Our bodies are truly amazing things. Too often when we think about them, we tend to focus on what may be wrong. Perhaps a part of us that does not function up to the max. Or when it might seem there is a bit too much body or not quite enough body. We compare our bodies to other bodies and more often than not they do not seem to measure up. Our media is filled with images and messages about our bodies – about how we need to change them to measure up to some made up standard in order to be better or more beautiful or more desirable. We can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on products to beautify ourselves and imagine that somehow we are going to look like the person in the advertisement. We usually fall a bit short of that, at least I do.
I am not saying that we should not care for our bodies or keep them healthy and safe. However, for a moment just think of your body for what it is without changing it in any way. Just the fact that we are alive on this beautiful blue planet, that we breathe in its air and exhale again. That our hearts beat and circulate blood throughout our bodies, that it is cleansed and renewed with oxygen. That we eat and drink so many different things that come from the earth and that it is processed through an amazingly complex system that provides our bodies with what they need and is able to eliminate what we don’t need. Our brains are incredible processing hubs, receiving messages from throughout the body and enabling us to respond to pleasure and pain, to needs and to the most eclectic range of possibilities in the world around us. We feel love, loyalty, anger, hatred and desire for the other. Our passion can be aroused for the other and we have the potential to reproduce ourselves through our bodies. And our brains enable us to imagine a different world in which our bodies and minds can work for change, for good or for ill.
In the current penchant in movies and television for creating beings with super powers, I always like to affirm that our bodies already have superpowers. We have been created in wonderful and marvellous ways by our Creator that enable us to live and to love and to overcome most of the challenges that are put before us. The Psalmist writes, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!”. We may not be able to shoot fire from our eyes, or put on our cape and fly to the moon, or have indestructible blades grow out of our fingers, but we can gaze upon and be in awe at the technicolour beauty of a sunset, we can walk out the door and into the garden and pick tomatoes to feed our family, and we can hug a child and carry them in our arms to console and delight them. What may seem to us to be just the routine things of life are actually, when you step back and think about it, miracles of creation.
The bible is not always so affirmative of our bodies. When we read it, it can seem, at times, that our bodies are our enemies and that we live in a world that is divided between body and spirit. There is a whole tradition within Christianity and indeed within many different religious faiths, that seeks to escape the body or at least to subdue it and limit its passions. The body, and particularly sexual passion, is seen to be the root of sin and the true believer is meant to resist and deny these passions and to live what is considered to be a pure and holy life. Much of this is taken from a reading of Paul in the New Testament who in many places seems to have a very strong negative view of the body and many would say of his own body. This has had implications for the way in which the church has viewed the body, and particularly human sexuality, which have made discussion of the body taboo and have had particularly negative consequences for women and sexual minorities.
But let’s look at the reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans that we read today. Chapter 12 begins a new section in the epistle that we have been hearing over the past two months. Significantly, the chapter begins with a “therefore”. In the previous chapters, Paul has outlined his understanding of the meaning of the gospel, of the coming of the Christ, and especially of the meaning of this for the chosen people of Israel and for those who had been outside the covenant, the Gentiles. Paul has made it clear that no matter what the response of Israel to the good news in Christ, God’s covenant remained with them but that in Christ the covenant is thrown open to all humanity including the people of Israel in a new and all embracing way. We know that this was a reflection on Paul’s lived experience of having been one of the most important figures in bringing the good news to many communities of people in the eastern Mediterranean and being a witness to the work of the Spirit among them as they responded to the good news in Christ. In Chapter 8 we read the famous words, “If God is for us, who is against us? . . . Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This is the good news writ large.
And then, “therefore”. If this is the case, then what? “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice”. It is an odd phrase, almost an oxymoron. In the ancient world the sacrifice of animals was a common thing but this, of necessity, meant the death of the animal. What is a living sacrifice? Something given wholly to another to the point of dying for the other. One commentator suggests that in our modern world a better translation might be an “offering”, our bodies are to be a living offering. Not just the money we put on the collection plate but our whole lives which are given to God in response to the love and forgiveness we have known in Christ. Because God has given all to you in Christ,therefore we are to give our all back to God in response. This is our spiritual worship. Again, here, the translation can be a bit misleading and can perhaps take us to that dualistic understanding of our bodies needing to be “spiritualized”, being made something different from what they are now. In fact the Greek word used here is λογικὴν –logikēn which can also mean “logical” or “reasonable” which is how it is translated in the Authorized or King James Version of the bible. This is what we should do – with our bodies.
Our life in Christ is about our life in our bodies. It is not about escaping our bodies or escaping the world in which we live. It is about giving ourselves – – fully, bodily, humanly – in response to the love we have known in Christ. This sacrifice, this offering will lead us into a new and transformed community which itself will reflect God’s love in Christ. Our living sacrifice means a change, a transformation, not staying the same, not conforming to the way things were. And it is interesting that Paul, here, uses the imagery of body, as he does elsewhere, to describe what this new community is to be like. Just as the body has many parts, so the new community, the body of Christ, has many parts and no one part is more important than the other. That wasn’t the kind of community the followers in the way of Jesus knew in the first century. There were people and groups of people who were definitely understood to be more important than the others. And it isn’t the kind of communities we are used to experiencing in our own world. There are people and groups of people who are definitely understood to more important than the others.
But in the new community, you are not to think of yourself more highly than you ought. There are a variety of people and gifts but just as in a body each one, each part has an important role to play. It is one of the marks of this new community that each member is valued and loved and respected because each part has a role to play. The ministers and elders have a role to play but they are no more important or loved or worthy of respect than any other member of the community. Each one is to do their part to the best of their ability and to encourage and uphold every other member as they play their part. It is what we are called to be, with our bodies and as the body of Christ.
And that’s who we are, right? Day by day, in every aspect of our lives together as the body of Christ we love and respect each other and never think too highly of ourselves. We have been transformed into the body beautiful. Well, not quite. We still have some problems. We need some Tylenol or a Band-Aid or some Pepto-Bismol or a trip to the emergency ward every now and again, just like our own bodies do. We need to work at staying well and fit and functioning. We have some challenges that sometimes seem almost impossible to overcome. We’re a real body offered to God in all its beauty and amazing abilities but also with all its warts and shortcomings. We are called to keep working at it. To do our part. To be the body of Christ in the world, each of us discerning and using our gifts for the other on whom we also depend. Perhaps we will see that the body of Christ, just like our own bodies, is an amazing, miraculous thing, already containing incredible super powers to welcome, heal, restore and transform us.
Are you someone who can vision for the future? Are you someone who likes to serve others? Are you someone who likes to teach? Are you someone who likes to pull people together in a team? Are you someone who likes to fundraise and encourage giving? Are you a natural born leader? Are you someone who wants to volunteer and give back to the community? Or maybe you are someone with other gifts that we could not even imagine. No matter what body you might be, you are part of the body of Christ and you can offer yourself in service and love, body, mind and Spirit to the one who has given all for you. A living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
