Love letter to the Body

<sup>Sermon for Trinity 7B.

Ephesians 2: 14</sup>For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. 

^{Mark 6: 31}He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.

⁵⁶And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the market-places, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.

Love Letter to the Body

Dear Body,

You know, don’t you, that if you’re saved at all, you’re saved in your body.

It started with a body, taking flesh, being born of a woman, coming in frailty, the ‘mewling and puking’; the growing; the growing up; the slow realisation that death would be, of course, bodily.

The Jews circumcise the body to mark themselves as separate, as superior to the uncircumcised Gentiles. It was always thus.

The humanity into which I came was a humanity bitterly divided.

Years of fighting over difference – a dividing wall of hostility.

‘We know God; you don’t’.

‘You’re crazy, we’re not.’

The Jews wanted me dead: the Gentiles carried it out.

But on that cross, the one that killed the body, slowly, painfully, in my flesh, the two became one household – Gentile and Jew welcomed into God’s family with open arms, the arms of my Father in heaven.

Because all who come to me are family.

And all who are in me are my Body.

That is why I long for you all – who does not love their own body, tending it, feeding it, grieving when it hurts and waiting for its final redemption?

Because of this, you must love the body.

Come to me when you’re weary, and I will give you rest.

Those early days of ministry, Peter, James and John and the others would dash about, breathless with excitement!

Everything was so good, so new, the life of the Son of Man, the teaching and healing, cooking and laughing under the stars.

The abundant life is so attractive; it draws people.

The abundant life of God can be difficult to handle though; it can be overwhelming.

(By the way, if you only know scarcity, you must have the wrong God!)

I urged them to rest, so many were coming and going, so much need.

Once you unstop the lid, out it all spills – hungers, pain, unforgiveness, illness, bereavement, feuding, envy, anger, lust. 

Out it comes, seeking healing, seeking reconciliation.

The clamouring for my presence, like sheep endlessly bleating in the green pasture, not really knowing one end of the pen from the other.

If you don’t rest you’ll burn up, like kindling on a hot day.

The pattern is there – work, rest, play.

So many evils come from abusing the pattern.

Too busy to pray, too greedy to stop, digestive problems, palpitations; the body will rebel.

It is a finely tuned instrument, like a lute.

Let me play its tune.

Treat it carefully, this temple of the Holy Spirit. I dwell there.

The body is good.

It thrives on good, honest, sweaty labour, like the labour of carving wood, shaving off the end of a beam, sawdust filtering down in the sunlit air, the fresh odour of sap released.

Your body craves water, fresh air, the great outdoors, sunshine on skin, long walks.

Listen to your body. Care for it. Tend it gently, love your body like a child; never harm it willingly, for you are fearfully and wonderfully made.

It is in the body that you are saved.

It is in resting that you remember you are not the Creator.

It is in eating that you remember man does not live by bread alone.

Don’t over-eat; don’t hide from yourself that you’re drinking too much.

Attend to where your hungers are coming from.

Did you know that eating is a sacrament?

A living sign of the goodness of God.

Food restores both body and soul. Eat together and be thankful.

Remember that in a world where some of my children go to bed and wake up hungry, the rich are often poor before God, and the poor rich, like Dives and Lazarus.

Remember the last time we eat together, last week, the week before….?

That is true fellowship, one with another.

Take, eat, this is my body, broken for you.

Take time. Notice every mouthful; eat with thankful hearts.

Never let it be true that you have no leisure even to eat.

Despite its glory, however, the body will let you down.

It is destined for a greater glory, so first it will wear itself out.

There will be times when you feel that your very being is dissolving, that you’re being poured out like dust.

There will be times when you’re so tired, three hours sleep will seem like a gift from heaven.

There will be times when you bless those who have spent years studying the infinite complexities of your insides and who can knit you back together, as far as is possible.

There will be times when death disrupts the order of things, a little one lost; a child before a parent; a parent before a grandparent.

This is dark, like Lazarus entombed, but not dark enough not to be redeemed, finally brought into the blinding light of day.

Unwrap them now!

All of creation groans to be delivered – your sufferings will seem like the pangs of childbirth, the cries of pain before deliverance.

Mary knew all about that.

So don’t curse the body that wears out; befriend it. Tend it.

Let others serve you. Let me serve you, let me tie a towel around my waist and wash your feet in the basin, wash away your tears.

Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Reach out and touch the fringe of my cloak, like the sick who were brought to me in the market places, the farms, the fields.

When you reach out and touch me, I will know that power has gone out from me, but that is why I came - to destroy all the works of the evil one, to entrust my body to death, to rise with a resurrection body, a sign of what is to follow for you.

Just imagine those walks we’ll do on the new earth, on the new grass, sharper and greener and harder than diamond...

I cannot wait!

But I am waiting...

From your loving Saviour and Brother,

Jesus.

On the Third Day

Easter Morning Sermon

John 20:1-8 'I have seen the Lord'.

The Resurrection of the Body (Maia Press, 1995) by author Maggie Hamand (whom I was privileged to meet recently) features a vicar with a crisis of faith. Revd. Richard Page shepherds a church in a London suburb; he has a loving wife and two small sons, but for him the resurrection of Jesus form the dead is more a spiritual thing than anything that could strictly said to be physical. He's a good man, with strong convictions, but he cannot reconcile the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. Until, that is, he has a dramatic experience in church on Good Friday.

During the sombre Good Friday service, while the congregation are in quiet prayer and contemplation of the saviour on the cross, a man stumbles in, bleeding from a vicious knife wound, and collapses inside the church. The paramedics are called, the congregation is distraught and the vicar unable to complete the service. The man is taken away to hospital where he later dies. The subsequent disappearance of the body is made even more mysterious by his later reported appearances in the local park, fish restaurant and ‘upper room’ of a flat in the town. The vicar sets out to try and find out what is really going on, and in doing so, nearly falls foul of the police, his congregation and even his wife. Is he going mad, or is the man still alive somehow? What would it mean if it were true? In addition one of the congregation is also convinced she has seen the man alive and wants Richard to corroborate this, whilst others doubt.

It makes the vicar reassess his crisis of faith.

In the end we’re left wondering if he has re-found his faith in a living Jesus.

The truth remains for us that we believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Our Creeds declare, ‘on the third day he rose again’)

Why this confidence?

BECAUSE OF WITNESSES.

Who dunnits are a favourite genre with me.

In any reconstruction of events, the testimony of a witness is of paramount importance.

We will consider 1) witnesses then and 2) witnesses now

1)Paul’s account in 1 Corinthians 15 reads rather different from the gospel account - he seems to miss out that it was the women who first saw Jesus on that Easter morning. 

In the gospel accounts, women feature heavily as witnesses: ‘the women in the gospel narratives are the first people to find the tomb of Jesus empty. Moreover 'they are the only witnesses to the empty tomb who had seen Jesus buried and therefore could vouch for the fact that the empty tomb really was the tomb in which Jesus’ body had been laid two days before’ (Richard Bauckham)*.

Let’s reconstruct the events from our eyewitness accounts.

In our gospel today, Mary is the first to witness the empty tomb.

She runs to Peter and John and says: ‘they have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have put him’.

Resurrection is so far from her mind, she naturally takes something known (theft of a body) and assumes this is the case here (the intriguing ‘we’ do not know where they have put him is suggestive of others with here – we know from other accounts that there were at least three women in the garden that morning – but John focuses on Mary Magdalene).

The next witnesses to the empty tomb are Peter and John.

I love the personal details: John outruns Peter but doesn’t go in; Peter goes into the empty tomb after arriving there and sees the linen cloth for the body wrapped up in a different place from the head wrapping.

It seems Jesus just passed through it (compare this to the raising of Lazarus, where Lazarus came out still wrapped in the linens...)

We’re not told what Peter made of this, but we are told that John looked in and believed: ‘he saw and believed’.

Seeing is not always believing, but in John’s case it is, though all he has seen is the absence of a body...

So we are building up a picture of the witnesses to the resurrection:

·      The empty tomb.

·      The empty tomb now seen by three disciples: Mary, Peter and John

·      The grave cloths wrapped up neatly inside.

Now we go to a different segment of the resurrection story.

Bauckham* points out that in each of the gospel accounts, we have the same narrative pattern: the discovery of the empty tomb – the appearance of Jesus to his disciples and their commissioning – and in the middle and transition: in this case, it is the personal experience of Mary Magdalene.

Added to her witnessing the empty tomb, she now sees the angels and meets the risen Lord.

The evidence of her eyes is battling with her preconceived ideas of what is actually possible – dead persons do not generally come back to life, so she thinks Jesus is the gardener.

In some way he must have looked different – though also the same – she does recognise him with her ears, when he says her name: MARY.

There is something intimate in the recognition.

We have seen that our belief in the risen Jesus is based on eyewitness accounts of the resurrection: that

·      Mary was a witness to where Jesus was buried; to the empty tomb, to the angels and finally to Jesus himself.

·      Peter and John witnessed the empty tomb, the linen cloths and eventually, on the evening of the first day of the week, Jesus himself in the upper room.

·      Paul attests to the very basic fact of Jesus’ resurrection, to Peter, the 12, James and to himself.

This leads us to our 2^nd point:

2)Where/who are the witnesses to the resurrection today?

You will have realised that Paul never actually met the physical person of Jesus – he was born too late.

However he testifies to the risen Jesus because he met him on the road to Damascus.

This is our clue: today, the witnesses to Jesus are us, those who have met him and know him to have changed our lives.

A witness is the word ‘marturia’ – martyr.

A martyr is simply one who testifies to Jesus.

I’d like us to think particularly about this idea of witness as we start a new year with the PCC.

In each generation, the Church has continued because of the witness of the followers of Jesus.

Where that witness stops, the Church stops.

How can we be witnesses, if we have never seen the Lord?

Mary said ‘I have seen the Lord’

Can we say the same?

What does a witness need to do?

·     Witnesses gather for worship.

·     Witnesses when love one another

·     Witnesses care about the community.

·     Witnesses point to Jesus 

We started with Revd. Richard Page, struggling to believe in the historical resurrection, wondering if it weren’t all a myth – a nice myth, but a myth nonetheless. You'll have to buy the book and read the final 2 pages to see what happened in the end...it changes everything...

*'The Women at the Tomb: The Credibility of their Story'. The Laing Lecture at London Bible College.