homily
preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA
by the
Rev. Josh Hosler, Associate Priest for Adult Formation
Thursday, April 20,
2017
What is our beginning? What
is our end? We think we know: conception and birth on the one hand and death
and decay on the other. Between those two mileposts, we live and move and have
our being.
That’s the scientific view.
But those of us raised in the church were told as children that death and decay
are not the end: that beyond the grave is a new and spiritual life. Well, they
probably didn’t put it to us this way at first. Instead, they told us, “When we
die, we go to heaven.” There may also have been a qualifier: “If you’ve been
good. If not, well, you go to other place, the place with a name you’re not
allowed to say.” (It was bad theology to use the threat of hell to make
children behave, but that’s a sermon for another day.)
At first it was easy to
believe it would happen just like this: when we died, we would be magically
transported to a new place. Then at some point we learned that dead bodies rot
away. Now we needed another explanation: where in reality is the one who has
died? And so we learned to separate body from spirit, and to see spirit as better
than body because it would not decay. If we grew up with any sort of shame
about our bodies, sexual or otherwise, this division may have become much more
pronounced, and it may have served as some sort of cold comfort.
It is at this point that
our understanding of death and eternal life began to diverge from the witness
of the gospel writers. Why do I say it happened at this point? Because the
resurrected Christ is not a ghost.
 |
| In the earliest years of the Church, the fish became a symbol for identifying fellow Christians. The Greek word "ichthus," for fish, is an acrostic for "Iesous Christos, Theou Huios, Soter" ("Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior"). Fish also serves as the first meal for the Resurrected Christ. |
We admit to this every
Sunday in the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the resurrection of the body.” Do
we? We say we do, but have we been properly grounded in what this might mean? When
Jesus returns, not only is he in a physical body, but he’s hungry from the work
of resurrecting! This story follows right on the heels of the story of the Road
to Emmaus, in which two disciples walk with the resurrected Christ for seven
miles without recognizing him: only when he breaks bread and gives it to them
does his presence become clear. So Jesus is walking and eating just like they
do, but in addition, there is a strange new quality to his body.
This may be puzzling to those
of us who fully adopted a spirit-versus-matter dualism while we were still
children. We had thought that our bodies were just something we had: a great tool at best, but not
really “ourselves.” We can bite off our fingernails or even lose limbs and not
lose any part of who we really are, right? We know from science that the body
that was small enough to be born is not in any way the same body that moves and
creaks painfully in our elder years. All the cells have replaced themselves
many times over. So our bodies can’t really be all that central to who we are.
Or are they?
Lately I’ve begun to think
of myself differently than I used to. I am not a spirit trapped in a body, or
even a spirit that has been given the incredible gift of a body. Rather, I am a
deeply loved process. I am matter and
energy trading back and forth. I am a continuation of myself at age 0, age 11,
age 22, age 33, age 44. I am my body! This, too, is science, but it is also the
gospel. The creature I am, whom God loves, is also the creature God loved at
the beginning, when I was being formed secretly in the darkness of my mother’s
womb. And Jesus comes back to us from the other side of death and decay to show
us something of what lies in store. We will not say goodbye to our bodies, but
we will be changed by the one who loves both matter and energy.
Now, it would be
irresponsible of me not to admit that there is much else in the Bible to support
the other, more familiar view of body versus spirit. When faced with the
prospect of death, Jesus himself says, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is
weak.” And speaking to the woman at the well, he says, “God is spirit.” If God
is spirit and doesn’t have a mortal body, doesn’t that make spirit better than
matter? These are both examples from John’s gospel, which tends to feel quite a
bit less “embodied” and more “spiritual” than Luke’s.
Yet in this same gospel,
after the resurrected Jesus appears inside a locked room like a ghost, he shows
them the wounds in his hands, feet, and side. Jesus hasn’t simply traded in his
badly damaged body for a new one. But his body is also able to do things that
ours can’t. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that God does actually have a
mortal body: that of Jesus of Nazareth. God chooses to exist on the same terms
that we do: with a body that is limited in its lifespan.
It is this tension between
two seemingly opposed understandings of our basic nature, that makes the
resurrection appearances so thrilling to me. It is our inability to put it all
together into a cohesive theory that reminds us who we are. We are God’s
creatures; we belong to God and exist on God’s terms. We don’t fully understand
or even want to accept those terms. We know from science that we are, like
everything else in the universe, made up of matter and energy, and that matter
and energy can be converted back and forth into each other. So we know that
matter and energy are the chosen medium of the great Artist. But there is still
so much we don’t know.
I imagine that our mortal
deaths will bring us much wisdom. Surely death is the end of something
significant, but Jesus shows us that it is also the beginning of something very
exciting. Death is terrifying, yes. But I like to imagine that on the other
side of that door, Jesus will greet us and welcome us as we look behind us for
a moment and say, “Oh, that wasn’t so bad.” And then Jesus will lead our
resurrected bodies into all sorts of new wonders. Amen.
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