I have never posted to a blog and don’t normally even read blogs. But what I do read is the weekly magazine “Christian Century.” In the Jan. 27, 2009 issue, there is an article by Barbara Brown Taylor who is wrestling with questions of theology and ethics. You might want to go on line to read the text in full; there’s good fodder there for a sermon.
Taylor quotes Duke ethicist Stanley Hauerwas who says, “most Christians are too spiritual in the practice of their faith. Christianity ‘is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a good Christian but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.’” Taylor’s point is that doctrines must “take on flesh.” She believes that faith has to include our daily life, our sensual activities, and our ordinariness to be true. She asserts that Hauerwas is asking us if “whether there is anything besides the body that can be sanctified.” And don’t you think that’s why the Bible focuses so much on daily activities—in the kitchen, the garden, the street, among the people, at the threshing floor, on the road? We don’t read about God holding a board meeting or Jesus consulting with CEOs. We read about real life, real people, and real situations.
Whew! Taylor brings it down to brass tacks when she quotes Daniel Berrigan (and for sure I’m going to use this quote in a sermon one day) who says, “It all comes down to this: Whose flesh are you touching and why? Whose flesh are you recoiling from and why? Whose flesh are you burning and why?”
Doesn’t this embody the questions we’ve been asked to think about in our first few classes….who’s benefiting, who’s losing, and where are you coming from on this argument? I think Berrigan’s comments are a good litmus test for ethics. Taylor and Hauerwas give us a good grounding for theology—the spiritual is not enough, the real must be included. God is at the molecular level in our lives; our theology has to go to our very cells to be true (or as Hauerwas says, so that the worship of God is unavoidable.” Selah.
Judy Green-Davis, Phoenix
