Body beautiful?

Sermon for the twenty-third Sunday after Trinity

People of an age will perhaps remember Charles Atlas' famous slogan, "You, too, can have a body like mine." His advertisements always used to present the contrast between his muscly physique with the "97lb weakling" whose ribs were showing.

Today, body image is a very big thing. You have to look right. Girls have to have curves in all the right places. Boys have to have abdomens which look as if they've slept on their fronts on a cattle grid. More and more, people, especially young people are being afflicted by disorders based on their perceptions of their bodies. Some magazines are only just beginning to see the damage that presenting the ideal body can do. Isn't it just better to be yourself? Is there really an ideal body?

[PAUSE]

St Paul says quite categorically that there is.

For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.

So there is an ideal body! One to which we should aspire. St Paul makes it quite clear that while we are loved by God unconditionally, that love wants us to be transformed not accepted as we are now. St Paul calls our bodies vile because they are broken and corrupted by sin - our own sins and the sins of others. God hates all that is Evil and thus does not want us to be so infected by sin. He does not accept us as we are: He loves us as we are AND seeks our transformation into something like His Son.

We can have a body like Our Lord Jesus.

Yet there is a problem here. If our earthly obsession with the body beautiful is causing terrible disorders like bulimia, anorexia and dysmorphia, won't the same happened to us if we obsess about transforming ourselves into Our Lord's body?

[PAUSE]

If we think like that, then we need to listen to St Paul again. It is not we who do the changing, it is Our Lord who changes us.

This is the purpose of the Mass. We receive into ourselves the true Body of Christ. By submitting ourselves to the grace of God, we become more like Him because we learn to co-operate more and more with His grace.

We only develop spiritual diseases by trying to live on our own terms, by setting up for ourselves false ideals and false images of who we think God is and who we think we are. Where Evil is, God cannot be and if we say that we have no sin - if we say that we are not broken as we are now - then we deceive ourselves and the truth is not on us.

Once we accept that we need to be transformed into the person God wants us to be, then we shall be truly happy. Then, we spend our lives looking to be in conversation with God, recognising our suffering now and offering that suffering up to God as a sacrifice for all others in the same boat. As we Christians grow in Christ, the more we will make our pain sacred and thus deprive the Devil of his victory of separating us from Our Lord by making us believe that we are unlovable.

[PAUSE]

It seems that the choice we face is simple: do you want to be accepted by God as you are, or do you dare to accept His love for you? You can't have both!