemplation over action, the theoretical over the practical, the universal over the particular, as if a monumental book of theology, a famed professor, can become “a key to all the mythologies,” unlocking all divine truths.[3]

Hiding behind this familiar academic pride is a less recognizable and yet more pervasive heresy among us, the heresy of denying the Incarnation, denying Christ’s full humanity, out of the fear of our own bodies.[4]

The Christian faith shatters these hierarchies, chastens our fear of bodies. The Incarnation units what is most unlikely to be united, violating our basic sense of what can or cannot be intimately united, uniting the extremes of two things: divinity and humanity. 

Christians who believe in a God incarnate should not seek God in some pristine, ethereal realm beyond the material plane. This embodied life, in the here and now, is the only life we have, the only condition for nurturing our love for God. We need to attend to the body, to its needs, to see its signs as the source of knowledge. This is no sentimental glorification of the self. That’s simply how Jesus taught. Jesus’s teaching was not a spiritual instruction at a nice, safe, sanitized distance. He healed by putting his hands in the ears of a deaf man and spat and touched the tongue of the man with a speech impairment. Jesus asked us to remember him not by an idea, a line in book, a school of thought, but by eating and drinking, by this bread and this wine: “Do this in remembrance of me.” If we are so busy with climbing up the spiritual ladders, we might miss the one who has already come down to meet us.

Another way our body might help is the bare fact that they are the humble tools, sometimes the only tools, for us to approach the divine in dark nights of the soul. In these years of wandering alone in America, at times when pain became physically manifest, it was often the things discounted by the high doctrine that brought me consolation: holding a cross, touching a rosery, putting a picture of Jesus in the pocket, or bringing an icon to bed, petting it, feeling its closeness. That is more powerful than any grand formulations of theodicy. 

The second way I’ve misrecognized God is the wish to locate God in certainty. For a long time, I took comfort in searching for God in the things I already knew. The Western theological academy can make God into a matter of mastery, possession, and control.[5] But God is not anyone’s tool, not anyone’s toy; God is by definition beyond this world, beyond our ability to grasp. God’s thoughts and ways are far above us, preceding us, exceeding everything there is. Jesus’s teaching is not about preserving whatever little we already have; his teaching sets us in motion to approach the One who is always doing a new thing.” In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says: 

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. ⁹ And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father, the one in heaven. ¹⁰ Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. ¹¹ The greatest among you will be your servant. ¹² All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

What a remarkable transvaluation of values! In just a few sentences, Jesus overturns some of the most fundamental human certainties: we are so sure that only the biological family commands our utmost care; we are so sure that we are self-contained individuals separated from the fate of our sisters and brothers; we are so sure that “making it” means we no longer need to serve; we are so sure that exaltation comes through self-assertion and overpowering. Jesus repudiates all these certainties of biology, isolated self, and the strict correspondence between power and rank. 

We know too well that history is mostly made up of apparent losers, swimming against the stream of their times, never seemed to get anywhere. We need to be led to a future which our bare eyes can’t see: a future in which “what will finally come will establish once and for all what could never be predicted: that our efforts were not in vain, were not for nothing, that our efforts to bring in another world did not, as they appeared to, come to nothing, vanish without consequence.”[6] This is the reason why we have only the Messiah as our true instructor, who calls our repentance. The meaning of “repentance,” after all, means “turning,” turning around to see God as God truly is, not as God wished by us. 

The whole of the Christian story is about unexpected surprises. None of us were there to expect that God would create and love a world that is finite, frail, and sure to die. None of us could expect an infinite God to incarnate to the humble material world, suffering an execution. And none of us could expect what is to come: “No one has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived, what God has prepared for those who love God.” (1 Corinthians 2:9). The whole of the Christian story—creation, incarnation, redemption—is about us being desired, being desired by God, being invited into the very divine life. 

The Eucharist table is one such place to be surprised, to experience being desired by God. It is a place to still see a vision at a time when neoliberal capitalism promises only sameness, repetition, and boredom; it is a place to see a vision when our faith seems to have become tired, comfortable, and no longer startling us. 

I remember such a vision when I was a seminarian. In the early 2010s, the issue of same-sex desire was fiercely debated in the Episcopal community. One Wednesday afternoon, a student, let’s call him Jerry, spoke some old toxic theology that was hard for all queer students to hear. I resented him. Hours later, at the evening service, we were placed together again in the same place, this time around the Eucharist table. Watching him approaching the table, keening, readying himself for the bread and wine, I suddenly saw him transfigured in the Vesper light. In previous class conversations, Jerry had intimated his experience with an atypical body, and had used his own long singlehood to argue for the viability of mandatory celibacy for queer persons. Jerry’s body is not considered conventionally beautiful. He must have been deemed undesirable by many who are very certain about what beauty is. He had difficulty walking. As I watched him straining towards the table, every movement a struggle, it occurred to me that he might know something about carrying an “unwanted body,” a lonely body that knew no touch of a lover, no “entering into the body’s grace” through a tender kiss or warm embrace.[7] He might have more in common with those of us whose bodies have been wrongfully considered sinful, tainted, and unwanted. It was an oddly beautiful vision: watching his “undesirable” body, capable of such misguided speech, being infused with a splendid light as he keened and partook the communion. The vision lasted only a few brief minutes: all of us, the confused, divided, mistreated, and hurting bodies all swept into One Body in Christ, into wounded, resurrected, and consecrated body. I wondered: Might not he join us the despised queer students in declaring to the world what Peter did in Acts: ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane?” (Acts 10:15)

As we prepare our hearts for communion, let us enter prayerfully into a realm where the most precious food is given to us as a sheer gift, rather than earned through competitive effort. We come here hungry, in want, because the world has innumerable ways to make our inferiority known to us, innumerable ways to tell us that we don’t belong. In this moment of appalling horrors in Gaza, we urgently long for the wounded bodies pulled out from rubbles, their lungs cleared, their water refreshed, and their aids to pass through. We need the Incarnate Jesus to contain our despair, to heal our wounds, to pick us up, and to carry us. Amen.