Pulpit Preacher Finding Freedom

I’ve mostly been a guest preacher. Only recently have I been preaching somewhere regularly although still not every week. A clergy friend and I were talking about different styles of preaching including where one preaches. One friend likes preaching from the same level as the congregation sits at, usually with a music stand to put a printed out manuscript on. I said I was more comfortable behind a pulpit regardless of whether the pulpit was on the floor or raised.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation and the why behind it. Why do I feel more comfortable being a pulpit? My first instinct is that I want people to pay attention to my message … which begs the question what do I think will distract people from the message? It’s an uncomfortable truth that I unconsciously assumed that my fat body will distract people from my sermon.

It’s not just my unconscious or conscious mind, either. J. Nicole Morgan writes in her book Fat and Faithful about her assumptions before she left to intern at a small church in West Virginia the summer after she graduated from high school:

I was overwhelmed with guilt. I could not imagine why God would allow me the opportunity to serve in such a visible way when I had failed to discipline my body into thinness…. I was so ashamed that I was supposed to spend my summer telling people about the power of God and the importance of serving God while my very presence could be a hinderance to my message. -J. Nicole Morgan, Fat and Faithful: Learning to Love Our Bodies, Our Neighbors, and Ourselves, p xv.

J. Nicole Morgan and I both grew up in Christian churches but had very different experiences of how the church handled fatness. Morgan (an evangelical) writes about hearing sermons about how fatness was a sin, praying at the altar for the self-control to become thin, and enduring fat jokes from peers at church. While the churches I went to (mostly Presbyterian) didn’t openly call being fat a sin, there was always the assumption that being fat was bad and in some way immoral; and, of course, fat jokes from peers is as close to a universal fat experience as there is.

Doing the work of fat liberation means acknowledging when anti-fat bias shows up inside of us, often unconsciously. We absorb things from those around us and from our culture without realizing it. It’s not just tiny models on magazine covers – it’s tiny comments from our aunts, watching our mothers eat different food than they fed to the rest of the family, never seeing your body size represented in media, seeing no one stop kids calling another fat kid names, diet companies advertising low fat low calorie foods, the shame you feel when after finally getting into show choir and discovering you can’t fit into the costume. (I admit, that one still hurts.)

We need to actively challenge the direct and indirect assumptions we absorb. We don’t choose the culture we’re born into, but we can choose to take a hard look at it and decide if we want to carry those assumptions within ourselves. It’s liberating work, but it is difficult. Sometimes it feels like when we try to shine a light on something in society we don’t like, a spotlight gets shone on where that thing lives in our brains.

Without challenging assumptions, we’re moving along with them like we’re standing on a moving sidewalk. We need to be actively walking against things like anti-fat bias, racism, sexism, and transphobia if we expect to make any progress in our culture. Of course, it’s more complicated than a simple moving sidewalk since everything is connected. A lot of anti-fat bias stems from sexism and racism, so confronting anti-fat bias without confronting sexism and racism will only get us so far. We may not like what turns up in our unconscious, but we can’t change things in our culture without changing things within ourselves.

There are profound freedoms in challenging the toxic things our culture presents to us as good or healthy that we have absorbed. What could we do if we weren’t held down by shame or guilt about our bodies? Wear a bikini in public? Negotiate a raise so your salary matches your thin co-worker’s? Preach somewhere your body is fully visible? Or just maybe live life a little bit richer having let go of all that shame?

Last Sunday I preached a sermon not at the pulpit knowing it would be uncomfortable for me, but it was important to the sermon’s message to be on the same level as the congregation. I watched the video today. I see how uncomfortable my body was, the shifting of weight from one foot to the other, the awkward arm movements. I don’t think anyone else saw that because I know they heard my message. Or if they did notice, it didn’t distract from the message.

This is the beauty of the upside down Gospel presented to us by Jesus. The kin-dom is a place where the last shall be first, the hungry fed, the lonely loved, the awkward made comfortable, the disabled and chronically ill prioritized, BIPOC folks centered, LGBTQ+ folks celebrated, trans people helped to feel safe, the abused healed, the mentally ill cared for, and the shamed freed.

It’s called fat liberation for a reason. We don’t know how much we’ve absorbed about fatness until we shine a light on it. Like Gloria Steinem (but made popular for many by Ted Lasso’s therapist) said:

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. -Gloria Steinem

The good news is, we’re not being pissed off alone and we will not be set free alone. We are all in this together.

Advanced Reading Recommendations

Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity by Kathleen LeBesco
Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies edited by Cat Pausé and Sonya Renee Taylor
The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies edited by Amy Farrell
Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives edited by Miguel Morales, Bruce Owens Grimm, and TJ Ferentini

Blessed are the Fat