Thursday, February 19, 2015

On dust and bodily living

Scripture: Matthew 18:1-9

We are people who live in bodies, who move in bodies and experience life through senses that are embodied, and Ash Wednesday is a day to talk about embodied-ness in all its inadequacy. It’s a day to say “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” and to mean it—not only as a potentially depressing reminder of our mortality but also as the foretaste to a promise. You are dust, but dust chosen by God.
            When we talk about bodies in the church it tends to make people uncomfortable, because we all have bodily hang-ups. We can all pretend we have the perfect personality (which we don’t) or the perfect sense of humor (which we don’t), and we can try to fake having the perfect family (which is fooling nobody), but our bodies? We can’t even fool ourselves into thinking those are all that great. Even those among us who might feel they look pretty good, or who train their body to be an athlete, even they need only wait a year or two, a decade or two, and it will start to fall apart. Time makes all of our bodies out for what they really are. You are dust, and to dust you will return. It’s a promise; even if it’s not a very good one.
            So, on the one hand we’re uncomfortable with our bodies because they aren’t as great as we could imagine them being, whether you want to be more attractive or whether you’re just unhealthy and only want to be healthy again. And, on the other hand, we are also uncomfortable with our bodies because we have a tremendous capacity toward bodily guilt. When the typical person thinks about sin they don’t think about it as an orientation away from God. Most people think of sin as a bodily thing; that they have bodily urges that they should act on or not act on, that they have feelings that they can’t control. Even if most of the language of sin that we use in church is about sin in its universal sense, the way we feel sinful is usually in the core of our bodies—again, one might say, in our “embodied-ness.”
            So when we come to those last few verses from today’s Gospel, Matthew 18:8-9—“If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into the hell of fire”—we read that with the same fear of our bodies with which we live most of our lives. Most of us are pretty put off by that scripture; so we assume it’s metaphorical or hyperbolic. Jesus can’t actually mean what he’s saying, right?
            Because of our bodily hang-ups we miss the point of what Jesus is saying. It’s actually very straightforward. Jesus is asking, “Where does sin live?” Is it in your hand or your foot? If so, cut it off and quick! Is if it in your eye? If so, dig it out. NOW. DO IT! These days Jesus would have to continue (because our bodily metaphors have changed somewhat) and he might ask, “Does sin live in your brain?” No? “How about your heart?”
            And this is where we might get led astray, because most of us may say that, yes, sin lives right there in our heart, but when we say that we don’t actually mean the beating, blood-pumping organ at the center of our circulatory system. What we mean is that sin lives at our innermost core. So, Jesus might say, then you should cut out your innermost core.
            And we’re left, as is so often the case, to say, “God, I can’t do that. I can’t remove the most central part of me—even if I wanted to.” Yes, that is the point. You see, if sin lived in the foot or the hand then we should absolutely be going around cutting off each others’ appendages. I’m not kidding or being hyperbolic or metaphorical. If cutting off your hand removed sin from your life you would be better off for it. In fact, if you removed sin from your life, then you wouldn’t have to die, because sin is the thing that caused our mortality in the first place. But this is all unimportant because sin doesn’t live there—not in our hands or feet or eyes; not in any part of our bodies.
            You see, we all have bodily hang-ups, but it’s not our bodies that are sinful. Our bodies were created by God and God called them “good.” So, when sin entered into the world it didn’t take the good and make it bad; it took the good and intertwined it with sin. It took our focus from God and caused us all to curve in on ourselves. Unfortunately, all of us have read Paul and let his talk of flesh and spirit cloud our understanding of our bodies. It’s not that our bodies are sinful; it’s that the fact that we look on our bodies as these imperfect things is; the fact that we are always trying to make ourselves look better is; the fact that we run as fast as we can away from the reality that we are dust—that is sinful. We are dust—dust that was created and called “good.”
Every little thing we do to try to improve on that dust has made things worse. Life is this great paradox of running from death only to discover in death that we are made whole. So today offers us this paradox of running from our mortality only to discover, as some of you will, that that moment of being reminded that you are dust is a moment of freedom. You are dust. Good dust. And, in spite of all the hang-ups you have about your body, that dust is beautiful dust.

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