Over the next four weeks, we are going to spend time with the body. Your body, my body, the body of Christ, the body politic, the body of the earth. Our claim for the series is this: the body is the place where divine power shows up. We start today with vulnerability, which is challenging to sit with. Most of us were taught to treat vulnerability as the thing that stands between us and power. I want to suggest that it is the ground where divine power is revealed.
I'll begin with a poem I wrote, “Body Image.”
And God drew in a deep breath, a generous respire of atoms –
quarks, an arc – prismatic-hued flavors, energies vying for attraction.
Lungs expand to near capacity, O2 inspire cells that spark
insight, wisdom, creative genius – Divine.
And on the exhalation a gale of primal matter –
wisps tendril, weave and knot and knit a pattern –
Word, a breath prayer:
Let us make
Let us make humankind in our image;
Let us make humankind according to our likeness.
All who are and were and ever will be, image God, are spoken into – life-breathed into the image and likeness of God. It was not enough to make it so, God breathed words into the scribe, urgent: make it clear that this is something extraordinary: All that Is bears Our mark, reflects the Source of All that is. Humankind, walking companions, conversation partners,
beloved – this is different, these are more –
more of Us.
Each human is not just image, not merely a copy of God; each is also – both-and – in likeness to God.
Notice what the poem is doing with the creation story. It insists on the body, and it does so on the strength of the text itself.
Genesis 1:26 says humankind is made in God’s image and according to God’s likeness. Two words. Image, tzelem, and likeness, demut. It is easy to read past that and assume the writer is simply repeating themselves for emphasis. But demut is a rare word in the scriptures. It is a word about how something looks, about form. When Scripture adds demut to tzelem, it is closing a door. It will not let us stop at a spiritual or internal reading of what it means to bear God’s image. The claim reaches the whole being of the human, body included.
The second creation story says the same thing from the other direction. In Genesis 2:7, God forms ha adam, the human, from ha adamah, the ground, and breathes the breath of life into it. Breath is the first sign of life, and it is given to form. The Creator does not breathe into the air. The Creator breathes into dust, into a body.
And the New Testament does not walk this back. Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us, the Word made flesh. If humankind is made in the image and likeness of God, and God takes on flesh and lives in it, then the body is not an incidental container for something more important. The body is where God chose to be present.
So. If every body images God, then no single body can be the standard for what God looks like. Every one of us is a different, unrepeatable reflection. And yet human beings have been shrinking that image since the beginning, boxing God into one form, usually the form of whoever is doing the boxing. My friend, the Rev. Pat Esker, describes this as idolatry: “a boxing in of God, a reduction of who God is so that we feel like we are more… and more in control.”
Idolatry of that kind never stays abstract. It becomes a list: color of skin, sex, size, the fit of clothes, the way you stand, the way you walk, the way you speak. Any body that falls outside the approved categories is treated as an offense, an aberration. So before anything else happens to certain bodies, before any act of harm, they have already been classified as a problem. That is where vulnerability begins. It begins with a body made in the image and likeness of God being told it is the wrong shape.
Hold that in mind as we turn to the sea.
In Exodus 14 Moses stretches out his hand, the waters part, the people cross on dry ground. But first, In verse 19, the angel of God and the pillar of cloud, which had been leading the Israelites from the front, relocate. They move behind the people and settle between the Israelites and the Egyptian army. The cloud is dark for the Egyptians and lights up the night for Israel, and for the whole night, the text says, one camp does not come near the other.
God does not rescue Israel from a distance. God does not decide their fate from somewhere safe. God’s own presence repositions itself into the gap, between the terrified and the army coming for them. Only then does the sea open, and notice that the people do not walk around the danger. They still walk through it, protected, with walls of water on either side. They are not exempted from vulnerability. They are accompanied in it.
The rest of this text is hard to reconcile. And we’ll address this next week, when we talk about violence. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker offer a principle for reading texts like this one: Scripture is a range of human responses to crisis, to be weighed and tested, and nothing in it absolves any of us of responsibility for the right use of power. For this morning, I am drawing one thing from the passage, because the text offers it clearly. At the moment of greatest danger, divine power takes the form of presence, positioned bodily between the vulnerable and the violence.
Vulnerability, in this text, is not overcome by force. It is held.
We also need to be careful with this word: “vulnerable.”
The philosopher Judith Butler has spent a great deal of their career writing about violence, grief, and the body, and they ask, When we describe communities that suffer systematic violence, do we do them justice if we summarize them as “the vulnerable”? Do we respect the dignity of their struggle?
Their concern is what happens to power once that label is applied. Once a group has been constituted as “the vulnerable,” does anyone look at them as if they hold power of their own? Or has all the power quietly moved out of the situation and reappeared as the power of the paternalistic helper, now obligated to step in? it becomes the savior complex. Relief from precarity is good. But does relief alone actually oppose the structures and economics that produce unlivable persistent insecurity to begin with?
And then Butler asks the question: Why don’t “we” give up the paternalistic option, the comfortable role of the one who helps, in order to join solidarity networks with people who are, at once, vulnerable and struggling?
At once. Vulnerable and struggling. Vulnerability, Butler says, should not be identified exclusively with passivity. It makes sense only within an embodied set of social relations, and that includes practices of resistance. The people we are tempted to label as merely vulnerable are often a constellation of vulnerability, rage, persistence, and resistance, all of it emerging under the same historical conditions.
Now return to the sea. Israel at the water’s edge is terrified, and Israel walks forward. They are protected, and they are acting. Vulnerable and moving, at once. And God’s response is not to take over, to pity them from a distance, or to manage them. God relocates into the gap beside them. That is the pattern for us. We are not called to fix vulnerable people from a safe vantage point. We are called to do what God does at the sea: move our own bodies into the space between harm and the people harmed, and stand there with them.
Romans 14 moves this from the shore of a sea to the life of a congregation.
Paul is writing to a church divided over practice. Some believe they can eat anything, while others eat only vegetables. Some regard one day as holier than another, and others treat all days alike. It is a real disagreement with real feeling behind it, and Paul does not try to settle who is right. His instruction is: “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?” Each of them, he says, stands or falls before their own Lord, and each of them will be upheld, because the Lord is able to make them stand.
This is a different kind of vulnerability from the one at the sea. It is the vulnerability of being different from the people around you. Of holding a conviction, or a body, or a practice that isn’t shared by the room, and being exposed to its judgment. Anyone who has felt that knows how real it is.
Paul’s answer goes to the root: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”
Put that beside the poem. If every body images God, then policing another person’s body, practice, or conviction is an act of idolatry, one more attempt to box the image of God into the shape we find comfortable. Paul is saying that no one in the room gets to be the standard. Each person is answerable to God, and God has already welcomed them.
Let me pull the threads together.
The body images God. Vulnerability, then, is not a flaw in that image. It is part of what makes the image embodied instead of abstract.
At the sea, God’s own presence moves into the gap between danger and the vulnerable. Divine power looks like solidarity, not distance.
The people we are tempted to call “the vulnerable” are never merely vulnerable. They carry rage, persistence, agency, and power. We will return to that in two weeks when we talk about resistance. Our calling is not to rescue them from a safe place, but to join them.
And inside the church, vulnerability means refusing to judge the bodies and convictions that differ from our own, because each person stands before God and not before our approval.
Divine power does not show up despite the vulnerable body. It shows up in it. In the space between danger and safety, where God chooses to stand. And in the space between us, where we are asked to do the same.
[Pause.] Take a moment, in your own body, in your own seat, and name silently one place where you feel vulnerable this morning. Then hear this, together:
Leader: We are not alone in the gap. People: God stands with us there.
Amen.
Benediction
Go now — not around your vulnerability, but through it. May the God who stood between the danger and the fleeing feet of a frightened people stand with you still, in whatever gap you carry today. May you know your body — ordinary, uncertain, unrepeatable — as image, as likeness, as home for the Spirit of God. Go in peace.
