Sam Bush, “The Real You”
Some of you may have noticed that I have a distinct walk. Having inherited abnormally high arches, my feet resemble that of a large shorebird. As a result, my stride has a slight bounce to it. Every so often, I try to reduce the bounce. I glide about as if on an airport’s moving sidewalk, but, when I grow tired of being so deliberate, the bounce returns. It’s a built-in bounce.
Does your body have any defects? Is there anything you’d change about your anatomy? For many of us, it’s a laundry list, especially if you’re older. Why didn’t anyone tell us our physical prowess would peak at age 11 and that it would be downhill from there? We’re all like butterflies morphing into caterpillars.
Why are we talking about bodies in church? Isn’t this supposed to be a spiritual haven, a break from the physical world? Well, since you asked, no. The Bible is nothing, if not an account of God’s active presence in this material world. Ever since He spoke things into creation, God has been the ultimate materialist. We’re not here to recite mantras or talk about ideas. We’re here to sink our teeth into something real.
As temporary and imperfect as our bodies are, our appointed psalm today is an explicit celebration and praise for the one who created them in the first place. David writes, “For you yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.” You may think, “Well, easy for David to say.” The Bible describes him as being ‘ruddy and handsome.’ Michelangelo’s great marble statue has preserved his perfect proportions, high cheek bones and chiseled abs (literally). For those of us who lack that kind of natural beauty, we spend a pretty penny to present ourselves. This year, our beauty industry will exceed $100 billion as we touch up all the spots and blemishes that God apparently overlooked.
Why do we do this? It’s not just surface level vanity. There is a religious component. Plato wrote that measure and proportion are identified with not just beauty but virtue. The Greeks believed that to be beautiful was to be godlike. As Christians, it seems we are not much the wiser. We may worship the one true God today, but being made in his image is not good enough for us. We want to be his mirror image. We want to be God. We want to be perfect.
Jamie Lee Curtis, the acclaimed actress, who has made a resurgence lately, was already on the rise when she made a movie in 1985 with John Travolta called Perfect. The movie was bad (far from Perfect) but, by all accounts, as a physical specimen, Jamie Lee Curtis was. And yet, she recently told a story on 60-Minutes about a cinematographer who criticized her eyes for looking baggy and refused to shoot the scene that day.
As soon as the movie finished, she got plastic surgery. She was 25. She is living proof that perfection is unattainable. She instantly regretted it and has since become a public advocate for affirming people’s God-given bodies.
Sadly, we are stuck between wanting to attain perfection and affirming ourselves. We can affirm ourselves all we want, but there is something in us that knows we are flawed. Not just surface-level imperfections, but deeply flawed, down to our very hearts. As Christians, this is what we call sin, something that separates us from a holy God. The book of Leviticus says that any sacrifice offered to the Lord “must be perfect so that there shall be no blemish in it.” Neither all the concealer nor all the affirmation in the world is enough to remove our inner blemishes. So what are we to do?
Well, a psychology professor named Gordon Flett, who has studied perfectionism his entire career, has a cure. What’s his silver-bullet solution for the impossible goal of perfection? Mattering to someone. Mattering is infinitely better than affirmation because rather than self-esteem from within it is love from the outside. Mattering is about feeling essential and irreplaceable. Flett says, “Feelings of mattering are often rooted in having someone recognize our distinctiveness.” In other words, rather than uniform perfection, our flawed, messy, unrepeatable qualities are what make us distinctive to God.
Psalm 139 says, “My body was not hidden from you, while I was being made in secret. Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; all of them were written in your book.” In other words, you matter to God. Not just your soul, but your body, your material matter matters. As perfect as Michelangelo’s David is, it lacks the thing that only God could fashion: life. Ears to hear, eyes to see, lungs to breath and a heart to beat. Only God could make such things.
You may want a new body, whether it’s your face or your feet or your hair or your height. But God gives you something better. He says in Ezekiel, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” When God gives you a new heart, well, it allows you to appreciate the miracle that is your life, the cells and molecules knit together, the amino acids kindled, the limbs that were fashioned day by day into you. You may even see a glimpse of yourself as God does. As the great Mavis Staples once sang, “There was a time I wished my hair was fine / And I can remember when I wished my lips were thin / Oh but now I wonder why should I be surprised / I like the things about me that I once despised.” Even I can see my bounce as God-given. It’s actually a fitting trait for a minister. (It’s hard to be intimidating when you naturally come across as such a jolly fellow.)
The hard reality is that we will only be given a God-given heart once our human hearts are broken. There’s an essay by Andre Dubus called “Broken Vessels.” One night in July of 1986, Dubus stopped on the side of a highway to help a motorist in distress and, while standing on the side of the road, was hit by a car. The accident cost him one of his legs and the use of his other leg, leaving him wheel chair bound. He talks about the loss he endured - the loss of running or walking, the end of his marriage which ended after the accident. But his loss is not without hope.
A year after the accident, Dubus is at physical therapy, moving across a long room full of machinery. Through tears, he says, “I’m not a man among men anymore and I’m not a man among women either.” The assistants tell him that he’s fine. They try to affirm him but it doesn’t help. Mrs. T, the physical therapist, says nothing.” She backs ahead of him, watching his leg, his face, his body. He keeps crying while she works on his ankle and toes and calf with her gentle strong hands. It sounds like our psalm: "You press upon me behind and before and lay your hand upon me.” And then Mrs. T. looks up at him. This is Andre Dubus’ account: “Her voice has much peace whose resonance is her own pain she has moved through and beyond. ‘It’s in Jeremiah, she said. The potter is making a pot and it cracks. So he smashes it, and makes a new vessel. You can’t make a new vessel out of a broken one. It’s time to find the real you." Here we find that God is less interested in the broken vessels. Not a perfect sacrifice but a broken and contrite heart.
Have you found the real you? Chances are, you won’t until your perfect facade has been broken. Either way, the real you is already fully known and fully loved by your Creator. “Lord, you have searched me out and known me.” Better yet, the real God became a body himself, a body that was not particularly beautiful. As Isaiah prophesied, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” His body was born, it hungered and it ate; his body laughed and cried, and eventually it hung on a cross and was broken and given for you. And today that’s something you can sink your teeth into.
And through his brokenness, your body will one day be completely restored. As the Apostle Paul writes to the Colossians, “You who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” You matter. You matter to the God who not only made you but redeemed you. And by his wounds you are healed.
Amen.
