Not as scatalogical as you might think!

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity

 

Have you shut up your bowels?

 

Well, really!

 

It’s just not something you ask in polite company, is it? Indeed, it sounds as if we’re about to embark on a topic that really should be conducted in a doctor’s medical room rather than in the Church.

 

Lest our conversation descend into things we don’t discuss in church, we ought to remind ourselves that it’s only comparatively recently that we talk about the heart being the seat of all emotion. Why do we sign our Valentine’s cards with a picture of a fundamental bodily organ? Why not the liver or the spleen, or the small intestine?

 

Again, we have to be careful as some of you are starting to turn a bit green.

 

What on earth do our organs have to do with God?

 

[PAUSE]

 

Ancient anatomy works mainly on the idea that emotions must be connected with the organ that becomes most obvious.

 

Think of that wonderful first flush of falling in love when your beloved kisses you for the first time. What are you feeling physically? Clearly, your heart is beating out a rhythm that would dislocate the hips of the Strictly Dancers. Therefore, the heart must be the organ where we feel love.

 

Yet there’s more. What happens at the first break up, when you lose your beloved? Where do you feel it now? Where do you feel nerves? Where do you feel that sense of devastation, of despair, of sadness? Where do you get that sensation when you see someone in the most horrible situation?

 

Chances are that you’d feel something in your tummy. That’s why we have expressions like “butterflies in the tummy” and “gut-wrenching.” Where do we get that “sinking feeling”? In the stomach. Therefore, it is the tummy, or the bowels, where you feel the most emotion. Today we laugh when we hear about someone’s bowels moving, but in times past, it was something serious.

 

[PAUSE]

 

This is a good point. We have learned to hate our bodies, or to laugh at the embarrassing things they do to let us down. We even see ourselves as being apart from us. You talk about your body as if you can be separated from it. It is because we learn to disengage from our bodies that we can often ignore what they are telling us.

 

Yes, sometimes they can be deceptive. A body that sounds as if it’s saying, “I’m hungry” might also be saying, “I’m thirsty” or “I’m bored” or “I’m lonely”. We really have to listen hard, because God has given us our bodies – you wouldn’t be you without your body. Our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost and they glorify God whether we believe in Him or not. What our bodies are telling us is important.

 

And yet, we try to numb ourselves to what they are saying. We reach for the painkillers to the extent that we forget that the pain is telling us that something deeper is wrong. If our tummies are unsettled, we reach for the Gaviscon and wait for it to settle down without wondering why in the first place.

 

St John warns us that we cannot shut our bodies up without numbing ourselves to the needs of the people around us. We are too ready to press the mute button, or change the channel when we see the latest famine, war, or natural disaster on the television. We try to shut up how we feel often because we cannot cope with the tide of emotion that would overwhelm us and sweep us away and stop us from being ourselves. In so doing, we are not listening to what our very selves are telling us.

 

Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost, so it makes sense that God Himself can speak through the pain of our bodies in order to draw us into compassion. Remember that compassion literally means to suffer alongside someone. If we weep at the plight of little children forced to labour to make cheap clothes for H&M or to maintain farms for Nestle, then these tears are good. What do we then do?

 

The best thing that we can do is use the little that God gives us to respond to Him. And then do little things. Little things such as prayer, talking to someone in need, choosing where to shop carefully. God can work just as well with little acts of genuine love than big gestures poorly meant. Sometimes we need to put the painkillers down so that we can feel the pain of others and hear what to do about it. If the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, then we have to bring it in line with His will and not what we think His will is, and especially not what we want His will to be.

 

[PAUSE]

 

St John makes it clear. We cannot love God, if we have made ourselves numb to Him with the distractions and painkillers of life. Once we can embrace the pain we feel, the more we will love Him and the more genuine a person we will become.