Adapted from a sermon preached at UUCV in November of 2022

Your body is a miracle.

It’s amazing and beautiful complex and spectacular…..and how many of you are squirming in your seats just having those words said about you?

They’re true, and yet, so often they’re difficult to hear. 

Not one single person is exempt from body image struggles. The diet and beauty industry has made sure of that.

There are a gazillion companies and people in the world who invent problems and point out what is wrong with our bodies, and then claim they have the products that will fix us. 

We’re constantly talking around this issue, modeling body insecurity to one another, And yet, we rarely talk about it openly.

Too often, we feel alone in our insecurities. We feel like what’s “wrong” with our body is wrong with us alone…which, if you think about it, is really bizarre, considering that  we all meet and know each other as bodies. 

We humans live in  tall, lanky, short, squat, round, lean, and  in between bodies; bodies with tattoos and piercings, with scars or sciatica, and with acne or arthritis; stooped and aging bodies, svelte and athletic bodies, sick and dying bodies; bodies in remission and recovery; worn and weary bodies; and—I’ve heard of these mythical—rested and energized bodies.

We don’t just have bodies; we ARE bodies—we’re more than bodies, of course, but never less. We are bodies and spirits—not either, but both. 

We can’t neatly separate our bodies and spirits; they are not divisible.

They are seamlessly woven together, which is why it’s difficult to do so-called “spiritual” things—like being patient, compassionate and centered—when our stomachs growl, our feet hurt, our heads throb, we haven’t slept enough, haven’t eaten well, or haven’t had our morning coffee.

When we’re tired, or hungry, or thirsty, it’s harder to love well, to think clearly, and to feel accurately.

Humans are body and spirit, brains and minds, hearts and love.

We can’t have one without the other.

We can’t exist without the circulation of blood, and we can’t live without the connection of relationships. We are biology and biography; what people see is our skin and what we want them to know are our stories.

We’re embodied spirits.

Emotional and physical experiences exist in tandem: they fire across the synapses of our brains and register somewhere in our bodies.

Anxiety shallows our breathing and speeds up our hearts. Fear churns in our stomachs. Loss sends tears running down our cheeks. Wonder widens our eyes. Desire burns and twitches in our loins. Joy lightens our steps. Confidence straightens our spines. Hope lifts our heads.

It is mind boggling how connected our bodies and our spirits are. 

Interestingly enough, when I think about the miracle of our bodies, I always come back to one particular, fairly irreverent, but oh so accurate translation of the Christian bible, and the way it frames the majestic prologue to the Gospel of John. 

Most translations say something like “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, a glory filled with grace and truth.”

This ain’t that.

This particular translation that makes me giggle so much says it slightly differently…..and it raised a lot of eyebrows in the Christian world when it was first released. It took that majestic metaphor and translated it, “One day, God put skin on and moved into the neighborhood.” 

Frankly, for all its Halloween-esque imagery, I think it’s a great way to think  “the incarnation” — which is the word Christians use to describe this idea of god coming to earth in human form. 

The actual etymology of the word incarnation is honestly really close to the idea of ‘putting skin on’ — it comes from the Latin words “in carne” and literally means “to put in meat.”

I kind of love that, in a gross-but-deep way.

I love the idea that in  the meat and muscle, the blood and bones, of a human body, we are able to experience life and  perceive the grace and truth of our incredible spirits.

I don’t think of ‘the incarnation’ as something that happened once and exclusively in Jesus; instead, I am of the mind that incarnation happens  to everyone, everywhere, every time a person is born. 

I believe what the idea of incarnation offers us is this: what happens to us, to our bodies, matters.

We, each one of us, are miracles that have been ‘put in meat’.

Bodies matter; they are where we meet glory, feel grace, and encounter truth. And, our bodies tell stories: 

Journalist Dana Jennings, of the New York Times wrote:

“Our scars tell stories . . . In their railroad-track-like appearance, my scars remind me of the startling journeys that my body has taken — My scars are what they are, born of accident and necessity. . . . More than anything, I relish the stories they tell.” 

Your body is holy and a gift of the divine. Cherish it and care for it. And let your scars tell their stories.

If you know me in real life, you know that, for the past decade, I’ve been living with Multiple Sclerosis. 

And for the past couple of years, my body has been telling me what my limits are. 

I’ve never been good at accepting limits, but there are days now when I don’t really have a choice. There are things I’ve always done which I can no longer reliably do.

I know what it means to feel that “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” I have had to learn to accept help—and not just to accept it, but to ask for it.

Learning to ask for and accept help has been central to honoring the incarnation, the miracle of my own body. Instead of being at war with my miraculous meat sack, I’m learning how to care for it—and  how to allow myself to be cared for—when my strength wanes.

I’m learning about extending the same compassion for my own weaknesses that I do to others. 

Barbara Brown Taylor wrote that “whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.” 

After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered.

Bodies take real beatings.

That they heal from most things is an underrated miracle.

Each one of our bodies has a story filled with unexpected wonder. Since we’re talking about etymology today, did you know that wonder shares a common root with wound? A wound is an opening in the body: to be wounded is to be cut, pierced, or torn open. Wonder is an opening in perception: something cuts away our customary assumptions, pierces our illusions, and tears open our minds and hearts.

To call something wonderful—full of wonder—is to say that it has opened us in ways we’ve not been open before and it has given us the opportunity to be filled with unexpected awareness and unimagined grace. 

It is wonderful 

to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes,

These miraculous meat sacks 

To carry us through our messy, beautiful, very human lives

We have these bodies, these miraculous, incarnate meat sacks that remind us that being human is both beautiful and messy. We touch someone we love and feel a spark of connection, a tingle of pleasure; we hug a friend or family member and feel at home again. We sweat, we smell, we get wrinkled and saggy.

At some point our bodies wear out, or are overcome by illness, and we die.

And our bodies return to the earth; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust.

Humans to humus.

We need these bodies to feel love and hurt, to experience our own strength and tenderness. We are meant to cherish and enjoy these bodies we have been given, to get to know and to give praise for this skin we are wearing.

To see ourselves as beautiful, and a blessing.

Oh that we would come to a place where all those companies pointing out everything wrong with us wouldn’t make a single dollar because we stop believing that there is anything about us that needs to be “fixed”.

Our bodies are ours.

And they are miracles.

Mind, spirit and body, we are who we are, and that is more than enough.