Memory Incarnate
June 11, 2022 + Holy Trinity Sunday + John 16:12-15 + Seminarian Liz Kuster
This past week I’ve been spending time with my sister and my 13 month old niece, Abigail. It's been such a joy to be with them, and watch my sister embody this incredible love for her little one. Not that Abigail is difficult to love; she has the biggest blue eyes and the greatest sense of humor even as a baby. But this treasured joy has put my sister’s body through the works: IVF, pregnancy, postpartum hormones and physical changes–not to mention many a sleepless night with a little girl who likes to party at 2:30 in the morning. And yet, even amidst all demands placed on my sister and her body, she still exudes this radical love, which transcends all the sacrifices she has made. This sacred love she feels, allows her a moment to rest and remember. To look back at all her body has done, all she has endured and accomplished, and the community that has journeyed with her along the way. And in these sometimes fleeting moments of rest, she is nourished by remembering who she is and how far she has come, and from it can continue outpouring love on that little one.
Resting and remembering for a moment. I imagine the disciples doing just that as Jesus addresses them in our Gospel passage today. It’s a relatively short passage, a part of a much bigger story. You see at this point the gospel of John, the disciples have been on the go with Jesus. They have journeyed with him through a three year ministry and have come to the point, unbeknownst to them, just before Jesus’s passion. At this time, they are sharing a meal, reclining together and Jesus is giving what is often referred to as his “farewell discourse.” In this soliloquy, Jesus gives his community of followers the commandment to love one another, and what’s more, offers them words of comfort for a trying future they do not yet know and could not yet bear.
This comfort Christ promises, comes in the promise of “the Spirit of truth,” or the “Paraclete”: the spiritual form that Jesus’s presence will take in and among the Johannine community after his death and resurrection. Commentaries suggest that the Spirit is “More than just a ‘comforter’ or ‘advocate.’” The Spirit also bears witness on behalf of the departed Jesus (15:26; 16:8), guides and instructs the believers (16:13-14), and reminds them of Jesus’ words (14:26).” This is wisdom incarnate. And I think this is what we might call, a memory incarnate. A memory that fills the first followers of Christ up and reminds them of who they are in Christ and companions them onward.
Perhaps you have experienced this idea of memory incarnate: It is the feeling you get when you are going along and without warning, it's as if your eyes have been opened, your sense have wakened. Some sort of realization has come over you and it feels as if you’ve taken the first fresh breath of air in what seems like hours–maybe days. The presence of the Holy is upon you and suddenly and sometimes quite unexpectedly, you remember you belong to God, and your body belongs to a bigger body, across time and space. Memory incarnate is remembering you are loved and feeling it throughout your whole person. It is the gift of the Spirit incarnate in our lives.
For the incarnation of Jesus does not end with his death, nor with his ascension– it countines in the Spirit, God–Jesus–incarnate in the world; and it calls us to stop, rest and remember our identity in Christ. And continued incarnation tells us that embodiment matters to God. Bodies, which research shows us are tools of memory and shapers of our minds and journeys. Bodies, which we know by experience, can be vehicles of God’s radical love which transgresses boundaries of human understanding, cultural norms, and boxes and lines which we use to categorize people by politics, race, nationality, sexuality, and gender.
It is most appropriate our text today which dwells on the Trinity and the Holy Spirit falls in the month of June–the same month we celebrate LGBTQIA+ Pride. For Queer theologian Patrick Cheng writes how the Holy Spirit is all about a return to radical love and that “Radical love is defined as a love so extreme that it dissolves all kinds of boundaries.” He goes onto say that “Indeed…both the queer experience and Christian theology are fundamentally about radical love.” Furthermore, he says that this love was sent by God, lost by humanity and Recovered by Jesus Christ.
And now, as we hear in John, Jesus is returning the responsibility for this recovering of radical love to us. For Jesus says, “The spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.” And what Jesus had, given to him by the Father, was mission and ministry. This is what is being bestowed unto us. The responsibility of Jesus’s service to others are declared to us in a way which will usher an eschatological vision of glory–God’s kindom on earth. Along with the bestowment of this call to spread radical love through service, the Spirit pours out in abundance the resources to do with work: hope, wisdom, and endurance in suffering that we may go out and continue to be the body of Christ that we are called to be.
But, we must be careful that we don’t just take this call to action as a call to rampant/systematic productivity. Because it is in the hustle and grind of our world, we often forget a theology of rest is important to a God who cherishes flesh and bones. And it’s difficult to remember who we are, when we are always looking ahead to who we might be or what we might do. But if we look at the context of both our second reading from Romans and our gospel of John, we are offered an example of rest, as the words we hear both come from a period of pausing along the way. As he writes his letter to Rome, Paul is resting in Corinth after a ten year stretch of ministry. And as we heard before, Jesus is pausing for the evening after a three year ministry with his disciples, now friends. In both readings, a moment is being taken to orally reflect on the journey–what has been endured, how it has shaped identity, and what will propel us as community forward.
And what will propel us forward, is the promise that God is with us.
Christ is with us. The Spirit is with us. Even if in a way we don’t understand.
Take a moment, right now, to pause and rest in this truth.
Breath it in. As if breathing in the scent of a loved one as you lie in their arms. As you hold them in your arms. As we as a community hold each other in our common mission that has been declared unto us.
My hope for us today is that we might remember our communal identity and reflect on our journey as the body of Christ so that we might be enabled to continue an outpouring of God’s embodied radical love. Radical love that transgresses and dissolves boundaries of self and other, of finite and infinite. Radical love that stirs renewal in us, and sends us forth. Amen