Body talk

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

That is the prayer we offered at the beginning of our worship today, and I repeat it now because one of the most important aspects of our faith has to do with our understanding of bodies.

The collect talks about us being reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body, and our Gospel reading has at its heart a question of what the resurrected Body of Christ is.

Each human being lives out their existence in a physical body, and our prevailing conception of life’s timeline has to do with the entrance of our physical bodies into the world through birth, and their eventual end in death.

Philosophers of many cultures have wrestled with how these physical bodies, with all their differences and histories, are related to concepts like the spirit, the soul, and the mind.

Are we spiritual beings having a physical experience or physical beings having a spiritual experience?

Are our beings composed of body, mind, and soul—or is this physical reality all there is?

This week a dear friend sent me a link to a lecture exploring the thought of one of the Church’s early theologians, Origen, who was deemed a heretic 300 years after his death when it served the political purposes of the Emperor Justinian.

There is much about Origen’s belief and thought that is commendable, and he influenced the faith of many early church figures we still laud as saints today.

I can’t do a thorough exposition of Origen’s theology or the history surrounding his standing for orthodoxy this morning, but I encourage you to check out the lecture by Professor Charles Stang if you are interested in discovering more (linked in online version of the sermon).

For now, I want to explore two separate models for existence that appear in the lecture and in Origen’s work and see how those models affect the way we Christians may think about the place of the body today.

One idea is that God first created all creatures as minds/spirits—including angels, demons, and humans—whose purpose as minds/spirits was to contemplate God. 

When these minds/spirits “fell” into a lower level of creation, they then had to acquire souls and bodies to inhabit that new realm.

In this model the physical body is a kind of shell that protects and houses your more important nature as mind/spirit, and when we leave this realm through death or through God’s final restoration of all things, the body and soul slough off like unneeded clothing.

It doesn’t take much to realize how this idea, especially when distorted, can lead to very negative views of the body.

If we are only spirits in the material world, and these bodies and souls mere layers that are destined to die, then what value do bodies really have?

Bodies are temporary, unreliable, changing—not worth investing in and perhaps even worthy of condemnation because of the way satisfying bodily desires can distract us from the contemplation that is our mind/spirits’ ultimate destiny.

This model of being can lead to an intense desire to escape the body and view it negatively.

I lament the amount of body shaming, body denigrating, and body devaluing that has accompanied the distorted application of this view of existence.

There is another model of being that appears in Origen’s thought as well—one I like much better because of my own lived experience as a Christian.

Professor Stang calls this second conception the “states of matter” model.

The original mind/spirit of each creature is likened to an iron in the fire of God, which remains fully afire and fully itself while within the eternal heart of God’s consuming flame.

In this model, the fall of Adam and Eve is likened to a hot iron being removed from the flame and cooling into a new state of matter.

The iron is still the same iron regardless of whether it is plunged in ice and fully cooled, lukewarm and malleable, or all aflame—the difference in the states of matter is one of degree and density of particles.

Removed from the forge of God, we experience a denser existence than we knew, and the integrity among our minds, souls, and bodies makes this earthly pilgrimage into an opportunity to slow down so our mind/spirits can learn something about themselves and eventually make their way back to the flaming heart of God.

The goal of all life in this model is transformation, not escape—life is about becoming immersed in the kiln of God so that our mind/spirits are one again.

Origen believes that Jesus Christ was the one mind/spirit, soul, and body who never ceased to be aflame with God’s fire (that is what we mean when we profess that he lived among us but without sin).

Christ’s incarnation in the denser states of matter we call soul and body and his resurrection from the dead showed us the pattern for the transformative journey we are all called to take.

The body of Jesus bears the wounds of the crucifixion because our bodies, though a denser state of being, have value and meaning, and are connected to the resurrected body that returns to the flame of God.

Like a grain of wheat that has a certain kind of body when planted in the ground and a different body when it breaks through the soil into the light of day—or like a caterpillar becoming a chrysalis and a butterfly—Jesus’ resurrection of the body reveals a new thing that is unable to be separated from what was.

Since Jesus calls us all to follow him into this life of the new creation, our bodies, souls, and mind/spirits can experience the same transformation as he did on our journey of return.

This means that we can honor and appreciate these bodies we have even as we know that they are not yet in their final and eternal form.

The body Jesus has in the Gospel is both familiar to us and unfamiliar.

He can slip into locked spaces with ease, and still show his astonished disciples the marks of the nails and the wound in his side.

What might our bodies and souls become when the flame of God made manifest in the resurrection begins to transform us?

And furthermore, who might we become as a people connected at our core and at the roots to the One who opened the way, the truth, and the life to us?

Professor Stang posits at the end of his lecture, “In the end I suggest, Origen wants us to think of God as having created only one thing, a kind of primordial mind-matter, which was to serve as the receptacle of his fire…In the end that is like the beginning…these fiery minds, all deified, will once again become spiritual bodies…It is only a half-step further, perhaps less to imagine Origen saying that God has made for himself a body: us.  We are God’s body.  The drama of the minds’ fall and restoration, led by their sibling Christ, is also the drama of the descent, dissolution and eventual resurrection of God’s own body, of which we are each an essential and inalienable part. According to Origen, God is quite literally enticing us to restore to God God’s own body.”

The Body of Christ, God’s body—a people connected to the true vine and the heart of the eternal—in pilgrimage together on a journey of reconciliation and restoration.

That is who we are called to be dear people of God.

May this Easter season that unfolds before us be a time of remembering the value of your body, soul, and mind—a time of discovery and transformation as you join with your siblings in the fellowship of Christ’s body—and a time of recommitting and rekindling the transformative and generative life to which Jesus calls us.