Text: Psalm 139:1-18
Speaker: Sarah Werner

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 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.