Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Text: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace to you this day. Amen.

Our faith lives in our bodies.

Jesus’ incarnation—God taking on flesh—started with a body…Mary’s body, which was broken in labor to bring Jesus into this world. God trusted in Mary’s body to house God’s own self, developing and growing over the months of pregnancy and beyond.

How can a God who lived in a body hate the bodies we inhabit? Yet that is the message we often receive. The flesh is weak. The spiritual is superior and our bodies are a barrier to goodness. We are often taught to disassociate from and ignore our bodies. Yet through God, bodies have the power to bring salvation to the world.

Our Lutheran faith is deeply incarnational. We rely on the belief that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, living among us with a body that experienced everything. Who truly took on human suffering and pain, who meets us in vulnerability, whose cross is a victory, whose hope is stronger than any pain we can experience.

Bodies tell us everything we need to know in this reading. Every time someone encounters Jesus, their bodily stance is changed. Matthew sits behind a tax booth, then steps beyond it and leaves it. The tax collectors and sinners, who are outside community, sit with Jesus and his disciples. The hemorrhaging women stops bleeding. The daughter gets up.

They are physically changed.

Jesus cares about their lives lived within their bodies. Jesus cares about your life lived within your body.

In her book “This Here Flesh,” Cole Arthur Riley describes the time she traveled to Paris, and while she was there, she lost the function of her legs. She spent two days in bed, her only consolation the pastries and espresso her husband raced back to her multiple times a day. On her second afternoon in bed, she prayed aloud to God and begged for healing. She writes, “I never begged or bargained so desperately in my life… I was not healed.”

There is a thread of desperation in our reading from Matthew for today. The father of the daughter who has just died is at the end of his rope. The woman who has hemorrhaged for twelve years, who is likely seen as unclean and can barely function due to anemia, uses her last sliver of energy to touch Jesus’ cloak. Their desperation leads them to Jesus, and they receive healing miracles.

The healing is instigated by others, not by Jesus. The man believes his daughter is worth saving. But almost more powerfully, the hemorrhaging woman, whose body has let her down and made her suffer for more than a decade, believes her body is worth saving.

A good friend of mine, who suffered from infertility and reproductive health issues for many years, sees the hemorrhaging woman as her personal Scriptural text. The woman, who has suffered and probably been ignored by health care givers—or faced with health care givers who know nothing about how to help her—is seen by Jesus. He witnesses her suffering and wants her to have more. He heals her in a multitude of ways.

While Cole Arthur Riley begged God for healing in that hotel room in Paris, she heard herself and discovered things she didn’t even know lived inside her. She writes, “I saw a profound hatred for a body that was only doing its best to survive…I had turned against myself. And a realization came awake in me: my body was not the bondage.”

As a black woman, Arthur Riley has learned throughout her life to mistrust and question her body; it felt like a stranger to her. She would go until sunset without eating because she didn’t pay attention to her hunger. She was told, over and over again, that her body is a problem, unwanted, unworthy.

Yet in that hotel room, she lay there in stillness and traveled around herself and passed the peace. She made peace with her eyes, her legs, her breath. Her own body, which once was enemy, she says, “became the object of my affection and protection.”

Think of the affection and protection Jesus gives to the bodies of the people in our Gospel today. The tax collector sits among friends; the bleeding stops; the daughter is taken by the hand and lives. Jesus protects our bodies through the breaking of his own, so we may have life abundant. Jesus does not want our bodies to suffer. Repair and restoration is the eternal promise, even as we live in this broken world.

Today, as we do every time we worship at Gloria Dei, we celebrate communion together. We receive Jesus’ body and blood, broken and shed for us. It’s a physical nourishment. We experience Christ as part of our own bodies, and we’re strengthened for the days ahead.

Arthur Riley also talks about a time she went to a church that gave everyone a whole slice of bread for communion—and they actually buttered each slice. I’m not sure how that would work—would communion take forever because people need time to finish their whole slice? How much wine or juice would you need to wash it down? Maybe you’ve done this at Gloria Dei and I just don’t know about it. Can you imagine coming forward to communion and receiving a thick slice of warm homemade bread with a generous slather of real butter?

It might feel a little wrong to feel satiated by communion, to maybe to have trouble finishing it. To feel the energy it gives our bodies as we leave this place.

Maybe, at times, healing is learning to be at home in our bodies, and this allows us to see the suffering and needs of the bodies around us. We are strengthened by Jesus’ body for service, and this means not only allowing others to live…it means doing what we can to help others thrive. To remove barriers. To see that the maternal death rate among black women is higher in this country than other racial groups. To bring healing and hope, because our faith calls us to see suffering and promote thriving.

In the book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van der Kolk writes, “our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another.” You all have the capacity to heal.

When you come for communion today, you’ll have the opportunity to light candles and pray in the chapel, and to receive prayer from a member of our Prayer Team. We are bringing back the monthly tradition of healing prayer during worship at Gloria Dei, to remember we are a community who knows God’s healing power.

Thanks be to God! Amen.