At
the risk of sounding rude – which has never bothered me – I wonder how you feel about your
body? Maybe you lament the fact that your body sags more and is somewhat
wider than it used to be – or perhaps your expanding girth is to you a very
approximate outward measurement of every act of love you have given and
received over the years? Maybe you cannot bear to hold your gaze in the mirror,
for creasing and indeed increasing wrinkles – or perhaps you treasure them for
every carefree laugh that etched them on your face, and every tear that flowed
between the lines? Maybe you are ashamed that you cannot bear your body; or
frustrated that it seems unable to bear you – or perhaps you have embraced it
as a gift, from Someone with a sense of humour?
Thursday
just gone was Ascension Day, the day we remember that Jesus ascended into
heaven, not as a spirit or a soul set free from its used-up body, but in flesh
and blood. This is a mystery, which is to say that it is beyond us to answer how this might be so, but that it reveals to us something incredibly
important: that our bodies matter to God. That matter matters, as author
Barbara Brown Taylor puts it.
One
of the best disciplines I can commend to you is to take your weekly pew sheet
home, and to make time to read the Bible passages over and over, out loud,
allowing them to get under your skin. As I have done that very thing with our
reading from Acts, I have been struck
by just
how physical an account it is.
Paul
and Silas are seized – imagine a fist grasping hold of your collar.
They
are dragged
– imagine your feet scraping the dirt as you stumble and trip and try to keep
up without falling.
They
are stripped
– roughly: feel your collar catching on your collar bone, your sleeve catching
on your armpit.
They
are beaten
with rods – involuntarily, the muscles of your back tense: do you sense the smarting
sting of the beating? And afterward, can you see the bruised flesh ripen purple;
feel it flinch away from every touch?
Their
feet are fastened in the stocks – feel the unyielding wood that scrapes
your shin – where skin is stretched across the bone – every time you shift your
weight, trying to relieve your aching back.
And
in response, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.
Why on earth would they do that?
Perhaps
they are expressing trust in God, who has history in setting his people free –
and association with those who trusted God, even when they, themselves, were
not rescued? Perhaps Paul is remembering the time he stood and watched while
Stephen, being murdered by a rock-throwing mob, saw heaven opened; perhaps this
experience was for Paul somehow redemptive? Perhaps they recalled Joseph,
handed over into captivity by his brothers, able to declare that while they had
meant it for evil, God had taken hold of the circumstances to bring good out of
them? Perhaps they recalled Jacob, wrestling with God all night long, left with
a permanent limp as a reminder of the blessing he received in the darkness – when
enmity with God and fellow human was transformed into new relationship, first
with God and then with human brother?
Perhaps
they are thanking God for their bodies, which we so easily take for granted
when all is well – for how amazing they are and what they make possible?
Perhaps their bruises remind them of grazed childhood knees, and a mother who
wiped away the blood? Perhaps the way they sit now, backs hunched, reminds them
of a much-loved grandparent, bent by the years, a wonderful story-teller?
Perhaps they are thanking God for particular people; or perhaps they are
thanking God that for every one who has rejected them, others have become
sisters and brothers?
And
then they are taken, again, but this time their wounds are washed;
they are brought, and others set food before them. This, too, can
be painful – or, at least, bitter-sweet – to have to surrender to the
vulnerable intimacy of being washed by another; of teaching your broken body to
hold cutlery and feed itself again.
‘Do
not harm yourself’ Paul shouts for the jailer to hear. Do not despair.
Salvation – the experience of God coming to you, doing for you what you cannot
do, bringing hope – is for the body as much as the spirit. The spiritual is
physical; and the physical is spiritual. The spiritual body is pressed down
under water in baptism, and brought up again to share in a meal, of bread and
wine and company (lit. sharing
bread).
A-week-and-a-half
ago, I had a headache that was so disabling I was taken to hospital in an
ambulance. Paramedics came into the office, stuck electrodes all over my body, strapped
me to a chair and carried me down the stairs. I was laid out on a trolley in
the back of their ambulance, and then on a bed in the Accident & Emergency
Services ward, where I was wired to a heart monitor and had a cannula inserted
into the crook of my elbow, and from where I was wheeled to Radiology for a
brain scan. For most of the time, I was aware of what was going on around me,
but for some time I was unable to respond: unable to grip or squeeze with either
hand, or move my legs, or open or track with my eyes. My speech was impaired.
Now,
to be clear, the treatment I received was excellent, and found nothing of
lasting damage. I have now had two such headaches, eleven years apart, which is
scary at the time but not warranting medical management other than in the
moment. If I start to have headaches more frequently, then we’ll cross that
bridge when we come to it; but for now it simply is what it is. The human body
is both fragile and resilient.
But,
while this was taking place, all I could do was let things unfold, within and
around me. And I discovered certain things. I discovered that people care about
me, people here, who know me, genuinely care. But I also discovered that
complete strangers, who might not expect to meet me ever again, also care about
me. And both those things are worth prayer and singing – when my body was
ready.
And
I also learned – not for the first time, because this is a lesson we need to be
refreshed in from time to time – that my body is not my enemy who frustrates what
I need to get done, but my companion closer-than-a-brother, through which I am
empowered to meet God and to meet other people – even when I am too
pre-occupied or too afraid or too much in need of being in control of what
happens to enable such encounters by my own strength. As Paul
discovered through an experience he could only describe as like having thorns
stuck in his flesh – which might be as unpleasant as a cannula needle – God’s
strength is made perfect in weakness. Or, God’s power at work in and for and
through us is most free to move when we stop resisting. May our bodies teach us
how to pray and sing to God. Amen.
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