One Body

I Corinthians 12:12-31 and Luke 4:14-21

Redeemer Lutheran Church

Jerusalem

January 27, 2013

I want to talk to you this Third Sunday in Epiphany about bodies, about our beautiful and hurting bodies, about what it means to be the body of Christ today in this world and in particular this holy place. I also want to talk to you about our mandate from Jesus via Isaiah especially proclaiming release for the captives. And finally I wish to invite you to consider ways we can act for justice, to make the Word flesh.

Part of my process in preparing for a sermon is to read the texts a week or two in advance and then let them marinate in my mind paying attention to what words, thoughts, images, keep returning. It’s kind of a lectio divina process, a listening to the Spirit in the text and my heart and noticing where do they meet. At the same time I try to bring the texts into dialogue with what is happening in the world---Barth’s preach with The Bible in one hand and the newspaper or your Facebook feed in the other. Lastly, because I am here doing mission work based on accompaniment, I bring all of this into dialogue with the people I am working with ---their stories and experiences. So it is out of all this, a messy meditative prayerful process that I have come to focus today on what it means to be the body of Christ and especially what it means to proclaim release for the captives.

Epiphany is the season of the manifestation of light, of the light being shared with more and more people. We are in a season of new beginnings both liturgically and seasonally. In the Eastern Orthodox Church Christmas was just celebrated. And finally, over this past week here in Jerusalem we celebrated a week of Christian unity by praying in each other’s worship spaces. In the Western church Christmas is already long gone. The holy family has fled and returned to Nazareth and Jesus has done his first miracle, turned water into wine at the Wedding in Cana.

  In our Gospel reading from Luke, who we will be following all year, we see that Jesus is still listening to his mother’s Magnificat, that radical song of revolution she sang to him while he was still in the womb.  Her influence can still be heard in his reading of Isaiah’s scroll. This is Jesus’ inaugural address outlining precisely the shape his ministry will take. It is his mission and that of the church too.  It even includes a foreshadowing of what will happen for this “good news” for the poor is not good for those in power, the 1%. It is not good news if you believe that these blessings are only your group. And then there is the question of the mandate. Who chose him, anointed him, Joseph’s son, this poor boy from Galilee?

I am aware today, as I stand here before you, that if I were back in Chicago preaching in my home church, I would be staring up at a very large portrait of Jesus behind or in front of bars in the choir loft. Every person who stands at our pulpit has to reckon with that image as they seek to preach the word. For me, that image is a reminder of the cost of discipleship, the danger of speaking truth to power. But Jesus is also in front of the bars, reminding us he has come to release us from whatever prisons we are in. He has come to proclaim release to the captives.

In the same way I preach with that image of Jesus behind and in front of the bars, I am aware of our proximity to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site that commemorates Jesus death and resurrection. I am aware that the cost of discipleship also leads to Calvary.  I invite you also to hold these images in your mind and heart as we begin to explore what it means to proclaim the release of the captives and what it means to be the body of Christ.

In the United States, where I am from, many of my colleagues are talking about the mass incarceration of people of color as a new form of the Jim Crow system, the systematic discrimination of people of color.  There is almost as much discussion about this as the high homicide rate in Chicago, over 500 people murdered last year, two on my block alone.  People are talking about how to stop the school to prison pipeline. Our youth are enslaved in poverty and then warehoused in prisons. How do we proclaim release from both the economic and social prisons that lock them out and the physical prisons that lock them in? And finally, how do we confront those who are making profits from the whole system? Where is our connection? Where is "our skin" in this game? Are these not our sisters and brothers? Are we not members of one body?

“Proclaim release to the captives.”  I think about what this means here in Palestine and Israel too, days after the shooting and murder of two youths from Bethlehem, that place Jesus was born which is now almost completely surrounded by the wall, that place many call an open air prison.

Child arrested at weekly demonstration in Kfer Qaddiem
January 25,2013

The blood of Herod’s slaughter is still wet on the streets of Bethlehem.   Imperial forces are still targeting innocent children. Did you know, for instance, that over 900 Palestinian children were held in Israeli prisons last year in direct violation of the Child Protection Act and other international laws? To proclaim their release means crying out about this abuse of rights, this injustice and supporting public accountability in places like The Hague. It means claiming kinship with these children--- Christian and Muslim alike, treating them as if they were our own.

“Proclaim release to the captives.”  In addition to the detained or imprisoned children, there are hundreds of political prisoners also being held in Israeli prisons all across the country.  They are being held without charge or trial in indefinite administrative detention, allowable under military law but against civil law. Many are being tortured as we speak.  Just as their bodies are being subjugated and deprived, they have also made their bodies places of resistance. Many are on hunger strikes for justice and freedom.  How can we proclaim their release if we are captive to our own country’s complicity in the military occupation? How can we proclaim release if we don’t challenge the inhumanity and illegality? Is advocacy enough?

“Proclaim release to the captives.”  Prisoners are not the only captives here in Israel and Palestine. Every person you meet, every living stone has a story of loss and sorrow, an experience of being imprisoned or trapped.  It has to do with living in militarized spaces, times, and locations. It has to do with the everydayness of violence, trauma, and exclusion and what that does to the body, mind, and spirit.

The Palestinians are prisoners in their own land as the program of dispossession and annexation continues without ceasing, with minimum awareness or outcry. House by house, tree by tree, vineyard by vineyard, revoked residency card by residency card, the people are not free to work, harvest their fields, leave or return home. These too are people in need of freedom and release. But how? For some, including many of our church leaders in the US, this means withdrawing our military aid until international laws are obeyed. For others, it means corporate engagement, withdrawing our financial support from companies and institutions that profit from the occupation. It means choosing not to buy products from the illegal settlements. For still others it means joining the nonviolent resistance movement with our bodies in the villages at the wall. It means seeing that we are all members of one body in Christ and that the suffering of one affects us all.

In addition to these forms of present captivity I have become aware of how the past injustices still hold people captive emotionally and literally. Thousands are in refugee camps through out the Middle East still grasping the keys to their homes. As part of my work with Palestinian women I have been reading reports about women’s lives and their experiences of displacement. I have been especially moved by the oral histories of older women who remember, like it was yesterday, what it was like to be expelled from their homes or villages during the great Catastrophe, the Nakba. What strikes me in reading these reports is the constant reference to the body, the notion that your body contains your history, that all you have left is your body. Story after story, these women talk about seeing dead bodies along the road as they fled from their village. Others talk about hiding bodies under trees to hopefully reclaim later for burial. And babies, story after story about babies being left by the side of the road in pray and hope another mother will come along and carry him or her to safety. While the men’s stories focus on loss of land and livelihood these women’s stories speak about the loss of family and the failure of the body to carry or care for another body. Where is the release for these women who seem to be forever captive to these horrific memories and who are re-traumatized each time a bomb hits Gaza? Where is the release for these women whose children went temporarily blind because of what they experienced? Where is the release for these women whose milk dried up or became poison so they could no longer support the life of their babies?  Is telling their stories enough? Who is listening? Are we? What does it mean to be the body of Christ and hold these stories as sacred as our own?

            I invite you today to reflect on what it means to be part of one broken body, to think about how our own brokenness might give us gifts for understanding someone else’s.  As you come to the table today, to participate in communion, to reflect on the fact that we eat, we ingest, we share the bread broken, the blood poured out. How does this communion strengthen or challenge our solidarity with others?

Rev. Martin Luther King said, “An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.” If one member suffers we all suffer says Paul. So what happens when that fabric is ripped apart? How does this affect us or not? What is our responsibility as one member to another of one bleeding body of Christ?

            I believe Luke’s Gospel reading today, Jesus’ mandate and mission, can provide us with a framework for action. Let us follow Jesus then not only to the places where he lived but also to the dangerous places where his spirit is still alive and resisting. Let us release the captives----all of them including us for we follow the one who stands behind and in front of the bars. We follow the one who died and was resurrected. We follow the one who meets us on the road ahead, who becomes known in the breaking of bread, the sharing of life. Let us follow this path.