Our Bodies Full of Light

Blue Christmas Service

Isaiah 40:1-5, 28-31

Matthew 6:22

We lived in New Haven, CT for nine years.  For the first three years we lived in student housing at the Divinity School, 352 Canner Street.  We had a basement level, dark little hole of an apartment right by the laundry room. 

We eventually moved a few blocks to 281 Edwards Street.  The building was a large and stately looking grey house on a busy corner with a little grey fence around it.  It was cut up into about eight apartments.  And we lived in apartment 6, just to the left at the top of the stairs.

When the landlord showed us the apartment, he made mention that the apartment across the hall from ours was home to George and Barbara Bush when they had their son George W. Bush.  I have no idea whether it’s true.  But we told other people the same story.  And every time our landlord showed an apartment to prospective tenants in the building, he told the same story again.

 

We tend to honor places where important people have lived or visited.  The status of any place gets raised if it happened to be the dwelling place of someone famous.  In New York, we lived at 41 W. 72^nd Street.  Down at the end of our block was the Dakota, a glamorous building right across from central park.  The Dakota was once home to John Lennon of the Beatles.  He was shot to death right at the entrance.  His wife Yoko Ono still lives there. 

In a similar way, when God inhabits the human life and body of Jesus from Nazareth, all of our bodies become sacred and special.  Our status is raised.  Our dignity is affirmed.  Both the earth itself and our human lives are fitting dwelling places for the living God.  We receive the comfort Isaiah promises when we realize that God is pleased to dwell with us, right in the middle of the ups and downs, highs and lows of living a human life.

Jesus invites us to imagine our bodies full of light.  Try it.  Later this evening when you get home, take all your clothes off in front of your bathroom mirror and shout loudly, “This body is full of light!”  But first make sure you’ve lowered the blinds.

Your body full of light.  Of course, this is easier to imagine with strong, healthy bodies.  The bodies of athletes in their prime, good looking models, and those heroically strong folks capable of physically demanding work.  But Jesus doesn’t limit his comment to strong, healthy bodies.  Jesus imagines all bodies full of light.

As a pastor, I spend a fair amount of time in hospitals, nursing homes and cemeteries.  That means I spend time with people who have bodies that don’t work, bodies that are sick, bodies that need to be fixed, bodies on the mend, bodies in decline, or bodies at the end of a life.

I spend time with people in hospitals, their bodies tethered to machines, their body’s processes monitored by beeps, their fluids regulated and restored from bags hanging on poles.

I spend time with people recuperating from illness and surgery.  They wait for their bodies to mend and repair.  They wait for surgeries and fixes to take hold.  They endure the work of therapy, learning again to use their mended bones, their new knees, their repaired backs. 

I spend time with people in nursing homes – people adjusting to needing more help; help getting up and getting dressed, help going to the restroom and bathing, help taking medication and eating. 

I spend time with people huddled together in cemeteries, saying tear-filled goodbyes to ones they love.  Though we have hope that God will raise the dead, we know all too well that we do not get these loved ones back in any straightforward way.  Their bodies no longer course with life and breath.  And so we return them to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  And we commend them for safekeeping to their Maker.  And we leave their graves keenly aware that we cannot keep ourselves alive forever.

When you stop to think about it, our bodies are stupendous, awe-inducing things.  When all the intricate plumbing and articulated joints and complex chemistry works, we are a glory to behold. 

And yet our bodies are fragile blessings: vulnerable to pain, accident, disease, and infection.  They wear down, deteriorate, weaken, and eventually give out.  The journey our bodies take between birth and death is never smooth sailing.

It’s not all that obvious that our bodies are full of light.  Part of me wonders if Jesus would like a mulligan on this one.  Perhaps he’d edit out that line in the next draft.  Or maybe he was just exaggerating.  Our bodies full of light?  Really? 

We spend a good bit of our time trying to conceal from others our body’s weaknesses and needs.  We’re taught to be private about our bodily functions, discreet and modest about all things related to the bathroom.  But too often we forget that these are just the middle years.  These are just the years between the beginning and ending of life – times when we do, in fact, need someone to change our diapers.

Part of what we learn to confess as people of the church is that Jesus was a living, personal body, just like we are.  He was born a squealing, demanding little body like we were.  His body was susceptible to disease and injury, weakness and fatigue like ours is.  He needed to eat, drink, and rest.  He wasn’t magic.  At the end of his life, his body gave out when others harmed him.

Did he really mean to say that across the wide arc of our lives, from beginning to end, our bodies are full of light?

Even Job and his weeping, oozing sores?  Even the unclean woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years and grabbed Jesus hoping for healing?

It is, in fact, to people like this, to people like us, that Jesus says, “Your bodies are full of light.”

This is the season we confess that the babe born to Mary comes to us with a body full of light.  His body was lit from within by the love and grace of God.  And the light from his body illumined all the dark places of the world.  “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness . . . “ (John 1:4-5).

Our culture wants to frame the holiday season for us as a time of happiness and cheer.  But framing the season that way blocks many of us from participating.  There is an older tradition.  And in that tradition this season of Advent and Christmas is about holiness.  And in the holy season all of you, every bit of you, is welcomed to the comfort and healing God makes possible.

This is the comfort spoken by the prophet Isaiah – comfort in times of hardship and disappointment, comfort when we feel abandoned, comfort when we experience ourselves exiled and far from home, comfort when our hearts are heavy.

We invite you to come and light a candle here at the front.  Your candle is a prayer for God’s light in your life.  You might want to say a prayer for others you know who are hurting.  Come, you with bodies full of light.