"Faith-full Five: Touch"

 “Faith-full Five: Touch”

John 20: 19-31

June 22, 2025

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

Earlier this spring, we put out a short survey about summer worship plans. One question asked people to indicate things they’d like to experience this summer: more music, art, conversations with other people in the congregation, that kind of thing. Several people asked me what I meant by “embodied worship.” Like, what the heck does that mean? Not surprisingly, it didn’t get too many votes. 

By embodied worship, I mean: actively engaging our bodies in the act of communal worship. Might involve something tactile - like squishing play doh or weaving fabric together. Or something musical like drumming or dancing. Embodied worship might include using our sense of smell, or creating art, or cooking together. Some of you may remember a couple summers ago we had a worship service where some of us made “seed paper” by mushing together pulp and plant seeds. That was certainly embodied (and squishy). 

I’ve always been a bit jealous of our Muslim friends who have a default worship style that is more kinesthetic than ours. The lining up shoulder to shoulder, the kneeling, the forehead resting on the floor - this is deeply embodied worship. Of course our Catholic friends are also more focused on bodies than we are - sitting, standing, kneeling at various points during worship. And the invitation to share the Eucharist at every Mass. There are, of course, lots of Protestants who also get their bodies more involved in worship than we usually do - clapping, swaying, raising hands. And we have a lot to learn from the youngest people in our congregation - children are hard-wired to use their bodies as they experience life, including worship. They move around the sanctuary to get a different vantage point, play with toys in the pray ground in the back of the church, and often use their hands to color or fidget as they worship alongside their families in the pews. 

Why am I thinking so much about how our bodies relate to the act of worship? Well, Christianity, along with many other religions, is a fully embodied faith. Through rituals like baptism, communion, anointing, foot washing, palm waving, candle lighting, laying on of hands and more, we experience our faith in our bodies. Our bodies are, after all, the only way we have to experience the spiritual. It’s all connected. 

Bodies mattered to the early followers of Jesus. Bodies mattered to Jesus himself – why else would he have spent so much time around those who had such conflicted and painful relationships with their own bodies? He could have just been a great teacher who stood up on a mountain, speaking eloquently about the nature of God and other existential truths. 

But he didn’t. Instead, he spent his time placing his body squarely in the middle of the messy humanity he encountered. He spit in a blind man’s eyes and healed him. He touched those with leprosy and who were hemorrhaging that others refused to touch. He broke bread and passed around fish and fed those who were hungry. He sat down at the well with the woman and asked her for a drink of water – a basic need we all have because we are all living in bodies. When he encountered another woman who was about to be stoned by an angry mob, he didn’t preach a long sermon. Instead, he simply put his body right in between the woman and the crowd, saying very little. 

Jesus ate and drank and slept and ran and laughed and danced and sang and cried and turned over tables…and felt the warm oil caressing his face when a friend anointed his head…and shook the dust off of his feet when things weren’t going well…and gently bathed the feet of his followers…and rode a smelly beast into Jerusalem for his final victory lap.

I think sometimes we have a tendency to want to compartmentalize our faith. To pretend like it’s only about words on a page, or prayers that we say aloud, or the great intellectual calisthenics we like to do when we’re debating a theological concept or an intriguing passage of scripture.

We don’t have to look any further than this morning’s text from John’s Gospel to see that our faith ancestors call us beyond a compartmentalized faith. They call us to a faith that is fleshy. Carnal. Corporeal. A faith that encompasses our entire bodies, not just our brains and hearts.

Every account of the Resurrection in John’s Gospel is about bodies. Mary comes to the tomb early in the morning to care for Jesus’s body. Peter and the Beloved Disciple strain their muscles, running to the tomb to see for themselves. Mary stands, weeping outside the tomb, thinking her friend’s body has been stolen. And when Mary comes to understand that Jesus has been raised she proclaims, “I have seen the Lord.” With her own two eyes. Seen. Experienced. Felt. An embodied knowing. 

Later that evening, the Resurrected Jesus appeared to all of his friends and brought greetings of peace. Again, this is an embodied faith experience. “We have seen the Lord,” his friends say, echoing Mary. Seen. With their own two eyes. Experienced. Felt. An embodied knowing. 

Except for one friend. Thomas. Thomas wasn’t there that evening. And when the friends told him later, “We have seen the Lord!” Thomas is incredulous, just as you would expect. And he says, I have to see for myself. With my own two eyes. Only Thomas goes one step further. “Unless I put my finger in the mark of the nail and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Thomas needs to not only see but touch.

A week later, Thomas gets his wish. Again, Jesus appears to the disciples, only this time Thomas is there, too. Jesus knows exactly what Thomas needs and invites him to see and touch. Thomas responds with a faith statement stronger than any other made in this gospel, “My Lord and my God!”

“My Lord and my God,” says Thomas. Seeing, touching, knowing, experiencing fully a newfound embodied faith. It’s not just a head thing. It’s not just a heart thing. It’s an everything thing. A full bodily-kinesthetic-intellectual-emotional experience of the Divine. 

Like Thomas, our faith is intimately intertwined with our bodies. Matter matters. 

It matters to us. It matters to God. We aren’t just spirits floating around in this world - we are embodied. God breathes her Spirit, her ruach into creation and it comes alive. Jesus breathes onto his followers and bestows the Holy Spirit upon them. God comes to us as an infant child, rushing headlong into the world in a mess of bodily fluids. God loves all of creation, including all physical matter. God loves your body and my body and the body of the person sitting next to you. 

We are not spirits floating around without bodies. We are not bodies devoid of spirit. Instead, we are holy messes of skin, bone, flesh, and the divine. We are infused with the very breath of God. Our faith is meant to be embodied because matter matters to God.

Polar bears and chickadees. River streams and falling rain. Molecules and quarks and black holes and things we don’t even have names for yet. God loves it all.

Our bodies are known fully and loved fully by the God who is the very source of our being. We are – all of us – created in God’s image….and our bodies, of every structure, size, age, and ability; bodies of every gender and ethnicity….our bodies are holy. 

This is why Jesus weeps with the people of Iran and Israel and Palestine and everywhere else in the world where bombs fall and children starve. This is why Jesus weeps when trans children and adults are bullied by lawmakers - unable to fully honor their own bodies and unable to make their own healthcare decisions. Jesus’s heart breaks that there are so many among us who are dying for lack of access to clean water, nourishing food, and all the modern miracles that can be found in doctor’s offices. And surely Jesus’s guts are moved with deep compassion by the sight of people putting their own bodies on the line between ICE and their neighbors. And Jesus knows what it’s like to be mistakenly labeled a thug or terrorist, shut up in a jail cell, feared by those in power. 

Our bodies of every structure, size, age, and ability; bodies of every gender and ethnicity; bodies in every nation all over the world are holy. The bodies of our friends and neighbors matter to God. The bodies of strangers and our enemies matter to God. 

We are called to live an embodied faith. A faith that cares for bodies, cares about bodies.

A faith that calls us to steward our bodies and the Earth as best we can. A faith that calls us to remember that God is present in each and every particle of creation and that we called to treat all people and our Earth with dignity and respect. 

When we take the bread and the cup, we taste and see that Christ is still with us. “This is my body, this is my blood,” Christ says, inviting us to take it into our bodies, uniting ourselves with Christ’s ongoing presence in the world. 

Christ compels us to see the beauty and terror of this world with our own two eyes. To offer a hug or gentle touch to those who despair. To breathe deeply and with intention, remembering our connection to every other living being on the planet. To hear the joyful sound of children laughing and to raise our voices as we pray and advocate for peace and justice. 

We are invited to do all of this in the name of the one who came and embodied faith to its fullest, so that all people and all creation might have life and have it abundantly. Amen.