Wonderful! Psalm 139:13-18

Psalms 139:13-18 [translation by Dr. Leslie Allen]
13.	Indeed you yourself created my kidneys; you wove me together in my mother’s womb.
14.	I give you thanks because you are awesomely wonderful, so wonderful is what you have made.
15.	You have known my being through and through; my bone structure was not concealed from you when I was being made in secret, worked in motley fashion deep down in the earth.
16.	Your eyes saw my embryo, and in your book are all written down days that were planned when none of them had yet occurred.
17.	How incomprehensible I find your thoughts of me, God! How vast they are in their totality!
18.	If I tried to count them, they would be more than the grains of sand. If I came to the end, I would not have finished with you.

       1.  Your body IS spiritual – right down to your kidneys.

If God made our bodies then our bodies are part of our spirituality – our life with God. It means that what we eat, how we dress, even how we suffer, are to be in cooperation with God. Now, this point isn’t meant as some backwards way to make you an ascetic, to tell you that you must feel bad about your body if you are a Christian – that’s the biggest heresy that the Church has ever faced called Gnosticism. Not surprisingly, the early Christians who fought this heresy of body-less-ness saw the issue directly related to the importance of the Old Testament to the Christianity community. The Spirit perspective of Gnosticism threatened the Bible, salvation, communion – everything.

By choosing the metaphor of the body - "the body of Christ" - to describe themselves, early Christians acknowledged that it is through our bodies that we love and serve God and one another. Although early Christians sometimes seemed to mistrust the body by opposing body to the spirit, they never called themselves the spirit of Christ.

Both Jews and Christians affirm, in Genesis that God judged creation good, and so everything God created, including bodies of all sorts, is good. The body, in other words, reflects God’s own goodness. The body is more than an element of creation, however, but holds central stage for the whole of the Biblical story. We simply cannot tell the story of our salvation without talking about the physical body any more than you can play a game of baseball without a ball (the game is much more than the ball but the ball remains indispensable). From its beginning in Genesis, through the incarnation and culminating in the resurrection of Jesus and finally all the saints, bodies occupy the centerpiece of redemptive history.

So, if your body is spiritual then you are in some way your body. In the Old Testament, the human person is never described as being made up of separable parts like “body” and “soul.” Rather, the whole human person is both soul and body. We are our bodies, just as we are our souls. In Genesis, the second creation account, the ‘adam' character is formed from the dust of the ground. In 2:7, God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life, so that he became “a living soul” (nephesh). The life-giving action of the Creator constituted the one physical reality – the first human creature – dust animated by spirit.

Throughout the Psalms – bodies are proclaimed as spiritual vehicles made for relationship with God: flesh longs for God (Ps. 63:1), can come to God (65:2), cry out for God (Ps. 84:2), and bless his holy name (Ps. 145:21).

To understand the body as spiritual means that it both longs for redemption and will be redeemed. It is to enter into a battle characterized by the poet Jane Kenyon “the long struggle to be at home in the body, this difficult friendship.” This rocky relationship we have with our bodies is a sure indication that they do not now exists in their true element. But, the salvation that the Psalmists hearkens to and that Christianity proclaims is precisely that new reality where we are made right – not into angels, or disembodied spirits, but the resurrected life as displayed by Jesus Christ. 

This is our task: to learn to see our bodies and the bodies of others through the eyes of God. To learn to see the body as both fragile and deeply blessed. To remember the body’s vulnerability and rejoice in the body as a sign of God’s gracious bounty that he created and will redeem, restore, renew.

This is why in one of his most challenging teachings is when Jesus claimed that when we honor the bodies of others, we honor him (Matt 25:31-46). And when we dishonor the bodies of others, it is him we wound. It is the conviction that every body is worthy of blessing and care and that through the needs of the body, we are invited into relationship with God.

          2.  Your body is praiseworthy.

Why is it we have no problem gasping at a sunset, standing silent, awestruck at a cascade of mountains, or the infinite stretch of the ocean and yet feel awkward, embarrassed, maybe even disgusted, when we consider ourselves as God’s beautiful creation? Think about the thousands of tasks your body is doing right now without your conscious knowledge: hair and fingernails growing, eyes adjusting to light and distance, etc. But the Psalmist’s point is not simply that our intricacies make us praiseworthy but the stronger point that – if God makes you – then you are wonderful. The wording, particularly Leslie Allen’s translation is especially revealing. The Hebrew text does not say that God is wonderful BECAUSE you are wonderful. It says that you are wonderful BECAUSE God is – “you are awesomely wonderful, so wonderful is what you have made.” God is the One who is the source of your life. So our bodies aren’t simply praiseworthy, though they are magnificent creations, but the Psalmist is declaring that praising God reorients our perspective toward our bodies. 

Stoll illustration (see image above) – My mother and grandmother hand-sewed this stoll for me. It is my most prized possession. It’s not entirely even, doesn’t always sit just right on my shoulders, but I love it. No amount of money could ever be offered for me to sell it. Now, it’s beautiful but its beauty is not simply self-contained but connects with a relationship, to those who it reminds me of, the ones who made it, who are its source. Its preciousness comes first and foremost from them not itself. This is what I believe the text is saying about your body as a source of praise. 

Why does such a distinction matter? It matters because this psalm isn’t some psychological pick me up aimed at bolstering your self esteem which can spiral into a sort of an obsessive desire to be perfect or to believe that our body is simply at our own whim or merely for our own self-satisfaction – the body becomes a task rather than a gift and becomes alienated from its purpose. No, this is not saying that a body should be praised because of how it looks or what it can do. Our bodies are not praiseworthy because they are cute or useful. If that were true then this text would be about babies and most Hollywood actors thereby relegating broken bodies, older bodies, distorted bodies, or even normal bodies to the margins of society.  When the body is all about us – we have lost our center. Your body is precious not because you are beautiful or thin, well-groomed with straight teeth, muscular, controlled, or sleek. Your body is precious because it is the Lord’s. This shouldn’t detract from your sense of wonder about yourself – you are wonderfully made – but vs. 14 says that the wonderfulness of your body comes from the Lord. This means that there is no such thing as any one body being more wonderful than any other for there is only One Lord who created all bodies.

Your body is wonderful and praiseworthy, make no mistake. It is complex, intricate, precise, amazing. And if your body doesn’t necessarily look just right, doesn’t actually feel alright, doesn’t possibly move as it should – good news. It’s still wonderful, still praiseworthy, it’s still God’s.  I love the the t.v. show Pawn Stars – where something that’s seemingly worthless becomes a treasure because of whose it was. It has to be authenticated, then there is the moment of tension and the expert renders his verdict – authentic or cheap knock off. You are not a cheap knock-off, you, my friend belong to God, you are authentically His. That’s why your body isn’t just about you. In vss. 13-15 – the “you” that’s spoken of that creates, weaves, is thanked, is wonderful, makes, and knows is not you but God – 7 x’s the “you” in our verses for today is God. 

But the Psalmist goes much further than to say that God made you. He tells us that God thinks about us actively. I was intrigued by the claim in vs. 18 that God’s thoughts for each one of us are more numerous than the “grains of sand” – Okay, time for a what I like to call a "google moment" – I discovered that the University of Hawaii took 1,000 hours to count over 1,000,000 grains of sand inside a bowl, then from that they estimated that there are 700,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on the earth (or seven quintillion five quadrillion grains of sand) 

What fascinates me though is that there are more atoms than this in your body, an estimated
7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or seven octillion – that’s a 7 with 27 zeros)

Now, if every grain of sand was a second that God thought about you that would mean that God would be thinking about each of you, your neighbor, your enemy, your child, for 22 trillion years (22,197,961,324,021.41 years to be exact). That is simply, well, wonderful.