Dear Friends in Christ,
Young bodies, old bodies; growing bodies, dying
bodies; the resurrection of the body; sick bodies, well bodies. Bodies. Rudolph Bultmann makes the ultimate anti-gnostic theological
statement: “Man does not have a body: he is BODY.” Christianity is the religion for people who are BODY. It is
the religion of incarnation. Most religion is gnostic, or semi-gnostic—the emphasis is on souls as somehow something
other than body or, at least, detachable from body, but Christianity agrees with the modem feminist slogan, “We are
our bodies.”
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This is also why Christianity is a religion so heavily invested in history. For spiritualist religions,
history is irrelevant, a distraction, a detour. But Christianity is carefully set within history: a decree went out from Caesar
Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria. It is also why Christianity should be (here we have often fallen down on the job) a religion heavily invested in
nature. Alfred North Whitehead thought it was no accident that modem science arose in the Christian West because Christianity
is a religion that does not disparage nature, it believes (see Genesis 1) that nature is God’s handiwork and that “it
is very good.”
The World (history-nature-body) is, therefore, Christianity’s task. Liberal Christians often
accuse fundamentalist Christians of being too overtly political, but this is disingenuous. Liberal Christians are just as
politically involved as any fundamentalist. The issue is not involvement, not trying to do God’s will in the political
sphere. The issue is what God’s will is. Liberals focus on social justice and peace issues and they believe in human
freedom in matters of personal ethics. They believe in equality before God for all people of all religions and no religion.
Fundamentalist religion is more theocratic: God’s will on all issues is known via the infallible text of the Bible and
it is the obligation of government to see that everyone obeys it. The truth is that if I believed the fundamentalists were
right about infallible texts and moral absolutes, I would be on their side about theocracy as well. But I don’t.
Where fundamentalists and liberals agree—if they are Christians—is on the importance
of body, of being faithful to God in history, in nature, in ethics, in politics, in everything we are and have. Alan Watts
implores Christians to”....ask the Holy Spirit to open our minds to the realization of the truth from which all the
joy and power of Christianity proceeds, the truth of the Word made flesh—that the eternal life of God is given to man
here and now in the ‘flesh’ of each moment’s experience.”
Soon we will celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration—the ultimate epiphany moment—Jesus’
body becomes translucent, it reveals the presence and glory of the God called love. Then, immediately, we will gather for
Ash Wednesday. Ashes on our foreheads will remind us that our bodies are finite, but also that they have been disfigured (an
equal possibility alongside ‘‘transfigure’’) by sin, by our turning away from love. But Lent is not
about the domination of sin. Lent is about overcoming sin, it is about the sublime journey to complete transfiguration: the
Feast of Easter. Lent is not about despair, it is about hope. It is not about repudiating our sinful bodies, it is about redeeming
our bodies, our history, our relationship to the natural world, our ethics, our politics, our art, our religion. We dare to
enter Lent only because we believe that at the end of the journey we will experience the resurrection OF THE BODY.
Yours in Christ,
—Pastor Bastien
Taken from Footnotes,
February 2005
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