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April 26, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

Saved by Waste
(But It Might Hurt a Little)

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 4
Genesis 1:29–31a
Luke 24:36–49

The trash bin is overflowing under the sink.
It’s time to feed the big outdoor garbage can
again. How quickly it happens . . . how astonishing
that every week my bins are full to the brim
with the wastes of my daily existence.
Here I am dumping everything
from carrot peelings to junk mail.
What a mess I make!

I try to remember that You planned waste
as an essential part of life. It, too, is holy.
I want to keep in mind
the pine tree by the front door
and how it keeps dropping its numberless needles
—a tall and humble prayer.

Gunilla Norris
“Taking out the Trash” from Being Home

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In the Gospel passage you just heard, we find Jesus insisting that his disciples believe in his physical resurrection. He doesn’t rely on reports to convince his disciples that he has risen, and it’s a good thing that he doesn’t, because though the disciples have already received reports from Simon Peter, the women who visited Jesus’ tomb, and the two disciples whom the risen Jesus met on the road, they cannot believe it. Rather than counting on the power of these reports to convince them, Jesus visits the disciples himself. Jesus tries to assure them that it really is he and that he is real. Not wanting to leave a single doubt in their minds, Jesus shows them his hands and feet, marked by the nails that had hung him to the cross. He invites them to touch him and feel the warmth of his flesh. And because they were still disbelieving, he even sat down and ate fish with them, giving them the physical proof they needed to know that he was no ghost, but was living and real.

The need for physical proof in this post-Easter story reminds me of an article I read years ago. It was written by an anthropologist, who recounted the first impressions made by white-skinned Europeans upon the dark-skinned native people whom he had been studying. At first, upon seeing these light-skinned persons, the native people thought they were seeing ghosts. Disbelief and curiosity led them to seek proof that these newcomers were indeed real. For some, it wasn’t until they observed the newcomers eat and realized that what they ate also came out the other end that they became convinced that the white-skinned people were not ghosts but were physically real.

Sometimes I forget, or neglect, how fundamentally physical our existence is. That’s why I am always shocked by such stories. In the story Luke tells, Jesus made every effort to emphasize his bodily resurrection. The same is true of the Gospel according to John. Insisting upon a bodily resurrection, both Luke and John were probably writing against skeptics in the church, skeptics known as docetic Christians. Docetic Christians believed that physical matter and the spirit could not coexist. In their view, either Christ may have inhabited the physical body of the man Jesus or Christ’s physical body was an optical illusion. In either case, docetic Christians believed that the true or real nature of Christ was spiritual, and therefore they could not imagine Christ to have truly united himself to flesh.

Against this view, which disparaged not just the body but all things physical and material, Luke placed his Gospel clearly within the context of Jewish belief in the God of creation. The God of Jesus, Luke asserted, was the very God who created the world and called it good.

In the final moments that Jesus has with his disciples, right before he must depart to be with his Father in heaven, Jesus shares one last teaching. “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,” he says, “that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” And he goes on, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” In his final teaching, Jesus wants his disciples to know that his suffering unto death and resurrection should be thought neither as separate nor as deviating from God’s plan from the beginning of time. His suffering, crucifixion, death, and resurrection were part of God’s plan.

During this past Lenten season, Fourth Church hosted Stephanie Paulsell, a professor from Harvard Divinity School, as our Lenten retreat leader. The retreat was entitled “Praying the Song of Songs.” On the first night of the retreat, Dr. Paulsell explained to us that the Song of Songs is the most sensual book in the Bible. It is essentially a love poem that rejoices in sexuality, in the body, and in the senses, and never once does it mention God. As Dr. Paulsell so astutely recognized, the theme of the retreat begged the question, Why would we be immersing ourselves in a reflection on the Song of Songs, the most sensual book in the Bible, during Lent, a liturgical season that the church has traditionally associated with practices of asceticism? (Usually Lent is the time when Christians ask themselves to give something up for forty days.) By the end of the retreat, I had formulated for myself a response to that question: What more appropriate time could there be to awaken our senses, our body’s needs, desires, and vulnerabilities, than during the weeks of Lent, when we accompany Jesus on his way to the cross? If we want to feel the weight of Jesus’ suffering unto death, if we want to appreciate what Jesus underwent for our sakes, we have to sense it.

Later this morning, at the 11:00 worship service, a number of congregants will be commissioned for the mission trips they will be taking or have already taken this year. A number of them have just participated in an urban plunge that took place this past weekend right here in our city. Instead of doing mission far away, these congregants engaged in the work of mission on Chicago Avenue at Fourth Church’s community garden. In preparation for this work, participants read and discussed together Paul Fleischman’s small book Seedfolks. Seedfolks is a novel about how an urban community garden, similar to the community garden on Chicago Avenue, got its start, flourished, and transformed a neglected and troubled neighborhood in which it was situated. One of the novel’s characters who contributes to the garden is Leona. As a mother of two, Leona is not afraid to get in the face of city administrators and officials to make her needs known. Setting out to get city hall to pick up the trash in the lot where a garden is growing, Leona brings a big bag of trash from the lot to city hall. Fleischman writes,

That morning I took a bus downtown and walked into the Public Health Department. Told about the trash all over again to this receptionist. Let her see me up close and personal and hear me loud and clear. She just told me to sit down with the others waiting. I did. Then I opened the garbage bag I’d picked up in the lot on my way. The smell that came out of it made you think of hog pens and maggots and kitchen scraps from back when Nixon was president. It was amazing how quick people noticed it, including the receptionist. And even more amazing how quick I was called in to have a meeting with someone. I was definitely real to them now. I brought that bag along with me into the meeting, to keep it that way. (p. 28)

Leona, who had learned the hard way that the distance between city hall and the block where she lived couldn’t be measured in miles, learned also that to be real is to be sensed. Whether pleasant or unpleasant, nothing and no one is real unless our senses tell us they are real.

This is a lesson that the early docetic Christians, given their disparaging views of all material and physical existence, wouldn’t have accepted. In fact, by the second century, a man named Marcion, who had become a leading proponent of docetic views, wanted to purge the Bible of the entire Old Testament as well as any books and passages in the New Testament that either alluded to the Old Testament God of creation or portrayed Jesus as an embodied fleshly being. When it came to passages from the Gospel of Luke, like the one we read today, that insisted upon Jesus’ bodily resurrection, Marcion simply excised them from the Bible. According to Marcion and other docetists, Christ, after being crucified, returned to his heavenly home and, in doing so, most certainly cast off or threw away the material body in which he had appeared.

How simple—just to separate the flesh from the spirit, the physical from the spiritual. There would be no serious need to grapple with the body’s needs, desires, suffering, and vulnerabilities; no serious need to examine and try to reform the conditions of life here on earth; and certainly no need for the forgiveness of sins. Why bother talking about redemption if you don’t even value creation?

Thank God, we did not inherit Marcion’s gospel. Thank God that in its wisdom, the early church did not go along with Marcion but instead continued to insist that Jesus, in his life, death, and resurrection, was physically real, for that which some want to throw away is the very thing that saves us.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church