A sermon for Hinde Street Methodist Church Sunday 24 th July 2016 11am Colossians 2:6-19 Luke 11:1-13 The bodies of grownups come with stretchmarks and scars, faces that have been lived in, relaxed breasts and bellies, backs that give trouble, and well-worn feet: flesh that is particular, and obviously mortal. They also come with bruises on their heart, wounds they can t forget, and each of them a company of lovers in their soul who will not return and cannot be erased. And yet I think there is a flood of beauty beyond the smoothness of youth; and my heart aches for that grace of longing that flows through bodies no longer straining to be innocent, but yearning for redemption. I ve always connected this poem by Janet Morley with a woman I ll call her Sally - though that isn t her real name. Sally was on the edge of the church, known by many members, but she couldn t call herself a Christian. I don t think I ll ever forget one phone call I had with her. My heart sank when I realized it was her. She could talk for hours about her latest ailment. And on this occasion she sounded very cross. I wondered what someone hadn t done that she expected them to do. But I soon had to eat my words. Why, she demanded, were all these church people helping her? Why were they offering her lifts? Why were they visiting and offering to do her shopping? Then she hesitated. Was this what love looked like? Is it what God s love looks like? I didn t know very much of her story then, but the question became even more poignant, when I realised that she didn t think she d ever really known what love was like. She d never felt accepted. She hated herself and she hated her body even more. But the care, the help, the love she was being offered, had left her reeling. And her body, the body she hated, had become the means through which she was glimpsing the possibility that she was loved. It was the beginning of a journey that is, in Janet Morley s words, is a yearning for redemption. Her journey began with her body. But it did not stay there. Being accepted, being loved, changes the way she sees herself. And that changes the way she lives. You may have noticed the words I ve used. They re important. Being loved changes rather than changed her. Change isn t usually final. It s on ongoing process. A continuing journey.
And it s this continuing process that the writer of the letter to the Colossians emphasises at the beginning of today s reading. Continue to live your lives in him. Continue to live in Christ Jesus the Lord., Christ through whom all things were created. Jesus in whom the fullness of God was present on earth. The one through whom God reconciled all things to God-self. The firstborn from the dead. Christ Jesus, the head of the body, the church. Continuing to live in him, isn t just about believing, it s about living. And continuing to live. It could be said in a number of different ways. One of my commentaries says orthodoxy and orthopraxis go hand in hand. That it s about walking the walk as well as talking the talk. And becoming what we are people made in the image and likeness of God in Christ Jesus who not only gives meaning to our lives but is the meaning of our lives. This isn t self-help advice that gives us the power to achieve our own fulfilment. It isn t even a well-mapped out route to success. It s a way of life rooted and built up in him and established in the faith If you wondering what this has to do with bodies - it s this. The writer of the letter to the Colossians was writing to remind them of the faith they d accepted and counter the philosophy that was threating to take them captive. We can t be sure about the precise nature of this philosophy. And it isn t known whether it was rooted in the Greek or Jewish tradition, but it is clear, that it was a form of dualism. A dualism in which bodies, because they re tied to a particular time and place, were seen in a negative light. Bodily life was seen as a lesser realm, of less importance that the world of the soul, spirituality and wisdom. In today s reading, the writer of the letter challenges this by developing a phrase from the hymn in praise of Christ that was part of last week s reading. There we read, In him (in Christ) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Building on that, the writer says, For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him. Bodies matter, our bodies matter, because in order to show us what we might become, and how we might become what we are, God came and lived among us a human being. In Jesus birth, in his life, death and resurrection, we see what fullness in him looks like not just for him but us too. And just as the life he lived was fully embodied. So it is for us. The life Jesus lived was firmly rooted on the earth and his body was real. He ate (even after his resurrection). He walked, prayed and relished life. His body hurt and ached with his own pain and others. Other people s bodies mattered too. He healed people whose minds and bodies were damaged. Women, children, lepers, blind and lame people, people possessed by demons - people who didn t normally matter. The stories he told were about the things that people knew about. Real things. Money, feasts, workers, vineyards, harvests. When the disciples were determined to send a crowd away, because they might get hungry, Jesus fed them. When they asked him how to pray, he didn t give them esoteric instructions, he told them to talk with God about real things. Things that happen to us each day. The need for bread, to forgive people who sin against us, the need for protection from temptation. And when he was raised from the dead, his body wasn t perfectly healed, he came back wounded. It was the proof Thomas needed to believe it was him. This is all the evidence I need that our bodies, even wounded, disabled, damaged bodies and minds matter to God. If they didn t, I assume God could have found some other way, of coming to earth. And they matter to us too, because we experience the world in and through our bodies. We see, we hear, we feel, we smell, we communicate in and through them. Because of this we usually think of ourselves as having a body, but if or when our body stops functioning, we discover that we are a body. Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendell is a German
theologian. And in a book called I am my body, she says that the moment we really learn that we are bodies and that they matter, is when we experience pain or some other limitation. It might come as illness, disabilities which seem final, old age or when we acknowledge our experience of abuse as a child or as an adult. And in that moment we experience the threating feeling that our body is now directing instead of reacting. If you ve experienced this, or someone close to you has, you ll know how challenging it is. It demands a rethinking, a reassessment of our lives, a recognition that we do not have total control over what we do and how we live. That we have to learn to listen to our body. One of the things I wanted to do on my sabbatical was to read around the theology of illness. I hoped it might help me find a way of talking theologically, about the operation I had almost 3 years ago now, and the chronic fatigue that has followed. Like most people who ve been ill, I can tell a story about what s been happening to my body, and I can tell it in several different ways. But there are aspects that I can t yet make sense of, make meaning of, and even though I know I ll never be able to do this my total satisfaction because it s ultimately unknown, the struggle is important for me. I didn t get as far as I d hoped to get. It s a work in progress. But one of the things I realised, right at the beginning of my sabbatical, was that my mind needs time to catch up with my body. My body is living the experience. The problem is my mind. I don t like the feeling that I m no longer in control of my body. That I can t do with it what I want. That it won t do what I tell it. I am having to learn from my body. And that is taking some learning. One of the reasons I didn t get as far as I d hoped, I think, is that I turned to theology books and stopped reading people s stories. Theology books are OK as far as they stay connected with real people s life, but as soon as they stop being real, as soon as they don t recognise the impact of some of their ideas have on real people and their lives, they start to lose the plot. So I ve gone back to people s real stories, and I want to tell you the stories of two people, who in the face of illness and of a body that doesn t fit the way they think of themselves, are becoming the people they are. Paul Kalanithi was close to completing a decade s training as a neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating dying patients, the next he was a patient, struggling to survive. He tells his story in When breath becomes air. It s a story of how someone becoming who they are. Paul always wanted to study literature. He thought it was the best way of exploring meaning and making sense of the world. But then he read a novel that raised questions about how the human brain works. And as he chose his classes at university he found himself taking biology and neuroscience classes as well as the literature and language ones he d long-looked forward to. A few years later, wondering about a career, he found himself asking the question, what makes life meaningful? And the answer he came to was this. It was the relational aspect of humans human relationality that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced of passion, of hunger, of love bore some relationship, however convoluted to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats. He discovered for himself, that human being and human relating, is rooted in our bodies. Bodies that break and fail, and recognising that, decided to train as a doctor. I think that the writer of the letter to the Colossians would have understood. This is exactly what she or he means about coming to fullness in Christ. Life in Christ involves us committing ourselves to working for fullness of life for others too. It s what continue to live your lives in
Christ Jesus the Lord means. This is how Paul chose to live, how he would make meaning out of his life, and he committed his heart, soul and body to it - until 10 years later, his body began to tell him though his aching back, and loss of weight, that something was wrong. The most poignant parts of the book for me, are those in which he s struggling with the questions, of what to do with his (now limited) life. He decides to write the book as a way of exploring questions of meaning, mortality and spirituality. And bringing together the two passions of his life enables him to become who he was created to be. It s worth reading. It s not at all morbid. It s a powerful testimony of someone living with the limitation of their body, with integrity and courage. Rachel Mann began life as Nick, but from an early age, she experienced gender identity distress. The problem wasn t with feeling like a woman trapped in a man s body she says, but it was with her body. Her discomfort and anxiety was always located there. Her life as a boy and later as a young man, meant that everything she lived, all her experience, felt wrong because her hopes and dreams had nothing to do with the body she was living in. It took until her early 20s to face up to it and then she began the process of transitioning. Soon after, she became a Christian and soon felt a call to ministry, but gender reassignment and her exploration of her call was interrupted by the onset of Crohn s disease. 20 years on, she s an Anglican Priest, and practical theologian. And for me, the most powerful parts of her book are when she uses her experience to ask questions of God, and the theology she s inherited. The writer of the letter to the Christians in Colossae speaks very differently. But he would have agreed with her. We are not called to be gods, but to work out our faith and hope in fragile, flesh bodies so easily damaged and so easily diverted from their course by circumstance. God did not come to us in Christ as a superhero, as Superman, solving all our problems through his superior strength God came to us as vulnerable as any of us, and as readily destroyed. Love s true transformative power lies in the depths of our humanity: in our essential fragility and capacity for brokenness and the prices we pay for being limited, passionate creatures. Like the writer of the letter to the Colossians Rachel speaks about forgiveness. Neither say how it happens, but they speak of the results in terms of release, disarming and setting aside. This is rooted in a paradox though, and that s that to be released of all that strips us of the fullness of embodied life, we need to take the risk of being exposed, naked with God, and not being ashamed. This is, what the letter s writer says happens in baptism, baptism that becomes the pattern for our life. The pattern we receive from Christ Jesus the Lord and live with him, as we continue to live our lives in him. And what does this mean for us, for those of us whose illnesses are nowhere near as challenging, or whose body issues are nowhere near as dramatic? What does it say about how we are becoming who we are? What does it tell us about the way we are called to participate in the fullness of God through Christ? I want to say three things by way of conclusion. The first, is that there isn t a single answer, that works for us all. The way in which God s fullness is embodied in you, your neighbour and your neighbour s neighbour is unique. It s why dualisms: whether they re male or female, black or white, straight or gay, Jew or Gentile, spiritual or bodily, earthly or heavenly, don t actually work in practice. Not if we are really real about our lives. And if we want to live, really live, we have to start with our lived reality. We have to learn to listen to the life we experience in and through our bodies. The second thing is that for human beings, being our true selves, is challenging because our brokenness gets in the way. Rachel Mann reminded me that Thomas Merton suggests that the greatest glory
created beings, whether trees or human can give to God, is by being our true selves. For a tree, she says, it s not difficult. Trees can t be other than trees. For broken people it is more complicated. And so the only way any of us can know and be truly ourselves it to know ourselves in God. God who accepts us as we are. God who loves us as we are. God who yearns with us for redemption and release from all that prevents us becoming who we are. And that leads me to the third thing I want to say, and brings me back to where I began, with Sally s broken body being the way she began to learn about love. It happened because some others were continuing to live their lives in Christ, becoming who they are through their commitment to live the fullness of Christ s life, as fully as they could. Their lives opened up the way for her to know herself loved by God. And later, when Sally heard that one of our elderly female members was in an unfamiliar hospital, away from her family, alone and probably dying, she drove there, sat beside her, and held her hand until she died. Transforming her death. And changing, and continuing to change, Sally s life. You are neither Sally, Paul nor Rachel. It s possible that you recognised elements of your stories in theirs. But it s possible that you did not. It doesn t matter. But your body does. To you. And to God. And if you re willing to listen, you ll hear your stretch-marks and scars, the bruises on your heart and the wounds you can t forget, speak. They ll speak of beauty and brokenness, love and forgiveness, acceptance and release, enabling you to become more fully, the you, you are. For our journey into becoming, into fullness, is a journey into God. And the more we yearn for God s fullness with our bodies as well as our minds, the more we know ourselves and the more we know ourselves, the more we know and continue to live and yearn for the fullness of God. Amen. Sue Keegan von Allmen 23 rd July 2016 The Bodies of Grown-ups is in All desires known by Janet Morley (SPCK, 2005) Rachel Mann s book is Dazzling Darkness, Gender, sexuality and illness and God (Wild Goose Publications, 2012) Paul Kalanithi s book is When breath becomes air (The Bodley Head, +2016)