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_{This altar is located in the Chapel of St. Ansgar.}

"And the Word became flesh" - John 1:14 (NRSVue)

The theologian M. Shawn Copeland uses the term “enfleshing” instead of embodying as an approach to taking seriously living in Black bodies in American history. You can see how Incarnation could be translated as Enfleshment. Isn’t it disarming, skin and blood like yours, loose flesh on a rack of bones? The term invites us to take seriously any suffering of flesh, especially systemized cruelty that denies the humanity of any flesh.

Enfleshment in Jesus, who is the flesh that we look to, to learn to love as God loves. I wonder if following in that way can give us some access to God’s range of emotion, awe, wonder, joy, sadness, anger, or quiet standing with, as we live among strangers every day.

In John, we first meet Jesus as an adult, full of grace and truth. Some Indian traditions write that Jesus travelled all over the known world of the time before we meet him in his thirties. It seems possible. Maybe he had those Buddhist soft eyes, concern about the birds of the air, like a Jain, a wildness like a fire worshipper, spiritual puzzles that Pharisees and pandits and spiritual healers from Africa and Europe sat around discussing. Maybe he came back to Nazareth unrecognizable with a head full of beautiful ideas about how the world could be, even for their small people.

In the beginning was the Word, made flesh in a particular place and time, that we might seek to know God, as Jesus did. The Word made flesh, for you.

The Very Reverend Winnie Varghese
Dean