Third Sunday of Epiphany 2022

 

I am a lover of stories. More than that, I am a lover of storytelling. Not only stories themselves, but how they are told, whether in novels or cinema or in our own everyday lives.

This week, the vicarage-dwellers watched Encanto, Disney’s 60th feature-length animation. Set in Columbia and inspired by the magical realism of much Latin American storytelling, Encanto tells the story of the family Madrigal, three generations who live together in a sentient house at the heart of a hidden village, presided over by their matriarch Abuela, Grandmother. For two generations, each member of the family has been bestowed a magical gift as a child. One has precognition; another, the ability to endow food with healing power; another can control the weather, to an extent, though her strong emotions can create unwanted downpours. One has enhanced hearing; another can shape-shift their form; another can converse with animals. One has super-human strength; another can summon flowers into being. And one, Mirabel Madrigal, did not receive any magical gift. However, it is Mirabel who sees their home cracking apart, the magic dying; and it is Mirabel who must save them all, by helping them to confront those things that they have tried to suppress for many years.

As Mirabel persists, the family secrets are brought into the light. Her older sister, Luisa, the one with superhuman strength, carries an enormous burden of anxiety, that her value is only in her talent, and should it fail, who then would she be? And Mirabel and Luisa’s older sister, Isabela, the one who makes everything pretty with flowers, resents the burden of beauty and perceived perfection, secretly wishing to be able to express all her emotions in a diversity of plant forms, resentful of Mirabel who is free from the burden of expectation, unaware of Mirabel’s burden of expectation to serve the village without a gift of her own. In the Madrigal’s world, image, how we are perceived, is everything; uncertainty and ambiguity are dangerous, to be pushed away. Abuela Alma is so frightened of losing the miracle that has been given her family that she controls everything. She is admired by the villagers and loved by her family, but over time she has become a toxic presence, her actions, however well-intentioned, threatening the very thing she is fighting to preserve: the future for her family, in their enchanted home.

I must confess that I did not enjoy this film. It was far too close to the bone. It told the story of many a local church congregation, where love blinds us to controlling behaviour, where duty becomes weaponised, and where we struggle with giftedness and identity.

This Sunday in our churches we hear again the words that Paul wrote to a household in Corinth (1 Corinthians 12:12-31a). He speaks of bodies and of gifts. Our bodies are interconnected, inter-dependent, and, in the case of a Christian community, express the body of Christ in our neighbourhood. Each has a role to play, each is worthy of honour and respect, if one suffers then all suffer. And Paul will continue, describing how love holds this household together, building and where necessary repairing a roof to shelter all, a house where the whole extended multigenerational family can live together (1 Corinthians 12:31b-13:13).

It is easy to see the body in 1 Corinthians 12 as a metaphor, but it is more than that. We are bodily creatures, bodies (and not just disembodied lives) entwined together, and that is why there are limits to Covid isolating, and to relating to one another virtually, through a screen. Both of those things are good gifts—indeed, life-saving—but beyond a certain point they shape us in unhelpful ways. We are bodily creatures, and Jesus is both our model and our life. Jesus, who experienced hunger and thirst, the need to sleep, to rest; Jesus, whose body was wiped by his mother in infancy and in death, whose body touched and was touched by others in healing ways, whose body was tortured, whose body experienced dying and death and whose body was raised from the dead in bodily form.

Our bodies carry our biography, from the face of our mother or father that looks out at us when we look in the mirror thanks to the genes they passed on, to the scars and burns and liver spots on our hands, to the tension we feel when the present moment pulls us without warning into the past. And our bodies need to know the healing power of love in the past, where we can return through accompanied memory (for memory is a shared construction) as well as in the present, through forgiveness and reconciliation. Our bodies can also experience future-healing, faith giving certainty to what we hope for, and the foretaste now of what will be one day.

By the end of Mirabel’s quest, her gift is made manifest to her family, the gift of reconciliation. Family members reconciled in their relationship with themselves—I can be weak as well as strong; cacti are as wonderful as roses—and to one another where they had become estranged. And the family are reconciled to the village, who come to help, possessing no magical gifts but being many, and knowing what it is to work together to bless others. One body, many parts. May we, as a local church, discover afresh what it is to be embodied, to be touched as well as to touch, to be healed and to heal, to discover Christ in our midst. Amen.

 

Second Sunday of Christmas 2022

 

Second Sunday of Christmas 2022

Lectionary readings: Jeremiah 31:7-14 and Ephesians 1:3-14 and John 1:10-18

We are still in the Season of Christmas, and Christmas is a time for the telling of wonderful stories. On the last day of 2021, my family and I made a trip to the cinema to see Steven Spielberg’s new version of West Side Story. Given that it was first staged on Broadway in 1957, and first adapted for the big screen in 1961, I am going to assume at least an awareness of this classic tale, based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, translating the action to the mid-1950s turf wars between White and Puerto Rican gangs in New York’s Upper West Side. Theirs is not only a contested territory, but also a condemned one, the working-class slum housing being cleared to make way for gentrification. Everything about West Side Story is wonderful, from Leonard Bernstein’s music to Stephen Sondheim’s words to Jerome Robbins’ choreography, and Spielberg’s retelling successfully walks the line between knowing irony and adoring tribute in pinpointing the location to the very blocks demolished to create the Lincoln Centre, home to the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet, among other resident arts organizations.

The Jets are the last remaining working-class Whites in the neighborhood, and they feel abandoned by their own community, those who have upped and left for a better life elsewhere and by the city authorities who, in the 1950s, were carving up established-but-poor neighborhoods to create landscaped parks and parkways for automobiles. These are the demonized poor, and they know it.

The Sharks are the latest in a long line of immigrants, arrived from Puerto Rico. The Free Associated State—or, Commonwealth—of Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States. Her people have been US citizens since 1917, but that doesn’t make them equal in the eyes of the Jets. The Sharks represent yet another community who have upped and left in hope of a better life elsewhere, only to find life hard in different ways, and salt in the wounds of the Jets who refuse to leave their native island behind but who feel it being taken from them. Scapegoats, to be sacrificed.

Within and around the Jets we meet Riff, trying to hold his world together as it falls apart; his best friend and former-Jet Tony, trying to move on from a life that was heading in the wrong direction, but still tied to his community; and Anybody’s, born a girl, identifying as a boy, rejected by her family, desperately wanting to be accepted and find a new home, a new family, within the Jets. When you’re a Jet, | You’re a Jet all the way | From your first cigarette | To your last dyin’ day. | When you’re a Jet, | If the spit hits the fan, | You got brothers around, | You’re a family man. | You’re never alone, | You’re never disconnected. | You’re home with your own— | When company’s expected, | You’re well protected!

Within and around the Sharks we meet Bernardo, a hard-scrabble fighter with a fearsome reputation; his lover Anita, longing for a better life in America and worried that Bernardo will jeopardise that; and Maria, Bernardo’s little sister, stifled by his over-protection and dreaming of her future. When Maria and Tony meet, sparks will fly. And all around them, everything is set up for there to be only losers, and no victors, in a fight for life that cannot be won. And yet, the dream remains. There’s a place for us, | Somewhere a place for us. | Peace and quiet and open air | Wait for us, somewhere. | There’s a time for us, | Some day a time for us, | Time together with time to spare, | Time to learn, time to care. | Some day, | Somewhere, | We’ll find a new way of living, | We’ll find a way of forgiving. | Somewhere, | Somewhere…

The themes and issues explored in West Side Story are timeless. Writing from the rubble of a Jerusalem that had been swallowed up by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, most of its prominent citizens having been relocated to Babylon, the prophet Jeremiah helps his community imagine a world in which their identity and future are secured, not through their own efforts but through the covenant-loyalty of the Lord. On his account, their mourning will turn to joy: he will comfort them and exchange their deep and complex sorrow for gladness.

Or think of Paul of Tarsus, a first-century Roman citizen of Jewish heritage, writing to a Christian community made up of two distinct ethnic and cultural communities living alongside one another in the city of Ephesus (where ‘Gentile’ is as umbrella a term as ‘White,’ and ‘Jew’ as un/welcome as ‘Puerto Rican’). Paul reframes Jeremiah’s themes of identity and a future in terms of adoption and an inheritance, and adds a new theme, that this is achieved through the shed blood of Jesus, the one caught in the crossfire of our enmity and striving for what we cannot hold on to.

And in our Gospel reading, John pushes the boundaries in his overture to the Life of Jesus, foreshadowing questions of whether this Jesus will be received into community or not accepted; and whether community is formed and sustained by rules (spoken and unspoken) or by grace and truth found in seeing the invisible God made visible in the face of this ‘Other’ whose coming into our world changes everything. Today, the world was just an address, | A place for me to live in, | No better than all right, | But here you are | And what was just a world is a star | Tonight!

It isn’t hard to see the appeal of the Jets. To believe our community to be let down by those in authority, in the Church and in wider society. Even the face of the Church, here in Sunderland, is increasingly Brown or Black, not White. Increasingly immigrant, not native-born. And if the future is presented as shiny, it may be hard to see where we fit in to that picture—even as those whom we imagine we are being moved aside in favour of wonder how long they must wait until they are seen as equals. It is easy to think that we must do whatever it takes to hold on to what is left to us, however far it may have fallen from glory. And yet, as Jesus put it, those who strive to save their lives always end up losing their lives—and not only their own lives, but the lives of those they love. Then, of course, there are those who see their only hope in establishing a rival gang of their own: the Church or the neighbourhood might go down, but we won’t go down with it! And then there are those who long to be a Jet, or a Shark, and are denied…

We are still in the Season of Christmas, and Christmas is a time for the telling of wonderful stories. Stories in which communities struggle with questions of identity—what makes them who they are—and the impossible possibility of a future—what that could look like and how it might be secured. Stories in which these things are, ultimately, given, received, experienced through grace. Stories in which those who find themselves on the margins, pushed out, unwelcome, come to discover family, a place of belonging. (That one is being written all the time and remains to be written.) Stories of tragedy transformed into Somewhere for the Anybody’s. Stories of grace and truth, and the invisible God made visible in the face of Jesus and in the eyes of his sisters and brothers. Stories that point us back to him, again and again, the light that shines in the darkness—of the world, and the Church, and of our hearts—and is not overwhelmed by it but shines all the brighter. Stories that never grow old, and that we never outgrow needing to hear. In God’s mercy, may they help us to walk in Christ’s light and dwell in his love that we may know the fullness of his joy throughout the year ahead. Amen.