A sermon from Jenny Wilkens: I’ve come across a novel with an intriguing title that I think I’d like to read – it’s called Towing Jehovah, by James Morrow. Apparently in this story God has died of unknown causes, and his body has fallen from heaven into the Atlantic Ocean, just south of the Equator...

The archangels want God to have a decent burial, but the Vatican realises the need for extreme secrecy. So a huge supertanker is chartered to find God’s body and tow it to a remote tomb under the North Pole. On board the tanker are of course sailors, but also a motley crew of theologians, atheists and feminists all alike struggling to absorb the implications of this stupendous happening: the atheists because God existed after all, the theologians because God had a body after all, and worse that body has died, and the feminists? Because it’s evident that God was male after all! Well, apparently, this whole tragi- comedy unfolds as God’s corpse which is over 2 miles long, is slowly towed by the ears towards the Arctic.

What’s that got to do with our readings [Acts 3:12-19; Luke 24: 36-49] today?! Well, the traditional belief that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples with a physical body has been the subject of quite a lot of debate over the years in the Church, certainly in recent times, but actually right from the earliest days of the Christian church.

Parts of the church from earliest times picked up on the prevailing Greek Platonic dualism between spirit and matter: spirit good, matter bad; mind good, body bad.

It certainly came through into Gnostic teaching, it’s there in the so-called Gospel of Judas, with the idea that Judas was actually doing Jesus a good turn by releasing him from his body. But even in orthodox Christian teaching, that dualism has lingered and been very destructive, and add onto that layers of monastic asceticism and Victorian attitudes to the body, and we often get in the Church very little positive sense of the body at all.

Rather the body has been seen as a burden, to be towed around in this mortal life while the spirit within us longs for freedom – even St Paul felt like that at times!

In much Christian teaching, the flesh has been an embarrassment and the enemy, think of the phrase, “fight against the world, the flesh and the devil” – there’s the flesh in the middle there, conjuring up something forbidden and illicit. Life in the flesh is something to be endured – the really important parts of the Christian life are the spiritual parts: like worship and prayer.

Our bodies have to come along to church as well of course but like resentful children, dragged along, our bodies get bored, fidget and cause a distraction!

Of course that’s exaggerating – but think back to when you were at Sunday School, if you went: in order to pray and be with God, we must keep still, hands together, eyes closed. Think of the old chorus: Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, then the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace. Block out the ‘things of earth’ – and help us to concentrate by giving us uncomfortable pews, unreliable heating systems and kneelers that feel like concrete!

Can you remember those excruciating evenings at youth group or bible class or confirmation class where the leaders would talk about our bodies being Temples of the Holy Spirit whatever that meant? but that also our bodies were full of awkward and powerful passions (which we already knew about pretty much anyway!) and we were given wonderful mixed messages about how these were wonderful feelings but wrong and needed strict controlling, and we were to save ourselves for marriage, when clearly their anxieties as youth leaders would be over when we were all safely married off!

Strangely nothing was ever said about how to live with those passions through a lifetime of celibacy - that is considered unnatural by our society, and is still mostly [for the nuclear-family focussed church] a too-hard basket it is not willing to validate.

Of course the monastics and mystics of the church through the ages do have something to teach us here but it hasn’t been helped, though, by the image we have often gained of saints as sexless people, all those virgin martyrs, where holiness is tantamount to bodilessness, a life floating around several feet above the ground…

And so it’s not really surprising that a Church that has been embarrassed for so long by its own fleshly humanity, comes so easily to resist the idea of the flesh of God, the risen flesh of Christ. And yet the Christian faith is unavoidably physical. Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple said the Christian faith is the most materialistic of all the world religions – faith in a God who has taken flesh, been born of a woman, and made his home in our physical, earthly world.

So Christianity is not about liberating the spirit from the flesh, rather it is as in Hebrew thought, the hope of the uniting and transforming of spirit and flesh, for us made one and whole in the love of Christ.

Our faith is a flesh and blood faith, declared for us so powerfully in the words of the Eucharist, or the Prayer of humble access, words which though familiar, can still be quite hard for us to stomach.

The Gospel stories, like today’s, go out of their way to emphasise the physical reality of the risen Jesus, indeed Jewish belief of the time could only conceive of resurrection as bodily, it was the Greeks who separated off body and spirit.

So the risen Jesus has a body – oh yes, it was a body with new abilities - Jesus could appear and disappear at will, he was very difficult to recognise until he chose to reveal himself, and he could overhear conversations at which he was not physically present – a useful skill, that one! The medieval theologians even had a name for these new abilities of Jesus, they called them his agilities, a lovely word even if it reminds me of dog trials!

But Jesus is not just a Harry Potter magician - to his startled and frightened disciples, Jesus went out of his way to assure them it’s really him, and he is not a ghost, he’s solid, real, do you have anything here to eat? In all the stories of the resurrection appearances, the disciples are in no doubt this is a real human being – but yes, with scars on. Jesus lived, suffered and died in our flesh. And now he rises from death and is glorified in our flesh – he takes our humanity into the skies.

We who’d like all the scientific details want to know more – just what did the risen Jesus look like? What was he wearing? He had left his grave clothes behind, so was he naked when he appeared to the disciples? Ever thought about that one? St Bernard of Clairvaux did and it was all a bit much for him, and he told his anxious readers that in the event, “the eye of love clothes the vision in familiar garments” – sounds a bit like the Emperor’s new clothes to me!

But and here’s a big but – shouldn’t our resurrection faith, the fact that we say in the creed “I believe in the resurrection of the body”, make a difference to how we see our own bodies? Many of us have a very ambivalent relationship with our bodies – I know I do, and probably many of us have a lifetime journey towards acceptance of our bodies….

We live in a global culture that puts impossible expectations on how we see and present our bodies – a huge burden for our young people, but increasingly right through the age spans.

The powerful multinational advertising industry exploits our ‘dis-ease’ with our bodies at all ages. Just think of the name the Body Shop. And of course at the worst end of the spectrum is the exploitation and abuse of bodies, particularly those of women and children, but not only so, when bodies are commodities to buy and sell, bodies separated from their inevitably damaged souls. It’s been said that the exploitation of the body is one of the consequences when a society loses sight of God’s involvement with the world. If God is found [only] beyond the body, then anything can be done to the body (Rubem Alves), the body doesn’t matter anymore.

Rather Christians would want to affirm the Word made flesh, the incarnation, God in a body, the body, yes, as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Of course there is the whole movement too today towards holistic health, the integration of healthcare for body, mind and spirit, led in Aotearoa by the Maori worldview. A lot of it is good common sense – making good life-style choices, life balance, we know the lingo. And maybe that’s where the church must not abdicate its commitment to healing and wholeness, linking in with the longing in our world for living as whole people, rather than being a church that is only interested in our minds and spirits, while the world only seems interested in our bodies.

Where we relate to God with our spirit and our mind and our body, there is the possibility of new life, of resurrection, of re-union, of God putting us back together in new creation.

Maybe for many of us part of that is accepting and owning our own bodies before God. That’s often a very powerful part of Footwashing on Maundy Thursday, isn’t it, owning our feet, imperfect as they are, before God and before each other!

We are followers of Jesus – in his incarnation, the Word made flesh, and in his resurrection – I believe in the resurrection of the body. There is hope for our bodies, we are not no-bodies, we are some-bodies, somebodies loved by God who calls us each by name.

So as we continue in worship, pray and worship as some-body before God. Maybe pray with your eyes open, use your senses, the beauty of this place, of the music and of God’s created world to feed your prayers.

And as you do so, know God’s peace. ‘The risen Jesus himself stood among them, and said Peace be with you’.

Amen.

[Based on David Runcorn’s ‘It’s flesh I’m talking about here’ in Rumours of Life: Reflections on the Resurrection Appearances, London: DLT, 1996.]