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Bodily Belonging - 3rd Sunday After the Epiphany

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Updated: Jan 30

Epiphany 3C: Neh. 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Ps. 19

1 Cor. 12:12-31a; Lk 4:14-21

The Rev. Cameron Partridge

January 26, 2025


Give us grace, O God, to perceive, live, and share your glory. Amen.[1]

Good morning, St. Aidan’s. Welcome to the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany and to this combined service at what is for us an odd hour, perhaps painfully early or late, depending on the service you usually attend. It is good to be with you gathered together in this way on this day. Good in the way that God declared the various days of creation Good, surveying all that God had created: each planetary body, each day or night, each waterway or mountain, each plant, each creature. Each of us in all our complexity, forming community and formed by community over time, called to embrace transformation in God’s unfolding future and to actively participate in manifesting that future, that dream, by God’s grace. How gloriously good. Give us grace, O God, to live so rooted in you and the promise of your dream, that together we might be strengthened to participate in it, to extend and reveal it with our very lives, come what may.

Our reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians dramatizes the together piece of this puzzle with a memorable image of the bodily collective. Paul did not make up this metaphor of the community as a body. He picked it up from philosophical writings of his era. The body with its various members was often used to call for unity amid diversity. Paul is certainly doing that here, referencing how parts of a body work together and are even indispensable to one another and to the whole: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Cor 12:21). Further, no one body part can stand for the whole: “if all were a single member, where would the body be?” he asks (1 Cor 12:19). No great unifying ear or nose, this collective. At the same time, Paul complicates a tendency in the collective body metaphor tradition to code parts of the body in hierarchical ways. For instance, the head was often seen as more important, and thus more symbolically significant, than other parts of the body – something Paul argues elsewhere.[2] In this passage, however, Paul visibly pushes back against the status usually accorded to particular body parts in his context: “The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,” he says, “and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect” (1 Cor 12:22-23). There is an ethos of upending a certain kind of respectability here, of reversing expected values, even of embracing the scandalous, something Paul has a propensity to do – his theology of the cross being a chief example.[3] The collective body, full of unexpected twists and turns, knits us together in deep solidarity: when one suffers, all suffer. This is this is the body into which we were baptized.

In our gospel passage this morning, Jesus proclaims this solidarity in a story from Luke’s gospel that depicts the launch of Jesus’ ministry. He had been baptized, the Spirit landing upon him in bodily form. He had been pressed by that Spirit into the wilderness where he was tempted – a story we will hear at the beginning of Lent. Now, after having taught at synagogues around Galilee, he has come to the synagogue at Nazareth where he had grown up. Again, filled with the Spirit – a key theme for Luke – Jesus stands up to read the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll, he reads from what for us is Isaiah 61:1-2:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

 

What deeply hopeful words to hear! These were words originally proclaimed to convey hope to exiled Israel that they would indeed return to their land. Now in Jesus’ context, this hope was being proclaimed amid Roman imperial oppression. The poor would receive good news, the captives release, the oppressed liberation, the year of God’s favor, of Jubilee – debts forgiven, a time of restoration and peace.[4] “This scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus then declares. The spirit of God was upon him, as indeed it had descended in bodily form. And with that wind at his back his whole life and ministry, his very body, would inhabit and spread this proclamation. Embedded in this message was, as Walter Brueggemann writes in The Prophetic Imagination, the announcement that “a new age was beginning,” an “announcement [that] carries within it a harsh criticism of all those powers and agents of the present order.”[5] Jesus’ embodiment of this prophetic imagination, his announcement of God’s in-breaking kingdom, God’s dream as Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Verna Dozer elaborate, made him deeply hopeful to all who were inspired by him and utterly threatening to the powers and agents whose realms he defied.[6] The critical yet compassionate heart of Jesus’ life, the prophetic Word he embodied, the death and resurrection that flowed from his ministry, forms the collective, transformative body to which we belong. This is the foundation of our discipleship: this hope, this compassion, this proclamation, this liberation, this confrontation with a world that does not want to be changed, that does not to want to upend the hierarchies of its body, that does not want to manifest the divine dream in all its justice.

Yet still, we are called to proclaim it, to live it, to share it.

This week, dear fiends we caught a glimpse of the power of such proclamation. On Monday we saw it as a number of us walked at the Martin Luther King march. With friends from various religious traditions and none, people who believed in the dream Dr. King preached and lived, we flowed through the streets in the warm sunlight. We talked, we listened, we chanted, we soaked up the energy. For myself, I will confess that later that day I napped like I haven’t napped in years, and then slept over ten hours that night. I had a sense of needing to store energy, as if I could sleep enough to power myself forward for the next several years. The next day, a barrage of executive orders, whose dust and legality have not yet settled, sought to say to members of our collective body, “I have no need of you.” To reassert a bodily hierarchy, to assert what parts of one’s body should signify.[7] And then Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde stepped into the pulpit at the cathedral that is the seat of her diocese, the Episcopal Diocese of Washington D.C. She stood in the pulpit on Tuesday and gently, compassionately, critically and in clear strength, preached the gospel. Unity amid distinctions, as in our Pauline passage, were accompanied by a call, a challenge, to resist the urge to cast one another out, to treat one another with respect, indeed, to make our way in the world with a spirit of grace and mercy.[8] That her message has been met with such vitriol is both unsurprising and astounding to me.[9] The Spirit of God was with her, as it is with us in our contexts, urging us forward to proclaim and embody God’s dream.

Friends, we have a difficult road ahead in our country. We will need each other more than ever. Solidarity is so necessary, especially for groups that are being targeted by this administration. We are still discerning what will be most needed to answer that call in concrete ways. But most importantly what we need is each other. Belonging in community, membership in a body that says without reserve, you are mine and I am yours; we are each other’s; we are indispensable to one another; I refuse to be party to your being cast out. The Spirit of God is upon us, beloved. It calls us to embody the seemingly impossible hope of liberation, of release from captivity, of recovery and healing, of transformation. Let us be about that work in this coming year more than ever. Let us remember the body into which we are baptized. Let us say in affirmation to God’s challenges to us, We will. We will, with God’s help.


[1] Based on the Collect for the Day for Epiphany 3C, The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 215.

[2] E.g. Ephesians 4:15-16

[3] Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 92-96.

[4] Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 64. As Walter Brueggemann writes of Isaiah 61:1-2, “The God who delivers is the God who can disrupt any circumstance of social bondage and exploitation, overthrow ruthless orderings of public life, and authorize new circumstances of dancing freedom, dignity, and justice. The verbs of deliverance refuse to accept as a given any circumstance of oppression.” Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1997), 208.

[5] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1978, 2018), 84.

[6] Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (Harper & Row, 1953), 41 cited in George K. Makechnie, Howard Thurman: His Enduring Dream (The Howard Thurman Center, Boston University, 1988), 1-2; Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream,” in ed. James M. Washington, A Testament to Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988), 217-220; Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Press, 1991).

[7] E.g. “Trump Signs Two Orders to Dismantle Equity Policies,” New York Times, January 20, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/us/politics/trump-transgender-race-education.html?searchResultPosition=6 and “Trump Bars Transgender Women From U.S. Prisons for Female Inmates,” New York Times, January 23, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/us/trump-transgender-inmates-prison.html?searchResultPosition=1

[9] Elizabeth Dias, “The Bishop Who Pleaded with Trump: ‘Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?’” in The New York Times, January 22, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/trump-bishop-plea.html?searchResultPosition=4

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