Come Now, O Prince of Peace,
make us one body.
Come, O Lord Jesus,
Reconcile your people.
-
Geonyong Lee, tr.
Marion Pope, “Come Now, O Prince of Peace,” ELW 247
Bodies. Everybody’s got one, or
maybe everybody is one? Our bodies grow old and fall ill; they limit us
physically as well as bringing us joy in work and in play. The human body is vastly complex, yet so often
simple and beautiful in its function and movement. I don’t exercise enough, I
eat more junk food than I should, and my sleep habits are irregular at best – like
some of you, I’m not always a good steward of my body, which is to say, of
myself.
The church, widely speaking, has
generally been bad at making sense of human bodies.
Historically the church has
treated most women terribly, blaming them for all manner of sin and weakness
because their bodies differ from those of the men in charge. Too often we have
fallen into the philosophized dichotomies telling us that bodies are bad and souls
are good, that our embodied experiences on earth mean nothing in comparison to an
ethereal existence in heaven. Without getting too deep into this (see/hear
basically everything I’ve ever written/said about Revelation and or “rapture”
for more), let me say that I reject this division we’ve imposed between body
and soul that always relegates bodies to second-class status.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not
claiming that bodies are better than souls, or that earth is better than
heaven, or any such thing. Rather, I’m asking why we feel the need to draw the
bright red line between them at all. I’ll use myself as an example: Am I a more
a soul than I am a body, or a mind or a spirit? No, I am all of those things. My
body is me, and my soul and mind and spirit are also me, and in this life I can’t
have one without the other. In the grand scheme of the church, we’ve done
alright with souls – maybe not great, but alright at least. And western
Protestantism has done pretty well with minds, with all our theological
propositions and systematic theologies and statements and creeds. I admit this
article falls well short of proving the following, but I’ll say it just the
same: we as the church have some work to do to bring our reckoning and
respecting of bodies up to the level at which we do the same for our souls and
minds.
Why in the world do I bring this
up? Advent, the season of waiting, is upon us. And what are we waiting for? For
God to come and dwell among us, as one of us. Jesus was born, a human being, to
a human woman. Maybe it’s because I’ve now witnessed actual human birth when my
son was born – I’ll spare you the details – but I cannot stop thinking about the
embodied reality of Jesus, the fullness of God who was fully human, even in the
form of a squawking, birth-covered baby.
Incarnation is the fancy church
word I’ve been avoiding until now. Incarnation is the embodiment of God in the
human person Jesus of Nazareth. Incarnation means that God loves us so much
that God became one of us in our human body, and that therefore our bodies are
at the center of God’s plan for redemption and reconciliation with all the
world. God loves us, not just our bright ideas or our good intentions or our
eternal souls. God loves all of us, all of each of us, our whole selves in our
whole lives.
So this Advent I’ll be thinking a
lot about human bodies, in all their frailty and all their beauty. On
Wednesdays in Advent we hope to address – not answer, likely, but make a
serious effort – this question: how can we use our bodies to worship God? As
God entered our world for our salvation as a human body, how can our human
bodies today be for God? We believe God’s embodied presence to be among us each
Sunday in the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ, so we’ll be celebrating
this sacrament on Advent Wednesdays this year as well. Remember, a sacrament is
God’s word wedded to some plain physical substance – water or wine or bread,
generally. Sacraments remind us that God takes ordinary physical things and
makes them extraordinary, makes them holy, sets them apart to show God’s glory
for the sake of the world God loves.
Sixteenth century saint Teresa of
Avila wrote:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
We often describe the church as
the body of Christ. This powerful metaphor takes us from 1st
Corinthians 12 (“For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body”) through
the history of the church, including Teresa, all the way to the ELCA’s current
tagline (“God’s Work, Our Hands”). We are Christ’s embodied presence in the
world. Not merely we are called to be Christ’s presence; we actually are the body
of Christ in the world, all the time. When I bother to take these words
seriously, to reflect on what they mean for me, I can think of no more humbling
or empowering summons to love and service of God and neighbor.
Thanks,
Pastor Andrew
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