New Pants and New Paradigms

4-18-21 -3rd Sunday of Easter year B

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our crucified and risen Lord and savior, Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Do not adjust your computer. You are not hearing things, and your technology is not haunted or playing tricks on you. You DID just hear from the Gospel of Luke in the Year of Mark with John sprinkled in. You have not entered the Twilight Zone… but you HAVE entered The Resurrection Zone, also known as the Season of Easter. Two weeks in, and things have gotten weird. Jesus is walking through walls, talking about ghosts, mind reading, and … eating fish?

Like the disciples, post-resurrection, we are currently in a partially open, partially vaccinated reality that is equally terrifying and confusing, with unreal things unfolding in front of our eyes.

In fact, I’m afraid that we are about to head into another pandemic, if it’s not already here. It was already bad before Covid even existed. As some of us emerge from the Covid cocoon, we are trying on clothes that have not seen the light of day in an entire year… and discovering not everything fits the way it used to. I see post after post all over social media lamenting how our bodies have changed during the pandemic, and now we might need a new wardrobe.

Body shaming existed well before Covid, but we seem to be in a particularly virulent strain at the moment – body shaming on overdrive. To my horror, I recently read about a segment on NPR guiding parents on how to“fix” their children’s pandemic weight gain, spearheaded by “concerned doctors.” Lord have mercy, these poor children have lost their routines, access to their friends, and even family members to Covid… Let’s just TRY not to traumatize them further with diet culture, ok? Even this act from a place of care can compound an already traumatic year.

We have all been surviving a pandemic in one way or another. Some of us baked cakes. I turned to YouTube and watched countless videos about women’s 19^th century European and American fashion. And let me tell you what I learned. For the past few hundred years, women’s fashion was not JUST about corsets and hoop skirts. Women of all shapes and sizes not only existed in history, but it was proportion, not size, that mattered in fashion. Also, up until most recently, garments were expected to be tailored to each person, or adjusted on a yearly basis, and thanks to things like gathers, laces, ties, pins, and drawstrings, our inevitable and natural body changes could be easily accommodated.

Fast forward to now, our bodies by themselves are supposed to just naturally be that perfect shape AND a perfectly small size.  We wear inflexible synthetic garments that are mass-produced. This, plus the bombardment of ceaseless advertising, tells us, “our bodies are imperfect and flawed. Our bodies are not enough. “

But is not your body that is “wrong.” It never was. We have all been set up to fail. But you were never the problem. Your body was created by God, and it is good.

In the beginning, God created people – matter and breath – and it was good. God gave us Jesus, who was born in blood and afterbirth. And,  Jesus was resurrected in a body - not a “perfect, aesthetically pleasing” body. It was a body still marked by the trauma of crucifixion and death. Jesus still carried the marks of the wounds he suffered on Good Friday. And, maybe Jesus still had a pallid look of death about him, and that is why the disciples also thought he might be a ghost.

Luke writes these seemingly insignificant details, because turns out, a common heresy that floated around post-resurrection was that Jesus did not rise bodily, but become a ghost. Some took this even further and said that Jesus never had a body at all – he was a phantom. After all, how scandalous and icky for God’s son to be saddled with something as “gross” as a human body that got hungry, needed sleep, cried, got hangnails, and presumably had a gut biome. And how shocking that God’s son actually died.

The fact that Jesus lived in a body MATTERS.  The fact that Jesus really suffered matters. And the fact that Jesus was resurrected in a body … a body that did not transform into something aesthetically perfect… says that our God is not about some human idea of perfection. We are not, as you may have heard floating around “You are a spiritual being having a human experience…” Instead, we are human beings experiencing the love of God, in all the glorious messiness of being in a human body.

Your body got you through this pandemic, but it might not be quite the same as it was when we started. And that’s ok. Not all of us experienced the same trauma during the last year, but we all experienced something. On the night he was betrayed, a night full of trauma, Jesus broke bread and shared it to his disciples. Now, Jesus receives something to eat in the presence of his disciples… as one theologian writes, “expressing physical hunger and accepting bodily nourishment, Jesus turns trauma into communion.”

Bodies eat… but bodies also bear witness. And we are witnessing how other pandemics are still raging – sexism, homophobia, racism, and our obsessions with guns, just to name a few. News of one tragic death is interrupted by news of another. Some kinds of bodies are bearing the sins of the racism and white privilege of others.  The body of Christ is hurting right now. And we are called to be witnesses, but not to stop there.

Witnesses also share what they have seen. Jesus also calls us to put our bodies on the line – to call all people to repentance, and to be forgiven of our sins. Until we live in a world where all bodies are treated the same, we who have privilege and voice must speak up when we witness injustice against other members of the body of Christ.

We’re living that moment now – post-resurrection but pre-heaven, post-vaccine but not yet post-covid, when we are need of both new pants and new paradigms. This is our moment to make a difference, so let’s not miss it. It’s time to clean our closets and check our privilege, so that we are ready for God to open our minds and hearts and eyes to this new reality, right now. Thanks be to God. Amen.