The Neighborhood Podcast
This is a podcast of Guilford Park Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina featuring guests from both inside the church and the surrounding community. Hosted by Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing, Head of Staff.
The Neighborhood Podcast
"Sacred the Body: Treat Flesh as Holy" (January 12, 2025 Sermon)
Have you ever wondered how your faith might shape your views on healthcare? Join us as we journey through the parable of the Good Samaritan, exploring the profound connection between Christian faith and the call to care for our sacred bodies. We reflect on how our physical forms are divine gifts, capable of both healing and harm, and how this informs our approach to a flawed healthcare system. Through theological insights like Gnosticism and Docetism, we uncover deeper meanings behind Christ's incarnation, emphasizing the divine value of human vulnerability.
In another stirring segment, we dissect a hymn that challenges us to reconsider the actions of priests and Levites, illustrating how routine faith can sometimes distract us from genuine compassion. Without focusing on guilt, we celebrate the gospel's call to choose love and action over complacency. We discuss tangible ways to manifest this compassion, from advocating for healthcare access to supporting affordable housing. Conclude with us as we unite in song, lifting a homegrown hymn that encapsulates our shared commitment to caring for our neighbors in both body and spirit.
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God of wisdom and truth. We've gathered in this space, both on site and online, to receive what you're saying to us through your Holy Scripture. For many of us, the story of the Good Samaritan is a familiar one, so give us a fresh perspective to receive its truth in new ways that help us treat our bodies and those of our neighbors as sacred gifts from you. Amen. Our scripture lesson today is from the Gospels. The Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, verses 25 through 37. Verses 25 through 37.
Speaker 1:Just then, a lawyer stood up to test Jesus, teacher. He said what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said to him what is written in the law? What do you read there? He answered you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus said to him you've given the right answer. Do this and you'll live. But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus and who is my neighbor? And Jesus replied a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell into the hands of robbers who stripped him and beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.
Speaker 1:Now, by chance, a priest was going down that road and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. And so likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, while traveling, came near him and when he saw him he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them, and then he put him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said take care of him and when I come back I'll repay you whatever more you spend. Now. Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? And the lawyer said the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus said to him go and do likewise. The word of the Lord.
Speaker 3:Thanks be to God. Friends, let us pray, lord. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in our sight. O Lord, our rock and our redeemer, amen. So, friends, our bodies, even though we may have complicated relationships with them, are sacred sacred, beautiful gifts.
Speaker 3:They come in all different shapes and sizes, colors and abilities. No two bodies, not even those of identical twins, are exactly alike. They are simultaneously fragile and resilience. As we sang in our opening hymn, our bodies are capable of the full spectrum of human experience, from facilitating great harm towards one another, on the one hand, to having an almost boundless capacity for healing and comforting and nourishing, on the other.
Speaker 3:Sociologists medical practitioners, artists and others have devoted their lives throughout the millennia to learn more about the human body, and we're still learning so much.
Speaker 3:As I mentioned, over the next four weeks we're doing this sermon series called Sacred the Body, where we will explore the intersection between health care and our Christian faith intersection between health care and our Christian faith. And though we may differ on how to fix it, I believe we can all agree that we do have a deeply flawed system in this country, where far too many of our neighbors lack access to affordable health care. And I wish to emphasize that the point of this sermon series isn't to propose a singular or even partisan solution to this problem. Instead, together, you and I will be guided through scripture, sermon and song to think theologically about how we cannot advocate for our neighbor's spiritual needs without being equally concerned for their physical needs. And while the sacredness of our bodies may seem to be a relatively non-controversial statement, such has not always been the case in the history of Christianity. Last week, we began the season of Epiphany, which is a season in the church when we dwell on what it means that Christ came to us in the flesh as God with us.
Speaker 3:It's a remarkable thing when you think about it, that God would love us so much as to embrace human vulnerability, as to take on flesh exactly like yours and mine, and that certainly stood in contrast to the Greek and the Roman gods, who largely couldn't have cared less about what happened with us, mere humans so taking a complete 180 degree turn from such popular Greek and Roman theologies.
Speaker 3:Early Christians affirmed and worshipped a God who set up shop right here in our arms, was baptized just like us, just like we saw today with Ava and Mitchell, and who was born right here in an unassuming small town to an unwed couple of little means, no less. And in fact, some people in the early church were so offended by the humanity of Christ that they sought to diminish it to the point of flat out denying that Jesus was even human in the first place. The practitioners of what is now considered a heresy were called the Gnostics. Maybe you've heard the term Gnosticism. It was a kind of a Greek influence philosophy that believed that the human body was evil, dirty and temporary on the one hand, and that the human soul, on the other, was, by contrast, pure and clean and eternal. They held a very strictly dualistic philosophy that really didn't know what to do with a God that was both fully human and fully divine.
Speaker 3:A century or two later, a group of Christians decided to take that school of thought a step further and disregarded Christ's humanity completely. They called themselves the Docetists, which is a fancy Greek word that comes from the verb to seem Because in their opinion, Jesus only seemed human. In their opinion, jesus Christ's humanity was an illusion, some sort of magic trick. They argued that Christ was 100% divine and a big whopping 0% human. Now I won't try to bore you, but long story short, the Council of Nicaea in 325 settled the question and called those folks heretics. The result of that was the Nicene Creed, which sometimes we say together here at Guilford Park. That says, and I quote truly human. That last line of the Nicene Creed is a line that no Gnostic or Docetist could ever stomach to say out loud.
Speaker 3:And therefore, to this day, our faith affirms that every body is sacred, precisely because God came to us in the flesh. So, pastor, why does this matter to us on this cold January day? I'm so grateful that you all asked that question, because when we affirm the sacredness of everybody, or rather, when we fail to affirm the sacredness of everybody, we can excuse and justify any sort of hurtful ideology that harms our neighbors. All sorts of ideologies that seek to divide you and me from one another, whether along lines of class or race or gender or sexuality, nationality or physical ability, are fueled by prioritizing certain bodies over and above others. So if we Christians affirm the sacredness of every body. It means that we take seriously our calling to follow Jesus, to build a neighborhood where every body is welcomed and celebrated and treated with care and compassion, and there's perhaps no greater story in the Gospels that affirms this than the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Speaker 3:I knew I wanted to start the sermon series with this passage because I believe that there is no other passage in the Gospels that better embodies the holistic nature of our calling as followers of Jesus Christ. Yes, friends, the soul matters. Yes, the spirit matters. Yes, the church, we are called to spiritually care for one another, but we're also called to physically care for one another.
Speaker 3:It's fitting in today's passage that the lawyer recites what's known as the Shema in response to Jesus's question. Some of you may know it well you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength, aka with all of our bodies. But the two characters first, two characters in today's passage who should have known that first, are the ones that tragically missed that opportunity to fulfill the words of the Shema. Both the priest and the Levite serve as obvious examples of what not to do when presented with the opportunity to care for a neighbor's physical needs. The term priest and Levite were somewhat synonymous terms to indicate anyone like you or like me who were church insiders.
Speaker 3:The hymn we'll sing in a few minutes, one written collaboratively with by some people in this very room uses its sanctified imagination to pretend as though the priest and the Levite were on their way to lead a worship service kind of like the one that you and I are gathered at right now.
Speaker 3:But by contrast, as I trust we all know well, the Samaritan made a very different choice. It would be difficult to imagine a group of people with more animosity, hatred, towards one another than Jews and Samaritans. So one of the reasons I love this story is that the animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans is a stand in for all kinds of antagonism that you and I see existing in the world around us today. Jesus deliberately chose to tell a story about two people whose society had taught to hate one another, and through this story Jesus proclaimed the gospel has no interest nor patience for such man-made categories, that the gospel has no interest nor patience for our turf wars or our power grabs, that the gospel has no interest nor patience for the labels we place upon one another to separate us from them. The gospel of Jesus Christ, instead, is about healing those divisions, not exacerbating them for personal gain.
Speaker 1:And so the story of the Good.
Speaker 3:Samaritan provides some counter-narratives to a culture that often preaches a message of pick yourself up by your bootstraps.
Speaker 3:It's a story that suggests that our spiritual, sacred traditions, though important and meaningful and transformative, should always take a back seat to serving those who are in pain. The story of the Good Samaritan reminds us that evil is not always done by evil people. I don't believe that the Levites or the priests were inherently bad people. I don't think either. One of them woke up that morning thinking today would be a really great day to ignore the needs of my neighbor. I think they were people like you and like me, people of faith, who try to do our best and sometimes need reminders of how to do that well. And finally, it's a story that teaches some uncomfortable truths in a culture that preaches the needs of the individual above the needs of the community. That you and I are, in fact, our brother's keepers. That what hurts one of us hurts all of us, one of us hurts all of us. And that we have a moral responsibility to provide affordable health care for the beaten and downtrodden among us.
Speaker 3:Again, I wish to say and confess that I don't have easy answers for how to do just that.
Speaker 3:I'm no expert on the nuances or complexities of our health care system. There are many among you all who are professionals in the health care system who probably know a heck of a lot more about that than I do. But I am a pastor and I know this much. The story of the Good Samaritan teaches us that providing for the physical well-being of our neighbors requires risk and sacrifice. One could even say it requires us to take up our cross Demands of us, the mandate from Paul's letter to the Galatians that we bear one another's burdens and in so doing fulfill the law of Christ. And so over the next few weeks we're going to talk about health care with a pretty broad lens. Next week we're going to talk about medical debt. The week after that we'll talk about including our neighbors who have disabilities or chronic illnesses, and then the final week we'll talk about mental health care. But in order to have those conversations faithfully, we have to first start from a theological position that the body is sacred.
Speaker 3:And in order to have those conversations faithfully, I also believe that it's important for us to sing together, and so our next homegrown hymn was written last week, just a couple days ago. If you want to go ahead and flip to the next page in your bulletin, you'll find it. I'm happy to share with you all that of the five hymns that we've written so far as I'm doing my doctoral research, this one was by far the most collaborative. I kind of wanted to have this sermon somewhat finished, but then Guilford County Schools decided to cancel three days of school last week and I did not have time to finish the hymn, which was actually for the best. I came to the folks at the Word this week with two really unfinished verses and said hey, y'all.
Speaker 3:I need your help Help me finish this hymn. And they didn't disappoint. You'll note that the first two verses of the hymn emphasize the priests and the Levites perhaps well-intentioned, but misguided faith. And then we see our tendency to settle into certain patterns that, if we're not careful, can distract us from the needs of our neighbors. But lest we get mired in guilt or in shame, which is not the point of this, the third verse that the class wrote together reminds us of the good news of the gospel, that you and I always have a choice. We can choose to be moved by the suffering of those around us.
Speaker 3:We can choose to act with loving care. We can choose to share the financial burden for those who need help. We can choose to spread God's kingdom by literally feeding our neighbors, advocating for affordable housing and having critical and compassionate conversations on how to increase access to affordable health care, which, for the record, these are not new conversations for this church, but things that we've been doing, thanks be to God, for a long time.
Speaker 1:And so together.
Speaker 3:I can't finish this sermon, but you all have to help me, so let's finish it together by rising in body or in spirit, and singing our latest homegrown hymn, with one voice and one body, to a tune that I trust will be familiar to most, if not all of us.
Speaker 2:The Chants of the Great, the saving salt. All else could wait Another day, like wise and free Might fail to end when he might Charge the help of God. It only brought the grief I spent the Lord's Prayer. © BF-WATCH TV 2021. Who was the King who Jesus had? The one who loved the Lord and stayed To die for us on earth, on death, the cross does leave the surest way. The cost of sin should be spent.