Touch of Skin
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
When I was studying for the ministry, I spent a year training in an Edinburgh church with a slightly idiosyncratic minister. We were talking about Bible Exams one day, and he told me of a question he’d been given some thirty years before:
If the Apostle Paul were alive today, would he preach the same gospel? My supervisor wrote one word in answer, Yes, and left the exam room. He got a B – that’s about a 13.5 in the St Andrews 20-point grading system. Please, before you get the wrong idea, I’m not advocating a one-word strategy for those of you taking the online exam in DI2003 New Testament 2: Paul and the Epistles, on Tuesday at 2 pm (Greenwich Mean Time).
But perhaps a similar question is worth asking. Given the year we have just had, is the Christmas message the same? Could I offer the same sermon I gave in Holy Trinity Church on 7 December 2019, entitled And a little child shall lead them? Maybe not – for what a difference a year makes.
For one thing, I had a bad cough that night last year at Holy Trinity, and proceeded to preach at a service with about 900 people there, shake hands at the West Door, then have all the choir and the ushers back to the Chaplain’s House for mulled wine and mince pies. It’s hard to know how many breaches of the Covid Code that would involve this year.
Some have even suggested that the Bible story has to change this year, because Mary and Joseph couldn’t make it to Bethlehem. After all, all Virgin flights were cancelled. But surely they had to go to Bethlehem – every home delivery slot was booked. And even if they did make it to Bethlehem, it was hard to stay in touch – no Zoom at the inn.
What a difference a year makes. We have recognised afresh the fragility of life, the proximity of death and our human vulnerability in countless ways.
We are physically distanced. Students scattered around the country and world in March. Much teaching since then has been online. Almost every exam last week and this week will be uploaded. On 1 May I saw a student run into the sea alone on the East Sands, then take a selfie – the oddest of May Dips. Post-final exam soakings were in back gardens; graduation conferrals were online – the first time I’ve filmed myself praying in Latin. Freshers Week was distanced; Raisin may be a spring harvest; the Chapel community became a zoomunity, before we could re-open with 50 precious places at each service.
We are becoming used to the wearing of face coverings, suppressing the virus, but masking our identity, veiling our flesh, reducing the clues to our humanity.
Meanwhile, as winter’s chill descends, hardy pairs of students brave pavement restaurants, the stone benches in the cloister outside chapel, and the queue outside Pret.
We social animals have become separate creatures. Some have quietly welcomed this revolution, having always found this world much too touchy-feely. But it has been profoundly difficult for others, who miss company, conversation and the conviviality of a party of more than six people from two households. I know from my listening to students and staff members that loneliness has been exacerbated.
In short order, then, there has been a profound change to how our senses receive their impressions. We now know that losing a sense of smell and taste can be a symptom of the coronavirus. But we’ve also lost some of our sense of sight – viewing each other largely within small rectangles on small screens.
We’ve lost some of our sense of hearing, as we listen to each other as digitally reconstructed sound, and cannot hear the beauty of multiple voices singing together – without astonishing technology.
And we’ve lost a great deal of our sense of touch. It’s now a rare gift to touch and be touched, given only to those who share their household with their family and other animals. The Bible says: There is a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing. This year has been a time to refrain not only from embracing, but from shaking hands, from linking arms, from a peck on the cheek, from binding together in the scrum, from rubbing shoulders with strangers on the train.
Actually, a couple of weeks ago, I met a former parishioner of mine on a walk. It was the first time I’d met him since his wife had died. He held out his hand. My friends, I took it and shook it. There didn’t seem to be a right option.
All right, we know all that. We’re all living through Covid and its constraints on our lives. But perhaps it is worth saying again how strange it all is.
Strange, but not completely so. Maybe we’d forgotten how fragile life always is. The prophet Isaiah knew that, as we heard earlier:
The grass withers, the flower fades.
But we also knew it, as students, members of staff, graduates and friends of this University:
that there are people who celebrated last Christmas with us who are no longer here;
that in the midst of life people have suddenly taken ill and woken up in hospital attached to various machines;
that some have received a diagnosis changing everything;
that there are people who, every day, somehow have to summon up the will to live.
We also know – and this was the focus of the University Carol Service last year – that the whole planet is fragile, given the global heating underway, barely affected by a few months of lockdown.
Could I suggest that the Christmas story doesn’t hide from that fragility, but somehow makes it holy. There is the very chanciness of pregnancy at any time, especially before modern medicine. There is the risk to mother and child in childbirth. There is the absence of a proper place to be born – the manger he was laid in was a feeding-trough for the beasts.
As our opening hymn put it,
He was little, weak and helpless.
And like all new-borns, Jesus had simple needs:
food – a breastful of milk, as we heard sung;
clothing – wrapped in bands of cloth, as Luke recounts;
shelter – a stable-place sufficed;
and love – the touch of his mother’s hands, the warmth of her body, the strongest of bonds found in her kiss.
The image on the first page of the order of service of the Virgin and Child by Dieric Bouts encapsulates this: Mary’s hands cradling the infant Christ – and his hand stretching out to Mary’s skin.
When I read The Midwife’s Carol, the poem by Michael Symmons Roberts we heard earlier, I realised it was the perfect poem for this year. It reflects on these simple human needs of the baby Jesus.
He cries for milk who gave it taste,
He aches for touch of skin,
Yet he spun every human hair,
And ushered love begin.
It is the touch which I’ve come back to, over and over, in reflecting on this year. As we have been separate, not visiting, not meeting, not hugging, not reaching out a hand to the other, it has become so clear how much we need touch to thrive. Maybe that’s why puppies have been so popular this year – not just for the walks, but the feel of them snuggling up. In the fragile walls of human skin, God becomes fragile, needy of touch, longing to be cradled. Yet, paradoxically, in becoming enveloped in human skin, God gives us his touch so that we can thrive: he ushered love begin.
Is the Christmas message the same? My one-word answer is, Yes. MacEwan Condensed. But different emphases come into view this year. It’s not seeing God in human form. It’s not hearing the song of the angels. It’s not the aroma of the Magi’s frankincense. It’s sensing God’s touch upon our lives, he who stretched out tiny fingers to his mother, he who shares our fragile walls. God is with us, in our skin. Is this sentimental touch a touch sentimental? I make no apologies for that – it’s Christmas, after all.
I also make no apology for keeping to tradition, and auditioning once again in the Carol Service for the Chapel Choir. For perhaps, God’s carol to us this year goes something like this:
I’ve got you under my skin
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me
So deep in my heart that you’re really a part of me
I’ve got you under my skin
29 years ago I spent Christmas in Japan. The Japanese language has a great facility for coining words from other languages and making them different.
Arubaito, for example, meaning a part-time job, from the German arbeit – work.
Or Tempura, delicious deep-fried morsels, from Portuguese tempero – seasoning.
Or Abekku, meaning a romantic couple, from the French avec – with.
But my favourite I think is skinshippu – a Japanese word borrowed from an English word which doesn’t exist – skinship, a blend of kinship and skin. It means a non-sexual experience of feeling close to someone through physical touch. When we think of what the name Emmanuel means, the name given to the son of Mary, is there a better description of that than skinship?
Christmas celebrations this year will be rather different from normal. We’ve just been told in song:
with true love and brotherhood
each other now embrace.
Fine, but only within three households over five days from December 23rd. And in a moment, we’ll hear and see And the glory of the Lord by Handel, in which all flesh shall see the glory of the Lord together – except this year we see that glory separately on countless screens via livestream.
But however unusual our festivities will be, we still have a wonderful invitation to share the unchanging good news in response to God’s love.
This year has already seen terrifically imaginative responses to the pandemic and our constrained human condition: virtual hugs, remarkable gatherings, smiling with our eyes.
This Christmas, perhaps more than ever, we will sense that God feeleth for our sadness, and so we in our turn will share the touch of his love with others, with our society, with the vulnerable, wherever we find ourselves.
Of course we hope that next year will be different again, that we will gradually close the 2m gap between us, venture a handshake, dare an embrace, risk a journey on a bus – and offer our touch to others. Next year we hope we’ll be back in this Chapel – and not just the 20 or so who are here tonight, and back in Holy Trinity, and back in London, and we hope we’ll be handing over presents rather than queuing at the Post Office to send them, and laughing at the brilliant dame in the Byre panto.
But for now, we’re in the midst of a socially distanced Christmas. Perhaps that has shown us more deeply than ever the heart of what the story means. That God has not self-isolated. That God is not in quarantine. That God has skin in this game, skin which can be cut and bruised, with rashes and wrinkles. That God’s hand is a fragile hand, but a hand of eternal love, which reaches out to touch us.
END