Excerpt from this Sunday’s sermon:  “Clothed in Flesh”.  Worship service starts at 10:30 am, and is followed by a Chilli Cook-Off!

It is a complicated relationship that we have with our bodies and with our spirits.  Even without the direct, consciously chosen influence of theology.

Millions of people are gearing up at this very moment to celebrate the glories of physical strength and skill on display at the Winter Olympics. Most of which, any true athlete will tell you, depends heavily on spiritual strengths.  Not just a proclivity for the cold.  Or for the gold.

Millions of people are starving their bodies at this very moment,  injecting them or subjecting them to surgical intervention – in order to conform to popular standards of health, beauty and competency.  Standards created by what?  Created by whom?  By an airbrush.   By someone hoping to get rich off of our self-loathing.

All of that, while millions (right beside us) lack the most basic, fundamental access to nutritional food, to clean water, to facts about how their bodies function, to the choices they should be able to make about their own bodies and to the healthcare they should be able to receive.

The bodies of millions are being fouled by addictions, bruised and bloodied by ignorance, and poisoned by the greed of corporations  claiming personhood!

What is wrong with this picture?