Touching the wounds of the body

The moderator-elect of The Presbyterian Church in Canada was announced on April 1, 2021. There’s a nationwide ballot preceding the announcement: all the members of the presbyteries vote, the ministers and representative elders. This year there were three nominees. The three nominees are voted on, and one is chosen, and that person is the moderator-elect. It actually goes to General Assembly, which ratifies it. They do have the right to choose someone else if they wish, but they never have; they always choose the moderator-elect.

The winner was the Reverend Daniel D. Scott, minister of St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Bradford, Ontario. And this prompted a Facebook post by one of the few Indigenous women ministers in our denomination, in which she grieved the fact that, in light of systemic racism being active in our Canadian institutions, we corporately chose a white male over the two other candidates: one a Black woman minister, and the other an Indigenous woman minister.

This prompted a host of replies, some agreeing, some disagreeing, with varying arguments. Some said it just proves we’re racist; other posts argued strenuously that we followed the election processes of The Presbyterian Church in Canada, and therefore we’re not racist.

My immediate gut reaction, to be honest, was a little defensive. It felt like I was being accused of racism — even though, to be honest, my first choice wasn’t the person who was chosen. But there is that ordination vow we take, to support the government of this church by sessions, presbyteries, synods and General Assembly.

To be fair, the person who first posted did not accuse the church of racism. She just said that we missed an opportunity, and she grieved and wept that we missed an opportunity to elect a woman, a Black woman or an Indigenous woman. And to be fair, even if we had elected that Black woman or Indigenous woman, it would not necessarily mean that the inequities the system has had for a long time would all be fixed.

This year there’s also an overture to General Assembly pointing out inequities in the stipends paid to women ministers in The Presbyterian Church in Canada. The Acts and Proceedings of The Presbyterian Church in Canada list all the stipends of the ministers for each congregation, and the overture points out that women average much less than men. It further raises concerns about discriminatory hiring practices in congregations: do women get a fair shot? It says that in the richest and best-paying churches, very few women are the senior minister.

And also this year, General Assembly will be voting on something that was passed at the previous General Assembly and sent through our Barrier Act: legislation that would allow same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQI individuals.

I think all those issues connect in a very real way to our scripture lessons today, which are all about the body of Christ.

Our first text talks about the disciples holding things in common, so that nobody was in need — and then goes right into a troubling story about Ananias and Sapphira, who sold land and gave some of the money to the apostles, but kept back some of the proceeds. Our second text is about God being light: in God there’s no darkness. But it’s not the same in us. If we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves; but if we confess our sins, we are forgiven. And the third text is about Jesus appearing to the disciples for the first time. He offers them peace and commissions them: as the Father has sent me, so I send you. Thomas isn’t there, and doesn’t believe Jesus is alive, and wants to touch the body of Jesus and touch the wounds before he’ll believe. But strangely enough, he’s actually the first disciple to make the confession after the resurrection that Jesus is Lord: “My Lord and my God!”

What I think holds all these scriptures together is the body of Christ. Jesus appears in body to the disciples. Thomas wants to touch the broken and scarred body. The believers who gather together hold all things in common because they understand themselves as one body. And Ananias and Sapphira hurt this body of believers, which we also call the body of Christ. While Christ is all glory and has no darkness, we, the body of Christ, have sin, and need to confess our brokenness. We are a broken body of Christ.

Let me read some selected verses from 1 Corinthians, chapter 12:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body.… But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body.… God has so arranged the body … that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

1 Corinthians 12:12–27

I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that the primary way Jesus works in this world is through his body, what we call the church. We are the body of Christ. We are his hands, his feet, his mouth: to care, to love, to forgive, to heal, to include, to share, to tell good news, and to tell Jesus’ story. Jesus is alive, and Jesus is alive in us.

And this body is very diverse. We’re not all the same; there are many members. Some of my reading and interest lately has been to look at the fact that though the body of Christ is diverse, my theological education was not very diverse.

There’s a book coming out this September entitled If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I?, with the subtitle Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority. It’s written by Dr. Angela Parker, who is assistant professor of New Testament and Greek at the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, a Baptist university in Georgia.

In the book, she says she was educated by white male theologians to be a white male theologian. And she goes on to say that white male theology has taken up residency in most of our minds, and the doctrines of white male theologians come with the baggage of white supremacist authority. In particular, she sees the doctrines of biblical inerrancy and infallibility as white male Christian lines which have been foisted on the world, not because they’re biblical, but because they have justified white males in positions of power using scripture to control marginalized groups.

She argues that the Bible has been used oppressively, and that we, the body of Christ, have to learn to breathe again, and let God breathe in us. And we do that by taking the Bible seriously and letting it be authoritative, but not authoritarian. In order to breathe as the body of Christ, we have to be aware of our identities and our diversity, and the different identities and diversity of the biblical authors.

And I find this really refreshing. What is it like to read the Bible from the position of a Black person whose history is that of slavery? What is it like to read the Bible from the position of an Aboriginal person who went to residential school, or a Chinese Christian who grew up in Communist China, or a woman who was sexually assaulted, or a poor person living in Central America, where multinational corporations are in league with the government to the detriment of the average poor person? I have a friend who’s studying queer theology — theology from the perspective of the LGBTQI community — and he is one of the most interesting and engaging preachers I know.

And I think this is all relevant to this guy Thomas, who wants to touch the body of Christ, touch the wounds, touch the scars. Because what it says to me is that not only did Jesus’ body have wounds and scars, but the body of Christ is still wounded and scarred and fractured and hurting.

The Christian wars! You can pick almost any issue, and Christians fight over it — and some of them are the worst. Fighting over biblical authority, over slavery, over the inclusion of women, over pacifism, over abortion, over medically assisted dying, over the inclusion of the LGBTQI community, over contemporary versus traditional worship. And it goes on and on and on.

And yet we read about that very first, original church: commonality, sharing, making sure each other’s needs were met. It sounds idyllic. But there seems to be a big, deep truth here: in order to have unity, we must recognize and accept diversity.

And not only recognize and accept diversity, but say to ourselves every day: if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. If we Presbyterians in Canada say we are not racist, we deceive ourselves. Racism has been built into the system.

I was educated by white male theologians to be a good white male theologian. And while I acknowledge I had a good education with good people, there was something lacking, and it was diversity: points of view from the marginalized, and from other races and other groups. The whole body of Christ was not part of my education. And yet the body is made up of many diverse parts, and each is a part of the body.

And so I would invite you to touch that whole body; to reach out to other parts of that body — Black theology, feminist theology, liberation theology, Asian theology, queer theology — and hear stories of pain and brokenness and exclusion and separation, and yet how they found in Christ hope and love and acceptance.

Many years ago, when I was at Knox College, someone came to talk about liberation theology. That was the thing back then. It was theology primarily from the perspective of the poor in Latin America, and it starts with this premise: God has a preferential option for the poor. And there are some scriptures, I think, that would back that up. But I was one of the ones who voiced my humble opinion that God loves rich people as well as poor people. And he does. But I missed the point.

It’s the same with the Black Lives Matter movement. When someone says “Black lives matter,” someone retorts, “Well, all lives matter.” Of course all lives matter. But the point is that there are some lives that have not been treated as if they matter, and we all need to do something about it. To say “all lives matter” in response to “Black lives matter” is like calling 911 and saying your house is on fire, that your house matters to you — and then having the 911 operator tell you, “Well, all houses matter,” and not do anything about your house burning down.

And so I want you to imagine today what it might be like to be a poor person, a marginalized person, an Indigenous person, a Black person, a queer person, or someone from some other culture or group that has been historically mistreated or even hated, as you come to this story of commonality in the Acts passage, and the story of Ananias and Sapphira.

Imagine you’re a Black person or an Aboriginal person, but you’re in this new little church, and it’s totally equal. There’s no prejudice, no hierarchy, no class system, no betters to put you in your place. In this community you’re valued and loved and listened to, and what you say matters, and your voice counts. And you participate equally in the wealth and the resources, and you lack nothing, because everything is shared equally. How refreshing would that be!

And along come a couple of people who hold back; who don’t share; who have more than everybody else; who lie and cheat and think they deserve it. That’s Ananias and Sapphira. They don’t feel they’re really part of the body. They think they’re entitled to more. They want to make it look like they love everybody, but in actual fact they’re hurting the body of Christ.

The sad part is, I’ve been Ananias and Sapphira.

As a teenager, as a young man: the things I said about gays, the terrible words I used, the jokes I told, the attitude I had — I could cry. I have cried. I grew up in a culture that was incredibly cruel to gays and lesbians and other queer folk, even if at the time I didn’t think I was that bad. The racial jokes I told, which I would have said were just jokes — I didn’t really mean anything by them; I didn’t really hate other people. But those things I said and did, I see now, were Ananias and Sapphira. The attitudes towards women that I had. Thinking that I was right, and everybody else except me and my little group was going to go to hell and burn for all eternity — and relishing the fact that some of those people would go to hell and burn for all eternity.

I could go on and on about my sin and the ways I hurt the body of Christ. And that didn’t just end when I was a teenager; I probably just moved on to different things. I don’t stand here as some kind of messiah with all the answers. I stand here in confession: believing that Jesus forgives sins; believing that if I hurt because of my sin, then the body hurts because of my sin; believing that if I confess my sin, it will help bring health to the body of Christ.

If we say we’re not racist and misogynist and homophobic and xenophobic, we deceive ourselves. We have all hurt the body of Christ, and it’s scarred and wounded and broken and hurting.

Ananias and Sapphira were not just two bad people who got killed for being bad. They represent a part of the body of Christ that hurts the body of Christ. And nothing kills the body of Christ like another part of the body of Christ — what members of the body of Christ can do to each other.

And it’s one of the reasons why Jesus died on the cross: to show us another way to be human, and to be a body. Love for all — even those who are enemies, even those who are different, even those who don’t fit in, even those you’ve been brought up to hate. Jesus came to show us how to be a new body, a resurrected body, a different body.

The other night I was watching a hospital drama on television, New Amsterdam, and this episode was about racism. The director, Max, a white doctor, is becoming more aware of systemic racism in his hospital, and one of the things he finds out is that Black doctors and doctors of colour don’t make as much as the white doctors.

At one point he tries to fix it. He decides to step down as the medical director, and so he goes to a Black doctor, a woman, and says, “I’ll step down so you can be the head of the hospital, so you can fix the problem and eradicate racism.” She says no. I’m not going to quote her here, but I’ll summarize what she said: “Do you not see the problem, Max? You and white people have created the problem and victimized people of colour and Black people, and now you want me, one of the victims, to step in and fix it?”

And Max tries different things. He paints “Black Lives Matter” in front of the entryway of the hospital. He tries to get the white doctors to take a pay cut — and then one of the white women doctors says, “Well, women get paid less too,” and anyway it doesn’t happen. Then he goes into the entryway, where all the paintings and pictures of the leaders of the hospital over the last century are, and he ends up taking them down, because they’ve all participated in systemic racism.

And finally the Black woman, Dr. Helen, stops him and says: “Stop being a white messiah, Max. You cannot change racism with one policy change, or one painting, or removing all the white people off the wall.” She insists: “Why don’t you try listening? Why don’t you try listening to the stories of the people in this hospital who have experienced racism?”

And that’s what he does. He listens: stories of racism, inequality, prejudice and abuse.

I think that’s the first step to being the body of Christ. It’s to touch the body where it hurts: to put your hand into the side of the body, and into the nail scars, and into the wounds. To listen to those you don’t normally listen to. To listen to stories of pain, of prejudice, of hurt — the body hurting the body. To listen to people of colour and difference without judgment, without comment, without fixing; just to understand how they feel. And I think it’ll blow your mind.

Maybe something else you could do is tell your own story of being Ananias and Sapphira. Find a counsellor, a listener, a minister, a friend, a spiritual director who is non-judgmental, and confess to them how you, part of the body, have hurt another part of the body. For if you confess your sin, Jesus is faithful and just to forgive your sin and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

For you are a part of the body of Christ, and whether you are victim or victimizer — or, as I suspect, both — you are important to God and to the health of the body. For this wounded and broken Christ wants to send this wounded and broken body of Christ into the world, to tell everyone there’s good news: news that everyone is loved, everyone is valued, everyone is part of God’s big body, and Jesus is the balm that can heal us and make us one.

Amen.