|
Foundry United Rev. |
|
|
Sermon Series: Love Yourself, Love Your Neighbor “You Are Wonderfully Made” Sunday, December 6,
2009 |
|
|
Psalm 139:13-18
Rev. |
I
am a fan of a guy named Jon Gabriel. He’s written a book called “The Gabriel
Method”[i]
and used to have a blog radio call-in show[ii]
I listened to. He has a meditation mp3 I sometimes listen to as I am falling
asleep. He
says he grew up an average sized kid. As an adult he got a job on Wall
Street, a very stressful job. He gained weight, and when he was 20 pounds
over his former weight, he started to diet. He followed a strict diet, denied
himself lots of food, lost ten pounds. After a few months, his weight loss
stalled, he got discouraged and fell off the diet, began to binge, and ended
up 40 pounds over his original weight. So he started a new diet, denied
himself, lost ten pounds, his weight loss stalled, he fell off his diet,
gained the weight back and more, and ended up 60 pounds over his original
weight. He
says he eventually dieted himself up to over 400 pounds. In
a moment of despair, he made a decision that he would never diet again even
if he weighed 400 pounds the rest of his life. He decided that he would try
to understand his own body. After a lot of study and self-reflection, he says
that he came to the realization that his body had been putting on weight
because it was trying to protect him. He had come to view his body as his
enemy, but really his body was putting on weight in order to protect him. By
reducing the stress in his life, by dealing with unresolved pain from his
past, by coming to understand why his body wanted to hold weight and why it
was always causing him to feel hungry, by eating certain things before he ate
whatever he felt like eating, by meditating and visualizing, he says that he
was able to return to his former weight without dieting. I
am not an expert on nutrition, diet, weight, or any of those things, so I
have nothing to say about that. I know of few topics more painful to many
people than the issue of weight. I think we as a society are screwed up about
weight and body size. I think I am screwed up about it. So I will be of no
help on that topic, I’m afraid. I
am just telling you Jon Gabriel’s story because I think what was true of him
is true for many of us. We have come to think of our own body as our enemy. It
may be because our body doesn’t fit society’s ideal standards of beauty, or
because it has what we consider to be handicaps, or because it has genes that
make us more prone to certain diseases or conditions, or because it has
appetites and desires someone has taught us are bad, or because it gets old
and finally dies. I
will not ask for a show of hands, but I think many of us are not totally
happy with our bodies. Lots of us resent some aspect or another of our body. Some
of the writers of the Bible were not immune from this same human struggle.
The Apostle Paul, at one point, compares his life to a marathon or a boxing
match. “I
do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air,” he writes,
“but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after preaching to others I myself
should not be disqualified” I Cor. 9:26-7). Another
time he says this: “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see
in my members [members of his body] another law at war with the law of my
mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched
man that I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death” (Romans 7: 22-4). I
don’t know specifically which members Paul is talking about, but Paul seems
to have had issues with his body, the way many of us have issues. He tended sometimes
to view his body as his enemy. But
there are other voices in the Bible about our bodies that have a different
attitude. Genesis says God created humankind in God’s own image, male and
female, God created them, and God called what God had created very good.
(Gen. 1: 27-31) The Creator was proud of the work of creating us. The Creator
looked at us and said, Boy, I do good work, don’t I? There
is the Song of Solomon which celebrates the male and female body lavishly,
with great sensuality. The Song of Solomon should have parental controls on
it. There
is Psalm 139 which praises the Creator because we are awesomely and
wonderfully made. (Psalm 139:14) Actually the Psalm writer uses the first
person. When ancient This
Advent/Christmas season of incarnation is about the human body. The Word
became flesh. Mary got pregnant and got larger and larger, until one night in
a stable a red ball of screaming human flesh got pushed and heaved into the
world, and it was God incarnate, theologians say. The human body was good
enough for God to be one for 30-some years. Resurrection
says something about the body. It is the whole person, including the body,
that is resurrected. The body is perhaps a new body but it is not just a soul
but also a body that is resurrected, according to the Christian idea of
resurrection. The two primary biblical
images of heaven are a feast and a choir. So whatever is resurrected can eat
and sing. We will at least have taste buds and vocal cords. Communion
says something about the body. We don’t understand it and we maybe don’t like
to think about it too much, and it caused the early Christians to be tortured
for cannibalism, but we say the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is
the blood of Christ. During
our Advent and Christmas series this year, we are focusing on a line from
Foundry’s key scripture. A religious scholar asked Jesus which was the
greatest commandment. Jesus said to love God with all your heart, soul, mind
and strength, and then the second great commandment was to love your neighbor
as yourself. This is our key scripture; this is who we want to be at Foundry…
people who love God with all of ourselves heart and mind, and people who love
our neighbors. The
presupposition behind Jesus saying to love our neighbors the way we love
ourselves is that we love ourselves. If you don’t love yourself in a healthy
way, I’d prefer that you not love me the way you love yourself. So
if you disdain your body, if you disdain your physicality, your humanness,
your vulnerability, your limitations, your sexuality, your appetites, please don’t
love me the way you love yourself. I
am not saying that we should not practice self-discipline but there is a
difference between setting limits on our behavior and disdaining our desires.
I think a lot of us have been taught to disdain our desires. The
fact that I love to eat doesn’t mean that I should eat anything I want whenever
I want to, but to disdain that I have to eat makes it hard for me to love my
hungry neighbor or any neighbor who has appetites I hate in myself. If
you ever are tempted to resent your appetite, talk to someone who has lost
it. There is a difference between me becoming a slave to my appetite and my
resenting it. I can love my appetite and not become its slave. But
let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about you. The
fact that you have a sex drive doesn’t mean that you need to have sex with
whoever you feel like whenever you feel like it, but to disdain your
sexuality will make it difficult for you to love other people without being
judgmental of their sexuality or else turning them into sexless beings. It
will especially make it difficult to love sexual minorities and maybe even
the other gender. If
your genes and chemistry cause you to wrestle with alcoholism or obesity or
depression or body odor, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to wrestle with those
things, but unless you make peace with it, it will affect your relationship
with others. I know of an alcoholic woman who so misses drinking and is so
worried that she passed on a genetic proclivity to alcoholism to her son and
she so wants him to be able to drink socially without being addicted that he
is already having alcohol problems. I’m
not saying this is always easy to figure out. All I am saying is that if we
have not made peace with our own bodies, it will be hard to love our neighbor
if he or she has a body. This is why there are some people we have a hard
time loving until they are dead. When they are dead we can love them. We
can’t really love them so long as they have a body. If
we resent our bodies more than appreciate them, it will tend to distort our
love of neighbor one way or another. And
when you think about it, we are awesomely and wonderfully made, everyone of
us. The human body is a miracle. Jane
and I were going to have Thanksgiving dinner with my older brother Nevin at
the retirement facility where he is living now. Two days earlier he was taken
to the hospital so we celebrated Thanksgiving in the hospital with him. The
evening before they had removed a catheter from him and his body was not resuming
its natural functions. He was very uncomfortable all morning, it was hard to watch,
until we talked the doctor into putting the catheter back in. So
he and I spent part of Thanksgiving telling bodily function jokes and stories
while Jane listened in disapprovingly. (You’d have to have known our father.) I
told my brother that Judaism has a prayer of thanksgiving to be prayed after
you went to the bathroom. He said he wanted to pray that prayer so I looked
it up for him. It
is called the Asher Yatzar. “Blessed
are You, Hashem, our G-d, Ruler of the universe, Who formed human beings with
wisdom and created within them many openings and many hollows (cavities). It
is obvious and known before Your Throne of Glory that if but one of them were
to be ruptured or if one of them were to be blocked it would be impossible to
survive and to stand before You (even for a short period of time). Blessed
are You, Hashem, Who heals all flesh and acts wondrously." I
wonder if it would help us if we wove prayers of thanksgiving into our lives
for our bodies. When someone gives us a piece of bread at communion and says,
“The body of Christ,” what if we prayed a prayer of thanksgiving for our
body. It may be weak, it may be vulnerable, it may my prone to alcoholism or
diabetes, but without this body I could not serve You, O God, on this good
earth. When
someone gives the cup to dip our bread in and says, “The blood of Christ,”
for us to pray a prayer of thanksgiving for our blood. It may be anemic, it
may be infected with cancer or HIV or subject to hemophilia or clotting, but
the blood in my veins is the miracle of life. Thank you, O God, for the
miracle of life. I
think we need to start saying grace again, those of us who don’t. Every time
we eat we stop and think for a moment about the miracle of our digestive
processes and our connectedness to the earth. The earth’s body and our bodies
and how it is all part of one organic being. Maybe
we need our own Asher Yatzar. Annie
Dillard says that Buddhism teaches that it is always a mistake to think that
your soul can go it alone.[iii]
I think the Bible teaches this as well. You
are awesomely and wonderfully made—all of you—body, soul, spirit. Love yourself so you can love your neighbor.
www.foundryumc.org |
|
|
|
|
|
|
