I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, May 8 as part of our exploration of resurrection stories during Easter. The text is Luke 24:36-49; read it here.
It seems that the children at teach music to at the Presbyterian Church across town are great fodder for sermons. And tonight's no exception! This morning I was teaching my littlest guys, who are in the kindergarten and first grade, this song called “We thank God.” And you can do this thing where you can insert anything you want to give thanks for into the song. So you could sing “we thank God for giving us life.” Or, “we thank God for giving us food.” You get the idea.
So there I was, asking all the kids for suggestions of what they wanted to give thanks for, and we’d sing their thanksgiving together, and they were suggesting all this great stuff, like "families" and "puppy dogs" and "transformers" and we'd sing it together and then one of the kids said, “bodies!”
And I said, “bodies?”
And she was like, “Yeah, bodies!”
And I swear to God, the first thought that went through my head, almost in a whisper, was, “we can’t sing that in church...!”
And then I thought,
"Of course we can!
What on earth am I thinking?"
What I was thinking was probably the result of a long line of cultural and religious training, explicit and implicit, that holds up the notion that anything related to the body is, by nature not godly.
Not good.
Inappropriate for church.
Dangerous,
Something that should be covered,
controlled,
suppressed.
And yet, here we have Jesus, in the story we read tonight,
Appearing to the disciples,
Having broken the bonds of death,
And saying,
Touch me and see.
I am flesh and bones.
I have a professor who doesn't like the word “spirituality.”
Instead, he told us in class recently, we should talk about Christian “carnality.”
Christianity, he thinks, has nothing to do with spirit,
And everything to do with flesh.
The word “carnal” is from the latin, carnalis,
Which means “flesh.”
The definition:
pertaining to the flesh or body, it's passions and appetites.
Not spiritual. Merely human. Temporal. Wordly.
Even the definition in the dictionary is telling us that there is some kind of a division between our flesh and our spirit, an idea that has clung to our culture since Plato put pen to paper.
Our flesh is “merely human.”
Is of this time and not of the next.
Is divorced from the spiritual realm.
And yet,
here we have Jesus,
asking for a piece of fish.
because he's hungry.
Christ's death and resurrection is carnal.
It happens in the flesh.
It happens because of a body that is broken,
that is stripped of life
and then brought to new life.
A resurrected person
whose flesh is as real as yours and mine.
who hungers and thirsts with an appetite
that is as real as yours and mine.
What happens in the resurrection has little to do with the spiritual, and everything to do with the carnal. Even the way Jesus Invites his followers to believe has everything to do to the flesh and not the spirit. He invites them to use their senses, their bodily ways of perceiving and knowing to experience his presence.
Touch me and see.
I have flesh and bones.
Look at my hands, my feet.
This is a God who is made known in our appetites.
Made known through the desires and wants of our very bodies.
When Christ stands among us,
we know it not in our minds but with our hands, our eyes, our ears.
When god is in our midst,
we taste and see her presence.
We may have heard or understood at some point in our lives,
that to meet god we must be pure.
Must somehow bypass or short circuit or suppress
the desires and appetites of our bodies.
But here stands the Risen One,
in this room with us,
asking us to touch and see
to taste and smell
Christ's presence among us.
We follow not a spiritual path but a carnal one.
A path that points to the next world,
But with and through the bodies we've been given in this one.
So let’s rewrite the definition:
Carnality:
From the Latin, “carnalis,” which means “flesh.”
Pertaining to the flesh or body, it's passions and appetites.
Spiritual.
Human.
Temporal.
Worldly.
That which you can touch and see.
That through which we love and are loved.
That through which god is made known.
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