The Body Takes Flight: Diversity and the Runway to Freedom
Category: Sundays after Pentecost
Speaker: The Rev. John Shellito
Gracious God give us the grace to present our bodies to you as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to you, in our spiritual worship. Let us not be conformed to this world, but let us be transformed by the renewing of our minds. I ask this in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Inspirer. Amen.
We are “one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.”
I thought of the concept of working together to be “One Body in Christ” when I found myself recently standing in Gravelly Point park, just past the end of the runway at Reagan National Airport, watching the planes take off over me, and land towards me, many taxiing past me just a short distance away, at the end of the runway.
I couldn’t help but think about the expertise and cooperation of air traffic controllers, pilots, flight crews, and ground crews, aligning and preparing the planes so that each one had plenty of time to take off and land, without any time wasted. Consistently, the arrivals and departures seemed to alternate with precision, each flight having just enough extra time to be sure that it was completely out of the way before the next plane was cleared for takeoff, or landing.
I found their coordination mesmerizing. And yet, I think the planes and the airport can be an image of unity in diversity in our call to be “one body in Christ”, to give witness to God’s action and God’s love in a variety of ways, with a diversity of gifts.
Like the pilots, air traffic controllers, ground crews, and flight crews, we are working together in community with one another, dealing with the crucial matter of where each of us is going in life. We are called to make use of each moment, to redeem the time, to not write off any moment as wasted, even if we are waiting in line, or cleaning up, or running an errand, or puzzling with something at work. Whether it is in prayer or in simple acts of love, we are called to do what we can with the time we have, and our action glorifies God when we act out of love for God, and when we act out of love for our neighbors as ourselves.
Our actions have diversity to them. At different seasons of life, and even at different times in our week we can find ourselves acting in an organizational capacity, as an air traffic controller, or in a performative capacity, as a pilot, or in a supportive capacity, as a ground crew or flight crew. Maybe you find yourself in a creative capacity, as someone who helps design a plane, or in a formative capacity, as someone who trains those who will serve in the future. We deploy our gifts in a variety of different ways at different times, but in everything we do, we have opportunities to act in concert with one another, guided by the God of love. We have been designed to work together, relying on one another, and journeying together in our work. Although our individual and communal life is probably not going to always be as smooth, as clean, or as precisely organized as an airport, we can still pursue our various tasks with faithfulness.
At a church I served before Seminary, I got to know a dear friend in Christ who was a retired commercial airline pilot. I can still remember the time he told me “I made a promise long ago that when Jesus asked me to do something, I would never refuse.” The man served faithfully during his years in the sky, and long afterwards as well.
When I first got to know him, he was helping to install insulation around a few pipes under the sanctuary—the church basement was always overheating while the Nave took a long time to warm up. Insulation increased the energy efficiency of the church heating system while reducing the utilities bill, and the carbon footprint. He was also one of several steadfast individuals providing leadership through a challenging time of transition for the church. He was a person through whom God acted.
But, I couldn’t help but think about the pressure he must have had in his work life, landing those planes, year after year, expertly bringing the body of the plane down to earth gently, so that the wheels of the plane would slow their approach to the runway just as they got within a few feet of the ground. It required gentleness, and care. I thought of all the times in flight when he could have been at risk of getting off course, or where something could have gone wrong, where he could have lost his concentration, or where the pressure could have gotten the best of him. I think of how much he must have depended on God’s help when he was flying, to bring him and his passengers safely to their destination. He was faithful, and through him, God was faithful.
I think it is part of the paradox of God’s faithfulness and our shared wholeness amid a broken and unfaithful world that at times in life we would feel out of place—that at times bodily pain, or feelings of disappointment, sadness, anger, or fear can disconnect us from our sense of purpose.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans do not naturally fly any more than humans naturally scuba dive. But God calls us to go beyond our comfort zones, in worship and in relationship so that we can carry one another, we can share our lives with one another, and so that we can be transformed by those who we encounter as our companions in the way. It is in our offering ourselves as a living sacrifice, in our spiritual worship, that we can find ourselves transported beyond ourselves, and transformed by the renewing of our minds, to be freed from the patterns of this world.
Returning to the planes taking off over gravelly point I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the awesome power and responsibility we have been given in our creativity, to make jet engines, rocketing us into the heavens. The metal wings of each plane have been perfectly shaped to create lift as the air passes over them, the fuselage constructed to protect precious cargo, and also designed so that the wheels could tuck neatly under the body of the plane for the long flight ahead.
Like the planes at the airport, we have been created to be different components of a beautiful whole, journeying together, carrying one another and sharing an abundance of life together.
Our prayers and actions give witness to our faith in the God of love and freedom, to remind ourselves and those around us that we work together for something that is radically other than the marginalization and dehumanization that the world so often presents to us.
Harold Kushner, a Rabbi and scholar, has pointed out in our Exodus text that the Pharaoh’s daughter could have very well had her own private bath in the palace. Kushner offered the possibility that her journey to wash in the river could have been a deliberate choice on her part, to draw on her privilege in order to act in solidarity with those who were in slavery, who had no other place to bathe but the river. When she noticed and adopted the Hebrew child, she gave him a name that had meanings in both Hebrew and Egyptian, and yet, in the text, she referenced the Hebrew meaning—“he draws out”—Moshe—to indicate how she drew him out of the water, from where he had been floating in the reeds. But it could also be a prophetic hint towards Moses’ future, when he would draw the people out of Egypt, through the Red Sea. The Pharaoh’s daughter, it seems, had taken the time to learn the language of the slave people in her father’s kingdom. And she adopted a slave child to save him from death. Moses grew up in a dual world, between the royal privilege of his adopted mother, and the nurturing of his own mother who acted as his nurse. The story of Moses is one of a man who grew up in a world of slavery, but who eventually came to understand his own heritage as one that called him and his community to freedom and responsibility outside of the system of slavery. This is our story in Baptism, when in our journey through water we recognize our own adoption through Christ, into the family of faith, and find ourselves to be children of the God who frees both slaves and slave-owners from the dehumanization of slavery.
What then, does it mean that Jesus calls Peter the rock on which he will build his church? Peter’s proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi, a Gentile city full of active pagans, reflects the truth that all people, slave and free, Jew and Greek, woman and man, are called to be a part of God’s plan. Pharaoh’s daughter has her own role, alongside Moses and Moses’s own biological mother in God’s action to bring the people to freedom. In Christ we are called to journey together with confidence, knowing that, although we may serve with a diversity of gifts,
“We all are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another”