SERMON FOR FEBRUARY 13, 2022              TEXT: 1 CORINTHIANS 15:12-20
          Ever since my first shoulder replacement back in 2016 I have worked with a personal trainer. It was a great relief when the gym reopened under careful Covid protocols in time for me to prepare myself for 2021’s two surgeries. Now these many months later, long after completing the prescribed course of physical therapy, I am still depending on the guidance of my wonderful trainer Jake at the River Valley Club. One day last week when I was trudging away on the elliptical I watched part of the Olympic ski jumping, which was playing on the overhead TV screens. That must be the closest experience a human being has to flying — soaring gracefully through the air, leaning out over your skis to extend the arc of your flight as far as possible, and then landing gracefully back on earth. How does a person do that? Courage, concentration and exhilaration made one with breath and bone and muscle. You can’t overthink the jump; you have to trust the body’s intelligence; it knows what to do. And then when the jump was landed, the competitors’ faces showed their delight or disappointment, followed by the expressions of congratulations or commiseration from their teammates. You didn’t hear a word; their bodies said it all. 
          My warm-up was over; Jake guided me through the weight training portion of that morning’s session. I stood on one leg, held a kettle bell in the opposite hand, and then stretched forward, lifting the other leg off the ground, holding the pose for a long, deep breath before returning to an upright position. Not leaning over my skis and soaring 15 feet in the air for 5-7 seconds, that’s for sure. But I didn’t lose my balance; I didn’t even wobble; I made a smooth, happy landing. That was as fine an act of praise as I presented    to God that day. 
          I know this is not what St. Paul had in mind when he insisted on the truth of Christ’s bodily resurrection to the skeptical Corinthians, but to me it’s a real good part of the Good News that Jesus saves the whole us. In the words of the Nicene Creed, “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary and became truly human.” His body was not just a means to a greater end — as if to get at what really mattered, the immortal soul, he had to don a disguise of flesh and blood. Jesus knows what we know — the importance of physical being, the power of physical contact.    
          Your beloved’s hand rests idly on the table, and you can’t help but reach out to cover it with your own. Your child climbs into your lap, takes a deep breath and announces, “I love your mommy smell.” You recover from an illness or an injury and feel for certain that the pain is gone. You experience the physical changes wrought by time and know yourself differently. You lose a loved one and realize you will never embrace them again. 
          According to the Scriptures, Jesus stretches out his hand and touches the leper when he heals him. He spits on the ground and makes a paste of mud which he then spreads on the eyes of the man born blind so that he might recover his sight. He takes little children into his arms and blesses them. Jesus accepts the ministrations of a woman who bathes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses them and anoints them with ointment. “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last,” St. Mark writes. The Lord knew pain and the relief of its ending, even in death. Our salvation was wrought in his body.
          The resurrection is unimaginable. Theologians in the early centuries of the church speculated quite a bit about how it would work. For example, did you get all your original parts back? And if so, what would happen if your arm had been eaten by a crocodile and thus become part of the crocodile’s body? Even more confounding, what if you were eaten by a cannibal? Assuming, of course, that the cannibal later had a come-to-Jesus-moment and forswore his human flesh-eating ways, who got what, when he and his victims were raised from the dead? 
          The tendency in the church often has been to divide the flesh from the spirit, the mortal body from the immortal soul, and to conceive of the resurrection as an event in stages. The soul leaves the body at death and passes immediately to God, while the body goes to the grave. On the last day it is really just the bodies then, not the dead, that are raised and ostensibly returned to the souls as a kind of value-plus add-on. In that case it would be hard to argue that the body is essential to salvation.
        As one of my seminary professors pointed out, this understanding is not biblical and in the end unsatisfying. Humans beings are embodied by God’s own design; bodies are essential to the good creation, not a cursed burden to be borne as a result of the fall. When God determined that the man should not be alone, God provided a partner. They found comfort and delight in companionship because they were present to each other as bodies doing body things, like touching and smiling and talking. My seminary professor argued that surely salvation would mean that we could continue to be present for each other in that way. Picking an immortal soul out of a crowd would be a challenge, he said. But I will know Lucy’s face the minute I spot it among the saints in light; I will recognize her hooting laugh, so like mine, echoing across the arc of heaven.
          The New Testament scholar Carla Works makes this observation with regard to today’s lesson from 1 Corinthians 15: “In an age where many churches are experiencing decline in attendance, some have intentionally decided to share only portions of the gospel that are ‘seeker-friendly.’ In other words, advice that sounds like wise counsel for living, like being kind to one another and living peaceably. While these are worthy goals, the gospel demands more. At the core of the gospel is a God who refuses to abandon creation to the corrupting powers of sin and death. This a God of life. And that is good news indeed.” 
          A friend of mine once opined, “I don’t think the resurrection of the body is any more preposterous than the fact that we exist in the first place.” It doesn’t pay to overthink this essential part of the Gospel, lest you get lost in the thicket of logistics, like those early church fathers contemplating the ravages inflicted by carnivores and cannibals. Just cherish this life in the body, God’s good gift now and forever. Amen.