lent three: living as embodied prayers...

TEXT: John 2: 13-23: The Passover of the Jewish community was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves where the money changers were seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, with the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” Those who had gathered for prayer then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” And Jesus answered: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” They Jews said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

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This morning, I want us to consider how our bodies are an integral part of our Lenten discipline – specifically our flesh as embodied prayers. We all HAVE one, you know? They may be young or old, tall or short, healthy or hurting. Karoline Lewis of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN wrote: “We all have bodies and all too often we don’t really know what to DO with them.” Sometimes:

We desperately want to change them, improve them, shrink them, hide them. We want to tighten them, shape them, mold them. We compare ours to others. We describe them with odd category-ies, like fruit. We analyze them, take them apart, and we like some parts more than others. We take them for granted. We look at them in the mirror with disgust or with modest admiration. We keep the lights off so that they cannot be seen; or, we expose them in ways that leave little to the imagination.

St. John’s gospel gives us a lot to chew on today – and not JUST about the unity of flesh, blood, and spirit. For the next few weeks, the appointed gospel texts come from St. John’s writing so sometime before Easter:

· We’ll need to clarify the tragic historical mistake made by the early Christian community that conflated a once time specific internecine squabble between Jews – some who followed Jesus and others who did not – into the sanctification of antisemitism for two millennia.

· We’ll also try to put the anger of Jesus and his furious civil disobedience against the money-changers and merchants of sacrificial animals in the courtyard of the Temple into context, con-sider how his assertion that his body was every bit as holy as the Temple itself – a critique of all spiritualities of sacrifice – and ponder what Mary Magdalene’s anointing of Jesus means in anticipation of his Passion.

And that’s not even opening the door to the spiritual and political parallels these ancient words have with some of the challenges we’re facing today. That could warrant a rich conversation and analysis of what happens when religious leaders get into bed with political authorities. But today the Spirit has led me in a very different direction: I’d like to contemplate what an embodied Lent might mean for you and me – or how our flesh and blood can become living prayers, ok?

You may recall that St. John’s gospel starts by telling us that at just the right time in the history of creation, God’s essence – the Word – became flesh and dwelt among us. The text says that since the beginning of time, the Word – the essence of the Lord – was waiting to become incarnate. So, at the right time, the time of God’s choosing, this holy essence took on flesh and blood, literally pitching his tent right next to ours to sojourn with us – that is, walk with us – so that we might see a one-of-a-kind glory saturated in generosity both inside and out. Tradition rightly insists that generosity shapes God’s grace as made visible to us in Jesus. It only stands to reason, therefore, that we’re encouraged to respond with a comparable largesse.

You may also recall that when St. Paul was asked to define how we are to respond to God’s generous love, he crafted Romans 12: Here’s what I want you to do with the help of God: pre-sent your bodies to the world as a living sacrifice. Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t be-come so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. In-stead, fix your attention on the Lord and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to the lowest level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. To express our gratitude to the Lord, we’re to practice living as embodied prayers for the world.

That’s what the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus shows us: love is greater than death – and love wins. But most of us aren’t used to seeing sacramentally – that is, recognizing reality as well as its deeper insights and truths – so we must train our eyes to see the holy amidst our human-ity. We need to SEE God’s truth in a tangible way, an incarnation we can trust, a manner of seeing the BIG picture in faith. Did you know that the word belief or faith – pistis in New Testament Greek and emuhan in the Old Testament’s Hebrew – is NOT about dogma, doctrine, catechisms, creeds or ideas? Faith is about trust – embodied trust – and I’d like to show you what I mean if I can have a volunteer, please?

Oh, you want to know WHAT you’ll be asked to do BEFORE you volunteer? Nothing dangerous, I assure you, something simple: I want to see who among us TRUSTS this stool to be a stool that will hold you up when you sit on it, ok? Anyone willing to help me with this demonstration? You see, you can say out loud that you trust this stool, you can hold a host of ideas about this stool in your mind, but you aren’t actually trusting it till you put buns on the seat. Anyone? (NOTE: Today a young tween volunteered - she first said I trust it because it looks sturdy - so I said: that's an observation but only verbal. I won't know you trust this stool till you sit on it and... she did. To the congregation's applause and delight.)

Trust – faith – is embodied not abstract, ok? St. John’s gospel asks us to practice trusting that the One who is holy not only brought the essence of the sacred to birth in the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth, but that the more Jesus practiced trusting God’s truth to be his guide, the more he GREW in wisdom and blessings.

· Does anyone recall what Jesus heard from the heavens – and his heart – when he came up from the baptismal waters in the River Jordan? YOU ARE MY BELOVED. Those words – YOU ARE MY BELOVED – were NOT for Jesus alone. By faith – by trust – YOU – and you and you and you and me – are God’s beloved, too.

· Incrementally, we mature into this blessing the more we practice living by trust. St. Paul was clear: we see by faith not just by sight alone? Practicing trust is how we embody God’s love and grace. It seems to me that’s what God was telling us when the Word became flesh in Jesus. And if it’s true for Jesus, then by association and faith it’s true for us too: trusting God’s grace in our flesh is the foundation of a living and salvific faith.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that poets are much better at affirming this truth than many theologians. I’m not going to unpack today WHY the church so often contributes to our confusion – and even sometimes hatred – of our bodies. I’ll save that for another sermon. And I do not want to go into the way culture and fashion warps our perspective except to say: they do. No, just give an ear to what old Walt Whitman told us about our bodies: I sing the body electric…

A man's body is sacred, and a woman's body is sacred, too. No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers' gang? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you, each has his or her place in the procession of creation.

ONE of the reasons we sing in worship is to practice trusting ourselves to become embodied prayers by expressing praise and gratitude with our WHOLE being – from the inside out. Not long ago I found out that scientists have discovered that when a group is singing something they love together that our hearts start beating more or less together in unison? The music, our voices, and our flesh and blood tenderly become ONE body guided by the Spirit. And in our case, that means the body of Christ as well as a community of compassion. 

Same for our celebration of Eucharist. In this sacrament we physically take IN to our bodies the mystical essence of Jesus so that Christ may nourish our bodies to pass on the generous blessings of God once worship is over. One of my favorite poets writing about the body, the bard of Provincetown, Mary Oliver of blessed memory, put it like this:

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Your body matters: it matters to God as the Lord’s beloved; it matters to Jesus who has NO body now but yours (as St. Teresa of Avila told us adding: Yours are the eyes with which he looks com-passionately on this world and yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.) Your body mat-ters to this community, to this church, and even to strangers. Your body matters because by faith, hope, and love, you are becoming an embodied prayer who makes Jesus visible to the world. That’s what Jesus did wherever he showed up: he made God’s grace visible more often than not by shar-ing peace, blessing, and healing to troubled flesh and blood.

· Think of the parable of the prodigal son who recognized his brokenness only when he woke up physically hungry and surrounded by ritually unclean pigs in a foreign land. When he repented – that is, when he changed direction in his life – he was embraced by his father and welcomed to a feast.

· What about the healing of the young man possessed by demons who lived in a graveyard? After banishing the abusive spirits, Jesus made certain that he fed and clothed this young man in need. And just to drive the point home, where do you think he GOT clothes for that broken body? From his disciples! He asked his followers to ante-up so that the one who was naked and alone could be clothed. In other words, he asked Peter, James, John, Magdalene and all the rest to practice sharing grace in a tangible and essential way.

· Same for the woman who had been hemorrhaging for seven years: she was made physically well in her body so that she might return to community life and spread the blessings. Over and again, the heart and soul of Jesus brings new life to worn out bodies. During Lent we now cast our eyes upon the body of Jesus: a body washed in the waters of baptism, a body that was anointed, then beaten, nailed to a Cross, and placed in a tomb. Lent tells and re-tells this story of Christ’s body so that we might listen to what OUR bodies are telling us about the sac-red, the desecrated, the ordinary, the extraordinary, and everything in-between.

When Jesus told his opponents that HIS body would be raised again in three days, he not only link-ed HIS flesh and blood with the presence and location of our living God, but yours and mine, too. He was telling us that by faith and trust in God’s grace we no longer need be confined to the Temple – or zendo – a mosque or church. Grace and God are now portable in our bodies. The historical incarnation made flesh in Jesus ended on the Cross – now, by faith, sharing this as God’s beloved has been passed on to you and me to make flesh every day. My prayer today is: Lord, may this be true among us. Amen.