The Spiritual Practice of Honoring Our Bodies

          This morning we’re going to talk about the spiritual practice of honoring the body.  “The poet Jane Kenyon speaks of our “long struggle to be at home in the body,” she calls it, “this difficult friendship.” (see Paulsell, “Honoring the Body,” in Practicing Our Faith)  It’s true, isn’t it?  Our relationship with our bodies, at most any age, is filled with such divergent emotions:  teenage years are marked with incredible growth and strength that at times makes us feel invincible; and at the very same time, raging hormones and rapid changes in our bodies make us feel so awkward and insecure.  In adulthood the awkwardness starts to yield, but by the time it does we’re on the doorstep of aches, pains and malfunctions that did not used to bother us.  Retirement is a gift to our bodies, as less is required of them each day, but the ailments only increased to fill the void.  I have older friends who joke that when they gather with their peers, they put a time limit on how long they can complain about their bodies before they insist on moving on to other topics; and yet, it is the very sharing of those intimate details of aging and vulnerability that creates intimacy and friendship—talking honestly about struggles with our bodies helps us to feel less alone in life, and connected to other people.  Especially when we confront serious and life-threatening failures in our bodies, it is important for us not to endure these things alone.

Our bodies are indeed ambiguous blessings, and when it comes to learning how to live in this amazing and problematic vessel, the church has often been unhelpful.  The Bible says humans are made in God’s image and names the body a “temple of the Holy Spirit.”  But in the early Christian world, these verses landed in a dualistic Greek philosophical culture; the result was a separation of the spirit from the body; the spirit became the dwelling place of God, while the body became suspect.  Much early Christian theology centered around the glorification of monks who found greater holiness through bodily discomfort; some theologians came to believe that Jesus’ human body must have been an illusion, so impossible was it to imagine that divinity could dwell in something as fallible and susceptible to temptation as the mortal human body.  Over time, suspicions about the body became a huge part of Christian belief.  In modern times, the church has become unhelpful in other ways, overly concerned with telling church members what is acceptable to do in their bedrooms, and creating insiders and outsiders based on gender and sexual orientation.  How far we have fallen away from the body created in the image of God or thinking of this vessel as a Temple of the Holy Spirit!

So in this sermon, as a part of this series on Christian practices, I want to talk about the body, at least long enough to reclaim some of its goodness.  Also though, I will do so with some caution, to remind us that the ambiguity exists for a reason.  Most Christian practices that help us enjoy our bodies can also be misused to harm ourselves and others.  That makes it even more important that we make a spiritual practice of honoring the body.  If we are wise, we might learn to know God more fully through the way we treat the bodies God has given us.

This whole series on practicing the faith is meant to make the point that Christian spirituality is not limited to what happens here at church.  Nor is faith limited to practices like Bible study and prayer, but that there are all kinds of ways to find God’s presence in daily life.  Often faithful practice simply means looking more closely to find God’s presence where it’s been all along.  So to that end, today I want to give you a few specific ideas of how honoring the body in daily life can connect us with God, as well as some biblical and theological support for each one.

The first example is easy to forget but obvious once you take time to consider it, and that’s bathing.  Christians mark the beginning of our life in Christ with baptism—a ritual bath, and we’re not alone in this ritual.  Plenty of other religions consider bathing to be a foundational practice, Islam and Judaism in ways many of you might have seen.  The baptism of Jesus is not the only story in his life about bathing.  In the Gospel of Luke, an intimate story is told of an unnamed woman who bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, wiping his feet with her hair; this humble person appears in contrast to the host of the house who provides no water for Jesus to wash his feet as was the custom and ritual, and the story becomes a powerful exchange about matters of justice and forgiveness.  In the larger story of Jesus, this moment also stands as a ritual preparations for Jesus’ death as he nears the road to the Cross.

As Jesus’ suffering and death grows closer, another bathing story appears:  Jesus himself will take a basin of water, kneel with a towel and wash the feet of his disciples, calling them not servants but friends—this is how he prepares them to follow him.  All this biblical talk of bathing, and the regularity with which it was ritualized in the ancient world, is a reminder that most of us should take our daily bathing a bit more spiritually.  Daily bathing is an intimate act during which we can give thanks to God for the health we enjoy and for the absolute miracle this machine God has created.  At the same time, I like this idea of intentional bathing even more because most of us have parts of our body we aren’t crazy about, and in that way the body is a reminder that God didn’t create us for perfection, but that God is pleased that we are made just as we are.  And finally, bathing doesn’t just need to be a time to pray about the body; you might even consider, just from a practical standpoint, that bathing is a point in the day when we usually aren’t distracted—unless you have a bunch of children!—so bathing is as good a time as any in the day to take some time for prayer.

          In addition to bathing, plenty of other physical activities present the same kind of opportunity for spiritual reflection.  Whether its yoga, soccer or just taking a walk, physical activity is a blessing; it’s a chance to appreciate the capability of our created bodies, a chance to directly thank God for what we’re able to enjoy.  And when age, injury or illness limit what we can do, those are physical reminders that again, God didn’t make us to be perfect, but also, that we are mortal.  When our bodies give us unpleasant physical reminders that we are not invincible, those are also invitations to take stock of the goodness of each day and not to take for granted the time that we have.  This is honoring the body.

          Touching and sexuality are the bodily acts that have perhaps the most potential for spiritual connection; at the same time they are fraught with the greatest potential for harm, and harm separates us from God.  Handshakes, hugs, kisses on the cheek are simple but important touches—ways that we welcome one another and extend warmth and hospitality; but touch is also a way in which abuses of power take place, any time we touch another person in a way that is unwelcome.  This reality is amplified in our sexual lives, in which God gives us the most intimate of gift as an expression of love, and yet that very gift when abused, and used in violence, separates us from one another and from God.

And of course sexual orientation has been a frequent matter where the church has caused tremendous harm.  The traditional argument that our bodies are only meant for procreation, or that only straight men and women deserve to enjoy the blessing of sexuality has driven countless people away from the church altogether.  Many sermons could be preached on that topic alone, but suffice it to say that I am grateful for the ongoing journey of this congregation in honoring all of the bodies that God has made.  We welcome all in membership, leadership, and marriage; our youth group is a safe place for all of God’s children where we try with honesty and integrity to help teens grow into healthy, embodied adults; here we seek to recover the idea that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, as the Bible calls them in the first place.

          It’s taken me most of the sermon to get to today’s Scripture lesson, but that’s kind of by design.  I’ve been working through several examples of how bodies give us potential for connection to God—and here’s a final idea that applies to all the others:

As with most spiritual practices, honoring our bodies is on one level about loving God, but is also about loving our neighbors.  That’s where the Scripture from Matthew 25 comes in.  We can spend every day honoring our bodies through greater attention to things like bathing, exercising, healthy touch and sexuality, not to mention all I haven’t said about what we eat and what we drink and what we wear; but the deepest spiritual awareness of the body comes when we consider honoring not only as a personal matter, but remembering the bodies of others.  Do our daily decisions about clean water for bathing, healthy sexuality, and adequate food and drink apply only to ourselves, or are we living in ways honor all of the bodies God has created?  In Matthew 25, Jesus says all these embodied things as he teaches his disciples:  “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was naked and you clothed me;” and he says, “whenever you did these things for the least of these, you did them to me…”

In these words come the challenge that we honor our own bodies most when we take actions that allow others to honor their bodies as well.  Can we eat a good meal, especially the Lord’s Supper, and forget about people who are starving—whether its Palestinians in a war zone or families in our own community?  Can we spend a small fortune adorning ourselves with the latest styles and not worry about children who are without shoes or coats?  Can we enjoy a good sex life, and not be concerned about trafficking and abuse happening right in our communities?  Honoring the body does not just mean our own bodies, and the joy that comes from caring for all of the world’s bodies, can help us enjoy our own bodies free of guilt or shame.  Honoring the body is a means to both loving God and loving our neighbor.