Why Bodies Matter to God

1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 51-57

When I read texts like this, I remember why I do not gravitate to Paul and why I stay away from the epistles generally. I’d rather stick with Jesus. It’s a struggle sometimes, but What Would Jesus Do? works a lot better for me than What Would Paul Say? Because he says soooo much! In fact I cut out the beginning of the very long reading assigned, which began with a bunch of if-then logic which makes my brain get all twisted up. (but if you follow the scripture link in the chat you can read the whole thing and try to make sense of it yourself).

The fact is, though, the early church only had some oral histories of Jesus and stories like Paul’s of his appearances to the disciples. So they struggled in the same way that we do to understand what it means to be a disciple. That’s the reason Paul went on so long - trying to help them make sense of Jesus. In this passage he’s responding to questions we all have now more than ever: Why do these bodies of ours suffer? What do we do with chaos? How do we deal with death?

This week on a walk, Orie asked if we could look for the dead bird. We’d seen the carcass of a dead robin a couple days previous and he wanted to return to the scene. In fact we have also inspected the bodies of a dead mole and a dead rat on our walks. In our world, death is real. It surrounds us every day in every statistic. And for many of us - for many of you - it is more real and painful and wrenching than the bodies of creatures found in the grass and at the side of the road. It’s family. It’s fearful. Those questions that Paul and the Corinthians had - we have them too.

Paul’s lens of understanding death - and life - is Jesus. He takes the problem of death and remembers his experience of a resurrected Jesus, who appeared to him and so many in a resurrected and transformed body, and applies that understanding to the problem. As I read Pauls’s words over and over this week, at first it seemed to me as if he was trying to deny death, to spiritualize the reality of death: asking rhetorically where is it’s sting? and proclaiming victory through resurrection. Death swallowed up by life? That’s what is hard to swallow.

These verses in 1 Corinthians 15 are a boiling down of Paul’s theology: God cared enough about the stuff of creation - earth and flesh and plants and water - that God became a part of it. In a human body that suffered and died. And that lived again. We’ve all heard of the dad-bod. Jesus had a God-bod. And, in fact we are all God-bods. Cathryn Schifferdecker, a Lutheran Bible scholar, tells her students, “matter matters.” Our bodies and the stuff of this earth is important to God, our creator.

Bodies matter so much to Paul that it is essential to his theology that they not just disintegrate and disappear into the universe. That they don’t, like the mole and rat and robbin, return to the earth. Paul believes our bodies are important and beloved by God. We are not two easily separated halves - body and soul - but whole beings in which both are sacred. So in death, believes Paul, our bodies will be transformed, remaining whole in the presence of God.

We have zero proof of what happens to our bodies or our spirits after death. I expect that we in our congregation believe many different things about that - just like the Corinthian Christians did. But we all have bodies. We love people and creatures who are embodied beings. And if we do believe in a Creator God who was intimately involved in piecing together the cells of leaves and the atoms in microbes and the fur and feathers of rats and robbins, and our own selves and spirits, then we are matter that matters - we have and we are God-bods.

I believe that means where we put our bodies and how we treat our bodies and what we do with our bodies - and the bodies of others - matters to God. Jesus, the original God-bod was our model: beginning from his birth as a fragile infant body, which we can imagine because like little baby Jedidiah, we have been and we have held and cared for bodies like that. And to his teenage body, nurturing his spirit and feeding his intellect in the temple, which we also know through our experience of study and discernment in community. Jesus' body spent years in a ministry of healing and feeding bodies and we follow his example in our care for and relationships with all manner of folks whose bodies and spirits long for wholeness. Jesus allowed his body and spirit rest, and like him we seek solace and sabbath. And finally he submitted his body to a violent and painful death in his dedication to God’s reign over all. But finally finally his body was resurrected.

I do not know where my body will be after death, nor in that coming day, though I want to believe that somehow I will be joined with my creator. I do know where my body is now. It is on the path with the bodies of animals decomposing into soil, and also flying and scurrying and hopping through the grass. It is with my dear ones and it is being broadcast through mystery and science to be beheld by your bodies. Our bodies are beloved. May we love them. May we love the bodies of all God’s creatures.

Love Is...

"Can I help you?"

"No, I have to work."

A minute later, "Can I help you now?"

"Not really, I'm reading something."

"But what can I help you with?" He is plaintive.

Regardless of my insistence that what would really help the most is putting away the toys in the living room and taking the laundry out of the dryer, the pleas continue. This along with calls to "Look at me" and "Can you do something with me?" and "I'm bored!" are more or less constant throughout the day. I finally gave in.

"Okay, you know what you can help me with? I'm going to write an email to families from our church. What should I say?"

"I love you and Orie loves you." he replies immediately.

My annoyance and impatience melt and think, that even fits with the Bible passage I'm working on!

"Can I write it?"

I sigh but tell him sure and he climbs on my lap to create the screen cap above. It takes a long time.

I'm not sure how y'all are filling your days and caring for your kids, but this is pretty much what work looks like for me right now. Except most of the time I'm not a lot less understanding and probably more often than not I snap, "Just go to your room!" or "Can you just stop asking for snacks for FIVE MINUTES so I can finish a thought!?"

Yesterday both my kids helped me with a project that some of y'all and your kids are contributing to as well. We recorded some short sections of the passage from 1 Corinthians 13 which you'll most often hear at weddings: Love is patient, love is kind, it isn't jealous, it doesn't brag, etc. All these attributes of love which are so often virtues extolled when celebrating a romantic relationship didn't have romance in mind at all when they were written.

Paul wrote to a church where people were having trouble getting on the same page about what it meant to follow Jesus. Not unlike the church today! In Corinth these Jesus-followers might not have chosen to be a faith family but they were stuck with each other because as disciples of Jesus they were the church.

These days the people we're stuck with are our own family members. You may not all have active and insistent five-year-olds in your homes, but possibly you do have people at home who take work to love sometimes.

When Paul says, "Love is patient" or "Love does not make lists of complaints." or "Love trusts" I think of all the ways that in my relationships with my family members I am impatient, that I let the complaints stack up, that I am suspicious or untrusting. Now, everything has changed. JK, reflecting on this passage hasn't put an end to my impatience. I am failing constantly. But maybe a little less constantly? I did let the kid sit on my lap instead of putting him off for the thousandth time.

But I have hope! When we were working on our videos and I was inviting Orie to say "Love never fails," into the camera. His sister in classic teen says, "Uh, yeah it does." The thing is, though, God's love doesn't. That's where I get my hope. My love will probably fail a million times. But as I try and fail, God's love will not end.

It was a joy for me to record my kids speak (and shout and giggle) Paul's words of love with enthusiasm (a little too much enthusiasm maybe - tune in Sunday to see) and I was overjoyed with all the kids also interested in taking part. I'm really looking forward to seeing and hearing them and to figuring out how to put all these words about God's love together in the video for our scripture reading in Zoom church.

Folks, we're figuring out news ways to love each other and our families. We're figuring out new ways to be together all the time. But thanks be to God, who is also here and loving us all the time.

You're doing a great job!

World Turned Upside Down

When I first read through this text, the words that I found the most striking (after being like, wait there’s a Jason in the Bible??) were the accusations against Paul and Silas: These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has entertained them as guests. They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus.

It’s translated in different ways in different texts - this isn’t a Greek phrase - but I really like it. I think I caught into it, honestly, because of Hamilton. The song is the battle of Yorktown - that outlines the battle, the losses, the surrender and then...freedom for America! And the drinking song they’re singing: The world turned upside down. In some nominal ways, at least, the earliest (European immigrant) Americans were like the earliest church: passionate, revolutionary, all-in, and determined to throw off the bonds of an empire.

And of course, there are differences. Paul starts where he’s most comfortable - in the synagogue. He’s Jewish, after all and doesn’t really see a distinction between his alignment with Jesus and his alignment with his Judaism. And as a Jewish believer, who values argument and dialogue with other Jews, he dives into scripture to engage the question of Jesus’ reign as Messiah. He does convince a few. And he convinces more than a few Greek God-worshippers. Enough to create a small community and it’s that community that’s accused by the Jewish establishment of treason - of mis-allegiance.

All through the Gospels, the disciples are asking - when, Jesus? When is the revolution? They’re expecting a battle - a Yorktown - and Jesus has to explain again and again. Folks, I’m not that kind of Messiah. The Jewish community in Thessalonica has the same misconception about this new crew. This isn’t a violent revolution. Jesus turns revolution itself on its head. Yes, they’re claiming him as king - but a king whose most powerful act was non-violent submission and reclaiming life from death.

One of the ways Paul imitates Jesus is by proclaiming that non-violent love. Thessalonian Jews - like those who were Jesus’ peers a decade or so before - would have felt threatened by that. They were a small community is a Roman/Greek city. They didn’t need people who called themselves Jews going around yapping about a king who wasn’t Caesar. They wanted to protect their community and ultimately Paul was run out of town.

Paul may have been run out of town, but the community he left behind, in turn became the revolutionary community. You can hear it in his letter back to them. He cites their work of faith and labour of love and steadfastness of hope in Jesus. He praises them for becoming imitators of himself and Silas and therefore imitators of Jesus himself. And he notes that in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers.

There is no doubt about it - our world has absolutely been turned upside down in the past few months. Likely it will never be fully righted. I think our challenge is, what kind of revolution might it spark? What ways can we follow Jesus out of this upside down world and into his upside down realm? And now, while the world is on its head, how can we use the shake up to notice how Jesus is calling us to love and justice?

Our reflection question for our fellowship time is, “What have you realized you can live without.” Many of us have realized that we can’t live without mail carriers and grocery workers and food production workers. I know many folks boycotted Amazon and other major retailers on May 1 to call for equity for warehouse and food and other essential employees. I pray that we may continue to seek a world that’s set on its head and follows the upside down king. The world turned upside down!
-

image by Paul Vasilovski on Unsplash