Sermon: The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity - Eucharist

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 30th September 2012

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

James 5.13-20

Mark 9.38-50

We are the Body of Christ…

Bodies are funny things for human beings. We’ve all got one, they’re all pretty similar essentially, but it would seem, at least in the West, that many of us are rather dissatisfied with the one we’ve got. We have body image issues. This can range from general worries about how we look and what impression that may give to other people, right through to the mental health conditions that relate to body image, which need specialist help, bulimia and anorexia. The balance of privacy and flaunting the body is unresolved. And we can instantly recognise the person who is ‘comfortable in their own skin’, by which we mean the person who is not anxious about appearance but seems integrated, whole and at one with themselves.

That seems to be the ideal we seek: body and soul working together in perfect harmony. But we also know that despite the beauty of the body and what it is capable of in dance, in sport, in love and in the making of music, the body also is subject to decline, pain, decay and ultimately death. Our bodies are vessels of both life and mortality.

Some of you are aware of the work I have witnessed, and played a tiny part in, at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed in Bangladesh. Just like the work of Headley Court here with service personnel there is work that rehabilitates human bodies that are disfigured, maimed and broken. And yet bodies which can begin to do all sorts of things that the rest of us can barely imagine. The Paralympics surely brought that home to us.

We even mention bodies in the Creed, ‘we believe in the resurrection of the body…’ Bodies are integral to who we are. The reverence and attention given to a dead human body bears testimony to that. The human body is not, in the Christian tradition, like an old pair of shoes that is cast off, no longer needed by the more noble soul. That heresy was dealt with some time ago but rears its ugly head from time to time. The body of a departed loved one is not just thrown away but is reverently tended, as Christ’s broken body was, and is mourned over. That body will have been a body that has embraced and been embraced, has been the focus of love and devotion, if a woman it may have brought another body to birth. Such is the high regard of the body in Christianity, to use St Paul’s phrase ‘temples of the Holy Spirit’, that the body is precious and sacred ground. When someone’s body is treated as an object and not integral to a person being him or herself, then that person is dehumanised and turned into an object. That is why reflection on how we love and look at other people is of concern to Christians, lest that sacred ground be trampled upon.

Christ’s body tells us of Resurrection in a paradox, a mystery; for his risen body is real and tangible, and yet out of our reach and recognition.

These reflections are prompted by our readings this morning. Both are concerned not with the glamour of the human body but with its salvation and healing.

The letter to James sets a pattern of Christian practice in praying for the sick, in the confession of sin – itself a plea for healing of body and soul – and of anointing with oil. That action is one I have privileged as a priest to administer, not simply to the dying but to those who seek God’s healing. Christian prayer and healing is not telepathic, it asks God’s healing and the touch of a body. After all, Jesus was in touch with those he healed, so often we hear, ‘he reached out and touched him…’ The oil soothes and smoothes the cracks in our brittle outer shells. That outward action tells us that God’s inner grace works healing within.

The Letter of James from beginning to end is about body image; the gracious body image of the Church, the Body of Christ. James reflects on the necessity of attending to the whole body, not just the glamorous bits but the ugly bits too, in the way he says ‘don’t shove the poor to the side to let the glamorous and wealthy to the front’. And in the passage read this morning it reflects on the way in which healing should be ministered by all in the body to all in the body.

The gospel seems on first reading so problematic, and actually on subsequent readings too. It speaks of maimed bodies and the maiming of them. In very dramatic terms it speaks of the fire of hell. Where is the ‘good news’ of it? Perhaps it’s in the brokenness of the Body of Christ: the Church is a maimed body, broken, divided and bitter, bearing the wounds of Christ as his body was abused and battered. Yet those wounds become glorified and transformed in the ultimate healing action of the resurrection. Our bodies are incorporated into Christ’s resurrection by baptism – we believe in the resurrection of the Body – and our mortal bodies our fed by his immortal body in the body and blood of the Eucharist. In that way even a maimed body of the Church is by God’s grace transformed and led away from the banality of hell, where persons cease to be, and are objects and things.

In God’s economy you are not a thing. In God’s economy you are not an object. You are given a body, made in his image, and Christ in his body restores in you that image.

So we come full circle and back to bodies made in God’s image. How about next time you look in the mirror just take an extra bit of time to look at yourself and say thank you; ‘thank you, Lord, that you have made me in your image, that I am precious in your sight; you see me body and soul’. And lest we become narcissistic, let us, perhaps at the Peace, when we hear the words, ‘we are the Body of Christ’ look at each person and in the same way give thanks for them as God’s creation and gift, beautiful and wholesome in his sight. Pray for the healing of the body of Christ, and our own bodies and souls.

Out we came,
As from water into air.
Our gnarled carapaces fell aside
Love no longer found resistance
And flowed like an ungent
Over our needy skin.

Padraig O’Daly ‘Imaging an Afterlife’