The moment God spoke, “Let there be…” into the great silence before time, God made physical realities spiritual and spiritual realities physical. The church’s sacramental tradition teaches us just that: holy things are fleshy, the spiritual is physical, and physical things are spiritual.
The Word will always put on flesh sooner rather than later.
Both baptism and communion remind us that we find God in the normal, physical existence that constitutes our lives. The communion table reminds us that we might just experience Christ anytime we break bread in the name of love, and that God supplies our daily bread. The waters of baptism remind us of the amniotic fluid that nurtured us in our birth, the life-giving power of water, and the cleansing potency of grace.
The sacraments combine the physical and the spiritual, not merely to call attention to those two sacraments alone, but to remind us that all life is a divine saturation of the physical and spiritual.
Throughout the history of human philosophy, there have been two basic views of the relationship between physicality and spirituality.
Spiritualism declares that the most real “reality” is unseen and spiritual, and matter is an illusion and a distraction. According to more spiritualist philosophies, the goal is to bypass the physical arena to live a spirituality in the realm of the invisible. Salvation, then, is a shedding of our mortal and bodily existence for the purity of the spiritual realm.
The spiritual eclipses the physical.
Materialism, on the other hand, is the view that the only things that are real are those we can observe with our senses. Matter is real. Spirit is fiction. What you see should always prevail over what you believe. Bodies matter more than souls.
This view tends to elevate science as the chief arbiter of truth and relegate religion to the realm of fantasy and make-believe.
According to materialism, matter is about the only thing that matters, and what you see is all there is to see.
The physical eclipses the spiritual.
According to orthodox Christianity, however, the problem with choosing materialism or spiritualism was the “or.” The problem with this framing is not which side one lands on in this dichotomy but the dichotomy itself.
This is a false choice born of a false binary.
God created all things, including matter, making all things spiritual and holy. God was present in the garden, not just above it at a distance.
This view is called a sacramental view, and it rejects the false binary between spiritualism and materialism. It subverts the “or” and replaces it with an “and.”
Sacramental theology points to bread and wine and proclaims “The body and blood of Christ.” It looks to the earthiness of creation and says, “Look, the dwelling of God is with people.” It takes the incarnation seriously. This means the apex of God’s redemptive work was done inside of human flesh, not outside of it.
It recognizes that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead rather than a mere soul-flutter heavenward, and he was revealed in the ordinary appearances of a gardener, a traveler to Emmaus, and a fisherman on the shore.
In other words, Christ is found in the ordinary, physical stuff of life.
Nowhere is the sacramental view of reality more apparent than in the birth of Jesus itself.
The chorus of angels blends with the mooing of cattle and the bleating of sheep. God is near a mother in labor pangs. The reign of God is made visible in Bethlehem, of all places, a small farming village that is literally rendered “House of Bread.”
The Savior of the world by the name of Jesus is born under the nose of “the savior of the world,” by the name of Caesar Augustus.
In Luke’s narrative, the miraculous birth of Jesus is told alongside the most basic and daily human realities: shepherds, animals, family, politics and places that resemble Bethlehem.
Jesus was born inside of human history, not without.
The good news of the Christmas story isn’t “God over us,” or “God above us,” or “God before us in the future,” but “God with us” in the here and now.
That is why the sacramental view of reality demands that we pay attention to the importance of this present moment and this present place, however inconspicuous, mundane, humble, earthy and physical they may be.
Christ is born in places like that and places like this, wherever “this” might be for you.
The truth is that the physical and spiritual are with, in and for each other.
We discover the presence and truths of the unseen God revealed in a tactile creation, and our most deeply held beliefs in our hearts and souls eventually trickle out into the public and physical realm.
Divorcing physical from spiritual or spiritual from the physical is to see the truth of neither and to put asunder what God has joined together the moment God said, “Let there be…”
The Christmas story subverts this false fracturing of reality.
The Christmas story indicates that God is not distant from physicality, but in it, even taking it on. God is flesh AND spirit. In the Christmas story, Jesus’ conception is the result of Mary’s feminine physicality and the Spirit’s mysterious and wondrous “hovering.”
In the Christmas story, heaven and earth rub shoulders, and angel feathers and sheep manure are found in close proximity.
We can see the foolishness of the faulty physical and spiritual dichotomy in how our bodies, minds and souls are all integrated with our humanity. Whatever is going on in our minds and souls can have a profound influence on our physical health.
It is well known that the mental and spiritual problem of anxiety has an immediate physiological impact on the body. Fear does not merely live in the brain; it activates hormones, dilutes pupils, and quickens the pulse.
Trauma can absolutely alter one’s physiology, shaping and re-shaping neural groves that impact how a person thinks moving forward.
Likewise, what happens in our bodies impacts our minds and souls.
I’ve stumped my toe in such a way that it made me question the goodness of God. A newborn baby who is not held, caressed and touched skin-to-skin might express feelings of abandonment later in life.
Anyone who has lived through a lengthy journey with cancer knows that the disease and corresponding treatments do not merely tax the body but demand a fortitude of spirit as well.
All of this means that the sacramental tradition is not only theologically accurate but ontologically true.
The spiritual is physical, and the physical is spiritual. Humans don’t have bodies; we are bodies. We do not have souls; we are souls.
We are both dust of the earth and Divine breath. Failing to recognize either composite aspect of our humanity reduces all of it.
The terrifying and glorious scandal of the birth narrative of Jesus is how earthy, mundane, and ordinary it is.
God isn’t up in the heavens but on Earth and in a most ordinary place. The bread of life is born in Bethlehem, the house of bread. Christ comes to a peasant couple with no place to lay their heads. Good news is first brought to night-shift shepherds, and the whole story begins when a young teenage girl agrees to the scandal, wonder, and mystery of God’s impossibilities.
In that light, this story could’ve happened anywhere and to anyone. Maybe that’s because this story is happening everywhere and to everyone.
This Good News doesn’t show up in holy places; it shows up in ordinary places and makes them holy. The Christmas story reminds us that all of life is a sacrament, and Christ can be seen in each and every face, particularly in the eyes of those we’d rather not look.
If you want a spiritual experience this Advent, find something physical and behold it.
Really behold it!
Carefully behold it!
Pray over it until you cultivate the eyes to see it.
It will transform you. If you ponder the vast spiritual mysteries of the Christmas story long enough, it will likely have real-world implications in your life. It might fill the stomachs of the hungry and the hands of the poor.
It could shape immigration policy, given that Jesus and his parents knew refugee life well.
What I’m trying to say is this: the physical is spiritual, and the spiritual is physical.
If we could grasp that truth, even in some proximate way, I don’t think the angels would be the only ones singing. It would be good news of great joy for all the people, especially those embodied people who feel like their lives are so very normal.
