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Forward Friday: The Meaning of the Story of God
Originally posted April 6, 2012
One of the most significant elements in body theology is the actual, physical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That’s why Christmas, Holy Week, and Easter Sunday are so pivotal. We Christians are who we are because of who Christ is and what Christ did for us.
Sometimes looking at the big picture of the course of biblical history can help us understand the rhythm of the liturgical year. Although this year’s Easter celebration is over, let us not be so hasty to rush on to the next big thing. Let’s take some time to pause and allow the passing of this season to inform the season to come.
As you reflect this weekend on the passing of Holy Week and Easter and the coming of Pentecost, read back over some of the key elements of the story of God from our little flash Bible course to dig into the significance of what we are about to celebrate. Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
What stands out as particularly meaningful to you?
1. God takes evening walks with Adam and Eve in the garden.
2. Becoming aware of their nakedness and feeling ashamed causes them to hide from God.
3. God’s people become afraid of God and ask Moses to speak to God on their behalf.
4. God’s people are afraid even of the glory of God reflected on Moses’ face, so he has to wear a veil until the glory fades.
5. God instructs the people to build the Ark of the Covenant, where God’s presence will be confined among them.
6. The people never touch or open the Ark of the Covenant because it is so holy.
7. The Ark lives in its own tent among them, called the Tabernacle, where the people come to worship God.
8. After Moses, God speaks only to specific people God chooses, usually prophets, kings, or priests. These chosen few share God’s words with the people–who often do not listen.
9. To see the face of God is to die, and even the prophet Elijah–who asks to see God’s face–covers his face with his robe before meeting God at the mouth of the cave.
10. Once God’s people settle down in one place and begin to build houses instead of tents, God instructs King Solomon to build a temple for God to live in.
11. God’s presence is reserved for the Holy of Holies–a small area within the temple restricted from everyone where the Ark is kept, the entrance to which is blocked with a thick curtain.
12. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest goes through an elaborate cleansing ritual in preparation to enter the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the blood of the sacrificed animal to atone for the people’s sins. (They even tie a rope around his foot each time in case he dies from the experience of being with God and has to be dragged out to be buried since no one else is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, even to retrieve a dead body.)
13. Then Jesus is born, and he is called Emmanuel, which means “God with us.”
14. No longer is God among the people yet blocked from their access. Jesus lives with the people, learns and grows with them, eats and drinks, sleeps, speaks, heals, reprimands, and teaches.
15. Jesus says that those who see him and know him also see and know God.
16. Jesus is anointed at Bethany for his coming death.
17. When the people celebrate Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem–what we call Palm Sunday–they acknowledge that Jesus is fulfilling the long-anticipated role of the Messiah, the one who has come to save them and restore the original order as God intended.
18. Jesus washes his disciples’ feet as an example of their role in each others’ lives.
19. Jesus breaks bread and passes the cup of wine to his disciples to foreshadow his impending arrest and execution.
20. Jesus prays in the garden with his disciples nearby–by some accounts so fervently that the capillaries break on his forehead and he begins to sweat blood–not only that he might yet be spared his role as the sacrifice for the people’s sins but also that he accepts that role.
21. Jesus is arrested, abandoned and denied by his disciples, beaten, mocked, and sentenced to death by Rome’s most barbaric form of execution.
22. Jesus is forced to carry the crossbeam through the crowded streets of Jerusalem up to the site of his execution.
23. Jesus is too weak to complete the trip and collapses. A member of the crowd is chosen at random by the guards to carry the crossbeam for Jesus the rest of the way.
24. At Golgatha, Jesus is stripped naked (yes, as naked as he was born).
25. The guards attach Jesus to the crossbeam with iron spikes through his wrists and to the stake with spikes through his ankles and raised to hang between two thieves until his struggle for breath overcomes him and he gives up his spirit to God and completes the sacrifice.
26. At the moment of his death, there is an earthquake and the curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple is torn in half from top to bottom.
27. Jesus’ execution lasts only six hours, considerably less time than most people endured the experience.
28. Jesus is buried and mourned, and the disciples hide in fear that they will be arrested and executed next.
29. The women at the tomb discover Jesus’ resurrection early in the morning three days later. They become the first bringers of the good news (gospel) that Jesus is alive.
30. Jesus appears to his disciples and to many other people over the 40 days following his execution, eating and drinking with them and allowing them to touch him to prove that he indeed has retaken physical form.
31. Jesus ascends into the clouds after promising to send his spirit to be with his followers and to return again one day soon to bring the kingdom of heaven.
32. The disciples wait and pray until they experience the promised presence of the Holy Spirit during Pentecost.
33. The disciples become apostles, who preach the good news (gospel) that Jesus came back to life to all who are gathered in the street. Miraculously, each listener hears the words in his or her own language.
34. The apostles perform many other miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus, and many who hear believe. Thus the Church is born, and all who believe in the good news that Jesus came back to life are filled with the Holy Spirit…even the Gentiles!
And then, after Holy Week…
Originally posted April 5, 2012
Last week, we looked at the big picture of the history of God’s relationship to people up to the Day of Atonement. Then, we looked at the entrance of Jesus into the story. On Good Friday, we considered the passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Now that we’ve celebrated Easter Sunday, let’s look at the coming of the Holy Spirit and the implications of this story for body theology.
32. The disciples wait and pray until they experience the promised presence of the Holy Spirit during Pentecost.
33. The disciples become apostles, who preach the good news (gospel) that Jesus came back to life to all who are gathered in the street. Miraculously, each listener hears the words in his or her own language.
34. The apostles perform many other miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus, and many who hear believe. Thus the Church is born, and all who believe in the good news that Jesus came back to life are filled with the Holy Spirit…even the Gentiles!
When I was little, we used the phrase Holy Ghost. Some people might have found that phrase a little scary. To me, it was just a name, as incorporeal and intangible as today’s more common Holy Spirit. Growing up Presbyterian, there was never much emphasis on the Holy Spirit at all. We talked a lot about God as The Father and Jesus as The Son, but God as The Holy Ghost was just something we said as part of the Nicene Creed each week in the church service.
I’ve come a long way in my journey with the Holy Spirit. That’s a post for another day. What I want to share today is the continued trajectory of the story of God.
Last week, we looked at the beginning of the story of God when God was present with Adam and Eve, walking in the garden. Through the entrance of sin and shame, a barrier went up that kept the people of God from God’s presence with them. As we walk through the story of God, we see God living nearby, but there is always something keeping the people from direct contact with God–whether that’s shame, fear, or the belief that they are too unclean or unholy.
But God was determined to be with the people again. On Wednesday and Friday, we looked at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus–God in human form. God broke the barrier by making the ultimate blood sacrifice so the people would never again be too unclean or unholy to be present with God. But Jesus’ physical existence on earth–like ours–was only temporary, even after death.
So God sent the Holy Spirit–the presence of God–to remain in the world with the people of God and to actually live within the people, making their physical bodies into temples. Now, people don’t have to go anywhere to be present with God. No one can keep us away from God or force us to stay at a distance from God’s presence because God is now present inside the human body!
If that’s not the most exciting thing ever, I don’t know what is! Our bodies house the presence of God. God’s presence inside us is what changes us, makes us new, and makes us holy. There is nowhere we can go where God is not present. There is nowhere we can go that is not made holy by God’s presence there. The curtain has been ripped open. The Spirit of God has been released into the world and into the body of every person who believes.
That is what body theology is all about. That is why our bodies matter to our faith. That is why the physical reality of God in the world matters to our theology.
And that is what Holistic Body Theology Blog is all about.
Forward Friday: Create your own spiritual practice
This week we’ve been talking about finding spiritual practices within daily life, in everything from flossing to breathing. In the words of Rob Bell, everything is spiritual.
This weekend, take some time to create your own spiritual practice.
It doesn’t have to be hard work. We breathe without any intentional effort and only stop breathing with concerted effort and for an extremely limited time. So, too, spiritual practice can be just as natural and even just as involuntary.
All it takes is desire and decision.
Find a practice that feels natural to you. Maybe it’s taking a daily walk, reading a morning Psalm, making dinner, driving to work, or breathing. Make it something that is already part of your natural routine, something that you can use to call your attention to the holy and sacred in the normal pace of life.
Whatever it is, decide to make that activity — however innocuous or normal it may seem — your invitation to the Holy Spirit.
Try it and see what happens.
Then come back and share your spiritual practice in the comment box below.
The Spiritual Practice of Breathing
Spiritual rhythms are like bodily rhythms: respiration requires both inhaling and exhaling, taking in and letting go. – Margaret Guenther, Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction
Breathing is perhaps the oldest and most widely accepted spiritual practice that involves the whole mind-body-spirit being. Aside from Buddhist and Zen uses of focused breathing to enhance mediation, Christians have long used breathing as prayer practice, perhaps the most well known of which is the Jesus Prayer.
The Jesus Prayer is a simple, repetitive prayer to be used as you breathe in and out:
Inhale: Lord Jesus, Son of God,
Exhale: have mercy on me, a poor sinner.
A simple Google search of “Jesus Prayer” pulls up a number of very helpful descriptions and guides for breath prayer, so I won’t reinvent the wheel. What I want to point out is this:
We have been created for rhythm and ritual, repetition and regularity. Just as our bodies depend on the pattern of heartbeat and inspiration/expiration to function and remain alive, so our spiritual selves depend on patterns of spiritual practice to function and remain alive to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
This is who we are. We are mind-body-spirit beings. We are creatures of habit. We are soothed by the rhythmic sound of rain or waves. We reduce stress with slow, steady breathing and periodic times of quiet.
We meet God in the most ordinary, uninspired moments. We come alive with the breath of God. God comes to walk with us in the garden, to enjoy our company in the cool of the evening. All we have to do is be available and attentive, recognize the presence of God in our daily experience, and open ourselves to the tingly rinse of the Holy Spirit within us.
It’s as easy and natural as breathing in and out and in. It’s who we are. It’s who we’ve been created to be.
Next time the world feels like it’s crashing in on you, next time you’re stressed out and rushing, next time it all feels like too much — take a moment, and breathe.
Compassion in Everyday Life
I caught a big work project this week and haven’t had the time I planned to get out the last post in our series on Nouwen’s Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life. It’s coming soon, I promise!
In the meantime, my husband has graciously provided below — for your reading pleasure — his unique perspective on what it looks like to live out the Compassionate Way in our daily lives. Enjoy!
Laura has been talking about compassion this week. I’m going to show compassion…by doing her compassion blog for her today.
I work retail. Retail is interesting. By the nature of this job, I run across people of all different flavors. A lot of people are cool – actually most are – but there are also those people who are sarcastic-awesome (in other words, they’re a bit difficult).
I am the type of employee who makes sure every customer who enters my store is welcomed and receives great service. Honestly, I treat my store like my home and I love it when my employees catch onto this and emulate the example I set in their own way.
Anywho, there was an instance at one point in time where I saw a guy looking at men’s casual pants on the wall.
I approached him and said, “Good morning! Are you looking for a certain type of pant or is there anything else I can help you find today?”
He replied angrily, “I don’t need your help, I can read the tags!”
Despite his reply, I still let him know I’d be around if anything came up that I could help with.
There’s a MeWithoutYou song where the lead singer, Aaron Weiss, sings “If your old man did you wrong, maybe his old man did him wrong…” In other words, every reaction is birthed by an action. Chances are that grumpy customer was grumpy because of something that happened before he was in our store and it had nothing to do with me.
And so I preach compassion and understanding.
Maybe that dude was just having a crappy day. Maybe he’d been diagnosed with cancer (as one customer in the last year told me about when they were angry). Maybe he’d just gotten into a car accident. Maybe his cell phone fell into the toilet. Who knows.
But there is one thing I do know: as a Christian, my reaction is called to be grace, understanding, and compassion, demonstrating the love Christ showed to us on the cross… and to let that love do the work.
Whatcha think? Does this resound with you?
The Compassionate Way (Part 1)
We’re coming to the end of Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life by Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison.
Last week we looked at what it means to live a Compassionate Life through voluntary displacement. We established that displacement is not something to be achieved but to be recognized and that we can only recognize displacement within the community of God and when attentive to the loving voice of God in our daily lives.
But what does it look like to live a life of compassion through voluntary displacement?
Part Three: The Compassionate Way
Now the authors take their argument into the practical action of our daily lives. What does a compassionate life look like? In a word: discipline.
In the Christian life, discipline is the human effort to unveil what has been covered, to bring to the foreground what has remained hidden, and to put on the lamp stand what has been kept under a basket. It is like raking away the leaves that cover the pathways in the garden of our soul. Discipline enables the revelation of God’s divine Spirit in us. (88)
Learning to listen to the loving voice of God — and heed God’s unique call on our individual lives — is a practice that requires the discipline of patience.
Discipline is the effort to avoid deafness and to become sensitive to the sound of the voice that calls us by a new name and invites us to a new life in discipleship…The compassionate way is the patient way. Patience is the discipline of compassion. (89)
This is what Eugene Peterson would call A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. Compassion isn’t something we can obtain through an easy three-step formula or a crash course. Compassion is a lifestyle choice, one that takes our entire lives to learn to live out effectively. In a world of quick fixes and instant gratification, the last thing we are drawn to is the discipline of patience. God’s call to the compassionate life is radically counter-cultural. Before we can hope to act compassionately toward those who are hurt by competition, we have to learn to live a life marked by patience.
But this patience practice is not one of passive existence but passionate action:
Patience means to enter actively into the thick of life and to fully bear the suffering within and around us….In short, patience is a willingness to be influenced even when this requires giving up control and entering into unknown territory. (91)
[T]he New Testament presents the discipline of patience as the way to a life of discipleship which makes us living signs of God’s compassionate presence in the world. (93)
We aren’t, by nature or by culture, very patient people. Especially Americans who are used to keeping careful track of time and valuing punctuality and efficiency above all — we are trained to push and rush and make deadlines and fill every moment of our time with busy productivity to earn and to accomplish and to succeed and to finish first. But as Christians, we are invited into a very different experience of time with a paradoxical definition of productivity and accomplishment:
The discipline of patience is the concentrated effort to let the new time into which we are led by Christ determine our perceptions and decisions. (93)
In God’s management of time, patience is productive:
[Patience] is the experience of the moment as full, rich, and pregnant. (96)
As long as we are the slaves of the clock and the calendar, our time remains empty and nothing really happens. Thus, we miss the moment of grace and salvation…. [T]hrough patience we can live in the fullness of time and invite others to share in it. (98)
[W]e are constantly preoccupied with our free evening, free weekend, or free month and lose the capacity to enjoy the people we live and work with day in and day out. (99)
The Compassionate Way calls us to learn to pay attention to life around us. When our lives are defined by the discipline of patience, we find more opportunities to hear God in the daily movements and activities of our lives and answer our unique call to voluntary displacement we might have missed in our rush from one busy productivity to another.
Our culture has done us a genuine disservice in this area, which is why developing cultural discernment is so important to body theology. When we allow culture to dictate our values and assumptions, the lens through which we view the world is skewed toward the value of competition. Even within Christian culture, our lenses could use a good cleaning:
[W]e have accepted the idea that “doing things” is more important than prayer and have come to think of prayer as something for times when there is nothing urgent to do. (101)
Prayer is an expression of the discipline of patience and is the medium through which we hear the loving voice of God and experience intimate relationship with God. Rather than a last resort or a convenient time-filler, prayer
as a discipline that strengthens and deepens discipleship, is the effort to remove everything that might prevent the Spirit of God, given to us by Jesus Christ, from speaking freely to us and in us…we liberate the Spirit of God from entanglement in our impatient impulses…[and] allow God’s Spirit to move freely. (102-3)
[P]rayer as a disciple of patience is the human effort to allow the Holy Spirit to do re-creating work in us…It involves the constant choice not to run from the present moment…the determination to listen carefully to people and events so as to discern the movements of the Spirit…the ongoing struggle to prevent our minds and hearts from becoming cluttered with the many distractions that clamour for our attention…[and] the decision to set aside time every day to be alone with God and listen to the Spirit. (104)
Prayer is hard work, but it is also as simple as sitting (or standing, or dancing, or running) with our bodies, minds, and hearts focused on attending to the Holy Spirit — the loving voice of God. Prayer as the mark of the compassionate life is a truly counter-cultural practice because it requires the most difficult voluntary displacement of all: prayer displaces our own voices, desires, and actions with the voice, desire, and call to action of God:
To listen patiently to the voice of the Spirit in prayer is a radical displacement. (105)
We cannot hope to be effective as the Mother Theresas of the world if we cannot first achieve this inner displacement through patient, disciplined prayer. We cannot act — rightly, timely, compassionately — if we have not first established a lifestyle of prayerful listening to the loving voice of God. Only through prayer are our actions molded to the compassionate way:
[Prayer is] a growing intimacy with God [that] deepens our sense of responsibility for others…requires deep and strong patience…[allows us to] discover a limitless space into which we can welcome all the people of the world…[and] is the very beat of a compassionate heart. (107)
To be concluded on Wednesday!
Forward Friday: Listen to the Voice of Love
Displacement begins with the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and it is that movement that we must be sensitive to if we are going to identify and join in the calling of God on our lives.
We’ve been going through Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life for the last couple of weeks. If you’re feeling moved by Henri Nouwen’s message of choosing voluntary displacement but are unsure how to start listening to the divine voice of love, I encourage you to check out Tim Hoekstra’s wonderful devotional Miles to Run Before We Sleep. All proceeds from book sales are donated to World Vision‘s clean water project in Africa, so you can’t go wrong.
As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, my husband and I know Tim (he married us in April 2011), and he is an unbelievably gentle and driven man of God with a passion for both running and racial reconciliation in the Church. His devotional provides readers the opportunity to think, pray, move, and discover the unique calling on each of our lives toward what Nouwen calls voluntary displacement.
Both of us are reading through the book ourselves and have already had some very unexpected insights. I may share some of my meditations here in the future, but for now, I highly recommend Tim’s book to anyone looking for guidance in recognizing the displacement in our lives.
If a devotional isn’t your thing, you may also find one of these books helpful in learning to listen to the loving voice of God:
The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
Inner Voice of Love by Henri Nouwen
Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer
Sacred Compass by Brent Bill
Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer by Richard Rohr
If you need more suggestions, drop me a line! I’d love to chat more with each of you.
Choosing Church: A Lament (Part 1)
Last week two of my dear friends were accepted as candidates for ordination in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. One was passed by the committee without any difficulty. The other was required to complete an extra step by writing a statement in defense of the biblical basis for being called to ordained ministry. One was accepted immediately. The other was accepted only by secret ballot.
These two friends, we’ll call them Adam and Amy, are a married couple who met in seminary and have been walking through the ordination process together. Can you guess which candidacy experience was Adam’s and which was Amy’s?
This kind of story is not uncommon, but it should be. When it comes to the issue of women in ministry and leadership, the question often revolves around teaching or preaching in the church. Should “they” be “allowed” to do “men’s work?”
But what about those of us who are not called to such obvious leadership roles? How do we advocate for ourselves or learn to find our own voices when even those women whose voices are gifted and called to vocation in the church are criticized, treated with suspicion, or even silenced?
Ideal vs Real
Consider the formation of the early church at Pentecost in Acts 2. When everything was new and just beginning, “all the believers were together and had everything in common.” In fact, “they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.” At that moment, as the community of God was being formed, everyone one was invited to the table, without regard for race, gender, or class. The excitement and joy over being first filled with the Holy Spirit superseded everything else. They had a common purse, a common purpose, and a shared trust in one another.
Then, as the church began to grow and as the first glow began to wear off, issues began to arise–issues of class, organization, leadership, rules, gender, and race. People began to argue, disagree, and divide. By the time of Martin Luther, the community of God was so broken that it could not remain unified anymore.
Since the emergence of Protestantism, the community of God has divided over issues of doctrine and church practice.
Gone is the unity believers once enjoyed and valued above all disagreements.
Gone are those first days of innocence and trust among fellow believers.
Gone is the ability to trust in the movement of the Holy Spirit in one another.
How can we regain our connection with the ideal, the beginning, the first bloom of the coming together of the community of God?
To be continued… (Read part 2 now!)
Against the Flesh: Part 1
One of my pet peeves is when people talk about fighting against their flesh, beating their flesh into submission, or some other allusion to the flesh/spirit (sometimes also earthly/heavenly) dichotomy present in a number of New Testament passages–mostly in Paul’s letters.
It bothers me because people often use these passages to support an unhealthy–or at least unbalanced–body theology, one in which the body is something wholly other, something to be forced into submission, blamed for failures, lamented, battled, beaten, and regarded as dirty, filthy, and something to get rid of and be finally, blessedly free from after death.
I am not my body, people seem to acknowledge. I am my mind, my personality, and my spirit. I am pursuing God, but my body pursues evil. I am good, but my body is bad. I am purified, but my body keeps contaminating me. “What I don’t want to do, I do, and what I do want to do, I don’t do”; and it’s all my body’s fault. Stupid human flesh holding me back from the glorious, Spirit-filled Christian life.
I get a little upset.
That is not the truth about who we are as children of God. These are lies we believe, perpetuated by a consistent misreading of scripture. Just as we can’t read Romans 3:23 without Romans 3:24, or Colossians 3:22 without Galatians 3:28, or Ephesians 5:22 without Ephesians 5:21 — so we can’t read Galatians 5:16-18 without Ephesians 6:12.
The Bible is meant to be read collectively as the revelation of the story of God for the people of God. We need a holistic hermeneutic by which to read the entirety of scripture. Otherwise we get caught up in a verse here and a verse there and end up so far away from the point the author was trying to make, or the truth the Holy Spirit intends to reveal.
Scripture is easily twisted to fit our preconceptions and presumptions. We are so used to reading scripture through the lens of our own understanding and experience that we are often unable to recognize when a beautiful spiritual truth — intended to free us and bring us into the fullness of life and completion of joy promised to us — has been distorted into a horrible lie — intended to steal, kill, and destroy us.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at some of the scriptures below through the lens of holistic body theology. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list but representative of the New Testament’s negative treatment of “the flesh.”
- Mat 26:40-42
- Jhn 3:6
- Jhn 6:63
- Rom 3:20
- Rom 7:4-25
- Rom 8:1-13
- Rom 13:13-14
- 1Cor 3:1-3
- 1Cor 15:49-50
- Gal 3:3
- Gal 5:13-24
- Gal 6:8
- Col 2:20-23
- 1Pet 2:11
- 1Jhn 2:15-17
To be continued…
And then, after Holy Week…
Monday, we looked at the big picture of the history of God’s relationship to people up to the Day of Atonement. Tuesday, we looked at the entrance of Jesus into the story. Yesterday, we considered the passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Today, let’s look at the coming of the Holy Spirit and the implications of this story for body theology.
32. The disciples wait and pray until they experience the promised presence of the Holy Spirit during Pentecost.
33. The disciples become apostles, who preach the good news (gospel) that Jesus came back to life to all who are gathered in the street. Miraculously, each listener hears the words in his or her own language.
34. The apostles perform many other miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus, and many who hear believe. Thus the Church is born, and all who believe in the good news that Jesus came back to life are filled with the Holy Spirit…even the Gentiles!
When I was little, we used the phrase Holy Ghost. Some people might have found that phrase a little scary. To me, it was just a name, as incorporeal and intangible as today’s more common Holy Spirit. Growing up Presbyterian, there was never much emphasis on the Holy Spirit at all. We talked a lot about God as The Father and Jesus as The Son, but God as The Holy Ghost was just something we said as part of the Nicene Creed each week in the church service.
I’ve come a long way in my journey with the Holy Spirit. That’s a post for another day. What I want to share today is the continued trajectory of the story of God.
On Monday, we looked at the beginning of the story of God when God was present with Adam and Eve, walking in the garden. Through the entrance of sin and shame, a barrier went up that kept the people of God from God’s presence with them. As we walk through the story of God, we see God living nearby, but there is always something keeping the people from direct contact with God–whether that’s shame, fear, or the belief that they are too unclean or unholy.
But God was determined to be with the people again. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we looked at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus–God in human form. God broke the barrier by making the ultimate blood sacrifice so the people would never again be too unclean or unholy to be present with God. But Jesus’ physical existence on earth–like ours–was only temporary, even after death.
So God sent the Holy Spirit–the presence of God–to remain in the world with the people of God and to actually live within the people, making their physical bodies into temples. Now, people don’t have to go anywhere to be present with God. No one can keep us away from God or force us to stay at a distance from God’s presence because God is now present inside the human body!
If that’s not the most exciting thing ever, I don’t know what is! Our bodies house the presence of God. God’s presence inside us is what changes us, makes us new, and makes us holy. There is nowhere we can go where God is not present. There is nowhere we can go that is not made holy by God’s presence there. The curtain has been ripped open. The Spirit of God has been released into the world and into the body of every person who believes.
That is what body theology is all about. That is why our bodies matter to our faith. That is why the physical reality of God in the world matters to our theology.
So get ready for Easter, people. The curtain gets ripped tomorrow. The body of Jesus gets buried and the spirit of Jesus enters the place of eternal damnation on Saturday. And then Sunday–oh glory!–we get to celebrate the living-breathing-walking-talking-eating-drinking-teaching-healing-actual-physical-human/divine-Jesus for defeating death, ending forever the need for blood sacrifice, forgiving sin, and making possible the presence of God in the world and in the body of every believer everywhere until the kingdom of God returns to us again one day soon.
People, get ‘a ready. Jesus is ‘a comin’!
Holistic Body Theology 