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3 Epiphany Think of your own body. At any given time, some 50 million X 50 million cells, a total of 50 trillion cells function in your body, working in concert. Everything you have done since you woke up this morning is a result of this staggeringly incomprehensible and intricate interplay of these tiny organic elements. Every breath you have taken today, every movement, every thought, every smile, every tear, every word, every feeling, every thing you are experiencing at this very moment depends on this stupendous miracle that is your body. But we are oblivious to this for the most part. We take all of this for granted. We do this because we all suffer from a tragic misconception, perpetrated in our own minds. And the misconception is this: We think we have a body, when in fact, we are a body. The difference between having a body and being a body may seem at first not that significant. But the words and the meanings they convey could not be more unalike. To have, according to Merriam Webster’s, means to own, to possess, to occupy, to use. To be, on the other hand, means to exist, to take place, to belong. Think of what this means. If I have a body, it is my possession, my property to do with as I choose. If I have a body, I go through life, using my body as an object, an instrument, something more or less from which I am detached, disconnected. In the famous words of Rene Descartes, I think, therefore, I am. And my body is an adjunct, a passive thing, subservient to my mind. And likewise, everything else which surrounds me becomes objectified, quantified, detached. All of it is a potential commodity to be possessed, consumed, and used for my own benefit. Yet if I truly am a body, everything changes. What I do with my body matters. How I feed myself. How I take care of my body. How I treat others. How I regard the world around me and all my fellow creatures. If I am a body, I am interrelated in myself and at the same time related to everything around me. My body is an active agent in the life of the world rather than a inert thing to carry with me through life. The conception of having a body as opposed to being a body is nearly universally held in our modern world. It is the foundation of our way of life, our politics, our economy, our culture, our legal system, our collective psychology. But what is interesting to me is that in Hebrew and Christian scripture, it is the conception of being a body that predominates. This is especially true when we come the writings of St. Paul, from which we read today. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes that Christians are members of Christ’s body. He writes in our epistle reading today these words: Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.” He commends the Christians in Rome to present their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to the Lord. And again , he writes to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Lord?” Paul’s whole theology of the body is steeped in the Jewish conception that rather than having a body, we are a body. This conception undoubtedly would have been Jesus’ as well, and underlies his own words in his last supper with his disciples: This is my body which is given for you. Over against the prevailing mind/body dualism in the dominant Greco-Roman culture of their time, Jesus and later Paul asserted a radically different claim. Rather than having a body, we are a body. We are Christ’s body, each of us in Christ individually members of it. This, I believe, is an essential truth we need to recover, most certainly in a world where materialism reigns supreme. And especially it is a truth we need to rediscover in the Church. Particularly in the Anglican communion which is rife these days with divisions and discord. Much of what plagues us in the Church today, I would argue, stems from the fact that we have lost our original understanding of what is means to be a body. Today, instead, we in the Church see ourselves as having a body. It is something we own, possess, control and occupy. Nobody has the moral or spiritual high ground here. All of us, on the left and on the right and everyone in between, we all have bought into the misconception that rather than being a body, we have a body. And so, as a consequence, we say to each other: because you are not like me, you cannot be a part of the body. If you are gay and a bishop, you cannot be a part of the body. If you are conservative, or if you are liberal, or a skeptic, or fundamentalist, you cannot be a part of the body. If you are this, or you are that, if you good or bad, if you are right or wrong, then you cannot be a part of the body. This essentially is what the Christians in Corinth were fighting over 2000 years ago, and it is exactly the same place where we are stuck today. Because we see the church as something we have, we own, we possess. Because we see our body as something we control and we occupy. In all of this we need to remember these words of Paul: it is God who arranged the members of the body, each one of them as God chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, but one body. As it is, we are creatures, not creators. As it is, we have nothing in this world. This world does not belong to us, it is not our private property, our body is not our possession to dispose with as we choose. We truly have nothing in this world, and yet, paradoxically, while we have nothing, we are everything. For, in the end, there is a great divide in this world. It is a spiritual divide. It is the divide between being and having. In our materialistic society, having means everything, and it holds hegemony, even over our noblest values. It distorts even our view of the body. But for those of us who follow Jesus, we are called to the world of being, a world of coming to terms with our existence. There has always been, there always will be, the temptation, to substitute having for being, Yet for us who live in Christ, we are a body, we are Christ’s body, and our existence is a great and glorious mystery to embrace and uphold.
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