The School Made Flesh

How can we think theologically about coming back together in-person? When it comes to reopening schools, churches, and workplaces, What would Jesus do?

Administrators in a Connecticut high school announced yesterday that they would shift programs to online learning, effective immediately, because disciplinary issues were rendering learning impossible. Students who had been separated for month after month were coming back together only to fight each other with their fists, and fight their teachers with disruptive behavior. Those students will be in-class, in the flesh, at school today. The school board shot down the administrators’ desperate choice. Online learning was a solution to the problem of a pandemic, not to the problem of kids being kids, and community being community.

I was reminded when hearing about this Connecticut high school, aching with the birth pangs of reopening, of a decision made by the leaders of the Divinity School I attended. A few years after I graduated, Harvard Divinity School turned its dorms into faculty offices, and students had to find housing in graduate student apartments on- and off-campus. I heard tell of a faculty member observing, with an air of blissful success, how the school’s disciplinary committee had become inactive. Peter Gomes evidently quipped, “Yes, and so has anything resembling community.”

As the school I serve, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School, reopens, I am particularly attentive to stories and memories like these above. I am hearing from leaders in all kinds of settings that reopening post-Covid 19 isn’t the great reunion one expects at the end of a movie. It’s part of the plot, not the denoument, and the plot is a thick one. There’s a lot going on underneath and around the acts of “emerging, gathering, and belonging.” Those three words comprise Andover Newton’s theme for the year, and they are giving all of us a lot to think about.

One word that captures the complexity of reopening comes from our theology: incarnation. God became flesh and dwelt among us, we read in Jesus’ birth narrative in John’s gospel. Jesus was fully human and fully divine simultaneously. There was something about flesh that God needed to don it in order to get through to us. Among the earliest Christian heretics, the Gnostics believed that Jesus wore flesh like a costume. He was light, and the fleshly human part of him wasn’t fully integrated into his identity. He pretended to feel pain on the cross to continue the ruse, but God would never stoop so low as to be made — of all things! — flesh? Eww!

As we come back together, we are all sensitive to how careful we need to be to continue to keep each other safe and healthy. We wear masks, we don’t shake hands, we don’t hug. The rules aren’t always clear, and we accept that they’re reducing, but never fully eliminating, risk. Since our masks obscure facial expressions, we sometimes misinterpret, or just plain can’t hear, one another. Instructors have to ask their classes, “Does this make sense?” because they used to rely on facial expressions to know if they were getting through to people. Confusion, misunderstandings, and a different kind of estrangement are inevitable.

Covid protocols are hard, but I wouldn’t have them any other way. Learning from a distance was miserable by comparison, and I never, ever want to do it again. A person who knows me might read that line, “distance was miserable,” and assume that’s a Sarah thing. True enough: I am an outlier extrovert. On the Myers-Briggs scale, there is no “E” that is “E” enough for me. But that’s not why I feel like we viscerally and deeply need to be together in-community to survive. Together is how God created us to be. The healthiest thing to do for a newborn is place it naked on its parent’s chest. The strongest impulse we have when we fall in love is to be closer than closer than close (hubba hubba) to our beloved. God became flesh to dwell among us because flesh was, and is, where it’s at.

And yet, as the Gnostics so helpfully observed, flesh is messy. It smells bad sometimes; it emits germs. Flesh-to-flesh proximity stirs up emotions that sometimes result in conflict. It’s for these reasons that one of the faith community leadership charisms we at Andover Newton explore with our students is how to build community.

People need guidance on how to be together, for when we’re just thrown into spaces without parameters, fights break out. They usually aren’t fights that result in bruises and property damage like what our poor, overwhelmed CT high school suffered. Rather, they’re the kind of conflicts that result in estrangement and disillusionment which then lead people into the isolation that Covid forced. As a Christian called to ministry, I’ll work to avoid communal isolation until the day I die.

Why do we at Andover Newton teach students how to build community? Why are those skills essential to ministry? Because the church can be the delivery system that brings knowledge about how to be together — really together: authentically enfleshed — into the wider world. During Covid, churches modeled how to adapt in order to protect bodies, particularly those that were already frail. Now, they need to model intentionality in coming back together, and that intentionality needs to be built upon our faith. I close with three teachings from the Christian tradition that can guide us:

1. Jesus was the word made flesh. Flesh is good. Holy scriptures tell us that God is present to those who gather in ways that are ineffably more significant than when we are alone. When we can gather in the flesh, we should; we must.
2. Jesus called attention to the vulnerable and poor. Anytime we gather, we need to eschew secular teachings about “equality” and put first the needs of those who are most fragile. We must gather, but we also must get together in ways that minimize risk of harm, especially to those in-need whom secular society often forgets.
3. Jesus didn’t avoid confrontation and hard conversations; he took on the tough stuff. He confronted principalities, challenged and coached his disciples, and even fought with his mom. Getting back together is hard work after so much time apart. For many, Covid isolation felt easier than being together, and I don’t suggest a 24/7 pig-pile. But Jesus modeled that, although we should minimize risk of harm to the vulnerable, steering clear of hard conversations does more damage than good.

The mess that is flesh is by-design, and God is in the midst of it. We have to gather; we have to do so carefully; and we have to go through the tough stuff, rather than around. Such is the nature of following an incarnate savior, being an incarnate people, and seeking to make God’s love real.