Jesus did not disdain our flesh but was conceived, born, lived, and died as one of us, like us except for sin. He became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. (John 1) To disown the material is to reject the love that was incarnate for us and for our salvation. But that is exactly what we are tempted to do. The current move to distinguish the biology or material of the body from the spiritual gender or the spiritual person rejects the material in some kind of dualism that is in conflict with Scripture. We are embodied creatures by God's design and not spirits imprisoned in flesh awaiting release. The modern day penchant for suggesting that the body is a burden instead of a gift or that God made mistakes in assigning us a gender in body that is in conflict with our spirit is absolutely foreign to Scripture.
For the Christian God is not an idea but flesh and blood in Christ. We do not meet Him on the level of some idealized existence but in the midst of our flesh and even in the midst of our sin that has marked us for death. We do not imagine God nor do we experience Him as an idea or a feeling. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us." (1 John 1:1-2) This is reminded us even in the dismissal at the end of the Distribution when the pastor says "The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen and preserve you in body and soul to life everlasting..."
This has become something or alien to us. Even Christians have embraced the idea of a more disembodied self and a God who is likewise more idea than anything else. In fact, the idea of Jesus is really much more attractive to us than the real Jesus whose words and actions are made known to us in Scripture. Not long ago, the daughter of a political family tweeted that if Jesus were alive today, he would... That is the point. Either Jesus is not alive (somebody forgot Easter) or else Jesus is alive only as an idea or a principle or a cause. Sacramental churches should be better prepared to combat this kind of dualism in which the material is an enemy of the spiritual. We live a life of sacraments, means in which Christ comes to us in a material element and we taste, touch, and feel Christ as well as hear His voice in the preached Gospel.
Certainly technology is the antithesis to this embodied life and Savior. The whole attraction of the internet, social media, and video games is that it is not real or at least only real in so far as we would grant it reality. It is the domain of the mind unleashed by its captivity to the material. Perhaps the most radical aspect of this is how sex has shifted from personal intimacy to an idea (pornography) and even worse, the idea of robotic prostitutes. The only humanity left in this equation is the idea of humanity. Our true selves are not the people in the mirror but the idea of self which we have generated or which others apply to us. The flesh becomes a mere costume we wear as opposed to something essential to who are and how we see ourselves. Contrast this with the God who comes to us in flesh -- this is My body and this is My blood!
The body is not the problem, sin is. The body is not an impediment to our spiritual but the domain in which that spiritual life is lived out. “Glorify God in your body.” (1 Cor. 6:20) Death is the enemy not because it kills the flesh only but because it takes away from us that which makes us truly human. We are not free spirits who inhabit flesh for a time but embodied creatures. This is evident in all aspects of our lives from our conception, our life in the womb, our birth, our growth, our marriage, our families, and our death. Our culture rebels against this and insists that the child in the womb is something less than human and therefore can be dealt with as one desires without guilt or shame. Our culture insists that marriage is not a man and a woman fulfilling the vocation God ordered for them in creation but a utilitarian relationship that can be defined, changed, and ended at whim.
Christian stewardship is not the worship of the material but the honoring of the material as a gift from God. As St. John of Damascus put it: "I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter
who became matter for my sake, who willed to take his abode in matter;
who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring
the matter which wrought my salvation! I honor it, but not as God." We honor God in part by honoring His creation as a gift, blessing, and sacred trust. What we do with the matter of God's creation matters. Even our bodies are not lost but created anew to be like Jesus' own glorious body and we confess this every Sunday: "I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting." Or in the Apostles' Creed more specifically: "I believe in the resurrection of the body." We may judge this to be something extraneous to us and who we are but this is not the case by God.
Lutherans teach that the Holy Spirit works exclusively through means -- the external Word of God and sacraments. These are not alternates or options to the work of the Spirit but the very essential means by which that Spirit creates and sustains faith and bestows salvation on us. Lutherans believe this and articulate this in a way the few others do. It is from this saving act that we learn how it is that we live and work under the Lord and within His Kingdom both not and eternally.
That is why we cannot simply sit quietly while around us the material is denied as the domain of God and the spiritual left as the only place where God lives. That is why we cannot ignore the way our culture defines sexuality and gender as something divorced from the flesh of the body. That is why disowning the flesh is in reality disowning God.
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