Sermon: "Bodily Resurrection," April 18, 2021

"Resurrection and the ostentatio vulnerum", wooden statue ca. 1500. Augustiner museum, Rattenberg, Austria

Preacher: The Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: Luke 24:36b-48

When I was training to be a minister, I served as a chaplain intern at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver for seven weeks. During that time I was posted to the short-term surgery ward. People who’d be there for a few days or a few weeks to get their surgical procedure and sent home.

One man I visited with, who was in his mid-thirties, was living with Crohn’s disease. If you’re unfamiliar it’s an inflammation of your digestive tract, which can lead to abdominal pain, fatigue, weight loss among other things. This surgery was yet another in a long line of surgeries to keep his health steady and relieve his pain. His pain caused him to be virtually immobilized, and confined to his home where he was cared for by his two elderly parents.

He was often in low spirits, but glad for the visit. Being young, arrogant, and healthy myself, I was certain that I could fix this guy’s problem. I could pull something out of my religious toolkit that would pick him and to send him home a new and reinvigorated person.

God loves you, I’d say.

He’d nod in understanding.

“You’re not alone in your suffering,” I’d offer. “God is with you.”

Another nod. “Ok.”

“At least you’ve got a lot to be grateful for,” I pointed out.

“That’s true.” He replied, then went back to staring at the ceiling.

When it came down to it, nothing I said provided a magic bullet that would release him from either physical discomfort, or despair. Nothing I said seemed to fix him.

Eventually, he confided in me that he was just sick and tired of his body. “Why was I born with this one?” He asked me, resentment hanging in the air. And when I couldn’t come up with a good answer he told me that on a lot of days dying sounded like a relief compared to living in this body that had been the source of such continual grief.

Our bodies can be a real mixed bag. When we’re younger, and if we’re healthy, our they're our friends. They keep growing, adapting to circumstances, partnering with us for success, procreation, and development. Some of us are lucky enough, either through genetics, habit or luck, to have this extend pretty far. For others, like my friend in the short-term surgical ward, it can be sooner, more severe. Chron’s disease for some, depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, or addiction-fomenting injury for others. No matter what or when, though, all of us experience our bodies as a source of challenge, disappointment, suffering or strife. It’s just a matter of when.

It's liable to make us feel like our bodies  are a problem to be solved. It's what makes cosmetic surgery such a lucrative profession. It’s what makes Assisted Death so appealing, too. We don’t have to let our bodies betray us with pain. And—just think—if we didn’t have these weak, vulnerable biological systems pandemics wouldn’t even be an issue at all.

Bodies, you might say, can be pretty problematic.

All of this, though, makes today’s scripture reading all the more… interesting. Because it’s all about the importance of bodies.

Here Jesus’ disciples are gathered, all atwitter with some incredible news. They’ve heard that Jesus, who’d been crucified three days earlier, is somehow alive. One report cites angels and an empty tomb. Another has Jesus meeting a couple disciples on the road and then disappearing as soon as he’d broken and blessed some bread. And then Simon Peter, Jesus’ right hand man, apparently had his own encounter with the risen Christ.

While they’re sharing their various Jesus sightings, suddenly our text tells us, Jesus appears among them. We don’t know if its with a sudden “pop,” or a gradual appearance like the Star Trek transporter. But here he is. Right in their midst. And he arrives with the words “Peace be with you.”[i]

The disciples are—understandably—freaked out. “Startled and terrified,” we’re told, because they think Jesus is a shade, a spectre. What Scooby Doo might call a “g-g-g-ghost!”

Immediately, Jesus presents them with the wounds in his hands and his feet to get them to calm down. The same hands and feet where nails pinned him to the cross. He invites them to look, to touch, and see that the man standing in front of them isn’t a ghost. But same Jesus who walked with them, taught them, and was eventually abandoned by them, crucified, died, and was buried. Jesus tells them. “Ghosts don’t have flesh and bones like this. It’s me, Jesus.”

At this point you can imagine their peering eyes investigating, their hands cautiously reaching out, tracing these bumpy scars. We’re told that this is a moment of joy. And yet, there’s still some lingering doubt. “In their joy,” it says, “they were still disbelieving and wondering.”

Despite seeing, and touching, the disciples still aren’t sure. What more proof could they need? Get out your microscopes and Bunsen burners… we’re about to do a little scientific analysis? No. Jesus asks for food. “Got anything here to eat?” I mean if you’ve ever seen Ghostbusters, you’ll know that the little green ghost, Slimer, loves to eat, but it just goes in his mouth and falls right out the bottom. Same idea here, a ghost wouldn’t retain anything. And so they bring him some broiled fish, it says. He sits down, takes a few bites, until he finishes it off. Ghosts don’t eat, but Jesus does. Therefore he’s not a ghost. The risen Jesus has a body.

Now, you’d think being a disembodied spirit would be preferable. No hunger, no sickness. Can’t crucify Casper. Considering the, weak, problematic party-pooping nature of bodies, it’s just bizarre that he bends over backwards to prove he’s not a ghost.

Why is that?

Because according to the Bible, the human body is the site of God’s mercy and redemption. The whole of creation is, in fact.

In the Bible’s thinking God didn’t create this universe of ours to be discarded. In fact, in the first chapter of Genesis, the Creation story, God creates the heavens and the earth, and calls them both good, including human bodies and animal bodies. Genesis one is actually this great divine poem where God is constructing the universe as a temple, her dwelling place for eternity.[ii] In the New Testament the Apostle Paul picks up this language, reminding his congregation that they are a temple of the Holy Spirit.[iii] Paul also talks about waiting and longing for the redemption of our bodies,[iv] and the Apostles’ Creed, which we say every second week refers ”resurrection of the body,” rather than the immortality of the soul.[v] Because human bodies—crappy, week, and busted up as they may be—are the Lord’s precious and beautiful creations, fashioned to be God’s dwelling place forever.

The final chapter in the Bible is maybe the most evocative. Here we’re shown the coming together of the unseen, spiritual realm, and the physical realm in an everlasting embrace. God dwelling in the midst of humanity, and the world forever:

‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’[vi]

Some have criticized Christianity as a world-denying religion, that the goal is to leave all this behind. Truth be told, some Christians have given this as a reason why we shouldn’t care about the destruction of the earth—it’s all a stepping stone to heaven anyway.[vii] But this is a complete misunderstanding. God’s end goal is not the sloughing off of creation like a used Oh Henry wrapper. No, the scars in Jesus’ hands and feet, and the fish in Jesus’ belly point us toward the undoing of death,[viii] the healing of creation of all ill and evil, and its eternal joy in communion with its Creator. This is what Easter signals. Jesus' resurrection is a preview of all things made right, the knitting together of God and humanity, of God and God’s good world.x   

Now, I don’t know how this exactly works. We’re not given blueprints in scripture, but something closer to poetry. We don’t want to get too literalistic or precise—that part is a mystery. But Easter gives us a sneak preview of that final consummation where the temple of the universe is filled with the glory of God forever. Not a single atom lost or forgotten, but brought to its glorious completion by the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Mended, set right for eternity. And that somehow includes me and you. Not in some imagined ideal version of ourselves, but our full selves as we are, body, mind and soul. From dad bods to developmental disabilities. All things new.

This is what I might have told my friend in short-term surgical. If I knew what I know now. If I believed then what I believe now. That’s what I might have said. And it’s what I’m saying to you right now.

Because of Easter we can see our bodies as good, and the object of Christ’s redemption, no matter how they might fail us. Doesn’t mean they’ll be free of pain or suffering. But it does mean we can stop seeing them as problems to be solved. We no longer have to resent them or be ashamed of them for what they are or aren’t, what they can and can’t do. We can stop fighting them and fleeing them as a burden to be left behind. Instead, we can see them as a part of us to be lived with, and befriended here and now, in the same way God has befriended them in his Son.

Knowing that in the same way God took on flesh, and in Christ suffered, died, and rose again in a human body, we can accept the weakness, pain and hurt in our bodies as a gateway to experiencing God’s healing and sustaining presence with us here and now. We can face these things with courage. We can encourage, build each other up, and bear one another’s burdens[ix] Rather than just wishing them away, or depleting ourselves in efforts to escape. Trusting that all of it will one day give way to a future where it will no longer be the case.

Our bodies, friends, may be a mixed bag. They may be problematic, the source of so much woe, sadness and disappointment. However yours may have failed you, is failing you now, or in the future, though, know this: the Good News is that God has befriended you in the totality of your existence.[x] This very same body has been blessed from before the beginning of time… and that—in Jesus Christ—it has been made holy and is one day destined to be made whole for eternity. All things made new.

And to Him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb be blessing, and honour, and glory and might for ever and ever.[xi]

AMEN.

[i] “A conventional Jewish greeting but also a sign of the kingdom.” David L. Tiede, “The Gospel of Luke,” in The Harper Collins Study Bible, rev. ed., ed. Harold W. Attridge (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2006), 1812.

[ii] See this great Bible Project video on the Bible’s “Temple” theme. https://bibleproject.com/learn/temple/

[iii] 1 Corinthians 3:16, 6:19.

[iv] See Romans 8:13-30.

[v] See Richard B. Hays, “The Resurrection of the Body,” in Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles’ Creed, ed. Roger E. Van Harn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 265.

[vi] Revelation 21:3-4 (NRSV).

[vii] For a conservative Christian’s critique of this attitude among other conservative Christians see https://www.christianity.com/blogs/tullian-tchividjian/making-all-things-new-not-all-new-things.html

[viii] I owe this phrase to the great Fleming Rutledge.

[ix] Galatians 6:2.

[x] This is the great affirmation of St. Athanasius: “For that which [Christ] has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” This includes the human body.

[xi] Revelation 5:13, from The Service Book, 1969.