I returned and did parish work while also rushing around doing things for my family in the evenings. I played phone tag with several people fruitlessly and frustratingly. We closed on a new house, and learned we needed new phones to be able to stay in contact with the outside world, and had to make the arrangement for all of the resulting changes. Bill was so excited we had to spend the night there even without our furniture and no internet. And more church work, and more family tasks. At the speed of sound.
And the truth is, it wore me out. And I thought about how we are prone in America to worship overwork, and overfunctioning, and how we take being tired and overscheduled to somehow be a sign to us of how important we are. And I give thanks that right when I needed it most, we get a gospel that reminds us of how Jesus calls us to remember the unity between body and soul, and the importance of honoring and caring for ourselves and others in our bodily needs.
To set the scene for the gospel: A couple of weeks ago in the lectionary, Jesus had sent the apostles out to evangelize throughout the Judean countryside. At the start of our gospel reading today, they return, exhilarated—but also exhausted. They have been more successful than they had ever dreamed they could be. After all, it was one thing for Jesus to heal the sick and explain the kingdom of God. Jesus is, after all, the Son of God. Miracles and healing are his specialty, we’ve been led to believe. But for merely human apostles to do the same thing? Inconceivable at first—but exactly what each person who follows Jesus is called to do.
Throughout this gospel today, we see Jesus lovingly, tenderly, perceptively taking human physical needs and limitations seriously. As always, he offers healing to all who ask—and even to the disciples, who forget to ask. Are you tired? Jesus asks. Rest. Especially, rest in prayer, in the presence of God. Honor your human body and its needs as well as your obligations as my followers. Being human is not less-than. Being human is holy, when all we do is lived in the pursuit and presence of God.
Far too much of Christianity today emphasizes the miraculous, divine side of Jesus and his status as the Christ. We then lose sight of the human being Jesus son of Mary also was— the son, the brother, the friend, the apprentice carpenter, the nascent rabbi. And that is not a good thing for a variety of reasons, but one of the most insidious of which is it leads to a splitting of our lives between the sacred and the worldly, the soul and the body, which can be very harmful to our overall well-being.
Worse, there are those who convince themselves that spiritual stuff is for Sundays, while also walling off the ethical obligations of being Christian the other days of the week. It has become common in our religious discourse to preference the spiritual over the material, and in particular the body —with often disastrous consequences.
Favoring the spiritual over the bodily has led to very real harm in Christian history. It has led to many pious people coldly discounting the pains, sufferings, and sorrows of this world and its inhabitants with a shrug of helplessness at best or unconcerned fatalism at worst. At its widest perspective, this disdain for bodily existence leads to talk about this world--and its inhabitants-- as fallen, evil, unredeemable, accursed, worthy only of being exploited and consumed rather than something holy that God from the moment of creation pronounced “good” and even “very good.” There are even groups of Christians who gleefully welcome natural disasters and diseases as signs of the Apocalypse, which they believe will lead to them being raptured off of this fallen world while millions suffer torment. It’s appallingly hateful and selfish—and also completely opposed to how Jesus lives his own life with others.
Men’s bodies, too, must be physically strong, vigorous, coordinated, masterful, dominant—or their very worth as men can be questioned. Weakness, emotion, or vulnerability must be denied at all costs. And it causes very real physical and spiritual harm for all of us.
Even more subtly, in our everyday lives, this false divide between body and soul can make it easy for us to excuse ethical decisions we make in our workaday lives that we know in our hearts violate Jesus’s gospel of good news for everyone.
We can find ourselves nodding our heads on Sunday to commandments not to lie or cheat or exploit others, but then relegate such promises to the spiritual world when confronted with the chance to grab power or make a buck during the rest of the week.
The contempt we can have for our own bodies and their needs is NOTHING compared to the contempt we can have for other people’s bodies and their needs if we believe it might cost us something in terms of advantage or privilege or freedom. Divorcing body from soul also costs us our integrity, compassion, and sense of duty to our fellow human beings by “othering” them and declaring “the weak”—a terrible word itself filled with blame and shame-- as deserving of their poverty and suffering for our own benefit.
We cannot draw a bright line between our bodily lives—political, economic, secular—and our spiritual lives. We have one life given to us by the gift and grace of God. That one life is a seamless whole, and we have to honor both our bodily needs and our spiritual growth as a unified whole. And as much as we honor our own bodily needs, as disciples of Jesus we are called to care for the bodily needs of others, particularly the vulnerable, and never insist on our own way if it could cause another person to stumble, or if it could obscure or refute the goodness of God in the world. We have to remember that each individual body does not exist by itself, but exists within a number of communities, including the Body of Christ.
Our gospel reading this week makes it clear that not only was Jesus human, he understood the cared for the very human needs of his disciples as they went about the shared work of bringing the kingdom of God to light on earth. The very human Jesus and the very human disciples spent large parts of their lives ministering to others because that is what the life of a follower of Jesus MUST be all about. Our daily lives flow out of our spiritual lives. What does our daily life say about our spiritual values? This is important, necessary and ongoing self-reflection.
Our gospel reminds us that body and the soul are the insuperable two sides of the same coin that makes up human existence, for Jesus as well as all of us. Jesus as the Incarnate One hallows and exemplifies human bodily existence, showing us all what wonder and beauty and nobility of which we are all capable as God’s children.
In unifying the body and the soul, the human and the divine, and awakening all of us to our possession of both natures from our very creation and first breath, Jesus has awakened us and those disciples that to the reality that we don’t get a free pass to leave the miracles to Jesus as the divine Son of God while we excuse our vices as being merely human.
How would it change our lives if we actively acknowledged the truth that everything we do, no matter how mundane or trivial or practical—how we work, how we play, how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, how we spend our time and our money-- is done in the presence of God? To realize that body and soul together are what makes each of us who we are both as individuals but also has very real implications with how we use our time and our skills and our bodies in the world as a visible testimony to who we say God is and who we are as God created each of us?
When we view our lives as completely lived before the presence of God, both our work and our play will reflect God’s kingdom values of justice, compassion, healing, wellness, interconnectedness. There will be no more “them” and us.” There will be no more division between “work” and “worship.” There will be no more striving without rest.
We are called to stand before God with all that we are and all that we have—body and soul. What we pray and what we do is our true testimony in the eyes of the world.
There must be no more illusion that all that we are and all that we do, that all that we give and all that we receive are all not of one seamless whole before our Lord, our Savior, our Creator, who loves us beyond imagining and calls us to embrace the life of generosity and community that both sustains us and calls us forward as beloveds of God. Body and soul, at work or at rest, always in the presence of God, our Companion, Shepherd, and Creator.
Preached at the 10:30 online service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, on July 18, 2021.
Readings:
No comments:
Post a Comment