Gloria Dei Lutheran Church | Urbandale, Iowa

I'll Never See Life the Same Again: I'll Never See my Body the Same

Pastor Meyer’s Sermon

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our heavenly Father and from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus, our Christ.

When I was living in St. Louis when I was attending seminary, we had some friends that came down from Omaha, Nebraska, to visit my wife and me. And they had never been to St. Louis before and we were driving around looking at all the different sites and visiting all different places like Ted Drewes. And the thing is we always took their car because they couldn’t stand the fact of having their seminary friend, their poor seminary friend, driving them around in his own car using his gas. So we always took their car but since they had never been to St. Louis before, they didn’t feel comfortable driving themselves so they asked me to drive their car. Well, I certainly was fine doing that. But as I was driving their car, I kept in mind that I needed to be careful, this was not my car.

I wouldn’t want something to happen to my own car but I especially did not want something happening to someone else’s car while I was driving it. Then came Sunday morning and my friend and I were coming back from church and I was driving the car. We got onto the on ramp to get onto the highway and the car in front of me stopped abruptly and I was not fast enough. I didn’t react fast enough and, you guessed it, I rear-ended the car. Can you imagine what was going through my mind at that time? Can you imagine how I was feeling? I felt terrible because I was in an accident but, not only that, the car was not my own.

You see, Paul is telling us in our reading for this morning that we are not our own. He says, “You are not your own. You were bought at a price.” And so we certainly can get an understanding of that idea because we have that heightened sense of care and protection when we’re watching over someone else’s things. After all, the Book of James tells us that every good gift, in fact, every perfect gift comes from above. It comes from our heavenly Father so we understand that everything we own, everything we have belongs to God. So when we have that Easter moment, when we see the resurrected Jesus for who He really is and what He has really done for us, we begin to not see life the same again and we begin to understand that there is a deeper meaning to what Paul is saying here. We begin to realize that he’s not just talking about our possessions and everything we have. He’s also talking about our bodies. In fact, when we have that Easter moment, we don’t look at our bodies the same. When we look at our bodies, we hear the words, “You are not your own. You were bought at a price.”

And as we come to grips with that, we begin to understand what that price means. What was that price? What did it entail? And Peter tells us in his first letter, “For you know that it was not with perishable things, such as silver or gold, that you were redeemed but with the precious blood of Christ.” So we begin to see that the precious price was the life and death of the Son of God. We begin to understand that Jesus Himself had to come down as a man so He could lay down His life for our sins. But that was the only price that would purchase us back from sin and death and that was a tremendous price for us. You are not your own. You were bought at a price.

In other words, we were bought with Jesus’ blood. Therefore, as Paul tells us, “Honor God with your body.” But isn’t it interesting that when we drive someone else’s car, we’re very careful with how we drive it. So we’re very attentive to the street sign or attentive to the rules of the road. When we come to a four-way stop, we come to a complete stop. But when we’re in our own car, we’re not as attentive. We’re not as careful because it’s our own car.

I would say that as we look at our own bodies, we could go one of two ways. We could understand and take to heart that we are not our own and Jesus has purchased us with His blood. Or we can go another way. The other way seems easier for us because, you see, we don’t like to hear that idea that you’re not your own. We don’t like to hear the word that we belong to someone else than ourselves, that we may be subject to authority and the desires of another. And in our pride, we would rather look at ourselves and see ourselves living our lives in more of an unrestrained freedom and a self determination to cry out in defiance, “I belong to me. No one is my master. I am my own.”

So we begin to look at other places besides our worth, to look at other places besides our values in how we should handle our bodies. And we look to our culture in search of worth and meaning. And that begins to affect what our life choices are. We may be led to believe that all there is in life is achieving material prosperity and, in doing so, we find ourselves saying, like the people in Corinth who Paul was talking to, that all things are permissible. Anything goes. After all, we think that material worth, material prosperity is what we need to have so we need to look the part. And so we begin to worry about being that perfect 10 according to what the world’s standards are. We begin to make going to the gym our religion or going to the tanning salon our religion or going out and buying the expensive clothes as our religion. And in this day and age when plastic surgery is so common, we’re reminded that some will do anything to try to look good according to the world’s standards. And so we look at the local magazines and we look at the super models and the other stars and we get caught up in trying to look like them when actually all they are, are airbrushed images meant to hide the imperfections.

Or maybe we go a different direction. Maybe we realize that no matter what we do, we’re never going to achieve that perfect 10. We can’t live up to the world’s expectations, so begin to not take good enough care of our physical self. We start thinking like the people in Corinth who Paul was writing to that our stomach is for food and food is for our stomach and we begin to drink too much. We begin to eat too much, having too many chips and too many slices of pizza, and exercising becomes haphazard and infrequent and we begin to lose sight that God has purchased us twice. Once because He has fearfully and wonderfully made us for who we are and second because He has bought us at a price. And sometimes we get so obsessed with the outside and how we look that we don’t remember we were created in the image of God. And our worth and our values and who we are doesn’t depend on our appearance because, my friends, Jesus certainly wasn’t a perfect 10.

We get a glimpse of what His appearance might have been like in Isaiah. Isaiah writes, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him. Nothing is in His appearance that we should desire Him.” Yet in this undesirable body of His, He did some wonderful things. He used His hands to make mud to put on the eyes of a blind man so he could be healed. He used His feet to walk the countryside to be with the people to let them know, “I care for you.” He used His voice when talking with the woman caught in adultery to say, “Neither do I condemn you.” He used His eyes as He shed tears while weeping because He was sad at the loss of His friend, Lazarus.

But yet, He also used His undesirable body to give us something so special, so important to help us to remember who we are. He said, “Take eat. This is my body which is given for you. Take drink. This is my blood which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” And it is through these words that we remember what Paul says, “You are not your own.” Because in the eyes of God, our call is not to be that perfect 10 according to the world’s standards. Our call is not to try to turn heads or to be a super model. Our goal is to honor God with our bodies.

Now some of us may be saying, “What does God want to do with my body? I’m overweight. I’m full of wrinkles and I have blotches all over. And my back doesn’t work as well as it used to. It hurts and I’m achy all over the place. And I’m dealing with this particular disease and I’m impulsive and nervous and some people say that I’m kind of awkward or maybe I don’t hear as well as I used to. It doesn’t seem that I would measure up to what God would want.” And that’s a good question. Why is God interested in our bodies? Well, Paul tells us in Romans 6, “Offer yourself to God as those who have been brought from death to life and offer the parts of your body to Him as instruments of righteousness.” We honor God by becoming His instruments, by becoming His hands and His feet and His voice and His eyes in this world.

It’s the hand that’s resting on a single mom who has three children who is at the end of her rope because she never has time for herself. It’s the feet that walk over to help that elderly neighbor up the stairs so he won’t fall and to spend some time with him talking. It’s the voice that whispers, “Honey, I’m so sorry,” to the man who is grieving because he just lost his mother. You see eyes that show acceptance and love while talking to someone who doesn’t yet know Jesus. It’s my friend who decided to go ahead and pay for the damages to his car even though I was responsible because they knew it would put me in a bind.

Yes, we can go in different ways with our bodies but I choose to remember and to take to heart that we are not our own. We have been bought at a price. What about you? Let us become God’s instruments. Let’s become His hands and His feet and His voice and His eyes in this world and let’s honor Him with our bodies. Amen.