Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 27, 2023

Whose Body?

Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor

Exodus 1:8–20
Romans 12:1–8

Recently I was at a parent-child camp with my oldest daughter, and we came to what, for me, is the most awkward request in making introductions: when you are asked to tell one interesting fact about yourself. So I searched my mind for something that wouldn’t come across convoluted, conceited, or as simply a letdown. I think I blurted out something like my favorite color is blue. But if I could have a do-over, I might have said, “I’m a ‘40g of coffee to 535g of water’ kind of person. The ratio for a perfect cup of pour-over coffee.:

Many of you here know of my love for coffee and rarely see me without a cup of it grasped gently in my hands. But my relationship with coffee had a rocky beginning. During my college years, I briefly had a job as a barista at a local marketplace, and I must confess I was mostly terrible at it.

I clearly remember arriving at an ungodly early hour my first day and swiftly being given the most complicated coffee orders possible. I was swamped with Mocha Frappuccinos, macchiatos, vanilla lattes, cardamon steamers — my mind barely recalling the instructions for making one before five more came calling. Overwhelmed, my brain felt like a laptop with too many internet browsing tabs left open. And in a moment of thoughtlessness, I pressed my unprotected finger to a hot steel lever of a milk steamer, and in an instant that finger was seared, burned, and scarred.

Beloved chef Anthony Bourdain, patron saint of restaurant workers and travelers, once referred to his right forefinger — callused by every knife he ever held — as a kind of secret handshake of his profession. You weren’t a chef until you had one. Well, I never forgot the feeling of that burn, and my finger wore a scar from that episode for months. I guess I officially joined the club of restaurant workers.

But one way or another, we have all worn the experience of our labors on our bodies: bags under weary eyes, cuts and scrapes, or more hidden scars, like trauma and anxiety. And they reveal a vital truth about what scripture calls vocation. A vocation is more than a job. It means calling – from the Latin word vocare. It is a purpose that beckons or calls to us that we must follow. A vocation can be a job, for sure, but it also encompasses all manner of labor under heaven, paid or unpaid, recognized or not, to which God is the beginning and the end of our endeavors.

And the truth of vocation is that it is a physical endeavor. When the prophet Ezekiel heard a call to ministry, he ate scrolls of scripture with his teeth. When Abram and Sarai hear a call, they get their feet to walking to far country. You cannot think a calling; you must respond to it with your whole self — mind, spirit, and, yes, body.

A few years ago, sociologist Carolyn Chen researched modern-day callings by following technology workers in Silicon Valley, California. She found that companies began speaking to their employees’ body, mind, and soul needs with incentives like three gourmet meals a day, yoga, and philosophy classes. The result, she thought, resembled a faith community with “members who belong to a shared community and believe in a higher and transcendent goal” (Carolyn Chen, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, p. 9). For some, work has brought belonging and identity not found elsewhere, though sometimes that comes with a price.

In the Egypt of the book of Exodus, it is Pharoah who requires those who toil under the sun to give him their body, mind, and spirit. Singer Dean Martin once said of his friend and fellow entertainer Frank Sinatra, a larger-than-life personality, that it’s Frank’s world; we all just live in it. In Egypt, it is Pharoah’s world, and everyone else just serves it. And to drive that point home, two midwives, tasked with the business of tending to newborn bodies, are asked to drown those same bodies when they no longer serve Pharoah’s supremacy.

Now Pharoah’s role as supreme ruler carried with it some legitimate purposes, described in ancient literature as bringing Maat (harmony) and repelling Isfet (chaos). The closing chapters of Genesis cleverly portray how these economic and political responsibilities served as cover — with Israelite Joseph’s help — for the confiscation of all property in Egypt into Pharoah’s hand and everybody in Egypt under Pharoah’s bondage, serving his body. As Yuval Noah Harari reminds us, Pharoah was just flesh and blood, but Pharoah’s body became transcendent. Pharoah became a system of governance, a story Egyptians told one another, an image that kept them in fear. Pharoah can take on many forms (Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow).

European political philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the term Leviathan to describe what we’ve called Pharoah. The Leviathan was a sovereign ruler who brought civic order, preventing life from becoming “nasty, brutish, and short” emerging when “a multitude of men are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, I.16.13). The cover of Hobbes’ book on the subject depicted a giant medieval king, wielding a scepter and sword, but composed of hundreds of individual bodies representing his subjects. It’s an image worthy of Pharoah’s own heart.

As we read in scripture today, the Apostle Paul was also fascinated with the image of the body. In fact, it became his primary metaphor for our relationship to Christ. For Paul, being a member of the body meant joining in a mission and identity larger than the self. To belong to the body of Christ was as demanding as membership in Pharoah’s body. Both ask for your whole self. Which begs an important question: how do you know when you’re living in the body of Christ or that of Pharoah?

Not every workplace, relationship, or profession that asks for your whole self intends you harm. Sometimes getting lost in your work is a pathway from selfishness to self-actualization. But how do you tell the difference between a body that wants to liberate you and one that wants to drain you like a battery until you’re all used up? The body where, as the gospels put it, you find your life by losing it versus the one where, as the band U2’s single “With or Without You” groans, you only “give and you give and you give yourself away.”

When theologian Karl Barth looked at Paul’s language about our being of one body in Romans, he took the “one” to mean fellowship or communion. “The One,” he said, “is not one among others, not a cell in a larger organism but simply the Holy One sanctus.” (Karl Barth, trans. Edwyn Hoskyns, Epistle to the Romans). If this is true, Paul is telling us here that other members of the body, our neighbors, are not cogs in a machine or means to an end but a sacred presence, representing God’s own body. To trample over them or to uncritically accept Pharoah’s distorted picture of them is to turn our back on God. So our response should be, as Paul suggests in 1 Corinthians, that if another member of the body suffers, we suffer with them; and if another is honored, we rejoice with them.

I’m convinced that Shiprah and Puah, living in the bowels of Pharoah’s Egypt, refused to be part of Pharoah’s body. Instead, they chose to see their neighbors — Hebrew women and their male children as standing in for God. The Hebrew word for fear in this passage, yirah, is a word more akin to awe and reverence than terror. Terror is what Pharoah is after. Reverence is what God seeks. In the eyes of God, the Other is the One who the despot Pharoah is desperate for us not to love. Because of their yirah, the gaze of the midwives, which was formerly fixed on Pharoah and his needs, is lifted so that they may show empathy for their beloved neighbors. But that change is not without consequences.

Earlier this summer, when Pastor Nanette was preaching about Jesus’ parable of the sower, something she said struck me: “the sower might be a terrible farmer, but so was a loving God.” Sometimes it’s the right thing to be bad at the job we have been given. In that sense, Shiprah and Puah embodied what Dr. King preached — that sometimes we are called to be holy noncomformists.

King meant what he said when sixty years ago tomorrow he joined with 250,000 compatriots for one of this nation’s largest demonstrations of noncomformity, a collective refusal to play the fool in Pharoah’s racialized body. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, there were singers, like Harry Belafonte and Tony Bennett, who died this summer. There were actors, like Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston (whose politics would later diverge, but for one late summer day were sympatico). There was Bayard Rustin, the Black gay brainchild of the march. And there were farmers, steelworkers, teachers, housekeepers, and war veterans. On that day, titles and indignities conferred by a wounded and wounding society did not matter. The crooners put down their lyrics, the actors their lines. The teacher put down her lesson plans, the factory worker his tools. Each became part of a new body and took up a new vocation. They all became walkers, putting their bodies on the line, making them living sacrifices within a body seeking earthly justice, healing, and hope. They became the body that we in this sanctuary call Christ.

But there are those among us who still choose Pharoah’s body. Yesterday, a gunman walked into a Dollar Store sending a community in Jacksonville, Florida, into terror and intentionally cutting short the lives of three beautiful Black people. He came not only armed with weaponry but an extensive racist manifesto that is Pharoah’s calling card. But let’s not give him the last word.

This summer I have found myself doing a fair amount of walking. With Fourth Church members, I marched in a hunger walk with Breakthrough Urban Ministries in East Garfield Park, in the Pride Parade down Clark Street, with St. Sabina parish in Auburn Gresham. I even marched in a Fourth of July parade for the town of Skokie and ran into Fourth Church members.

In each case, when I looked out at these neighbors and beloveds not as Pharoah would dictate but as the holy others they truly are, I was astounded. I saw queer neighbors cheering for Christians sharing a gospel of love and faithfulness with conviction. I walked with residents in East Garfield, who sought to bring playgrounds to life. I walked with mothers in Auburn Gresham who take pride in the successes of their children and their own degrees in a neighborhood where Pharoah tells us to count those folks out. In the community I call home, I saw children of every hue, cultural, and religious background cheering with glee, waving flags for a country that is not quite yet, but can be, consonant with the Beloved Community. These glimpses of the holy other made me say, yes, they are worth it. Worthy of our struggle, worth the awkwardness of not knowing how to talk about race, worth the patient listening that takes hours for a few minutes of breakthrough words, worth the stretching of dollars and time we aren’t sure we have. This dream is worth it.

Over the course of our lives, we are regularly confronted with the question In whose body will we seek membership? To whom will we give our life, our best, our all? To whom will we entrust the treasure within our souls? Will it be Pharoah’s systems and schemes and unending appetites, or will it be God’s Beloved Community? Now more than ever, the question raises itself in our families, our neighborhoods, our politics, our economics, our stewardship of the planet. My prayer is that each of us may have such a vision of our neighbors, so that we might know we have chosen the right body and, at the end of the day, you and I may say, come what may, it is worth it. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church