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**I guess I want to begin this sermon by saying something that might sound controversial, but I don’t mean it that way. I identify as fat, and that has less to do with the size of my body at this second and more to do with the reality that I have been big most of my life—which has profoundly shaped the way I experience the world and the way I experience myself in it. Fat has been labeled a bad word, but it is just a word. I’m not denigrating myself by saying I’m fat—it’s just a way of describing how I’ve experienced the world. At other points in my life

I’ve been much, much larger than I am today, and that experience has defined my view of the world and of myself. I have been big my whole life. For most of my life, I thought that was a problem. In recent years, though, my own journey to self-love has taught me more than I could’ve imagined about God, about embodiment, about incarnation. I can only speak from my own experience, but I want to invite us all to reflect together on the ways our bodies might not fit society’s standard— because of our size, our skin color, our gender presentation, our ability, or who we love. It is hard to remember, in a culture where beauty is used as capital, traded for status and a sense of worth, that we are each made in God’s image. Do you have a body? Cool. It’s a good one. If you hear nothing else today, hear that. Your body is a good body, a body that is a reflection of the Divine.

My Grandma Sybil is the relative from whom I inherited my body type.

She was an itinerant farmer in the early 1900s in

Texas/Oklahoma/Louisiana/Arkansas. She was a large, strapping woman whose body helped her do the hard, physical work that put food on her family table. Today, the physical shape I inherited from her is a quality I love, but that love has been hard-won. I remember the first time I realized my body was bigger than it should be. I was six. My mother and I had driven to North Carolina from Arkansas to visit some neighbors that had moved away two years earlier. The husband said, wow you look different. Proudly, I said, “I’ve grown, haven’t I?” He said,

Yes, and while I don’t remember what he said next, I do remember that it confused me, because he didn’t seem to think I should be as proud as I felt…. It was sometime later during the visit that I realized he was referring to my size. His understanding of beauty was narrow, and his social skills were lacking, and that is just the way it goes. He was the first but not the last person to comment on my body, and I guarantee if 3 you ask other big bodied persons, especially female big bodied persons, you will get a whole list of stories.

The South is a complicated culture in which to learn about bodies, matters of faith, and incarnation. In addition to our history of racist, sexist, heterosexist theology and political policies, there are the myriad ways these isms translate into lived experience. My Mammaw, my other grandmother, taught me early and often that food is a way to love—food and love go hand-in-hand in many cultures. But those foods don’t always come deep fried in bacon grease or slathered with butter. So we had the cultural food norms and the simultaneous conservative theology—that our bodies are just temporary homes for our souls, that we are only passing through on our way to Jesus, and therefore, we need not pay our bodies much attention theologically. And yet, there is also the cultural standard of blonde sorority girls—a tradition of Southern girls being homegrown beauties…white, curves in all the right places, heavily made up with short skirts, obviously always straight. To review, that is: fried food equals love, spirits trump bodies, so it doesn’t matter what you look like, but be white/straight/blonde/thin/and otherwise stereotypically beautiful. The combination of these realities, in my own life, meant that I didn’t learn to take care of my body, much less celebrate it. Since my body was already big, I wasn’t concerned with fitting in, but I also didn’t realize that paying attention to it could change my spiritual reality. But still, I understood that I was less worthy than my thin peers—I experienced bullying not for my orientation or even for the fact that I was a giant nerd…I experienced bullying around my size.

I continued to get bigger until, when I graduated from college, I was about 100 pounds heavier than I am today. At my top weight, and even as I descended the scale, I was heckled by strangers and fat-shamed

(sometimes even in the guise of health concerns) by acquaintances. I was asked regularly if I was pregnant and never knew how to respond.

And these experiences only reinforced what our social standards convince us of—that if we are big bodied, then our bodies are subject to public scrutiny even at the hands of strangers, that we deserve the stares or to be charged extra to fly (did you know that’s a thing?!). When you add race, class, ability, or queerness to that, it gets exponentially 5 harder to move through the world without constant commentary and/or harassment.

Size and beauty standards, of course, vary across race and culture, ability, gender, sexuality. In her book The Fat Jesus, Lisa Isherwood talks about how white men often fetishize big-bodied women of color while rejecting big bodied white women as ugly. Although some communities value size more than others, size is a place of intersectionality. And, of course, many of the so-called “norms” are created from within the center of power—the white, wealthy, hetero, cisgender, patriarchal center of power. Many people within the body- positive movement are also part of the LGBTQ community, and many of us consider “fat” a queer identity (or part of our queer identities). But body hatred and placing ourselves within or outside a beauty standard transcends culture. Media and advertising as well as the norms of our communities place pressure on us to conform or not conform to certain standards of beauty (and, therefore, worthiness). Men cannot be short, women cannot be tall, be thin but not too thin, be big but not too big, you know the messages. Mary and Elizabeth had social norms impressing upon their bodies when they both found themselves pregnant. Elizabeth was old, past childbearing age, when she became pregnant with John the Baptist.

And, well, we know Mary’s story—an unmarried maiden who finds herself carrying a child who doesn’t even belong to her fiancé. And still

Mary called herself blessed, to be a person of no social status who is chosen for a holy task. The song of Mary is called the Magnificat, from the line “my soul magnifies the Lord,” but this is a song of revolution. A song of the powerful being brought low and the lowly being exalted. A song of the hungry being fed and the rich being left empty-handed. It’s a song of upending social orders, such that anything is possible, the despised is revered, the unworthy is held in high regard.

To understand one’s body as worthy, as a reflection of the Divine, to insist on being present to our lives and to insist on taking the space that is ours to take—that is an act of revolution, the revolution to which the incarnation calls us. That turns the system on its head. Theologian

Patricia Farmer coined a phrase, “Fat soul philosophy,” taking a page from the philosophy of fat activism. She says, “the term Fat Soul is edgy, for the fat soul dares to get bigger than society deems proper.” A fat soul 7 dares to believe in the right to grow deep and wide and spacious enough that we might confront our privilege, our white supremacy, our privilege of wealth, and we might dare to relinquish our privilege that other souls have room to be their fat selves. What might be possible if we built a beloved community of spiritually voluptuous people?

It is not easy to overcome systems of power and oppression that tell us to loathe our bodies, but loathing our bodies is loathing our very selves, and that is sin. Patricia Adams Farmer says the world suffers from anorexia of the Spirit. I say, we all suffer in body and soul from the effects of eating disorders; we all know someone who hates their body to the point of self-harm. So it is not enough to say we have anorexia of the spirit, even if we are trying to plump up our souls. In a very real way, the body of Christ is anorexic, bulimic, bingeing, addicted, starved for radical self-love, in desperate need for fat souls that have the capacity to expand with boundless love and compassion, unfettered by social expectations. The incarnation is the inbreaking of divine Love enfleshed in the body of a tiny baby, a baby born to a family relegated to a barn, told over and over again that they could not take up space. Christmas is the birth—all over again—of a hope that we can overcome the sins that bind us, including the sin of self-loathing. Giving up stories about our worth or lovability based on our bodies increases our capacity for radical self-love. We need fat souls, but not at the expense of ignoring our bodies. Brene Brown says that we can only love another as much as we love ourself, and while I sometimes struggle with whether or not that’s true, I do think we must learn to love ourselves in our totality. The incarnation is also fundamentally about the joining of spirit and flesh, such that our radical self-love must inherently include loving our own bodies so that we can love other bodies more effectively, which is the only way that we can stop projecting our own fear and shame onto the body of another (or onto a whole community of people). We must sing our own songs of revolution. And that audacious, revolutionary,

Divinely-inspired self-love is the love that can repair the world.