Our Bodies, Our Selves
a sermon by John W. Wimberly, Jr.
Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
August 24, 2008

Text: Romans 12:1-2

In the church, we talk about stewardship of our personal finances, stewardship of the environment along with other stewardship issues.  But all too rarely do we address stewardship of our bodies. So every few years, I preach a sermon on the need for us to enjoy and take care of our bodies.  It is a significant biblical theme.  It is also a matter of common sense.

As a preacher, I need to confess the subject makes me a bit uncomfortable.  Why?  Because I’m standing up here as a guy who is about 15-20 pounds overweight.  So I can understand if some of you say, “Who is he to preach to me about taking care of our bodies?”

First, everything has a context.  My weight has its context in the state of Wisconsin where I grew up.  In Wisconsin, I am a slim jim—fit and trim.  The amount of cheese, brats, beer and plain, old-fashioned grease consumed by my people in Badgerland is mind boggling.  So when I think of myself vis á vis my fellow Wisconsinites, I feel pretty good about my weight.

Second, the only difference between today’s sermon subject and other subjects upon which I preach is that my weight is visible.  My nasty thoughts, greed, and selfishness just aren’t quite as visible as my weight!  If I stopped preaching about things with which I struggle, the list of preaching topics would get very short indeed.

The relationship between Christianity and our bodies was distorted when Paul took Jesus’ message through Greece.  Christianity went into Greece as Judeo-Christianity.  It came out as Greco-Christianity. 

The Hebrew Scriptures contain a very healthy approach to our bodies, sex and everything else physical.  They view our bodies as a gift from God to be enjoyed.  In contrast, Greece had a strikingly different, very negative approach to the human body. 

If we haven’t studied Greek culture, we are inclined to associate Greece with the adoration of the body, evident in the Olympics and Greek art.  However, a closer look produces a much different picture.  To the major Greek philosophers, the body is a prison for the Spirit.  Our spirits are entrapped in our bodies during earthly life, longing to escape and return to the Spirit after death.

To them, human bodies, like everything on earth, are perishable and therefore of no eternal value. Our spirits, however, descend from the Eternal and return to the same upon death.  Therefore, in contrast to our bodies, our spirits possess eternal value.

Indeed, many Greeks saw Jesus as playing out their primary world view.  Namely the pre-existing Spirit descends to earth where it is entrapped in the body.  Upon death, the spirit returns to the spiritual world.  Christian gnosticism, which almost overwhelmed the church, is rooted in this world view, explaining why the preexistent Christ became such a big deal in the Greek world.

Adopting Greek philosophy, the church has devalued the human body and human sexuality while exalting the spiritual life.  Christianity adopted this approach to the body even though it was antithetical to Jesus’ world view.  Worse, we adopted it not a bit, but hook, line and sinker. 

In the late 1970’s our denomination created a new sex education curriculum.  After considerable study, the authors realized they basically had to bypass much of the teaching of the church.  Taking a detour around Greek thinking, they returned to the Judaism in which Jesus was raised.  There they found a healthy rather than negative approach to God’s gift of human sexuality. 

Despite the overall negative approach to the body in Christianity, there are a few places in the New Testament where we find helpful advice.  For example, in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he beseeches Christians, “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” It is through this lens that I would like us to consider our stewardship of our own bodies. 

Viewed as holy, what we put in our bodies, how we use our bodies becomes a matter of being religious or sacrilegious, faithful or unfaithful, respectful or disrespectful.  When we gorge ourselves with foods we know aren’t good for us, it is a religious issue, as surely as lying, cheating, and killing are religious issues.  We are profaning our sacred bodies.

Now I know the issue of what is good and what isn’t good to eat can be a very subjective matter.  When I was growing up, having a couple of eggs cooked in bacon grease with a lot of salt was considered a healthy breakfast.  It was!  Really. 

However, despite the ever-changing definition of a healthy diet, we have a responsibility to figure out, to the best of our ability, what constitutes a healthy diet and then eat accordingly.  Just as we think about what is or is not ethical in our work lives, we need to think about what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior vis á vis our bodies.  Certainly, what we eat falls into that discussion.

Exercise has its own trendiness.  My generation became convinced that jogging was great for us.  When done properly, it is.  But an uneducated embrace of jogging by many of my peers has produced a goldmine for orthopedic surgeons.  They are now dealing with boomers who didn’t understand the stress jogging places on the ankles, knees and hips. 

Despite differing views as to how we should workout, exercise is a religious discipline as surely as prayer is.  We need to find ways of exercising on a regular basis.  If we don’t, we are literally not exercising good stewardship of our bodies.

As some of you know, I am a bit of a gym rat.  Since my mid-30’s, I have spent 3-5 days a week in the gym engaging in some pretty strenuous workouts.  But my love of the gym is not just about keeping my body in some kind of reasonable condition.  It is also about my spirit.

I suffer from a low grade form of depression.  Gratefully, I learned that I can manage it with strenuous exercise.  If I work out regularly early in the morning, I don’t have problems with the depression.  When I don’t, I do.

This summer I decided to take a vacation from the gym in Mexico because I had a shoulder issue that wouldn’t allow me to lift weights.  So instead, I took long, one hour walks through our hilly town.  It was a mistake.  While walking is beneficial on many levels, it doesn’t get my pulse up into the 125-145 range where I need it to be while I exercise.  As a result, I felt sluggish and kind of blue until I figured out what was going on.

The relationship between our bodies and our spirits is another reason why we have a huge responsibility to take care of our bodies.  When our bodies are out of whack, there is a pretty good chance our spirits will be out of whack.  Everything from our mood to our productivity is affected.  Overall physical health and mental health are linked in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.

Sex is another body-related issue, although it surely taps the emotional and spiritual parts of our being as well.  The drive for and enjoyment we gain from sex is a basic part of the human condition.  It is a gift from God. 

To leave sex out of our understanding of faithfulness is an enormous mistake.  It is also a huge mistake to come up with simplistic rules about what one should or shouldn’t do sexually or when one should or shouldn’t have sex.  Too often, the church has taken a very legalistic and unhelpful approach as to when, with whom and how we should enjoy the gift of sex.

It certainly hasn’t helped individual Christians that the church has held up the Virgin Mary as a role model, not Mary the mother of several children.  Whether or not we believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, to produce her other children, Mary definitely employed the gift of human sexuality, not to mention Joseph.  Focusing on her virginity keeps us from viewing Mary as a sexual woman.  Frankly, I don’t think that is accidental.  I am convinced the male leadership of the early church didn’t want us to think of Mary as a sexual being.

Virginity and abstinence have their place in life.  But so does sexual activity.  Knowing the difference is at the heart of a faithful sex life.  And, no, there will be no personal illustrations from me regarding this particular point! 

However, I did live through the most dramatic change in sexual behavior in human history.  When I graduated from high school in 1965, in a class of almost 900, I bet you could have counted the non-virgins on one, maybe two hands.  Two years later, the Sixties’ sexual revolution descended upon us and the sexual ethic was captured by Stephen Stills’ chorus “love the one you’re with.” Not love the one you love; not even love the one you know; just love the one you’re with.

Decades later, we are still sorting out the fallout from that dramatic, traumatic transition.  We remain confused and conflicted about the non-structured ethos that has ruled sexual conduct in our society for about four decades. 

The rise of HIV/AIDS and STDs certainly has forced folks to be more cautious about sex. But such an approach is ethics built by fear.  As Christians, our goal is to build a positive ethics that embraces our sexuality and helps us think through our choices in a healthy, holy way.

As we do so, resurrecting the hard and fast rules of the fifties won’t help.  They didn’t help then and they won’t help now.  They simply produce rebellion or guilt.  But the “if it feels good, it is good” approach should also be buried in the past.

The church has a lot of work to do to help Christians develop the ability to think through issues of human sexuality.  Having the church simply denounce one entire expression of human sexuality, homosexuality, makes the task that much more difficult.  Again, we need to move beyond what we condemn to what we affirm.

This week I heard an interview with a young rock star.  He was asked an incredibly bizarre question: “If you had a choice, would you rather be Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or John Fogerty.” The young man’s response seemed more bizarre than the question.  “John Fogerty,” he replied without hesitation.  The interviewer, obviously puzzled that he hadn’t picked one of the two legends (Hendrix or Morrison), said, “Why?” “Because he is alive,” came the immediate response. 

“Staying alive” is a wonderful bottom line for a person of faith.  It fits perfectly with the Biblical command to “choose life.” It also perfectly describes why caring for our bodies is so important.  If we aren’t alive, we can’t build a just, peaceful and loving world, can we?  If we eat or drink ourselves to an early death or a life of debilitating diseases, we have not only robbed ourselves and our loved ones.  We have robbed God. 

God puts us here for a purpose.  To the extent that we are healthy, we have the option of fulfilling that purpose.  To the extent we are not, we have to deal with physical constraints.

This, by the way, is one reason why universal, quality health care should be a major issue as Christians evaluate candidates in this fall’s election.  Rick Warren did us a huge disservice when he felt the need to ask Senators Obama and McCain about their relationship to Jesus rather than their commitment to making sure that all of God’s children receive quality health care.  We have no qualms about spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fight a war in Iraq.  But we suddenly start equivocating when we discuss spending billions of dollars to fight a lack of health care here at home.  It is a contradiction that does not go unnoticed by our God, even it goes unnoticed by those who want to make a candidate’s faith a central political issue.

Some of us have to worry about weight.  Some don’t.  Some have the sex thing all figured out.  Some of us don’t.  Some of us have to deal with genetic health issues.  Some of us don’t.

But no matter what the shape or condition of our bodies and no matter how they got in that particular shape or condition, our relationship to our bodies is not merely a question of fitness.  It is a question of stewardship, Christian stewardship. 

God gave us our bodies with the clear intention that we would take care of them, enjoy them and use them faithfully.  God wants us to use them in ways that bring us pleasure.  God wants us to use them in ways that build a just and peaceful world. 

As summer comes to an end, may we recommit ourselves not only to working hard in our jobs and classrooms.  May we also commit ourselves to working hard in taking care of one of the greatest gifts God gives us—our bodies.

Let us pray: Good God, you bless us in so many ways.  Some of those blessings we take for granted.  Help us not to take for granted our bodies or those of others.  Enable us to lead healthy, holy lives which will be acceptable in your sight.  Amen.