Preached at St John’s, Devizes and Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Romans 12.1-8; Matthew 16.13-20
“present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
On Thursday, when cooking, I gave my thumb a proper deep cut with a sharp cooking knife. It happened as I was getting something ready to put in the slow cooker overnight, so my evening peace was disturbed by frantically finding a plaster to deal with the profuse bleeding. By the time I’d found one, the blood was already showing signs of clotting. Over the 60 hours since, the cut has healed with remarkable speed. I haven’t used any medical aid other than a few plasters; yet the pain has long gone and the gash in the skin is starting to close.
Our bodies are remarkable things. Even the most basic functions of the human body can provoke wonder, and we live at a time when science has unveiled just how wonderful many of the body’s workings are. Yet although the human body in general often provokes wonder, many of us seem to feel our own specific bodies are not good enough.Especially among teenage girls, there is an epidemic of self-harm and depression related to poor body image.
Apostle Paul Preaching on the Ruins (1744) by Giovanni Paolo Pannini; now hangs in the Hermitage, St Petersburg.
So it can be a surprise to hear St Paul speak so positively about bodies in today’s Epistle reading – we are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, he says, and furthermore, he sees the human body as a model for a healthy Church.
Now, if you ask people about faith, very few will tell you that our physical bodies have much to do with it—whether they are Christians, or believers in other faiths, or non-religious people. Faith is held to be a matter of one’s mental or emotional state, detached from physical reality. Even the most faithful and well-read Christians are inclined to go along with the idea that the body is a prison for the soul, a soul which longs to be united with God in a relationship in the world to come that is undisturbed by material things.
Yet, Christianity is a religion of the physical at least as much as of the spiritual. We worship God who became human in the person of Jesus Christ—eating and drinking, getting cuts that healed and viruses that made Him sneeze. We worship a God who even went to the toilet; and a God who ultimately died a death of brutal physicality on the Cross. God lived a human life in the person of Jesus Christ, a life just like ours, except without sin.
When we unite ourselves spiritually with God in the Eucharist it is also a physical act; without bread and wine, blessed and shared in remembrance of the Last Supper, there can be no Holy Communion.
Thus is the God in whose image and likeness we are made, a God who is truly divine and truly human. Far from being a prison for the soul, the body is the nourishing soil in which the mind and the soul are designed to grow and flourish. While thinkers across the ages from Plato to Descartes have emphasised the idea that the body is somehow distinct from our consciousness, with the body being very much inferior, the Judaism from which Christianity sprang never saw the body as of less value than the soul.
Even though most people hardly know his name, our own culture is influenced profoundly by Descartes and his successors, so tends to see our bodies as a problem rather than a gift. We are in danger of seeing our bodies as primarily a source of pain rather than a source of pleasure—and for all but a lucky few slim and beautiful people (of which I am not one) a source of profound embarrassment. Yet, our physicality is the source from which we get much of the joy of being alive: the joys of exercise, eating food, or smelling flowers; the feeling a lush carpet between our toes or the fur of a house-pet through the palms of our hands.
Advertising and the media constantly tell most of us that our bodies aren’t quite good enough – too old, or else too young to be as wrinkly as they are, or too fat, or with those terrible teeth – and therefore that we need to spend money on a beauty product or teeth-straightening or some cosmetic surgery.
This alienation from our physical selves also has more subtle effects, including on how we pray. Fewer people kneel in church than they did twenty or thirty years ago, and they kneel for less of the service; we spend more and more of our time in Church simply sitting back, as passive consumers. The alienation from our physical selves reached a fever-pitch during the lockdowns, when we were taught that being in one another’s physical presence was a potentially deadly threat. The Church pretended worship was just the same if it was watching a YouTube video sitting on the sofa. The effects of the decision to close our churches will be with us for many years to come, as will the effects of closing the schools. No wonder so many young people, so many young women in particular, have picked up the idea that their bodies are a problem.
Yet St Paul, remember, calls us to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God”. He says that as someone the Christian tradition always remembered as being ugly—one 2nd Century author described him as “a man small of stature, with a bald head and crooked legs … with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked.” Yet St Paul, no pin-up boy, frequently uses the body as a metaphor for what the Church should be like. Just as different body parts have different roles, but all are needed for a healthy life, so the Church needs different types of people to fulfil different roles. Some of them might not be that impressive, on surface inspection, yet are the sort of people the body of Christ can’t function well without. So St Paul tries to convince the Christians in Rome, a varied bunch from very different backgrounds, to understand that it’s precisely because of their differences from one another and with one another that they are all essential.
Just as we are often negative about our own bodies, we are often negative about the body of Christ, the Church. We struggle with the fact that so many people in it disagree with us. We expect it to be a lot better than any institution composed of imperfect human beings could ever be. We often judge it against a much higher standard than we judge secular organisations by. But just like none of us individually is very close to being perfect, yet each of us has been given enough to fulfil God’s purposes for us, so the imperfect Church has been given enough to live as the Body of Christ.
St Peter certainly wasn’t perfect, and recent weeks’ Gospel readings have very often been about St Peter getting things wrong. Yet in today’s reading, Jesus, who knew St Peter’s failings better than anyone, tells him that he is the rock on which the Church will be built, a rock who continues to be an anchor two millennia later.
So present your bodies as they are, so that you can be loved by God as you are, a creature of flesh and blood and not merely an imprisoned soul. Trust that as you are good enough for God, that the Church – for all its failings – is good enough for God. Trust that it matters that you are a member of Christ’s Church, and that God has called you to a particular role in it. Finally, pray that through the Holy Communion you will make today, meeting God alive in bread and wine, you, and everyone gathered here today, and the whole Church, may be made a little closer to what God has made us to be.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
