Easter 3 Luke 24:36-49

Just about 10 days ago I was sitting on the beach in Florida, feeling the warm sun on my poor Snow Belt winter weary skin, listening to waves crash, smelling the salt air, and looking at the most interesting, vast array of people I had had the chance to just sit and look at in a long time. I don’t get the chance to people-watch much in my daily work, and beaches are great places to do this, so I did it quite a lot last week. I remarked to my husband a couple of times, “Isn’t there a fascinating variety in the human body?” If you want to sit and observe the Creator’s creativity, genius, artistry, and yes, sense of humor, go to a beach sometime. At the beach—at least a sunny, warm water beach—people are at their most exposed, least covered up state that you will find in public.

Even yours truly. I had on a bathing suit in a relatively public place. A discreet, tasteful, modest one, to be sure, but a bathing suit nonetheless. I sometimes joke that swimwear for women over 40 should really be designed by a team of MIT engineers who specialize in cantilever technology. But when it comes right down to it, a bathing suit represents a kind of freedom and honesty that you just don’t find in most ordinary clothes. People expose themselves, their flaws, and even their beauty when they take off that swim suit cover-up or T-shirt, or drop that towel, and stretch out in the sun, in a way that they never would dream of in their average ordinary life, unless their profession is lingerie modeling. Even in the most modest of cases, like mine, somehow people are willing to expose things that have ordinarily only been observed by a spouse or partner, a health care provider, or their close family members in childhood. And lest you think I’m only talking about the “PG-13 and up” kind of exposure, let me give you an example. Men: how often have your friends and co-workers seen your bare back, or the soles of your feet? But when you get to the beach…all bets (along with the T-shirts and sandals)are off. You just never know what you’re going to find, or what others will find in you.

And so I sat for the first couple of hours we were there, under the beach umbrella, just kind of watching. Like everyone else, I have this relationship with my physical self, you see. And sometimes that relationship is friendlier than at other times. In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott writes a lot about her relationship with her body, specifically her thighs. She describes her distaste for them, her disappointment in them, her dislike of them. But once she became of a certain age, she realized that her thighs were a part of her, and that they were not going to change significantly. She started to think of them kindly, to lavish them with good-smelling lotion, and she gave them a nickname. Her thighs are now called “The Aunties.” She now thinks of her thighs as kindly older sisters of her mother, who may not be perfect, but they are part of her life and she loves them.

I remembered this story from her book when it came time for me to take my first beach walk. I decided that my Aunties, those parts of me that sometimes bring me disappointment and dismay, deserved sun and wind and salt spray as much as my arms or ankles did, and so I began to refer to walking on the beach as “taking the Aunties for a stroll.” It was not an easy thing to do. I did not somehow lose my body self-consciousness in one week. But I suspected that sitting hovered under a towel and watching the whole world go by just might be the bigger sin of idolatry.

I have seen and heard much in the media lately about our culture’s unhealthy obsession with the body. The incidence of eating disorders in preteen children, especially preteen girls, is alarmingly on the rise. I saw a story the other day about a four-year-old who wanted to be on a diet, because she was afraid of getting fat. On the other hand, I saw a program Friday night about a family of four who, due to genetic and lifestyle factors, would probably all die at an early age of obesity-related illnesses if drastic dietary and lifestyle changes were not made.

Our culture seems to not quite understand what we are to do with these physical manifestations of ourselves. It seems we are either starving ourselves to fit an unhealthy or unrealistic ideal that we have been sold in the media, or we are neglectful in taking care of the one body we have been given by our Creator. But, hey, its’ just a body, right? It’s just an earthly, finite, flawed machine that eventually breaks down. It fails us or we fail it, and it just stops working.

My thinking about the human body recently has been colored by our recent losses in this church. Our bodies are indeed finite and flawed; this has become painfully evident for two families in our community this month alone. Spending time with grieving family members of those recently departed is the surest reminder of the fact that although our bodies are something that we sometimes take for granted or fret over in ways that might seem frivolous, they are indeed one of the ways that we are connected to each other. They are, for this life, the manifestation of our Creator’s love for us. Do we forget that we are created in God’s own image?

A group of Jesus’ friends sat in a room together, no doubt the only subject on their minds the recent events: the death of the one on whom they had pinned so much hope, and the apparent disappearance of his body. If you have even been in a home of someone who has died, you can imagine the demeanor of the crowd. There were plenty of tears, to be sure, and maybe even some smiles and laughter as they remembered all they had seen and done with Jesus. Mourning is such a mixed bag of emotion. Behind every tear and every furtive smile, however, is the one truth: He is dead.

Suddenly the two (Cleopas and the unnamed one) who met him along the road to Emmaus barge in and start telling a story that you can bet everyone in the room desperately wanted to believe: He is alive! We have seen him! So as the crowd sits suspended in the chasm between grief and hope, somewhere just left of disbelief, he stands up, right among them. No doubt some in the crowd had the very practical question come to mind: How did he get in here without anyone noticing? (Sometimes when what is happening right before our very eyes is more than we can comprehend, our mind immediately goes to the questions that are most irrelevant. It’s just the mind’s way of coping.)

He knew his friends well enough that he could anticipate and understand their response. They thought they had seen a ghost; they certainly weren’t expecting a flesh and blood Jesus standing before them. Before their disbelief could become joy, Jesus says to them, “I’m right here. See, this is where I was pierced—these are the wounds I endured on your behalf—see them? Go ahead, you can touch me. I won’t break. I want you to know that I am real. I want you to understand that I have risen.”

This unbreakable flesh and bone Savior, this risen one exposed his wounds to those gathered, not that they might feel sorry for him, or weep for his agony, but that they might know and understand that they were scars of victory. The wounded one had been made whole, you see.

Have you ever seen photos of breast cancer survivors who have allowed their mastectomy scars to be acknowledged and celebrated? A magazine I subscribe to did such a photo spread a few year ago, and printed some beautifully artistic, breathtakingly honest photos of women—survivors—who had allowed the most dark period of their lives, the cellular, chemical, and surgical invasion of their bodies (that we don’t like to talk about except in hushed tones) to be photographed. The photos were hard to look at at first. We are used to seeing topless women only in a certain contexts, something shameful to be ogled, or for the gratification of the person looking at them. We certainly aren’t used to seeing surgical scars in a magazine spread, no matter how artfully constructed with good lighting and expert cropping.

But these were badges of courage. In every one of those beautiful photos a woman was saying, “I was broken, I fought, I was scarred; and yet, I live. These are my battle scars.”

In the showing of his battle scars, in the declaration that he lives, Christ the unbreakable Savior declares for us life eternal. We are flesh and bone as he was. We need and we hurt, we struggle and we overcome, and ultimately we are healed. In Christ the flesh and bone Savior we are forever intimately connected to God in a way that we could have not have been had God not decided to become flesh and dwell among us. Our wounds are his wounds, and they can be made as badges of courage. I was discussing emotional woundedness with a friend of mine once. My friend said, “I see you rolling this wound into a new and elegant scar, becoming like a laugh line in your face.”

If we take the Incarnation seriously, if we truly believe as best we can that we are made in the image of God, then we are free to reveal our wounds, our scars, our disappointments, the Aunties of our lives to God, and within the body of Christ, to one another. We serve a God who was bruised, scorned, cut, and pierced on our behalf. And yet, in the flesh he declares that he lives again. And in that revelation, we are made whole.

Thanks be to God.