Dearly Beloved,
What a wonderful and full weekend we had with the Leaders' Retreat on Saturday, Worship, and our second Sabbatical informational meeting on Sunday.
We have a lot of good and exciting things going on as a congregation! Last week, I shared some of the special opportunities we had coming up for Lent, and just to remind you, we have a printed Lenten Devotional, Lenten Devotional Cards, "Cherished Belonging: book study on Saturday mornings, and "Practical Righteousness" Bible Study on Thursdays.
It has also been a challenging week. The papers have brought news of God's beloved children in Sudan facing starvation without support from USAID. Within our congregation medical grants being ended, federal contracts being pulled, job loss, illness, mental health struggles, worry for children and grandchildren, and grief are touching many of us in ways that feel overwhelming and hopeless. Many of us are working hard to simply face the day to day demands of our lives.
In the midst of all of that, we keep hearing from Jesus words of hope and affirmation for hard times, invitations to receive and offer grace, and the call to community and love over and over again. This week, we will hear a story of sin and forgiveness, of love and devotion, of confusion and judgment centered around a very embodied encounter between Jesus and an unnamed woman (Luke 7:36-50).
Debie Thomas writes: "Feet. Tears. Perfume. Hair. All four Gospels tell it, the scandalous story of a woman who dared to love Jesus in the flesh — to love his spirit and his body with her own. Each writer frames the story differently, to suit his own thematic and theological concerns, but that hardly matters; the story at its core remains the most sensual, most shocking one in the New Testament. If it doesn't embarrass us, we're not paying attention."
The story is about Jesus who is fully human. And about a woman who honors Jesus in his body, in his flesh, in his messy full humanity. What happens when we embrace an embodied Jesus? What happens when we really get thinking about what the incarnation means -- that God came into a physical body? That God took on flesh and blood, and it wasn't somehow sanitized but the messy, vulnerable, tender flesh and blood that we know of our own bodies? What hope is there for each of us in this particular moment as we encounter a fully embodied Jesus, a fully incarnate Holy One, and a story that honors bodies?
Thomas concludes her reflections this way: "We are people of the Incarnation, called to look, to see, to break bread, share wine, and wash feet. Can we learn to see our embodied lives, our sensory lives, as fully implicated in our lives with God? Can we move past contempt, squeamishness, and fear, and offer him our whole selves? 'This is my body,' Jesus says, 'given for you.' Touch me and see."
With love and tenderness,
Thandiwe
