Mythbusters: Do You Hate Your Body?

         Do you hate your body?  Statistics show that a good portion of you would answer “yes” to that question.  There are entire industries that rely on us hating our bodies.  Beauty products like make-up, hair color all exploit at our insecurity about our bodies.  In many advertisements women are portrayed as unhealthily thin, and a body image is promoted that leads many young girls into struggles with eating disorders.  Even healthy products and services like exercise equipment and gyms motivate us to change our behavior by preying on our low image of our bodies.

Beyond that, most advertisements presume we hate our bodies, even if they aren’t specifically selling us a product to improve them.  Think about it.  Have you ever seen an out-of-shape person in a car commercial?  From watching TV, one might even assume that the best way to get a hot body is to drink beer, since, at least in commercials, it seems all the people with the best bodies drink beer or at least attend beer-related events.

One would expect that Christian culture would offer us an alternative to holding our bodies in low esteem, but sadly that is not always the case.  In Christianity, it seems that not only do we hate our own bodies, we hate everyone else’s body as well.  In fact we hate the idea of bodies.

For the most part, throughout much of Christian history, the human body has been portrayed as something in which evil resides.  The body is where all kinds of human lusts and desire fester that must be repressed and eventually done away with.

This is why so much of Christian culture is obsessed with sex.  Many of us who grew up in churches, were raised with an overt or covert suggestion that sex was something that was always bad and dirty.  Furthermore, our bodies were something bad and dirty too.   After all, the apostle Paul wrote about his struggles with the “flesh” and what else could “flesh” mean other than human muscle tissue and organs? 

Our bodies, many Christians suggest, are obstacles to a more spiritual life in God.   Consequently, our ultimate destiny is to be free of them.  We see this in popular religious belief. Many of us believe that when we die, our body will deteriorate but our souls will go to heaven.  By souls we imagine this disembodied wispy kind of thing that has no physical substance.  We picture that when we die this misty thing will rise from our bodies, and float up to heaven where it will do purely spiritual things.  All sorts of fun things like sing hymns (of course in English since that’s the language God speaks) and go to church 24/7 for eternity.  Not only is that not the best recruiting tool for the church, I’m not so sure it’s entirely biblical.

The truth is, this notion of denigrating the physical, or viewing reality dualistically, or the idea that when we die our disembodied souls float up to heaven is not as orthodox as we may believe.  It is neither what Paul described nor what the early church taught.  Actually, this dualism that infects Christianity, even to this day, more resembles the thinking of Greek philosophers and Gnostics, than it does First Century Jewish thought or the outlook of the New Testament or our Creeds.

Even though that kind of thinking still lingers within our collective Christian consciousness, it would behoove us all if we took a fresh look at how the first followers of Jesus spoke about the human body, specifically when it comes to resurrection.

Whatever one believes happened at Easter, one thing is certain, the Resurrection Narratives are insistent about that the fact Jesus was raised to some type of new physical existence.  The stories of his appearances to his disciples go to great lengths to say that he was neither disembodied ghost (after all he could eat and be handled and had scars) nor was he merely a resuscitated corpse (since he was not immediately recognizable and had the ability to appear in locked rooms).  What to make of these stories can be very puzzling to us in our time, but one thing is clear - the disciples experienced Jesus after his death in a very physical way and saw that as a positive thing.

A few years ago, it seemed that our family’s weekends were spent doing nothing but attending our kid’s friends’ birthday parties.  Some of you have probably noticed that kid’s birthday parties have become somewhat excessive lately.  It is almost as if some parents believe there has never been another child in the world who turned three before.  Little Dakota’s third birthday is apparently right up in historical significance with the discovery of fire or Guttenberg’s printing press.  Sometimes it is difficult to get excited about these things unless it’s your kid.  Sure I’m happy your child is three but for me it’s just another last minute trip to the Toy Chest for the old gift certificate because we misplaced the invitation and just realized we had to be at the party.

  Whatever resurrection is, if it only happened to Jesus, then Easter was nothing more than a great weekend for him.  Resurrection would be good news for a first century itinerant rabbi, but not for anyone else. 

But resurrection is for everyone else.  Christianity is a path of hope and what gives a follower of Jesus hope is this.  We who follow Jesus will follow him in every way, even to death.  But more than that, we will also follow him in Resurrection and new life. The same magnificent transformation that happened to Jesus will someday also happen to us.  We may not understand the mechanics of it, but we can be transformed, even now, merely by the hope of it. 

When Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, he struggled to find the right words to describe it because our human words always fall short of the God reality to which they point.  Paul does not claim that when we die our souls go to a place called heaven.  Instead he proclaims that we will be raised up with spiritual bodies.  I don’t claim to know what that is.  I don’t think Paul knew what that was.  In his Hellenist culture the physical was bad and the spiritual was good.  But along comes Paul and says, “No.  Resurrection makes the physical good.”

Spiritual bodies - in his dualistic Greek culture that was an oxymoron, but then again most of our key Christian beliefs are.  God is transcendent/immanent.  Jesus is the divine/human. The lion/lamb. The kingdom is now/future. We are strong in our weakness.  All these conflicting images fly in the face of the dualistic thinking of the Hellenist era and the either/or fact/fiction thinking of the modern era.  They don’t fit in with the certitude of either atheists or fundamentalists. Ironically, they resonate with us in this emerging postmodern era.  Resurrection, being raised with a spiritual body, may actually make more sense to us than it did to people a century ago.  Our postmodern culture is more attuned to living in the tension between two seemingly polar opposites.

Over the past three months, I hope you have been able to see that many of the misconceptions about our faith and objections to belief are in fact relics of this either/or thinking of the modern era.  It is not that we need to be convinced of our Creed through clever argumentation or apologetical proofs.  Instead we need to simply dive in to and experience the tension and relational uncertainty that is built into our beliefs.

When it comes to questions of ultimate concern, issues like what happens to us when we die, Paul does not respond with a cartoon from a religious tract or PowerPoint diagram.  Instead he says, “Behold I tell you a mystery.”  Our hope resides in mystery.  What God began in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ will one day be brought to completion, not in some other mystical dimension, but in a very physical reality that we do not yet understand.  This is why the writers of the Apostles Creed were so definitive to say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”

The scholar N T Wright has pointed out that when we look on the last page of our Bibles, the story does not end with all of us ascending to heaven.  It ends with heaven descending upon a new earth.

The idea of resurrection seems unbelievable to us.  It’s too good to be true.  It’s pie in the sky.  But it’s not pie in the sky.  It’s found on the ground.  It’s not an escape from reality but a call to live more fully in it.  We believe that God’s project of renewal, reconciliation and resurrection that began in Jesus Christ, continues through us and will one day come to fulfillment.  We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.  Amen.

A message from 1 Corinthians 15:35-44 by Don Heatley, pastor of Vision Community Church, Warwick, NY