The Third Sunday in Lent Year B

Lent 3B March 4, 2018 How many of y’all are perfectly happy with your body the way it is right in this present moment? You are content with the way it moves, the way it looks, the way it feels (not too tired, not too achy)? How many of you would be able to pray a part of the prayer that we pray at our weekly healing service with truthfulness, sincerity, and integrity: “God the Holy Spirit, you make our bodies the temple of your presence. We praise you, and thank you, O Lord.” Look, I’m right there with y’all. I spend 30 minutes every day doing workouts with a celebrity trainer who seems to be obsessed with “sculpting” different parts of my anatomy and also with “giving me the body I’ve always wanted.” I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a little concerning, and that there is a fine line between good health and fanaticism or ridiculousness. Plus, it’s Lent. And Lent is a time when we focus on our own our sinfulness, on the ways we have turned away from God and “followed for too long the devices and desires of our own hearts.” And for some reason, maybe it is because we live in a body-obsessed culture, we often spend much or our Lent focusing on the sins of the body. But today, we have a different model. We have Jesus, who we see in John’s gospel today, taking on the temple. Now, unlike the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) which locate Jesus’s cleansing of the temple immediately before his death and resurrection, this is early on in John’s gospel, right after Jesus’s first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. John’s gospel is also the latest of the four gospels, and it was written after the Romans had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. So we have a marked contrast between the other three gospel writers, who show how this particular act of Jesus is the final straw for the authorities in Jerusalem and is what eventually leads to his crucifixion, and the writer of John who is doing something very different with this story. The writer of John’s gospel is showing how, in Jesus’s ministry, Jesus has revolutionized how people relate to God. (Remember how John’s gospel starts: In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God…and the word became flesh and lived among us…”) The way that John tells this story of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple is to show the early Christians who find themselves without a temple, the central place in which to worship God, that we no longer need that. In the body of Jesus, we encounter God. God is not confined to a central worship space but is embodied in the person of Jesus and can be found in Jesus’s own suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection. God is revealed in and through the temple that is Jesus’ body, and therefore, God can be revealed in and through the temple that is our own bodies. When is the last time you thought of your body not as something to be changed or endured, hidden or minimized, not as something that embarrasses or betrays you? When is the last time you thought about your body without contempt, squeamishness, or fear? When is the last time you thought of your body as the temple of God’s presence? The poet Mary Oliver writes about the wonder of our bodies in a part of her poem titled Evidence: "…I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed. As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in the world that can hold, in a mix of power and sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas, ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue. Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable."i It is in and through the human form that God has revealed God’s self to us in the person of Jesus. Our bodies are gifts that God has given us, not something that we have to subdue or sculpt, deny or denigrate. Truly we are fearfully and wonderfully made. That may be a challenge in and of itself to embrace, but there is a deeper challenge embedded in this awareness. “In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes that it is not possible to lean into God’s love for my body, without simultaneously recognizing that God loves ‘all bodies everywhere.” The ‘bodies of the hungry children and indentured women along with the bodies of sleek athletes and cigar-smoking tycoons.’ ‘One of the truer things about bodies,’ Taylor concludes, ‘is that it is just about impossible to increase the reverence I show mine without also increasing the reverence I show yours.’ In other words, once I value my own body as God’s temple, as a site of God’s pleasure, delight, and grace, how can I stand by while other bodies suffer exploitation, poverty, discrimination, or abuse?”ii In closing, I’m going to give you your invitation for this week, and then I’m going to follow it with a blessing for you. Your invitation this week is to make peace with your body, to acknowledge that it is the only vessel in/ the world that can hold, in a mix of power and/ sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,/ ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue; that it is the temple of God’s presence. To do this, you may consider praying: God the Holy Spirit, you make my body the temple of your presence. I praise you, and thank you, O Lord.” The second part of your invitation is to consider how you use your body to embody the gospel, the good news of God’s love to those around you? And finally, the Blessing. Blessing the Body By Jan Richardson This blessing takes one look at you and all it can say is holy. Holy hands. Holy face. Holy feet. Holy everything in between. Holy even in pain. Holy even when weary. In brokenness, holy. In shame, holy still. Holy in delight. Holy in distress. Holy when being born. Holy when we lay it down at the hour of our death. So, friend, open your eyes (holy eyes). For one moment see what this blessing sees, this blessing that knows how you have been formed and knit together in wonder and in love. Welcome this blessing that folds its hands in prayer when it meets you; receive this blessing that wants to kneel in reverence before you: you who are temple, sanctuary, home for God in this world.iii i. Evidence by Mary Oliver ii. Written by Debbie Thomas on Journey with Jesus Blog https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1675-the-temple-of-his-body iii. http://paintedprayerbook.com/2012/03/05/3rd-sunday-in-lent-speaking-of-the-body/