January 18, 2008

Sometime this past July, my body, with which I had always had a good relationship, began to betray me.  With no warning or explanation, my happy working parts started falling apart.  In Costa Rica, I was my usual over-functioning self and, while carrying a ridiculously large bag, I slipped on wet tile and really hurt my knee.  I let it go untreated for some weeks and, while I was mowing down brambles in my backyard, I caught a bad case of poison ivy that spread and spread and spread, and itched.  A few weeks later, I was running from the Parish Hall kitchen to a vestry meeting and I fell off my shoes and broke the foot below my now scratchy bad knee.  Just as the whole left side was about normal, on Thanksgiving, I pinched a nerve in my back and now my right side from the hip to the ankle is a throbbing mess.  So, I go to my new best friend, Mr. Orthopedist, with his favorite toy, Mr. MRI, and on Friday, he sends me home with two prescriptions.  The first 24 hours, I take 11 pills.  The last thing I said in his office as he outlined treatment options was, I’ll do whatever you say but I have to be able to function.  Soon after taking pill number 2, I noticed my thoughts were floating away and I was getting really sleepy.  After pill number 5, I felt queasy.  So, I go back through the 16 pages of disclaimers stapled to the medicine bottles and sure enough, one guarantees drowsiness and the other nausea.  Now I have to wake up to throw up.  And I still can’t walk worth a hoot.  About 3 am Saturday morning I’m thinking I need some Texas mercy.  Just take a gun and put me down.  It’s hard to find an obliging cowboy in the ’burbs of Huntersville that early in the morning so the thought occurred maybe a bullet wasn’t an acceptable option. 

I imagine about now you all are wondering, why is she telling us this litany of malady and malfunction and why isn’t putting her (and us) out of misery a fine idea?

Well, dear friends, the answer to both those questions can be found in our appointed readings this morning.  A theme introduced in our psalm was expanded in Paul’s letter to the congregation at Corinth.  Sometime, about 1000 years before the birth of Christ, a poet in the court of King David wrote enduring words about our inescapable connection to God.  The psalmist reminds us that we are not free agents but, rather, we are inextricably tied to our creator.  “Lord you have searched me out and known me; you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar.  You are acquainted with all my ways.  For you yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.  My body was not hidden from you, while I was being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth.  Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; they were fashioned day by day when as yet there was none of them.”

We are not our own possession.  We do not belong to ourselves.  We were not there at our beginning.  God was there.  God was the initiator.  God put cell and sinew, bone and thought together.  God brought heart and spirit, skill and purpose together and made each one of us unique.  Before we ever came into this world, God put his impress upon us and created us with a hope-filled destiny.  The Almighty Father gave us all we need to locate and live into our divinely inspired purpose.  In creating us, God perfectly knitted two beings into our essence.  The Greeks referred to these beings as soma, the body and pneuma, the spirit.  Our soma is made up of our physical parts, our working limbs, our pumping organs, our acute senses, our functioning brains.  Our soma carries us through the world allowing us to gain mastery over our environment, to grow and mature, to detect and avoid danger, to discover our best talents and powerful skills.  Our pneuma is our emotional and soulful side.  Our pneuma is the part of our essence that propels us to God and to one another.  In our spirit resides the yearning to connect with the world and with the divine.  In our spirit lives a driving force that pushes us to relationships, that calls us to care about others, to fall in love over and over again, to love deeply our parents, our children, our friends.  Our pneuma nudges our conscience so that we respond to the hurts in this world.

We are a body and a spirit woven together, melded together, a perfect vessel to house and carry God’s divine spark.  “I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.”  We know, but we also forget.  We lose the memory of our creation and the image of the maker’s hand grows dim.  This is not a modern dilemma.  Paul encountered the same issue in the fledgling Christian Church.  He observed that the followers of Christ had difficulty protecting and honoring the vessel God had given them.  They were not mindful of the devotion and precision that went into their creation.  They were treating their united essence, their soma and pneuma with little regard.  So Paul reminded them, “The body is meant for the Lord.  Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.  You are not your own.”  Paul encouraged his people to remember the thought and precision that went into their make up.  He set their sights to the elevated heights of their purpose and their obligation.

We are not our own possession.  We belong to the Lord and the vessel we walk around in will return to him.  For as long as it is loaned to us, we have a responsibility to care for it well.  We are charged to make good decisions for our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.  We are obligated to remember from whence we came, and to whom we shall return and how we will honor the gift of life we carry in our body.

This means that we are accountable for the overall condition of our personal vessel.  This means the care we give our physical body is a divine imperative, not just a reasonable expectation from AMA.  What we eat, how we exercise, when and how long we rest, where and how frequently we rejuvenate are Godly concerns.  The Almighty Creator does not want his perfect work corrupted and mistreated.  All that precision, all that knitting together in the depths of the earth is not meant to be unraveled by careless abuse.  Attention to healthy choices is required.  The condition of our vessel also includes mental health.  The Lord created us with complex minds.  He means for us to keep those gray cells engaged.  His divine impress carries the potential and the expectation that we will use our brains to learn new concepts, to master new skills, to create new works, to reflect more complex realities every day of our lives.

Our bodies also house an emotional essence that God expects us to nurture and protect well.  The master creator intends for us to forge extensive, but healthy connections.  We are built for relationships, but only for ones that affirm us and give us confidence, that comfort us and call the very best out of us.  Ongoing interactions with people, friends, relatives, lovers that make us question our divine origin, our primeval, essential goodness need to be put aside.  God calls us to healthy, life-giving relationships.  Life on earth is short.  Our time here is precious.  We have much to do as God’s creation.  We cannot waste our days and energy in places that diminish and drain us.  This is poor care of God’s vessel.

A final essence we carry is our spiritual nature.  God fashioned a soul into our being and it is a beautiful, mighty force to behold.  Our soul connects us at a cellular level with our creator.  Our soul is our most essential quality, not an afterthought.  It is from our soul that we connect with the holy spark God put into us at our earliest creation.  Our body is the covering, the shield and armor that protects the Holy Spirit residing within us.  In our life, we are charged to keep this spirit nourished and expressed.  The world is to see its effects burning within us.  The care of our soul requires mindfulness and time with God.  That time can be in prayer, in study, in action, with words, in silence, in creative processes, in contemplation.  God knows us well.  Good time spent in his presence will be in ways that we love best.  They will be as unique as we are.

Caring for our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual body is no small thing.  Tending all four components requires practice and attention.  Sometimes we over-emphasize one and let the others lag behind.  Sometimes we take one essence for granted.  Occasionally, we get painful reminders.  (I’m not running in cork heels ever again.)  Sometimes we need reminders from God and he sends them in the words of our Scripture.  The psalmist nudges our memory.  Paul sets us straight and at our very end, we are once again convicted.

In the burial office, as our remains are brought into the church, the priest reads this anthem: “I am Resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord.  Whoever has faith in me shall have life even though he die.  And everyone who has life, and has committed himself to me in faith, shall not die forever…  For none of us has life himself, and no one becomes his own master when he dies.  For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord, and if we die, we die in the Lord.  So, then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s possession.”

Dear ones, let us live today so that at our end, when we return to the Lord, we will do so having honored his possession.

Amen.