Pooping in St. Paul's and the Incarnation

These days I rarely post more than twice a week, let alone twice in one day. What prompts me to put up a second post today is something that I just read. This something comes from Giles Fraser's book Chosen: Lost and Found Between Christianity and Judaism.

For those unfamiliar with Fraser, he is a priest of the Church of England. In addition to having a Jewish lineage on his Dad's side, his wife is an Israeli Jew. Hopefully, this little bit of background helps explain the subtitle of his book.

For those who remember back slightly more than a decade ago, the Occupy movement was big. In London, the movement occupied ground connected to Saint Paul's Cathedral. At that time Fraser was the Canon Chancellor of the Cathedral. Unlike a number of his clerical colleagues, Fraser was sympathetic to and somewhat supportive of Occupy's occupancy of the land around the cathedral.

Ultimately, the Church decided to team up with the City of London to forcibly evict Occupy, which led Fraser to resign from his position. His resignation led to a personal crisis. He went through a divorce, had life-threatening health issues, and had to find a new place of ministry. The first part of his book is about these events.

The second part of the book is a good (by no means perfect) account of the history of relations between Jews and Christians. He especially focuses on the early centuries of Christianity's existence. He is quite superb in discussing the role of the Temple in pre-Jewish Judaism. It was the Temple and not "orthodoxy" that held Israelites together.

Moving on from his discussion of the Jerusalem Temple, Fraser moves back to the joint decision by Saint Paul's Cathedral and the City of London to forcibly evict the Occupy occupiers from the vicinity of the cathedral. Citing a report given to London's Metropolitan Police, he notes the complaint that on a few occasions people had pooped inside the Cathedral. It is his subsequent treatment of this that prompted this post.

This morning I noted how really appalling were the circumstances of Jesus's birth, at least according to Saint Luke's account. No matter how historical this account may or may not be, the inspired author's point is that the Son of God became incarnate in the most "real" of circumstances. I went on to note that for Christ to be born in us, it has to happen in the messiness of our own lives to be real.

Fraser first points how effectively shitting insider the cathedral rallied public opinion in favor of forcibly removing the protestors. But, he correctly grasps, "At stake here was something surprisingly theological- in Christians terms, what is the proper relationship between a church and the messiness of the world?" (146) This is a great question in societies full of need in which churches sit on large swaths of prime real estate empty most of the time. It bears noting that the term "Emergent Church" was first coined by German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz. What he addressed was the fact that, at least in most advanced Western societies, Christianity has become a largely bourgeois phenomenon (see The Emergent Church: The Future of Christianity in a Postbourgeois World).

Fraser goes on to ask: "Does the church seek to maintain and protect a cordoned-off sanctuary of purity, a pollution-free space for a pollution-free God? Or is the whole point of the incarnation that God becomes human, thus collapsing the barriers between the sacred and the profane, between God and shit?" (146-147) At least for me, these are rhetorical questions; the respective answers to which are No and Yes respectively. Further, when we consider the full and complete humanity of Jesus Christ, as insisted on by Christian orthodoxy, God evacuated his bowels the same way all human beings do. While in the flesh, God took dumps. While it isn't something one need fixate on, it does bear noting that denying this is denying Christ's full humanity,

Early on in the second part of Chosen, when considering how the Council of Nicea was intent to brighten and embolden the line of demarcation between nascent Rabbinic Judaism and the nascent Church, along with Spanish liberation theologian Jon Sobrino (specifically his essay "The Kingdom of God and the Theological Dimension of the Poor: The Jesuanic Principle," which can be found in the compilation Who Do You Say That I Am?: Confessing the Mystery of Christ, pages 109-145), Fraser notes how quickly Jesus's radical preaching and teaching about God's kingdom disappeared.

While this could serve as a springboard for my deep dislike of this least wonderful time of the year, I will limit myself to noting it passing and leaving both of my readers to ponder this for themselves.