Last week, as part of my birthday celebrations, a church historian friend visiting from Australia and I visited the special exhibition entitled “Tattoos: Ritual, Identity, Obsession, Art” at the Royal Ontario Museum. Personally, I have never much been interested in getting a tattoo, being of the age that connects them with sailors, lowlife criminals and infections gone wrong; and I do not like pain. However, tattoos are very popular in South Pacific societies and are often a mark of cultural identity, something that many early missionaries did not appreciate. I have many Solomon Islands and South Pacific friends with tattoos.
Tattoos have even had a small positive role in Christian history: Ethiopian Orthodox Christians tattoo crosses on their foreheads as a sign of identity and pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages sometimes got a tattoo of the holy sites there to mark the accomplishment.
Recently tattoos have become much more socially acceptable, whether as a sign of identity or body art or the permanence of a relationship. [Does anyone here want to own up to having a tattoo?] As we were walking around the exhibition, my friend and I began to talk about writing an article on the significance of tattoos for Anglicans. (Anglican church historians always think about writing articles.) He remembered the first Anglican bishop’s wife in Australia to have tattoos and I thought of a church in Michigan (not Anglican) that provides free “Christian tattoos” to its members. We vowed to go home and google “Anglican tattoos” – and there they are, looking rather like our processional cross. However, somehow, I think I would not get very far if I suggested we invite an Anglican tattoo artist to come to give free Anglican tattoos in in the chapel. On second thought, I’ll give this suggestion to our Fundraising Committee.
It was a fascinating exhibition and I recommend it. At the very end of it, I was struck almost speechless in fascination with a film of a Buddhist tattoo festival in Thailand. Men came to the temple to have the tattoo of a powerful animal spirit engraved on their bodies (perhaps a tiger or a snake or an eagle) and then were prayed over by a monk that they would take on the powers of the tattooed animal: bravery, cleverness, aggression, adventure, or whatever. The film then fast forwarded to an annual festival in which hundreds of tattooed devotees quietly sat in the courtyard of the temple, being prayed over and sprinkled (and, indeed, fire-hosed) with holy water. Suddenly, one after another, the devotees would stand up and become the tiger or snake or eagle of their tattoo, wildly lunging forward to the monks’ platform, rolling on the ground, attacking others, until they were exhausted and collapsed. The narrator explained that it was a service of renewal of the spiritual tattoos: that having become the tiger or snake or eagle for this one day of the year, they would be energized with the power of their tattoos for the year ahead. I called my friend over to watch the film. He commented, “It doesn’t look very Anglican”.
I have been thinking about that film in the last few days and wondering what would be the Anglican (or Christian) equivalent? What would be the service of renewal that would enliven the marks of our Christian faith? Indeed, what are those marks?
The marks are the waters of Baptism, the sign of the Cross on our foreheads, episcopal hands representing millennia of Christian faith placed on our heads and, for some, rings (whether as signs of marriage, episcopal ordination or the consecrated religious life). The signs come from both Scripture and tradition.
How do these signs come alive for us and how are they renewed?
For Christians, any true Christian sign points us back to God’s grace, God’s free gift of love in Jesus Christ. We cannot quite say the signs themselves come to life and bring us renewal. It is God who gives us life and renewal day by day through our participation in the life of the church, including these signs.
We do have other signs (or sacraments) that attempt to bring us to renewal: the renewal of baptismal, ordination and marriage promises, participation in the Eucharist, anointing for healing, confession. We encounter God in word and sacrament and are brought to ongoing renewal through God’s grace.
In these signs of renewal, it is always God’s grace that is primary. What helps is our receptivity, our openness, to God’s love in our lives. While some Pentecostal traditions include ecstatic behaviour as a sign of the Holy Spirit – being “slain in the spirit”, “speaking in tongues”, rolling in the aisles, breaking into uncontrolled laughter – even there, if such actions are truly Christian, God’s grace rather than human manipulation must be behind them and the real fruits of the Holy Spirit – love, joy, peace, forgiveness, compassion, and so forth – must also show forth. Here many of the televangelists and Donald Trump-Christians are lacking.
Our receptive participation in the sacramental life of the church opens us to God’s grace. So does listening to the word of God in Scripture. Scripture tells us, so to speak, IF we were to get a Christian tattoo, as a reminder of our identity and mission, of what that tattoo would be an image. And so we come to today’s two lessons.
Our God is not a spiritual tiger or snake or eagle, a spirit, a small-G god, nor is God (in the words of today’s lesson from Hebrews) “something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them”. Rather, our God is one who brings us to “Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” through the New Covenant of Jesus Christ’s Cross, Resurrection and Glorification (in the Epistle to the Hebrews, all rolled into one), bringing us to full and eternal life in the God who is perfect Love.
The motif is Love rather than fear; in John’s words, “Perfect love casts out fear”. We are warned against images of God that are vindictive, fearful and gloomy; we are encouraged to allow ourselves to be lifted up to the heavenly Jerusalem through Christ’s triumphant entry to heaven, abolishing all forms of human sacrifice, including self-destructive behaviour. It is unfortunate how many people still hang on to the image of God as an angry and vindictive parent, always ready to punish or curse. Rather, in Christ the love of God has triumphed!
That is no more apparent than in the second lesson, a simple story from Luke’s Gospel of Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath in a synagogue of a woman who had been disabled for 18 years – against the wishes of the synagogue authorities who are offended because they believe their “sign”, the Sabbath, has been dishonoured. Jesus makes it clear to them that healing is what he is about, not observance of obsolete signs. Healing is the giving of life, the expression of God’s love in a broken human body. And, of course, society needs healing too. Both word and sacrament in our Christian life point to God’s grace expressed through healing. And we are invited to be healers with Christ, in how we treat, respect and encourage others. And, of course, in how we pray for them.
The telling of these two biblical stories should open us further to God’s grace in our lives and renewal. If you wish to go out and get a tattoo of New Jerusalem or Jesus the Healer, I will not stop you. However, as long as the Bible stories are told and reflected upon, and we participate in the church’s signs, the sacraments, tattoos are not really necessary for salvation. At best, perhaps they are an added extra, a reminder. Perhaps like a medieval Christian returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and thinking back to the excitement of that event.
In the closing words of the passage from Hebrews: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an accepted worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire.” Amen.
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