It appears that we are confused about our bodies. It seems as if we are not sure whether our bodies are to be honored or feared, adored or altered or if we are simply to do with them what we please. We are certainly not alone since nearly every community to which Paul sent his letters was confused too. We read in his first letter to the community in Corinth that the new believers weren’t entirely sure if resurrection would be physical or spiritual, they weren’t sure if they were supposed to refrain from sex altogether even in marriage and it was unclear to them whether their heads should be covered when praying or worshiping- all of this resulted from confusion about their bodies. And in Paul’s letter to the people in Rome, a piece of which you just heard, we learn that Paul has his own struggles with matters of the flesh. He writes, “…for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” But he says this at the same time that he was celebrating and proclaiming the Christian life as an incarnational and embodied faith. Paul himself struggled to include his own body fully into his walk with God. We see this in his myriad letters that include all kinds of condemnation of the body. For Paul, the total self or ‘body’ holds within it a struggle between the ‘spirit’, the higher self, and the ‘flesh.’ The body is subject to attack by sin, a power Paul frequently personifies. “According to Paul, it is sin in the flesh that leads us to rebel against God, and this rebellion manifests itself in all forms of wickedness and vice.” Clearly he was mired in his own battle, as he struggled to embrace a Christian identity that included the Jewish faith of his childhood. Particularly in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes within the framework of two extremes. On the one hand he says that “all things are lawful” (1 Corinthians 6:12, 10:23) and on the other hand he saw physical desire as evil and among other things he wrote, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman (1 Corinthians 7:1).” Given Paul’s role in crafting the tone and theological foundation for the early Christian church, it is of little surprise that two thousand years later, we are still confused about how our bodies fit into our Christian faith.
This way of thinking has led us to mistrust our bodies and has allowed us to engage in unhealthy and ungodly behavior. Instead of being equipped by the Church to see our bodies as signs of God’s love and instruments of God’s hopes for wholeness, many of us were raised to see our bodies as something for which we should be ashamed or something we should hide or something we need to change to fit the culturally established standards of beauty. Some have even argued that the Christian church’s condemnation of the body has led to many of our most heated social and political arguments. After analyzing the so-called American culture war, James D. Hunter has argued that most of our intense disagreements are ultimately about our unhealthy relationship with our bodies. He writes, “Controversies about abortion, sexual harassment, pornography, vulgar art or music, sex education, condom distribution, homosexuality, AIDS policy or euthanasia and the ‘right to die’ all trace back to the human body.” We aren’t sure whether our bodies are to be honored or feared adored or altered or if we are simply to do with them what we please
Clearly, there are a lot of factors that have gotten us into this feud with our bodies. First, we have come to think of our body as some kind of machine, something where parts can easily be replaced or quickly tweaked by professionals. We say that we need to plug-in to get recharged and we are disappointed when our machines fail us. It is no wonder that in this mindset we find it difficult to see our bodies as part of our whole integrated self. Further, we are sent literally millions of messages from advertisements, television and we are told that “normal” is something that no one could naturally or safely achieve. Our bodies are put forth as commodities to be used, changed or means by which we can get ahead or get attention. Darrell Jodock writes, “Magazines and movies overvalue the body when they glorify sex, then undervalue it by endorsing casual sex.” This has been especially true for young women. We tell them to that their bodies can get them into trouble and yet we fail to give them any tools by which they are empowered to celebrate this gift.
We overvalue our bodies when we put our appearance before our core substance and we undervalue our bodies when we drink too much, eat too much or simply fail to honor it as a blessing from God. We say that we believe in the abundant life that Jesus offers, but many of us have excluded our body entirely and we are left feeling somehow incomplete.
Writer, D.J. Heasman contends that the attitude of Christians has all too often been as though the joy arising from the body were itself unhealthy, and wicked. A persistent tendency in Christianity has been towards the Manichaean view that the body itself is evil; … Heasman goes on to argue that an unhealthy attitude to sexuality has bedeviled the Christian tradition by encouraging people to reduce all morals to the connotation of sexual morals, in such a way as to regard denial as superior to indulgence, even within marriage, thereby generating needless and unnatural guilt.
And guilt and shame have not gotten us very far. Our failure to celebrate our bodies, to love them, care for them and use them to love one another has done damage to all of us. And I suspect that this thinking hurt Paul too. Because even wrote at length about how sinful the flesh was, he also wrote, “that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” Indeed if we are to see ourselves as children of God, heirs of God’s being and blessing, if we are inheritors of that very breath that called creation into being, if we are the keepers of that promise and we believe what the story of Genesis sings out again and again, “God saw that it was good,” then we need to begin to change the way we see our bodies. If we really believe that we are precious in God’s sight, then that must mean all of us, our whole selves, including our flesh and bones. We need to begin to undo the years of shame and guilt, the decades and centuries of violence and suspicion that we have laid upon our bodies and not just for ourselves, but for our children. What if we were the first generation to teach our children to see their bodies as evidence of God’s love? What if we started the process of unraveling the baggage we have put upon our bodies? What would it look like for us to follow Jesus with our mind, our heart and even our body?
If we continue to proclaim that we live an incarnational faith, then we must begin to embody that which we believe. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “For all of our failure to honor them, our bodies remain God’s best way of getting to us. To embrace the daily practice of incarnation is to walk the way of life that God opened to us in Jesus Christ, by showing us how to inhabit our own flesh as fully and faithfully as he did his.” There is a reason we are called the Body of Christ- in part because Jesus asked us to be his body, to be his hands, to be his heart, to be his flesh and presence of love far beyond his time here on Earth and we if we believe that the Gospel is true, then even our bodies are redeemed- even our bodies are precious in God’s sight. Our bodies are holy; our bodies are signs of God’s love and instruments of God’s hopes for wholeness for each of us. Amen.
The New Testament: Proclamation and Parenesis, Myth and History. Eds. Dennis C. Duling and Norman Perrin. (New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 1994) 249
James D. Taylor’s book Before the Shooting Begins cited by Darrell Jodock in “Living by the Word: Confused about the Body” in Christian Century February 1-8, 1995
Darrell Jodock in Living by the Word: Confused about the body in Christian Century February 1-8 1995
D. J. Heasman in the July 1977 issue of Political Quarterly
Barbara Brown Taylor. Practicing incarnation in Christian Century April 5th, 2005. pp. 39.