This Season at Emmanuel…

This fall we are going to explore what it means to live in a way that acknowledges we are human and that we live life in our bodies.  What does it look like in practice? How do we align ourselves in this way of living? How do we get it wrong at times? And how does this kind of living bring healing and life?

Theologian Stephanie Paulsell writes this:

There is a long history of honoring the body in Christian traditions, an accumulated wisdom with which we might fashion a contemporary practice of honoring the body. But we must also acknowledge that Christians have inherited an ambiguous legacy about the body. Christianity has long struggled with an uneasiness about the body, even as it affirms the goodness of the body in its bedrock beliefs. Many people have experienced religious traditions not as repositories of wisdom about how to honor the body but as repressive institutions that deny the goodness of the body and its pleasures, or as beliefs that nurture animosity toward particular bodies.

The affirmation that every body is made in the image of God is supplemented in Christianity by the belief that God was somehow fully present in a particular human body that lived in a particular time and place, the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The church has used the word incarnation to describe the conviction that God was incarnate, enfleshed in a body that ate and drank, slept and woke, touched and received touch. This body also suffered a death as painful and degrading as any human beings have devised. Early Christian testimony that this body also lived again after death shapes a profound Christian hope that undergirds the practice of honoring the body. Whatever else it means, the resurrection of Jesus suggests that bodies matter to God. And they ought to matter to us, too.

Early Christians choose the metaphor of the body to describe themselves.  In doing this, these early Christians acknowledged that it is through our bodies that we love and serve God and one another.

These, then, are the touchstones for a contemporary Christian practice of honoring the body. That God created our bodies good. That God dwelled fully in a vulnerable human body. That in death God gathers us up, body and all. That through our bodies we participate in God’s activity in the world.

You're invited to join us on Sunday morning at 10:30 am for our weekly community gathering. You can also watch the livestream of our service.