Easter 3 Year B: All Bodies Are Good Bodies
Laurel Dykstra
While the lections assigned for this week do not at first glance seem to have a lot of environmental content, the passages from Acts and the Gospel actually have some very relevant themes when we stop looking for references to “nature” and broaden our focus to an ecological justice framework and the complex web of interspecies economics which that entails. Both the healing of a lame beggar in Acts and the focus on the corporeality of the risen Jesus in the Gospel portion from Luke emphasize the importance of bodies. These passages give preachers and teachers the opportunity to consider the goodness of bodies, disability theology, disability and poverty, environmental racism, and the disproportionate impact of climate change on people with disabilities. The brief reference to fish in Luke points to inter-species and inter-human relationships in the Galilean fishing economy inviting reflection on local fish and global depletion of fish stocks. Not every preacher will choose ecological justice for their major theme this week but there is plenty of material here that can be incorporated to keep the urgency of the climate crisis in the fore.
Commentary
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Michael Trainor of the Earth Bible project describes the book of Acts this way: the household of disciples are imbued with the spirit of the risen Jesus that empowers them as Earth's children sent out over all of Earth's lands.
Verses 1-11In the verses before those assigned for today, Peter and John encounter a lame beggar at the temple. The man asks for money, instead Peter takes him by the hand and tells him, in the name of Jesus, to walk. The crowd’s astonishment when he does so, triggers Peter’s speech, the second major sermon in acts.
Notice the emphasis on staring: Verse 4 Peter stares at the lame man, tells him to look at them, Verse 5 the man stares at Peter and John, Verse 12 the people in the temple stare at Peter and John
Verse 2 in the biblical context and in our own people with disabilities are often impoverished
Verse 6 Peter says he has no silver or gold here it seems is evidence that the apostles adhered to the collective economic practice described in Acts 2:44-45 “they would sell their possessions and goods sharing the proceeds to those in the community who had need.”
Verses 12-15 “You Israelites handed over and killed the author of life” If you read this passage in a worship context knowing the harm that it and passages like it have caused to Jewish people, New Testament and Jewish Studies professor Amy-Jill Levine you can: Put a note in service bulletins to explain the harm the texts have caused. Read the problematic texts silently, or in a whisper. Have Jews today give testimony about how they have been hurt by the texts. Those who proclaim the problematic verses from the pulpit might imagine a Jewish child sitting in the front pew and take heed: don’t say anything that would hurt this child, and don’t say anything that would cause a member of the congregation to hurt this child.
Verse 22, 26 Peter describes Jesus as prophet (v. 22) and servant (v 26) that is raised up. Just as in verse 7 the lame man is raised up. There is some resonance here with the prophetic and Christ-bearing roles and ministry of people with disabilities. Also some caution about making people into object lessons.
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Michael Trainor, of the Earth Bible Project, says that the whole of the gospel of Luke presents an ecological symphony that reveals a Jesus connected to Earth. His ministry touches all aspects of creation, human and non-human, and invites disciples into an ecological asceticism.
Anne Elvey says that the first century Lukan context and our contemporary experience of climate change are situations of grief. Both are connected to systems of political and economic domination and rupture of relationship with land. Luke is threaded through with an urgency about responding to crisis and the conviction that a different future is possible.
The verses for today (24:36b-48) are the third and final resurrection appearance in Luke. It occurring immediately after the Emmaus appearance, having some of the same cast of characters and following the same pattern. Jesus: reveals himself, eats, teaches, sends.
Verses 38-40 Notice how many body parts are named: heart, hands, feet, flesh, bones, hands, feet. The need or offer to touch and see Jesus in the place where empire has touched him most violently resonates with the appearance to Thomas in John 20:24-29. Disability theologian Nancy Eiesland says this passage demonstrates that resurrected Christ is a disabled God.
Verses 41-43 K. C. Hanson cites this as one of many examples of fish and fishing that give evidence of the complex, highly taxed and regulated Galilean fishing economy and the lives of fishing families which were subject, source and receivers of much of Jesus’ teaching and tradition. The action words “gave, took and ate” are a partial Eucharistic formula and there are many frescoes in the catacombs connecting fish with the celebration of Communion/Eucharist. This Lukan passage has similar themes with the post resurrection appearance of John 21:1-14.
Preaching and Teaching Ideas
Bodies Matter
Today’s lectionary readings attest profoundly to the truth that bodies matter. If we include the first verses of Acts 3, in which today’s first reading is rooted, these are the body parts that are named or implied. Acts: eyes, eyes, hand, feet, ankles, eyes. Psalm: face, heart. Luke: heart, hands, feet, flesh, bones, hands, feet, mouth.
Most of us don’t like to think about bodies in church, not our bodies, not other people’s bodies —but it is good to remember but we have bodies, in some very real way we are bodies
Our bodies are created by God, loved by God, our bodies are good
Old bodies, new bodies, creaky bodies, ill bodies, disabled bodies, queer bodies, trans bodies –good, just as they are
In today’s Gospel reading and the preceding episode on the way to Emmaus Jesus is known and known to be fully alive in the act of eating, of feeding his good body, resonating with all those other gospel meals. And this is what the church does, we eat together, we tell stories and when we think love has died there is love with us again.
Unlike the meal on the road, in this reading Jesus eats fish. Jesus who says, “take eat this is my body” eats another body, another being, taking his place in the web of energetic, predator/prey relations. Lisa Dahill explores questions about what happens when Christians bring our sacrament out of doors, opening ourselves to “the disconcerting real of bodies’ physical edibility to other creatures: the possibility of our own flesh becoming food.” In this interspecies economy she advocates for Eucharistic practices in wild places which allow us at least to consider how we pray as we are at least potentially, prey.
What disables? Economics, Eco-justice, and Disability
Together the story of the lame man in Acts, and Jesus’ post resurrection appearance in Luke, offer the opportunity for powerful reflection on disability, disability theology, and questions about what disables in the Anthropocene. While the beggar in Acts is healed, Jesus invites, even demands, that his companions see and touch his injured body. Nancy Eiesland says, “In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God.” He is adamantly not cured or made whole; his injury is part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for a healing object lesson. Nether is the gospeler offering inspiration porn, a term coined or popularized by Stella Young for images objectifying disabled people as “courageous” “exceptional” for the benefit of nondisabled people.
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The disabled Jesus helps us to ask questions about what disability is. And the linguistic echo of the lame man and “the prophet” being raised up encourages us to attend to the voices and prophetic work of people with disabilities. This perspective of “disability embrace” simultaneously recognizes disability as a site of social violence and also claims it as source of critical embodied knowledge and political resistance.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson says “Disability is [simply] the transformation of the flesh as it encounters world, ... the body’s response over time to its environment” (Garland Thomson 2012: 342)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha advocates for a Disability Justice framework that understands that “all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.” Both of these perspectives normalize disability but problematize barriers that exclude some bodies. Things like inaccessible buildings, websites, or washrooms. Segregation in schools.
As the encounter between the beggar and Peter and John who have no silver and gold highlights, poverty is often a disabling condition.
Rabbi and academic Julia Watts-Belser attests to the ways the embodied knowledge of disability activists offers powerful critique and hope in a time of climate crisis. Environmental justice movements can portray disability as a marker of environmental harm—a dehumanizing scare tactic. At the same time environmental racism is a cause of disability in Indigenous, Black and brown and impoverished communities. People with disabilities, “vulnerable populations” are and have been navigating the kinds of limits that polluted air is imposing on the rest of us. Disability communities know the cost of socially organized denial. People with disabilities know and have rejected the alure the magic cure –some damage is irreversible, some systems cannot be restored.
Poet and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes a dream that, although she probably wouldn’t call it that, sounds an awful lot like the kingdom of the disabled God, shoving his police-state-torn gimpy hands into his disciples faces and “opening their minds.”
“For years awaiting this apocalypse, I have worried that as sick and disabled people, we will be the ones abandoned when our cities flood. But I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life—dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way. With all of our crazy, adaptive-deviced, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sign, and move in a million ways towards co-creating the decolonial living future. I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does.”
Fish
The gospels are alive, fairly thrashing with fish. There are fish in the sayings, parables, narratives. Share or ask participants to some examples—loaves and fishes, fishing for people, a fish with a coin for taxes, throw your nets on the other side…
And today “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence”
You could argue that fish are as important symbolically in the gospel as bread, the way, the cross, sheep, vine, seed — but they don’t seem to get as much press
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Kinnaret sardines are one of the species that Galilee fishing families caught for processing and export in a near-subsistence economy. What is a watershed and why does it matter? What are the places in your watershed where people fish? If Jesus asked for fish what would you give him? -farmed salmon from open net pens? -tuna from a can? Whitefish that a family member caught?
How are people who make their living from fishing doing? What kind of fish live there? How is the health of their ecosystem? How does it compare to the 30-90% of fish stocks that are seriously depleted world-wide?
Introduce and explore the idea of shifting baseline syndrome -first observed in fisheries. The fact that we cannot accurately describe or comprehend the loss of biomass because each successive generation sees the conditions we were raised in as normal.
Fishing in Galilee was contentious. The Roman Empire taxed catches for export markets. Taxes were often paid in kind as a portion of the day’s catch, but would be collected whether the fishing had been successful or not generating resentment. Both people and animals were treated as things, as means to an end, as resources to be turned into money.
In our own time of depleted oceans where people and animals are treated as things you can invite your community to consider:
That fishing and the fishing economy was core to the context of Jesus and the kingdom movement. And that real life economics are also core to our faith.
Saying yes to Jesus means saying no to empire, to exploitation and scarcity,
That both humans and creatures are part of the story of salvation
That Jesus’ circle included some of the most economically exploited, people with very little left to lose –for those of us who have more to lose saying yes to Jesus might be proportionally harder.
Sources and Resources
Julia Watts Belser, “I’d Fight Like Hell For You: Julia Watts Belser on not giving up on each other in the climate crisis” interview by Peter Torres Fremlin, Disability Debrief Feb 7, 2024. https://www.disabilitydebrief.org/debrief/fight-like-hell/
Julia Watts Belser, “Disability, Climate Change, and Environmental Violence: The Politics of Invisibility and the Horizon of Hope” Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 40 No. 4, 2020
Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, Duke University Press, 2015
Lisa Dahill, “Eating and Being Eaten: Interspecies Vulnerability as Eucharist” in Religions, 2020
John Davies, “The Disabled God: Living into the Resurrection” https://johndavies.typepad.com/blog/the-disabled-god-living-into-the-resurrection.html
Disability and Climate Change: A Public Archive Project http://disabilityclimatechange.georgetown.domains/the-archive/?ref=disabilitydebrief.org
Nancy Eiesland, ‘The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability’.
https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/6959/5805
Anne Elvey, Interpreting the Time: Climate Change and the Climate in/of the Gospel of Luke, in Climate Change-Cultural Change: Religious Responses and Responsibilities, edited by Anne Elvey and David Gormley O’Brien, 78–91. Preston, Vic.: Mosaic Press, 2013.
C. K. Hanson, The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition Originally published in Biblical Theology Bulletin 27 (1997) 99-111 https://www.kchanson.com/ARTICLES/fishing.html
Amy Kenny, “Can the Church View Disabled Bodies as Jesus’ Body?” Sojourners, May 1, 2020 https://sojo.net/articles/can-church-view-disabled-bodies-jesus-body
Nancy Eiesland, ‘The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability’.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015
Amy-Jill Levine, “Holy Week and the hatred of the Jews: How to avoid anti-Judaism this Easter” https://www.abc.net.au/religion/holy-week-and-the-hatred-of-the-jews/11029900
Ched Myers, Watershed Discipleship https://watersheddiscipleship.org/about-us/
Miriam Spies, “Covid Exposed Christian Ableism. What Happens When Churches Reopen?” Sojourners, 10-05-2020 https://sojo.net/articles/covid-exposed-christian-ableism-what-happens-when-churches-reopen
Michael Trainor, Acts: An Earth Bible Commentary, About Earth's Children: An Ecological Listening to the Acts of the Apostles, T&T Clark, 2021
Contributor Bio
Laurel Dykstra is the founding priest of Salal + Cedar Watershed Discipleship Community, a church that worships outdoors and seeks to help Christians in the lower Fraser watershed grow their skills for Climate Justice. Laurel’s latest book on interspecies loneliness, Wildlife Congregations is newly out from Hancock House.
Photo Credit:
NYC Department of Transportation
2016 Disability Pride