A Place to Be More

A Place to Be More

A Sermon on Luke 24:36-48

By Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On The Third Sunday of Easter

April 15 2018

Incarnate and Resurrected God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing new reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Resurrected Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

That hymn, really? And during the season of Eastertide? I can imagine the responses you have in your minds: all that made me blush a bit, those are not things we talk about in church, it made me fidget and squirm, it made me feel physically uncomfortable, it’s a lot of flesh for right now…. And are we really going to sing about the body like that in church?

And our discomfort and that question alone tells us how distorted our theology of the body has becomes… not that it is our fault, this has been passed down to us for a long, long time…. It’s as ancient as the Bible itself.

Jesus was Jewish but a great deal of his ministry and the New Testament finds itself in a Greek world and Greeks had a very distinct philosophy of the body. Greek philosophy held that the soul was immortal and held hostage- imprisoned- by the body, thinking that at death the soul will fly away and the body stays here like left behind luggage…. We still hold a lot of this view today, a distinct body and soul with a greater emphasis on the soul. Think of I’ll Fly Away or a great deal of the way we offer sympathy to one another in times of loss.

And a great deal of our oldest theological arguments are about Jesus and if he can really be human or if he just appeared to be human, is he fully God or fully man or both? And in that comes a lot of theology of original sin and how the flesh is doomed from day one. See just about anything John Piper has written or said to get just dose of this. 

And then you have the entire Gnostic debate, where a part of Gnosticism is the physical matter is inherently flawed, maybe even evil. This was largely ruled heretical yet like all good heresy it keeps showing up again, there is a lot of theology and church practice today that places more emphasis on the spiritual matter than the physical matter. This is are the churches that largely avoid any justice movement because none of this matters, it’s all temporary and we should focus more on the Kingdom promised than creating that Kingdom here on earth.

Augustine certainly does not help the case for flesh, just read The Confession. He might have loved the flesh and struggled with how deeply he loved the flesh, but all of that lead him to often condemn and remove it from spiritual matter. For instance: “When we shall have reached that peace, this mortal life shall give place to one that is eternal, and our body shall be no more this animal body which by its corruption weighs down the soul.”

The Protestant Reformation does not help us gain any ground here, it simply makes us all the more suspicious of our bodies and physical pleasure. Puritans don’t help us one bit. And then some of the more recent movements like True Love Waits have simply added a bunch of guilt on top of this pile that we have been accumulating. 

And the world at large itself has struggled…. Freud does us no favors, quite the opposite, even in his brilliance, his insight into flesh and the physical was often dark and left us feeling rather icky for lack of a better word. Medicine has helped us to compartmentalize our body and to see them as simply biological matter, as pure science. And then our culture has made our bodies little more than objects of sexual desire or sexual disgust, one critic said that we currently “live in a culture where we can’t separate the physical from the sexual.”

So no wonder we wince and fidget during a hymn like the one we just sang…. A hymn written by Brian Wren, one of our most prolific and brilliant hymn writers today, five of his hymns are in the hymnal we use, but not this one, it’s too physical.

We don’t talk about things like that in here, do we? And yet it’s something we all have in common, we all have bodies, we all exist in bodies, we all spend a lot of time concerned about our bodies.

We all have bodies that carry our history…. For instance in my left hand I can still see traces of a piece of pencil that lodged there during an fall in first grade, or on the back of my head there is a place where hair won’t grow (well there are lots of places) but there is one that is from when I feel backwards out of a chair and had to get stitches, my left ring finger knuckles is a bit knotted from a sprain that healed funny… and you carry these too.

We all have bodies with needs…. When our entire body is ready to collapse because we are so tired, when our stomach growls in the middle of the service because it’s time for lunch, backs that suddenly itch to alert us to irritation with our skin, we yawn to take a deep breath, our muscles remind us to stand and stretch.

We all have bodies that teach us…. Our quads and hamstrings let us know we have done enough squats and stair machine at the gym, our eyes let us know when we have stared at a screen long enough that day, goosebumps alert us that we are cold or that something is happening that we need to noticed heartbeats that increase in response to beauty, love and pleasure.

We have bodies with things we hate and want to change… the size of this or that, too big too small, hair in funny places or not the right places, feet that seem to big, ears that seem too small, backs that ache, knees that make noises knees should not make.

And we have bodies with things we just love…. Legs that run races, hands that hold other hands, the perfect eye color, hair that is just perfect, arms that lift our kids up, bodies that birth and nurture children, wrinkles that are evidence we smile enough.

We all have bodies. And these bodies have largely shaped us into who we are today and how we understand the world.

And these bodies are the ones our Creator gave us, flesh that is good- hear that again because we don’t say it enough- flesh that is good, a body that God delights in…

Because God loves and reveres the body, isn’t that one of the central messages of Incarnation, which is pretty important to our theology? In Tara Owen’s magnificent and important book Embracing the Body: Finding God in our Flesh and Bones, she writes: “If God becomes human, God is taking on something that we thought was full only of decay and betrayal. If God becomes human it means that the very stuff of our lives can be infused with the holy, the true, the good. If God becomes human, then there’s something essential and true to be discovered in our very flesh and blood.”

And if the Incarnation is not enough evidence that God loves flesh, well then it seems that one of the central messages of the Resurrection is about the body. Just look at today’s text- this passage from Luke which we just read, which is so physical is almost needs to be read either with our eyes closed so that we can see it or even better performed for us, this text is physical. Jesus tells the disciples “look at my hands” and then Jesus tells the disciples “Touch me and see…” and then this strange detail that Luke gives us “Have you anything to eat? They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and the took it and ate it in their presence.”

Which seems like a very strange detail for Luke to feel he needs to share. I can think of a lot of other details about the resurrection I would rather have than what Jesus wanted for his meal this day… unless there is something hidden there, evidence that although the resurrection had changed him, he was still one of us.

Over and over in the Resurrection appearances we are given physical details: the road to Emmaus, the run to the tomb, Mary don’t hold onto me yet, walking through walls, Thomas put you hand in my side, breakfast by the beach. All evidence to show us that the Resurrected body is not just a miracle but it’s fundamental to the proclamation of new life in Christ. That message once again: flesh is good, your flesh is good, and God takes pleasure in it.

Jesus gives us plenty of further evidence about how much bodies matter… look at just about anything Jesus command us to do…

Feed my sheep.

Wash one another’s feet.

Take, tell and baptize.

Clothe the naked.

Feed the hungry.

Give the thirsty something to drink.

Visit the widow.

Invite the stranger in.

Heal the sick.

Care for the prisoner.

These are practices of Incarnation…. And they all require a body, flesh. 

It’s do this, not believe this… which are words our church really needs to hear… do this, not believe this. Because First Austin we love to believe because believe requires thinking and we love to think, we love to debate, we love to learn. We can sit and talk about a book we read or theology or interpretation of Scripture or how to change this or that all damn day. We love to think, which is different than contemplation or deepening. 

We love to think. In fact we probably think too much.

Barbara Brown Taylor worries about this in the church today. Her words: “when I hear people talk about what is wrong with organized religion, or why the mainline churches are failing. I hear about bad music, inept clergy, mean congregations, and preoccupation with institutional maintenance. I almost need hear about the intellectualization of faith, which strikes me as a far greater danger than anything on the list. In an age of information overload, when a vast variety of medial delivers news faster than most of us can digest- when many of us have two email addresses, two phones- the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God, More God.”

We need those words.

We need to do better at doing and being with our bodies, if nothing else the better I do with my body, the better I will do with other bodies…. To honor our bodies, we might finally honor other bodies… Imagine how many of the troubles in our world- the Me Too Movement, Black Lives Matter, sex trafficking, bullying- imagine how many end if we learn to honor our bodies and the bodies of others. Imagine how much better we would treat our earth, the body of all of us, if we learned to honor our bodies, so many of the messes we made would not exist. If we only learned that “love others as you love yourself” was a physical command. 

Our faith is quite physical. And it’s time we do a better job with that. 

Your flesh is good, perfectly created, worthy of love.

God delights in it, so pay attention to it.

Care for your and care for others.

And in doing so make your faith physical….. 

Feed my sheep.

Wash one another’s feet.

Take, tell and baptize.

Clothe the naked.

Feed the hungry.

Give the thirsty something to drink.

Visit the widow.

Invite the stranger in.

Heal the sick.

Care for the prisoner.

Do This in Remembrance of Me.

In the Incarnation and Resurrection Jesus- God- the Word took on flesh…. Whose flesh will the Word take on this day?

May it be ours.

Amen and Amen.

*artwork: The Ascension, painting by Jesus Mafa, Camaroon, 1973, librairie-emmanuel.fr