Musings

Dec

31

Your Body is Holy

A sermon preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Port Chester, NY on Sunday, December 31st, 2017 (1st Sunday after Christmas)

Readings: Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147; Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

The portion of John’s Gospel that we just read is probably not the first place our minds go when we think of the Christmas story. Where is the manger? The star? The shepherds? Where is the Baby Jesus, for that matter? This story, full of words and light, glory and grace, might seem abstract compared to the very specific details that we heard in the Gospel according to Luke on Christmas Day. And yet, John is the one who offers us this verse that is, in so many ways, the key to our Christian faith: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

The Word became flesh. It’s one of those Bible catchphrases we’ve heard a million times. Every Sunday, we recite a variation of it when we read the Nicene Creed: “He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.” On some level, we understand that being Christian involves worshipping a God who voluntarily became a human being. But how often do we really think through what that means? How comfortable are we, really, with a God who has a body?

It’s fine when we think about it from a safe distance. A baby in a manger: that’s cute. God became one of us, that’s lovely, reassuring, even. But, by and large, we are not so comfortable with bodies. Starting with our own. Having a body is a complicated business. Bodies don’t always do what we want them to. They hurt. They catch colds at the most inconvenient times. They refuse to fit into the clothes we want to wear on a given day. And, sooner or later, they start to fail us in more significant ways. Bones become brittle and break. Cancer cells invade. Memories become fuzzy under the veil of dementia. In a thousand different ways, ranging from annoying to downright terrifying, our bodies remind us of our fragility and our mortality. And for that, we tend to resent and be ashamed of our flesh. We ignore its needs, we disparage its appearance, we demand superhuman feats of our fragile human bodies, or we just wish they were different – skinnier, younger, healthier. The idea that God might have a body just like ours is uncomfortable, scary, and threatening.

To make matters more challenging, the church has a long history of picking up on our general human discomfort with bodies. The Bible is littered with verses that sound like an all-out assault on human flesh: according to Paul, our bodies are basically obstacles to be overcome on the path to enlightened, spiritual existence. In 1 Corinthians, Paul even boasts of punishing and enslaving his body, which brings to mind images of medieval monks flagellating themselves, doing violence to their bodies in the name of Jesus.

But there is a huge, glaring contradiction here. Do you see it? If the Word became Flesh, if God became human, if the divine took on a body, then how can our flesh be bad? If human flesh was good enough for Jesus, then what are we still doing condemning it? If the Word became Flesh, then our bodies are a place where we can meet God. If the Word became Flesh, it was to show us loud and clear, once and for all, that our own flesh is holy.

How would we live differently if we really believed that? What would our medical system look like if we really believed that every human body was worthy of healing and care? What would our immigration system look like if we believed that no human body can be casually labeled as illegal, deportable? What would our lives look like if we treated our human flesh with respect and dignity, if we saw the ways we eat and rest and move not as obligations foisted upon us by others, but as invitations to encounter our own fundamental holiness?

It’s easy for us to imagine Jesus as some kind of divine superman: sure, he looked human, but he can’t really have been just like us. It’s easy to imagine a Jesus who’s a little too perfect – a baby Jesus who never cried. An adult Jesus who never got hungry, never was tired, and who, oh, by the way, was ridiculously good-looking. This super-Jesus is too good for the banal limitations of a body. Human flesh is beneath his divine dignity. But that is not the Jesus John is describing when he writes, “The Word was made Flesh.” He doesn’t say, “the Word looked an awful lot like flesh,” or “the Word pretended to be flesh.” The Word was made Flesh. Period. And that is our salvation.

Why? Because God understands that our bodies matter, that they are much more than just cumbersome containers for our eternal souls. Our imperfect, fragile bodies are the only way we have to meet God: our ears hear God’s word in Scripture, our eyes see God’s beauty in the world around us, our hands reach out and touch God when we greet each other at the Peace, our tongues taste the sweetness of Christ every time we receive the Eucharist. God understands this even when we do not. By taking on a human body, God is showing us that there is no aspect of our humanity that God is not willing to share. That no secret pocket of shame or fear is too much for God to handle, that no brokenness is too great for God to heal, that there is nothing we need to hold back for fear of being ridiculed, judged, or punished. There is no place we can go where Jesus hasn’t already been, no darkness within us that Jesus cannot visit. The Word became flesh to heal our deeply fractured relationship with our own bodies, so that we might be whole and holy, so that we might have the abundant life that God promises us.

None of this is easy for us to take in. If we’ve spent a lifetime seeing our bodies as inconvenient, broken, weak, and unworthy, it will take time and patience to unlearn those assumptions enough to see our flesh as inherently holy and worthy of love. But the Incarnation that we celebrate in these 12 days of Christmas shows us that it is possible. And lucky for us, we get an opportunity to practice recognizing the divine holiness of our flesh every Sunday, every time we stretch out our hands to receive Christ’s body into our own in the Eucharist.

When I distribute Communion, when I look you in the eyes (if you’ll let me), place a piece of bread in your palm, and say, “The Body of Christ,” it’s not only the host I’m referring to. It’s you. It’s cool that a piece of bread can turn into Jesus, but what has the potential to change the world is that we become God’s body. So as I give you the Sacrament, my prayer is that that tiny piece of bread will allow you to realize how holy, how beloved your own bodies are. My prayer is that you might recognize that you already share God’s body. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. What if we really allowed ourselves to believe it? Amen.