Gift

Stand as you are able as we read God's word:

Psalm 139:13–14 NRSV

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Have you ever felt ashamed of your body?

I can remember experiencing body shame relatively young - late grade school/jr high. Doing sports meant you learned a lot of intimate details about your fellow athletes, including their pant size. And mine were bigger than most of the other boys.

Keep in mind, I was thin. But I was born with a body that had a wider frame, which meant me being at a healthy weight still meant my pants were going to be a size or two bigger than others.

And I remember the shame attached to realizing this. I don’t recall anyone ever calling me fat - I was very thin. But in my mind, my larger pant size translated to being fat. I felt shame.

Even with our recent cultural trend of body positivity, body shame is still very prevalent in our culture. Fat shaming, in particular, is rampant in our society as obesity is associated with being lazy, unattractive, and lacking willpower to lose weight. In one study, over 70% of adolescents reported being bullied about their weight in the past few years.

Why is there so much shame associated with the body today? I think a big reason is the changing standards of beauty in our time.

Check out this image of female beauty painted by the Italian painter Titian around 1570 (pic). This is titled Venus and the Lute Player. Venus - the goddess of love and beauty - sporting a mom bod.

Times have changed. In the 60s Barbie became the standard of beauty for an entire generation of girls - and boys. A massively augmented upstairs and an unrealistically narrow middle was what you must aspire to to be seen as beautiful in society.

Fast forward 50 years and you have a new standard of beauty that involves a massively augmented downstairs.

But what normal gal can compete with these images. And what normal guy cannot help but have his vision of beauty likewise distorted by them?

It’s not just a female issue. Reports from online dating sites show that most women are looking for a guy that is over 6 feet with dark hair and blue eyes. So again, most guys are out of luck achieving this standard.

All of this has been a part of the rise in body shame. And the consequences have led toward a couple of extremes. On the one hand it has led to the rejection of the body as something that is good or noble. C. S. Lewis explores this aspect in his novel That Hideous Strength where scientists are secretly trying to establish a form of human existence that is independent of the body. The body is something that now holds us back.

The other extreme is captured in Earnest Cline’s novel, Ready Player One, where the humanity of the future does most of its living in a virtual reality world where we can choose our own appearance. In this virtual world, the fat can be thin, the ugly beautiful, or vise versa. you can change your name, age, sex, and size. Or you can cease being human altogether and become an elf or ogre. You can make your body be anything you like.

In one case the body is gross and something to escape; in the other, we become the gods over our body with the ability to exchange it however we choose. But the Bible utterly rejects both of these extremes. Rather, it consistently calls us to receive our body as a gift with gratitude.

Far from being spiritually irrelevant, the Bible tells us that our body is meaningful and is part of God's eternal plan for us. The gospel of Jesus is good news for your physical self.

This morning I want to begin our series in what may be an uncomfortable starting place for some of us: receiving your body as a gift.

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Psalm 139:13–14 “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

What does this passage say about the gift of the body?

Your body is handmade.

Julie and I received a present this year that was very unique. We don’t necessarily like it better than other gifts we received, but there is something about it that sets it apart: it was handmade (show coaster). It was made by a friend of ours who is an artist but has lost most of her sight. Yet with what little sight remains, she still loves to make things. It’s not particularly beautiful, but it is the only thing we received that wasn’t mass produced. It’s not more valuable than other gifts, but it is more meaningful bc of the care that went into making it.

David says that likewise our body has been formed by an artist. As an artist working with clay or as a craftsperson knitting a piece of cloth, we have been uniquely woven together. This doesn’t mean our bodies are perfect. As we know, they have been impacted by the effects of sin. Our bodies experience brokenness. They are not as God originally conceived them. And yet for all that, we each remain a work of art.

Your body is extraordinary.

Humor me for a moment. Hold out your hand. Now flex each finger. Wiggle them together, make a fist. How are you doing that?! I know science says that your brain is sending messages to your muscles… But how are you really doing it? It’s literally a miracle when you think about it. It should inspire a sense of awe and reverence.

This is what David is getting at when he says you fearfully and wonderfully made. He is in awe of the human body, and it’s making is too difficult to properly comprehend. Your body is truly an extraordinary device.

Your body is intentional.

That we are handcrafted means that none of have come about by accident. Some of you may be like me - a complete surprise to your parents. But you were planned long ago by God. Therefore, your body is not random or arbitrary. You are God’s deliberate choice.

Imagine you are preparing a meal for some friends. You decide to get ambitious and make something that has several complex dishes. As you are working on a sauce on the stove, you begin to smell something burning in the oven. It’s still edible, but a little burnt. You serve up the meal anyway and parts of it are ok, but no one will be asking for the recipe.

Now image preparing a meal, but this time you pull it off successfully. Each component turns out exactly as you intended. It may not be Michelin 3 star, but it is exactly what you wanted your guests to enjoy.

In both cases you’ve produced a meal. But only in the second case is the meal what you intended. It’s a bit like this with our body. The Bible doesn’t just affirm that we are the result of god’s work and have come about bc of him. It goes further. We’re not just the outcome or byproduct of God’s activity; we are the product of his intention. It’s not that God made our body but didn’t particularly care how they came out. They are what he intended them to be. We can affirm with David that even with our imperfect bodies, God made them and that he meant to.

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All this means that you have the body God meant for you to have, even when not everything about it is perfect. I know I’m speaking to people who have various physical problems. It may be an attribute of your parents that you didn’t want - like your dad’s ears or mom’s nose. You may have inherited physical limitations. I know sometimes we feel about our body the way we feel when we pick up a hand of cards - who dealt me this! But when it comes to your body, the Bible affirms that there was no random shuffling of the deck.

This intentionality to our bodies runs counter to how many modern ppl think. The American transgender journalist, Thomas Page McBee, expressed our modern view of the body when he wrote, “Most of us have the bodies we occupy because of the luck of the draw.” This was stated as self-evident and assumes our physical body has no plan or purpose behind them.

But if our body is not accidental, it must therefore also not be incidental. If we really are the the product of accidental processes, then we could justifiably write off our body as having no theological significance. We could seek to escape it through suicide, or seek to modify it to fit our particular desires.

But if we have been created “fearfully and wonderfully”, then our body it not some arbitrary lump of matter. It means something. It’s not peripheral to who we are. For all the difficulties we may experience with our bodies, it is a body that God wanted you to have. It is a gift.

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The surpassing value of the human body is made evident in the season we just celebrated. We call it Christmas. The ancients called it the Incarnation.

The apostle John wrote, John 1:14 “And the Word became flesh and lived among us...” This is the claim behind Christmas; God become man. For some, the scandal is the claim that there is a God at all. But even more scandalous is the claim about what he did. He became flesh.

The basics of the gospel message is that by become one of us, Jesus could die for our sins, rise to new life, bring us into fellowship with God, and begin the work of putting to right everything that’s wrong with the world. But at the center of this claim, tucked away where it is often overlooked, is that to do any of this Jesus had to become one of us. To become a human person he needed to become a human body.

The doctrine of the hypostatic union is that Jesus didn’t just put on a body for a few years. Becoming one of us took much more. He had to become a fetus in the womb, a baby in a crib, a toddler stumbling around learning to walk, a teenager going through puberty. It wasn’t enough to have a body; he needed to become one just as we are.

Sam Allberry writes that, “Jesus’ incarnation is the highest compliment the human body has ever been paid.” God not only thought up bodies and apparently has enjoyed putting together several billion of them; he made one for himself. Becoming human at Christmas was not meant to be reversible. It was permanent. There is right now a human body sitting at God’s right hand ruling the universe.

Bodies matter. Jesus couldn’t become a real human person without one. And we can’t hope to enjoy authentic life without one either. That Jesus’ body matters is proof that yours does too. Jesus become what he valued enough to redeem.

C. S. Lewis sums this all up:

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body - which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.

While it has become common in our secular age to demean the body as something gross, or something we can exercise godlike power over, Christianity sees our body as a good - even if imperfect - creation of God. Your body is a gift.

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What would it be like to enter the new year with a new appreciation for your body - warts and all? What if you could stand in front of a mirror without loathing and simply accept your physical self as the good gift that it is? What would that do for your confidence if you knew that your worth was not tied to our culture’s ever-changing standards of beauty?

This means you’re going to have to be intentional about overcoming false views you may carry about your body. Part of apprenticeship to Jesus is bringing our own misguided thoughts and false assumptions into agreement with what God says. God says you body handmade, extraordinary, and intentional. Each of us must choose to let the truth of God’s word reshape our negative feelings we may carry about our physical self.

One way we can lean into this is to begin practicing gratitude concerning our body. As Christians, we don’t stick our head in the sand and pretend everything is roses. But even with the difficulties we may have with our bodies, they are still a gift we can give thanks over. So I invite you to lean into the practice of gratitude over the next few weeks. Thank God for your body. Thank him for the amazing things it allows you to do. Thank him, not for your limitations, but how your limitations help you to remain dependent on God. Thank him for the gift of having an embodied life and the good news the gospel has for your physical self, where one day your body will be completely redeemed.