by K. J. Ramsey
The church needs the embodied witness of weakness to fully inhabit the true story of God’s kingdom. In 1 Corinthians, Paul challenges the church in Corinth to be strengthened in the way of Jesus instead of divided and distracted by rivalries and the wealth, worldly wisdom, and immorality of their culture. He reminds the Corinthians that “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”20
In a culture fueled by fear, where the weakest are denigrated by the powerful and cast into dark, dank places, out of sight, while the rest of the country tries to march happily on, we need to listen closely to Paul’s subversive, challenging words. God has chosen what is weak in the world to show his wisdom. God has chosen what is small and despised to most show his great love.21 The parts of the body of Christ we most don’t want to be or see are the parts Paul says are indispensable.22
We who are weak remind the entire church that salvation comes only through God and not through our self-sufficient striving. Our cries help the church hear the truth that our shared story is not finished. The mighty kingdom of God has not fully come, and the small kingdoms of this world offer only a puny, plastic imitation of the freedom and joy we were made for.23
We who mourn carry vision the world needs. Through the lenses of tears, we can truly see.24 Something is broken that God will make whole. We who grieve call the church’s attention back to those to whom Jesus directed the majority of his attention—the poor, the widows, the orphans, the marginalized, disabled, doubting, and weak. We remember Christ, Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf writes, “by reenacting his solidarity with the victims of oppression.”25
We grieve because we have seen flashes of the beauty and joy and pure love of the kingdom of God. And we ache for it to come. The church most displays the heart of God when she is willing to remain in the mystery that it is the tears of the saints mingling with God’s that water the tree of life God is growing to heal this world.26
The church needs to rediscover the worship of repositioning the brokenness of humanity. When we suffer, we sometimes lose sight of ourselves, our worth, and who we are beyond our diagnoses, disappointments, struggles, and grief. Maybe we lose ourselves because our communities have let us. Maybe the reason why we lose sight of our worth as indispensable vessels of weakness that show the world God’s strength is because our communities continue to treat weakness like an inconvenience or an avoidable, temporary problem.27 Who in the church is going to give value back to those the Word says are indispensable?
When we treat suffering predominantly as a problem to eradicate or ignore, we throw away all the depth it reveals about the reality of being human in a world God is making new. As Thomas Merton warned, “A society whose whole idea is to eliminate suffering and bring all its members the greatest amount of comfort and pleasure is doomed to be destroyed. It does not understand that all evil is not necessarily to be avoided.”28
We who can’t hide our weakness help every member of the body see their own places of hidden weakness and pain. As we courageously share our stories of suffering and allow others to see our whole selves, we give permission to others to do the same. Bearing witness to weakness helps us all place empty hands on the empty cross, forming expectant hearts for the risen Christ who is coming again to heal, restore, and redeem.
The year I stopped working at the Chalmers Center, I arrived at church most Sundays on edge, my body anticipating the discomfort of difference and the frustration of answering yet another “How are you feeling?” with the disappointing answer that I was, yep, still really sick.
I’d shift in the wooden pew—they really aren’t made for bodies like mine—and wistfully watch the other twentysomethings lifting their hands in praise. Their effortless stand-and-sit seemed like a dazzling taunt next to my inability to rise with ease. It wasn’t a sitting-friendly church, which was part of why I loved it. I loved the clapping, swaying joy of our multicultural worship, the way our church painted a small picture of the redeemed new earth, where every tribe, tongue, and nation will worship the Lamb together in unity. But in a body that couldn’t sway without a groan, I felt frustrated.
After church I would often sob or swear. (That year, it seemed my soul mostly knew how to crumble or cuss.) But one particular Sunday, the only tears I left with were good, the only words praise.
Every week, our quirky little church practiced the tradition of forming one large circle to receive communion together. As we crammed too close for comfort against the walls, every face was visible. We’d sing while receiving the bread and wine, handed with words spoken with utmost intention from church leaders who looked you in the eyes.
In such a circle, you cannot hide.
While everyone else stood, I self-consciously sat in a chair squashed between two seemingly-able bodies in a space much smaller and more exposed than I preferred. The songs were just too long for me to make it through standing. I burned inside with the shame of difference, of not being able to do something that seemed so simple. Surrounded by people, I felt alone. And everyone could see me crying.
A man handed me a chunk of bread. “The body of Christ, broken for you.”
A broken body, I thought. Broken like mine, sitting in a chair while everyone else stood.
Another man placed a tiny plastic cup of wine in my shaking hands, too inflamed to grasp it from the tray myself. “The blood of Christ, poured out for you.”
I looked up to see a friend looking down at me, meeting my shame-filled eyes with a soft glance, a smile of respect. Suddenly I knew: Jesus as broken was Jesus for me. I grasped, seated and broken, that together we held the mystery of faith. Encircled by people I envied and adored, I realized my life is encircled by love. Positioned with open hands in a circle of praise, I realized my suffering is always situated in love.
Communion equalizes and repositions us all.
We all bring our weakness, inadequacy, and memories of harm to the table, receiving with our bodies the truth that only the cross can unite us to love. In the sacrament of communion, we express the embodied truth that we live and move and have our being in Christ as one body. In the Eucharist, the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann reminds us, “we create the memory of each other, we identify each other as living in Christ and being united with each other in him.”29
We each come holding hidden pain and longing for full, unending love. In communion our stories are physically situated into the narrative of God’s love. His pursuit, solidarity, and imminent return merge with the past and present shattered pieces of our stories, allowing us to remember Jesus with hope larger than any despair.30
Communion repositions all of our brokenness into Christ’s body and forms us for the day when our bodies will be made new.
To be faithful to God’s story of redemption, the church’s public witness must be true to the time and place she occupies in the story. We are a people with the presence of Christ in our midst and a people waiting for the wholeness he’ll bring. It is only as we stand open-eyed and openhearted together on the taut line of redemption’s story that we’ll each experience the wonder of sharing in Christ’s life. We all need our brokenness repositioned under the communion of the cross.
Together at the table, we name the wrong of suffering that Jesus willingly accepted, we name the darkness remaining in our lives, and we remember God has forever crossed the chasm to us with his love. Communion names us rightly—sinners saved by grace, loved children heading toward a greater feast that will satisfy us forever. Together, in our broken bodies holding Christ’s broken body, sipping the spilt wine of his obedience, we position our whole selves to yearn for the marriage supper to come.31 Sometimes we might even taste it.
In church, in pain, my heart gets turned inside out by encountering my aloneness alongside the love that willingly assumed it. My questions lift my hands, from fists to open fingers, ready to receive a body broken. The only answer to the quest
ions hiding in my heart, the ones that hide in your heart too, is an experience. The answer is a reality we receive together in fragile hands.
This faith we possess is not a list of beliefs that remains effectual only when we can feel their truth. The hope we hold is not a bludgeon goading us into submission to a God who punishes.32 No matter how imperfectly the church holds space for weakness, hope is in her midst. No matter how awkwardly the church encounters our suffering, Jesus Christ is present when we gather. No matter how angry or hopeless I might feel on any given Sunday, the Spirit is there, turning my groans and even eye-rolls into prayers. In Jesus and his church, I discover God has everything to do with my pain. The doubt, the aloneness, the discomfort, and even the agony of a life torn apart by suffering become the canvas to display the stunning work of God uniting us to himself.
When we gather, we encounter the King who chose to suffer so we could live in his love. This faith we possess is participation in a shared reality that touches and transforms the reality of brokenness in our lives. The Spirit takes the substance of a life spread thin by suffering and makes it a canvas on which the colors of God’s embodied love turn from dull red to vibrant crimson through encountering the Son of God stricken. When we who suffer show up in church, we allow the Spirit to paint us all into the likeness and story of Christ.
For the body of Christ to faithfully express the love of Christ, she must be willing to dwell in the mystery of her time and place in the story. We must be willing to plant our feet on the tightrope tension between Christ’s coming and his return. We must seek and express God’s kingdom of healing and restoration while honoring the mystery hidden in the heart of God, of all the ways his kingdom has not yet come in our lives. With fierce faith and humble holiness, the church must be unwilling to wander from the tension of embodying the presence of our redeeming Christ while weeping remains.
So may we be people of hope, willing to be formed by enduring affliction and willing to radically let the rest of the church see our scars long enough to remember our true, shared story. We will have suffering in this world, and as we courageously endure it, the whole church will better know the sustaining power and presence of Christ.
NOTES
1 Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 166–67.
2 There are seasons and reasons we sometimes cannot attend church services (trauma triggers, illnesses that keep you homebound, distance, and more). If this is your current season, please know there is grace for you. Relationships with other believers remain a gift and grace you need, even if you can’t access that grace in the same way others can or that you have in the past.
3 John 16:20–22.
4 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 47.
5 1 Peter 4:12–13.
6 1 Peter 5:9.
7 James 1:2–3, emphasis added.
8 James 5:7, 8, 10–11.
9 Luke 22:30; Rev. 20:4.
10 James 1:12.
11 2 Cor. 1:4.
12 2 Cor. 1:6.
13 John 16:33, emphasis added.
14 John 16:33, emphasis added.
15 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 91.
16 See chapter 9, “The Embodied Church,” in Warren S. Brown and Brad D. Strawn, The Physical Nature of Christian Life: Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Church (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 140–57.
17 Ibid.
18 Stanley Hauerwas, “The Sanctified Body,” in Embodied Holiness, ed. Samuel M. Powell and Michael E. Lodahl (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 22.
19 Brad D. Strawn and Warren S. Brown, “Liturgical Animals: What Psychology and Neuroscience Tell Us about Formation and Worship,” Liturgy 28, no. 4 (2013): 11.
20 1 Cor. 1:24–25.
21 1 Cor. 1:27–28.
22 1 Cor. 12:22.
23 Kate Bowler writes, “What would it mean for Christians to give up that little piece of the American Dream that says, ‘You are limitless’? Everything is not possible. The mighty kingdom of God is not yet here. What if ‘rich’ did not have to mean ‘wealthy,’ and ‘whole’ did not have to mean ‘healed’? What if being the people of ‘the gospel’ meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough.” Kate C. Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (New York: Random House, 2018), 21.
24 In his memoir lamenting his wife’s dementia, Douglas Groothuis writes, “Seeing through tears may be the truest seeing of all—at least on this side of paradise.” Douglas Groothuis, Walking through Twilight: A Wife’s Illness, a Philosopher’s Lament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 86.
25 Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 114.
26 Rev. 22:2.
27 My thinking on this has been profoundly shaped by the work of disability theologian John Swinton. John Swinton, Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
28 Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 83.
29 Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 130.
30 Volf, The End of Memory, 115.
31 Revelation 19.
32 Though Scripture makes it clear that God does punish at times, it is important to consider our suffering against the backdrop of Christ’s willing absorption of God’s rightful, just punishment for all of humanity’s sin. He already bore the punishment for sin in his body on the cross.
CHAPTER 10
REPENTANCE
All of Life Is an Opportunity for Communion
The core message of the gospel is that God invades us with new life, but the setting for this most often is the ordinariness of our lives. The new life takes place in the place and person of our present. It is not a means by which God solves problems. God creates new life. He is not a problem solver but a person creator.
—EUGENE PETERSON, AS KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE
We want a gospel that tells us we are beloved and safe, but we don’t like remembering it also includes death.1 We want to be protagonists in the story of love, but we need continual conversion to inhabit the place Christ bought for us in his story. The grasp of decay is too tight on our old selves for freedom to be our automatic, constant reality, unless we respond to a different reality, unless we continually turn toward the existence of grace and the pace of its unhurried, never-ending pursuit.2 The only way we will break the vise grip of sin and the frantic stride of fear and shame is, as theologian William Willimon asserts, “to be transferred to another dominion, to be cut loose from our old certainties, to be thrust under the flood and then pulled forth fresh and newborn. Baptism takes us there.”3
Jesus started his public ministry standing on the muddy banks of the Jordan River with a striking act of submission one might assume he didn’t need. Jews from all over Judea and Jerusalem were coming to John to be baptized and to confess their sins as a sign of repentance because the kingdom of heaven had come near.4 Then Jesus came from Galilee and asked John to thrust him under the same dirty water to respond to the reality he had come to inaugurate. The man whose breath formed every atom of hydrogen and oxygen yielded to the symbol and submersion of water. Plunging backward by John’s hands into the river’s saline coolness, Jesus turned his whole body and whole self toward God in a posture of willing relinquishment, aligning himself and his coming ministry with the will of his Father that would lead him to the cross and to death. And as the water rushed past his rising body, “the heavens suddenly opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming down on him. And a voice from heaven said: ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased.’ ”5
The Father spoke across time and space to acknowledge Jesus b
oth as his Son and as willingly obedient to the waters that foreshadowed his death.6 Hearing his voice across centuries and cultures today, we catch the tonic of their relationship, the central sound upon which all the music of God’s love revolves and extends. It is communion, sonship, a loving trust formed and expressed in both the massive and the mundane.7 It is the sound and reality we are constantly offered as adopted daughters and sons of God, united to Jesus by faith and being renewed by his Spirit day by day. “When we are baptized,” Julie Canlis affirms, “we pass through the waters (which signify death) into this relationship—and into this declaration of divine love, spoken for us as well.”8
On the banks of the Jordan River, turning toward his Father with trust, Jesus heard the words we cannot hear on our own: “You are my beloved.” Standing in the mud of our ordinary lives, Jesus still hears what we strain to believe and trains us to hear beloved in every mundane and even miserable moment we encounter.9
Jesus let the Father’s voice of love saturate his entire being. His every thought and action proceeded from the deep inner knowledge that he was wholly, irrevocably loved by God.10 The sound of his Father’s delight sustained him as he faced temptation, isolation, mocking, pain, and even death. And Jesus receives the Father’s words of love with joy on our behalf today, the words that sometimes sound cruelly untrue when suffering descends like a dark cloud over our lives.
My husband and I are still picking up the pieces of our shattered life after abrupt and painful job transitions. We don’t know where we’ll live beyond next month or how we’ll pay for my health insurance when our meager savings run out in four months. I’ve also been battling a sinus infection for weeks, exhausted from pressure and pain. I could easily interpret the misery and mishaps of recent events as a negation of God’s love. Can I hear I am beloved by God here? Can you learn to hear you are loved in the middle of your hardest, darkest, most exhausting nights?