sermons

Summer at Reservoir

The Control of Bodies and the Body of Christ

Steve Watson

Jul 28, 2024

As many of you know, before I was a pastor, I was a high school principal. And one of the moments that captures some of the tensions of that work happened during one of my interviews. As a finalist, I stood before the whole high school faculty to speak and answer questions. And one of them said:

Hey, we hear that next year’s freshman class is a difficult one. Those 8th graders at the middle school have a lot of troublemakers, and we have bad enough school discipline already, so what are you going to do about that? How will you control these kids?

Now I had some training and experience in student discipline. I have some philosophy and approach on these things. So there was a lot I could have said, but I had skipped my midday coffee by mistake, so I had a headache, I wasn’t thinking all that great. I felt like I was sort of bombing this faculty meeting interview already.

So I just asked:

What if we were to meet these kids first? These 8th graders who’ve never set foot in this school, who are about to be a quarter of our student body, what if we were to meet them before we assume how bad they will be? What if we were to try to know them and welcome them, before we try to solve the problems they haven’t yet created? 

I don’t think that was a popular answer. I wasn’t always a popular principal. 

But that moment was at the heart of what was complicated and challenging about that job. So many of the parents and adults of that community wanted a school leader who would command and control the students. Make them behave the way we wanted, so we could do school with them. 

A high school principal is a small-time political figure, and so much of politics in any organization, at any scale, is about control. Who will control the people? Who will control the behaviors, the changes that threaten us? 

In our communities of every size – relationships, families, schools, workplaces – so many of us are striving for control. But it’s illusive. We don’t usually manage to control people or things for very long, and even when we’re able to, the results aren’t often what we hoped they’d be. Same is true at a bigger scale – in our religions, in our countries. So many futile efforts to control big threats, big changes. 

So today, I offer you a few thoughts on our issues with control and I offer another image for dealing with people or changes we don’t understand or may not like.

The Control of Bodies and the Body of Christ. These are words I’ve lifted from Willie James Jennings. I’ve been reading the book of Acts alongside his brilliant commentary on that part of the Bible. And we’ll be reading a bunch of the 15th chapter of Acts today, a section known as the Jerusalem council. I’ll read it in three parts and make some comments in between. Here’s how it starts:

Acts 15:1-5 (Common English Bible)

15 Some people came down from Judea teaching the family of believers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom we’ve received from Moses, you can’t be saved.”

2 Paul and Barnabas took sides against these Judeans and argued strongly against their position.

The church at Antioch appointed Paul, Barnabas, and several others from Antioch to go up to Jerusalem to set this question before the apostles and the elders.

3 The church sent this delegation on their way. They traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria, telling stories about the conversion of the Gentiles to everyone. Their reports thrilled the brothers and sisters.

4 When they arrived in Jerusalem, the church, the apostles, and the elders all welcomed them. They gave a full report of what God had accomplished through their activity.

5 Some believers from among the Pharisees stood up and claimed, “The Gentiles must be circumcised. They must be required to keep the Law from Moses.”

So the good news of Jesus is traveling, just as Jesus wanted it to. From Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to all the ends of the earth. 

But things change as they travel, don’t they? Change is the story of health, of growth, of life, of time, but we hate it, don’t we? 

I hate that I can’t buy lunch for less than $5. Fifteen years ago, the last time I bought lunch out regularly, I could still get a Banh Mi in Boston’s Chinatown where I taught, for like $3.50. I lament the world of the year 2024 where that is no longer true. So I try not to buy lunch out, other than like from 7/11, maybe because I’m cheap – frugal more politely. Or maybe because I hate change. 

Same with the Jerusalem church, the OG followers of Jesus. They loved the idea of their message going to the ends of the earth, but they thought it meant everyone would in time be like them. When that’s not the case – and these pork-eating, face shaving, uncircumcised Gentiles start joining the Jesus movement, it just seems so wrong. 

They’re like: y’all get yourselves circumcised, as our law has always required. If we have to go through that, so do you!

Because just like in American politics today, our traditions and our way of life, our nostalgia for the way things used to be can get real important in the face of changes we don’t understand. And so we grasp for control, which usually means control of bodies that don’t act like we want them to. 

Psychologists know that bodies scare us. At some level they disgust us. They leak and ooze and excrete uncomfortably, and eventually they die, and rot and decompose, and there is something in our deep evolutionary psychology that fears the body just as we fear change. 

At the high school I took on as principal, the faculty wanted some peace and respect in the school. But they thought they’d get it by controlling bodies. They were like: if we crack down on all the boys wearing hats in the hallway, that’ll help. Same with those damn cell phones. 

As a new principal, I was like: why do we care about whether a guy wears a hat in the hallway or not? So we changed that. Because a school becomes sick when it fixates on the control of bodies. We want you to behave and to conform, goes the message, to make our environment less troublesome. That’s a very different feel than wanting kids to belong, to grow.

We know that when teens feel wanted and liked and when they are engaged in activities that are building them up toward a better future, they act more productively and respectfully as well. They don’t need their body controlled as much as they need to be part of a healthy body.

The same is true in our marriages. When we form an intimate partnership, we fast discover our many differences, and the threatened spouse, the threatened partner, tries to subtly control their beloved, because they can’t handle a change in their life, a change in their expectations. And this is always misguided and hurtful. Because love doesn’t control. Love embraces the other as they are today, gloriously alive, gloriously changing, gloriously different. 

All this is true at large scale in our religions. 

Part of the point of religion is to conserve old truths and traditions. So religion hates change. 

Your church and my church share a history here. We were part of a denomination of contemporary Protestant churches called Vineyard/USA. Vineyard itself was born of a kind of wacky renewal movement where 1950s era evangelical Christians met 60s and 70s counterculture, spiritually awakened Jesus freak hippies. And yet over time, the movement got more cautious, more conservative. And so 10-15 years ago, as our churches and others were looking to continue to change and grow, to let go of some of the dysfunctions of the purity movement and to welcome and embrace our LGBTQ siblings and selves, we were threatened and shunned, asked to leave and cast out. 

A group of churches whose first question used to be:

• what is the Spirit of God doing today?

was threatened by change and instead asked:

• what restrictions and rules is the Bible placing upon us?

• And how do we get rid of the dissenters who read it differently and see the Spirit of God doing a new thing?

This is backwards of course. The scholar Luke Timothy Johnson writes that the text of scripture doesn’t indicate how God should act. How God acts shows us how we should read the text of scripture. 

I’m not picking on the Vineyard here, by the way, this is the trend in global religion. The world is changing at rates we’ve never seen. Globalization, technology, climate change, awakenings to what’s done harm in the past – the pace of change and the sense of threat we’re experiencing in our lifetimes is dizzying. It is not normal for our species. And the majority of global religion – Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish – is resisting this change, is moving toward its more fundamentalist impulses, is lurching rightward, toward nationalism, toward separatism, and toward control of bodies. 

Friends, this is not the way of the Spirit. It is not the liberating good news of Jesus. Control of bodies will hurt the people we’re trying to control. It will hurt the souls of the people trying to do the controlling. And it will not work. It rarely does. Control of bodies will not free us, it will not save us. 

Let’s look at what this Jerusalem council does – what it does well and not so much – as we look for a better way. 

Acts 15:6-18 (Common English Bible)

6 The apostles and the elders gathered to consider this matter.

7 After much debate, Peter stood and addressed them, “Fellow believers, you know that, early on, God chose me from among you as the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and come to believe.

8 God, who knows people’s deepest thoughts and desires, confirmed this by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us.

9 He made no distinction between us and them, but purified their deepest thoughts and desires through faith.

10 Why then are you now challenging God by placing a burden on the shoulders of these disciples that neither we nor our ancestors could bear?

11 On the contrary, we believe that we and they are saved in the same way, by the grace of the Lord Jesus.”

12 The entire assembly fell quiet as they listened to Barnabas and Paul describe all the signs and wonders God did among the Gentiles through their activity.

13 When Barnabas and Paul also fell silent, James responded, “Fellow believers, listen to me.

14 Simon reported how, in his kindness, God came to the Gentiles in the first place, to raise up from them a people of God.

15 The prophets’ words agree with this…(and they go on to quote the Bible some)

They’d been in a debate between two cities, two attitudes, two sets of politics around control of bodies. Manage the change or not? Control these Gentile bodies or not? Enforce the old rules or let them go? Paul and Barnabas took sides. They all took sides against each other.

Peter stands up and shifts the conversation. He asks what the Spirit is doing. He asks what it would mean to take sides with the movement of the Spirit of God. 

The Spirit of God is doing new things among them and is doing some old things but in new people. Paul and Barnabas tell them that these humans who are so foreign to them are welcoming their faith. They may be different, “other,” but spiritually, they are now sisters and brothers. How can we not welcome them?

And so the conversation changes from the control of bodies to the body of Christ. 

The body of Christ is the New Testament’s big metaphor for Christian community, for all people who welcome the teachings of Jesus, who find Jesus to be a true and helpful guide to knowing God and living well. 

It’s a radical image, that to follow Jesus is to be part of his body, to be intimately connected to our ancestor Jesus, to the living Spirit of Jesus. And to be intimately connected to millions of people you don’t choose and maybe you don’t even like. 

Love the God that you see in Jesus, and there you are, like it or not, in the Body of Christ, where none of us get to police the barriers or enforce the boundaries or control the bodies of this extended family. 

The Body of Christ doesn’t ask what you have to do to belong, because God has said we belong already. That’s not up for discussion.

And the body of  Christ doesn’t ask how to control the other participants. Because we’re not in charge, it’s not our place. The Spirit of Jesus takes the lead. We can take distance from other parts of the body that seem like they’re trying to get rid of us or do us harm. And we can avoid the parts of the body that seem to stink like they’re trying to be the armpits and the buttholes of the body. 

But we don’t get to control them, just as they don’t get to control us. 

Instead, the body of Christ asks what does it mean to welcome people into the body? And what does it mean to be welcomed? 

I see this in my church, where our mission is to welcome everyone without exception, to discover the love of God, the gift of community, and the joy of living. Everyone’s story matters, everyone has something to receive when they participate in the community, and everyone has something to give. And it’s such a holy, delightful surprise who I get to meet and be connected to in that community. 

I got a beautiful picture of this outside the church too, back in the school where I was a principal, when I was invited into a grief circle in the school basement.

Two years into my tenure, those rising 8th graders were in 10th grade now, and some of them had been trouble. One day we heard that the most notorious among them, often absent from school, defiant and checked out when he was there, rumored to be behind a number of problems, we learned that his mom died. 

And knowing how this tragedy would ripple out in this kid’s life and among his friends, one of our school social workers, a friend of mine named Mike, gathered this kids’ friends in his grade for a circle to talk it out, and he invited me to join them.

So we sat in the school basement, Mike, me, and seven or eight of this kid’s friends, most of them barely passing school, and among our school’s most problematic, worst behaving students as well. These were the bodies we wanted to control.

But in this circle, they were invited to belong, and to tell the truth about themselves. And the truth was they were hurting.

They were worried about their friend, and their friend’s mom dying reminded them of a lot of traumas they’d faced too. Pretty much all of them had had an important person in their life die or abandon them or get taken away from them. And in this circle of safety, of welcome, of belonging, they told those stories. This circle wasn’t called the Body of Christ, but anytime we can tell the truth about ourselves and our trauma in a circle of trust and safety, of grace and love, that’s a sacred space. 

My friend Mike encouraged them to feel the hurt, not to try to numb it out that night with weed, and he encouraged them: you’re valuable, you matter, you’re loved, and this can get better.

I don’t know that I had anything all that valuable to say, I was just so honored to be there. But I remember hoping that my presence communicated that these boys belonged to our school, that they were wanted and welcome. 

Belonging to the body of Christ tells us we are welcome as we are. We matter to God, and we ought to matter to one another. We don’t get to control anyone else, and no one gets to control us. We commit to a circle of love and truth where the Spirit of God does its work on us over time. Where we’re loved and moved and persuaded to a higher call for our lives. 

• How do you hear this today, friends?
• Have you been told you don’t belong in the body of Christ?
• That because of your views, your politics, your sexuality, that you need to be the subject of judgment or control, rather than welcome and love?

What does it mean to know that the Spirit of God won’t have this in the body of Christ? That it’s no one’s right to police the borders of God’s family or control your membership or control your body? No one’s. You matter, friend. You too are a beloved child of God, adopted and welcome forever. 

And for all those of us who have control issues, who have a hard time letting go of changes or tensions or people or conflicts that threaten us? What does it mean to surrender to the fact that we probably can’t control those changes or people anyway? And we’re probably not meant to try? Instead, we can trust we are part of a bigger story. We are part of a bigger body. 

We’re connected to ancestors and descendants in the body that are part of this story. We’re connected to a wise and loving God that can handle some things that we can’t. The help of God and friends is there to call upon. It’s not all on our shoulders. We’re just one person, one part of this big body of Christ. There’s help. There’s more. There’s time. 

Friends, I want to read the end of this passage as a kind of coda, to see how they do and don’t let go of control of Bodies, and what it says about how we might live into the welcome and the encouragement of the Body of Christ. 

Acts 15:19-35 (Common English Bible)

19 “Therefore, I conclude that we shouldn’t create problems for Gentiles who turn to God.

20 Instead, we should write a letter, telling them to avoid the pollution associated with idols, sexual immorality, eating meat from strangled animals, and consuming blood.

21 After all, Moses has been proclaimed in every city for a long time, and is read aloud every Sabbath in every synagogue.”

22 The apostles and the elders, along with the entire church, agreed to send some delegates chosen from among themselves to Antioch, together with Paul and Barnabas. They selected Judas Barsabbas and Silas, who were leaders among the brothers and sisters.

23 They were to carry this letter:

(and the letter goes over this compromise they made – we’ll skip that bit…)

30 When Barnabas, Paul, and the delegates were sent on their way, they went down to Antioch. They gathered the believers and delivered the letter.

31 The people read it, delighted with its encouraging message.

32 Judas and Silas were prophets, and they said many things that encouraged and strengthened the brothers and sisters.

33 Judas and Silas stayed there awhile, then were sent back with a blessing of peace from the brothers and sisters to those who first sent them.

35 Paul and Barnabas stayed in Antioch, where, together with many others, they taught and proclaimed the good news of the Lord’s word.

So here’s what doesn’t work. Can you hear how they’re not ready to let go of the control of bodies? They’re like, fine, you don’t need to get circumcised. Leave your genitals alone. And maybe we’ll flex on some other rules. 

But hey, all that disgusting non-kosher meat – don’t touch that stuff. And all your dirty sex thoughts and dirty sex lives, keep away from that too. Keep it clean. That’s the compromise, OK. 

It’s a weird landing spot. One, are these really the two most important ethical issues for new converts? Clean up your sex lives and eat kosher? 

Two, this compromise doesn’t hold for even a generation. Within 15 or 20 years, Paul is forcibly arguing to let go of the kosher meat, meat involved in idol worship rules bit. He’s like: it really doesn’t matter. 

The sex stuff continues to matter, for millennia. And it’s not all bad. Our sexuality and our sex lives run deep in us, and living with love, goodness, and holiness in our sexuality is actually super-important in a life of freedom and joy and love. But even in this, control doesn’t usually get the job done. Telling people – avoid this website, don’t have sex with this person or at this time doesn’t usually change anything. And it doesn’t magically make our sexuality and sex lives a place of freedom, health, love, and joy. That’s a deeper work.

So compromise rules, just toning down our efforts at control don’t get the job done. 

Because we suck at controlling things. Our efforts to control things mostly stress us out. They don’t do very much. And our efforts to control other people tell them they aren’t welcome and loved as they are, that we won’t love them until they change, and that hurts them and it hurts us. 

So the letter isn’t perfect. But here’s what is. They send a delegation from one side of this debate to the other. They say:

let’s get to know one another.

And they offer one another blessings of peace. 

Members of these embattled religious opponents say let’s try being friends. Blue state, red state opponents say – let’s take a pause on trying to convince and control each other because that’s not working. Let’s try to understand one another.

I just read a book by Monica Guzman, a liberal journalist from a blue city in a blue state, who wrote I Never Thought of it that Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. 

She’s got some hard words we need to hear if we’ve got a shot as a nation, or even a species. She’s not a both-sideser. She’s not saying to agree with all the trash out there in our politics or our culture wars. But she’s like we have go to put more effort, more love, into trying to know and understand one another, before we just try to judge and control one another. We’ve got to wish each other blessing and peace, not talk like we wish each other dead. 

Friends, I wonder where this lands for you. 

Perhaps you have some people whose bodies you’ve been trying to control.

• Family members, employees, strangers, political or religious enemies?
• What would it mean to let them go?
• To entrust them to the Spirit and care of God?
• To entrust them to themselves?
• To acknowledge that they too have a right to be alive and share this earth with you, maybe even share a portion in the body of Christ?

You don’t need to like them or be friends. But you don’t get to control them or change them unilaterally.

What would it mean to let them be? To let them go? 

What would it mean to resist their ideas or their laws or their politics where you need to, but to welcome their humanity?

To welcome that they too are part of the body?

That they too are under God’s care, and within reach of God’s Spirit? Not easy these days. Hey, faith, hope, and love have never been easy.

But they’re good, and they’re true, and they’re all we’ve got.