May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts, be acceptable worship in your sight, oh God, my rock and my redeemer.

Psalm 32

32:1 Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

32:2 Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

32:3 While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.

There was once an old grandmother who claimed to be in close communion with the LORD and to speak with her on a nearly daily basis. People from the town in which she lived would come to visit her often to hear the latest message from the divine and to ask her to carry their cares and concerns to the LORD.

Now the local priest heard about this and was a little concerned. This woman was a lovely older woman, consistently attended mass and had a good heart. He was sure  that she meant well and that perhaps she believed that she was in fact communing with the LORD but that she was simple minded, and there was perhaps some risk that she might lead his flock astray by accident with the messages she brought, she not being an ordained priest.

So the priest went to visit the old woman. His hope was to find a way to gently demonstrate to the town that her messages  were not divine so that everyone could go on with their days.

Well he arrived at her home and sat with her and they spoke about what the LORD had told her, and he said to her, now every morning I make my confessions, the next time you speak with our LORD I would like you to ask him what I have confessed that morning,  I will come and see you and we can discuss what he said.

So the following morning the woman spoke with the LORD and around lunch the priest came  to see her and he asked her, did you ask about my confessions? Oh yes, said the woman. And what did God say? He has forgotten.

Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity.

God sees our  sin in a way that is different from our own vision.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.

We confess our sins not because they are offensive to God, but because of our own shame. We are ashamed of our inequities, our failings.

I saw a bumper sticker I liked once that read “God’s idea of paradise is hanging out in a garden with a couple naked vegetarians.”

In the garden, Adam and Eve are naked and they walk with God in the garden in the cool of the day. Yet after they eat the fruit, they become aware of their nakedness and feel ashamed, they make clothing, they cover themselves.

Is this not a constant image of ourselves? We are vulnerable to others and we are vulnerable to God, and so we are ashamed, and we hide ourselves.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.

In confession we have an opportunity to openly share our vulnerability with God, a God who became vulnerable to us in the person of  Jesus, the Christ, whom we have crucified.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.

The body is the site of this groaning, of this vulnerability. Not in some heaven, light years away, but here in this place, in this body, this frail flesh, this decaying form. This body breaks, it aches, it dies. This is how we come to God, clothed in weakness.

Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity.

It is not God who separates us from her, but we who hide ourselves, in our shame. And so, God comes to us, in our frailty, in the divine body of Christ. There is a beautiful poem by George Herbert called The Bag, it describes God’s coming to earth as an undressing.

Hast thou not heard, that my Lord Jesus di’d?
Then let me tell thee a strange storie.
The God of power, as he did ride
In his majestic robes of glorie,
Reserv’d to light; and so one day
He did descend, undressing all the way.

This is the God who sits with us, eats with us, teaches us, dies with us and then, and then, and then something different happens. Something special and unique. The first born of the dead. Christ is resurrected. He returns to us from the grave, our sin against him, forgiven, he eats with us again, teaches us again, sits with us, again.

But then the ascension, gone, we are abandoned and alone again. Yet before the ascension Jesus promises, if ye love me, I will send you another comforter.

2 Cor 5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.

The Christ of the body, the undressed God, has ascended. We know him no longer in that way. He does not sit with us, teach us, eat with us, or die with us, any longer. We live in a time after the bodily God.

The story of the relationship with God can be told as one of immanence and transcendence. First the Israelites were the people of the transcendent God, they did not make idols, or carry their God with them. They carried the law, but God was not with them in person. Theirs was a transcendent God, then Jesus came, Emmanuel, God with us, an immanent God. Thomas put his hands in his wounds, Mary washed his feet with perfume and dried them with her hair, he washed his disciples feet, broke bread with them, died in front of them. This was an immanent God.

No longer did we need to feel ashamed of our bodies. Christ had redeemed them, he had lived through one, lived without sin yet in the human flesh. He had been touched with human hands. We had seen him with human eyes, but then, ascension. God returns to the transcendent God.

Early Christians are called atheists by the Romans because their God is a non-existent god, a disembodied god. Or so they think, so we think.

We picture our relationship with God now as a relationship with a disembodied spirit Jesus, always walking beside us, unseen, like being friends with the wind. But this is a human way of seeing, we look with our eyes and we do not see God, we say to ourselves, he must not be there, but if I believe, surely he will come back, back in the body.

I tell you he has already come. God returned to this earth, in bodily form, unashamed.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

see, everything has become new!

We no longer view anyone from a human point of view, from a view of vulnerability and shame. Yes we are still vulnerable in a human view, but to the divine view this is not held against us, God has reconciled us.

The old way of seeing, the old way of being has passed away.

See, everything has become new!

There was the time of creation, and then there was the time of humanity, and then there is the divine time, the kingdom time, this is the time we are now looking into.

Human time has ended, the human world has ended, human power has ended. A human worldview says, this man claiming to be God is a fool, he can bleed, he can be beaten, he can be killed, he should be ashamed of his frailty, of his vulnerability.

But a divine worldview says

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

In resurrection Christ showed to be false the premise that world powers have ultimate power in this world, that they decide who lives and who dies. Jesus could be killed but he could rise again, the stone was rolled away, the roman Empire was not able to have power over him.

But then the ascension. This power has left us, this body has left us and we are alone. Just when the new creation arrived, Jesus the first born of the dead, we are returned to the human world. But if anyone is in  Christ, there is a new creation.

Christ is here, on earth, in bodies, because he is here in the Holy Spirit, and his body is the Church. No longer does Jesus eat with us, teach us, sit with us, die with us, now we, in him eat with each other, teach each other, sit with each other, die with each other.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.

We see them as Christ sees them, we look through Christ’s eyes, we walk with Christ’s feet we are both subject and object of Christ’s love. We love others with the love of Christ, and in turn we are loved by others with the love of Christ. What we do for others, we do for Christ. We regard them not with a human point of view, but with a divine point of view.

Yet it is here, in this world, right now that this happens. This new creation that is breaking out everywhere that someone is in Christ is not some kingdom of gold streets in an age to come, the divine age has already arrived. It started when Jesus rose from the dead.

Giorgio Agamben writes in his commentary on the Letter to the Romans, entitled “The Time That Remains” “The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time,[…] not in order to to defer it, but, on the contrary to make it graspable” (Agamben 71).

This precarious time that we now live in, this time after human time has ended, is not a deferment of messianic time, of kingdom time, it is a fulfillment of time. This is the time we have to grasp the Kingdom. This is the time we have to be the Kingdom.

2 Cor 6:2 For God says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.” See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!

See, everything has become new!

Today the body of Christ is made up of millions of parts, it is spread all over the world. No longer is it located in one spot in first century Palestine, now it is in the work of the Church and it is in the body of the Church.

The church is literally the body of Christ.

Now I am someone who often becomes upset when people make certain grammatical mistakes. For all of my poor grammar, I have trouble letting go when people use the word literally incorrectly, when they use it to mean figuratively or emphatically. As in “I could literally eat a whole cow!”

I want to be clear that I wish we used the word literally to mean the opposite of metaphorically.

So how can I say that the church is literally the body of Christ? Literally? really? Literally. Yes!

Not in the human view but in the new view, with Kingdom eyes. This is what Jesus looks like now, he is disembodied and yet embodied, alive in each of us, acting when we do his will. The church as the body of Christ is a metaphor in the human kingdom, but in the Kingdom of God, the much more true Kingdom, the church is literally the body of Christ.

And for us, living somewhere in between these two worlds, somehow caught in the middle. For us we must see Christ no longer from a human point of view, From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.

We once knew him from a view that was ashamed, ashamed that he had suffered down in the muck and the manure and the animal nutrient material with us. No longer do we need to be ashamed for See, everything has become new!

So how can we live in this new creation? How do we act as the body of Christ?

Boldly.

From our vulnerability we must act without shame, in this place that we are, in these bodies we have.

In the story of transcendence and immanence, we are now in a time of immanence. Christ is here, imminently surrounding us. We consume him in the communion, and we become what we receive.

As the saying goes, you are what you eat.

And so we eat together, we sit together, we teach together, we die together, and we do it all in these bodies. These bodies are not something to be shed as we strive for the Kingdom. They were created good in the first creation, they were reconciled to God in the resurrection, and they are the body of Christ in this new creation.

So be not ashamed, act boldly, love boldly, love bodily,

and see, everything has become new!

Amen.