Flesh

John 1:1-18

Prescott American Baptist Church

January 5, 2014

As an artist I know the deep satisfaction that comes from creating something new. As a playwright and performer I have had the privilege of putting myself into an art form and expressing the incidents and ideas that come from being me, body and soul. It’s all in there when the play hits the stage. I can’t separate them. My imagination, my mind, my education, my family, my flesh, my health, my faith, my hopes, my fears, my energy, the grace of God’s love and the light of my spirit. All of it has come together and I created a new thing. And because of this opportunity to create I feel such joy in being alive. By writing and performing “For Goodness Sake” and “Skin and Bones,” I feel that I have contributed from the best of my body and soul.

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, believed that all of us have “a vocation to be fully human”  We are created to become all that we can be, to learn, grow and develop into fully human creatures, deeply satisfied with what we can contribute to the world around us. 

Being fully human means recognizing the great honor it is to be body and spirit, flesh and soul.  Being fully human means coming to a place in life where we recognize and respect what we have to contribute to the world around us. Being fully human includes a search for meaning that asks questions about our identity in the community and how we use the grace and gifts we’ve been given. Being fully human also includes extending ourselves into the life of others for the good of others. Being fully human is to merge our flesh and spirit as one creation, recognizing our sacred partnership with The Word.  

The Word became flesh so we might know the joy of becoming fully human. 

From the beginning the Word has been with the Creator communicating love to human life, creating hope in our body and soul, connecting with us, claiming us and setting us free to continue the good work of creation. We are flesh and the weight of our bodies would seem to limit us, minimize what we can do and how far we can extend ourselves. It would seem that way—until we recognize and respect that the Word has been made flesh within and among us. We are never far away from the mysteries and miracles of God’s love.

Nelson Mandela and others were imprisoned for more than twenty-five years because of their struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. They were held in an island prison, Robben Island. The recorded history of the political prisoners on Robben Island contains many stories of the triumph of the human flesh and spirit over oppression and torture. 

Writer, Margaret Wheatley, tells of a tour she took with friends through that island prison. The tour guide had been a prisoner in the very room they were viewing, a long narrow room that had held dozens of freedom fighters for years. No cots were in the room. There had been no furniture at all. Just cement walls and floors with narrow windows near the ceiling. Wheatley stood there and listened to the guide’s narration. The cold came up through the floor. She stared through the bars as the guide described constant threats and capricious brutalities. Then, speaking very quietly, the guide grinned, “Sometimes, to pass the time here, we taught each other ballroom dancing.”

Wheatley writes: “Demoralized and weary men were teaching each other to dance in the cold silence of a long prison cell. Only the human spirit is capable of such dancing.” *

The Word became flesh and danced among us.

The African American people in Montgomery, Alabama chose to walk to work rather than to ride on the Montgomery buses. The entire community of African American neighbors came together and created a plan and the will to walk, to work and to be something more in their own eyes. They knew they were created to be recognized and respected as equals among all God’s people.  They made up their minds not to ride the bus, not to sit in the back, not to be seen as an under-class. They walked for a year. Twelve months went by as they connected to each other and to the power of God’s grace and love in their spirits.  They turned down rides and they wore out pair after pair of shoes. Their bodies did the walking but it was their fully human spirits that kept up the boycott and kept the movement going strong.

The Word became flesh and marched among us.

I met Carolyn while she was serving time in our county jail. A short and round African American woman. Thirty-seven years old when I met her. Carolyn has spent most of her life around North Memphis. Sometimes she lived with her mother in an apartment or in the home of a friend or relative. Sometimes she lived on her own on the streets. She started prostituting at the age of thirteen. Dropped out of school. Fell in love with crack cocaine. No one urged her to stick with her formal education. She learned how to survive by the strength of her own body and spirit. 

She chose to join us in Prison Stories class. For four months she sat in the circle with me and eleven other women in the jail. Carolyn told stories about her life. Some of them were so funny we slapped our knees and laughed til we cried. Some of her stories were frightening, so frightening it made me see the world through different eyes when I left the jail and headed for home. Her stories opened windows on worlds I had never seen, places and people not far from my home but previously invisible to me. 

At the close of our time together and at the performance of the class stories, I called Carolyn up to the front and gave her the certificate of completion she had earned.  She turned to the gathered audience of incarcerated women, family members, jail staff and community guests. She held that certificate up high over her head and she announced, “I took this class because I wanted to tell my story to somebody. And somebody listened. Ms Elaine and my sisters listened to what I been through and I saw the truth. I used to think I was a bad girl, a fast girl. I used to think wasn’t no hope for somebody like me. But now I told my story and I can see that I ain’t no bad girl. I ain’t no fast girl. I am a girl what had bad things done to me and I can get over that. I can become who I was intended to be. I can be free from my past and be me.”

The Word became flesh and told stories of liberation and hope among us. 

From the beginning the Word has been with the Creator communicating love to human life, creating hope in our body and soul, connecting with us, claiming us and setting us free to continue the good work of creation. We are flesh and the weight of our bodies would seem to limit us, minimize what we can do and how far we can extend ourselves. It would seem that way—until we recognize and respect that the Word has been made flesh within and among us. We are never far away from the mysteries and miracles of God’s love.

Amen

 

·        *Wheatley, Margaret J, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. San Francisco, 2009