This evening I want us to think together about what it means for us to be faithful disciples of a sensual Saviour.

Other spiritual teachers lived ascetic lives detached from the physical world, but at the heart of Christianity is our belief in both the incarnation, that is, that God became flesh and dwelled among us and the traditional belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus.

If you think that being a Christian is only a spiritual journey, I want to suggest that you have signed up for the wrong religion!

Jesus spent his life in such a way that people called him a glutton and a drunkard.  He didn't just go moving people around spiritually; he touched them, and he healed their physical bodies.

When Jesus appeared to Thomas, it was his physical scars which he showed him. In today's Gospel lesson we find Jesus frying, making food for his friends.

Did you notice that Jesus helped them catch 153 fish that morning?  He didn't just teach them about prayer or how to find peace. He helped them catch fish because he cared about their work. Who knows?  Maybe Jesus liked to fish, to feel the sun on his face and the wind in his hair, to smell the sea and hear the laughter of his friends.

Where did Christianity lose it's understanding of a sensual Saviour who celebrated the physical gifts and joys of life?

Actually, I'm not as interested in where we lost it as I am in how we get it back. Though our church has moved beyond its founding focus on sexual orientation, we still have a deep investment in the physical gift of human sexuality.  More than any other church in the world, we ought to understand the inseparable link between the sensual and the spiritual.  Not just because of our sexuality, but because we are artists, musicians, decorators and lovers of beautiful music, good food, and fine wine; because we are creative people.

I came across and American writer this week who learnt two things about God when we was growing up in the deep south of America:

·       God loves you, and He's gonna send you to hell

That is more true than many in the church would like to admit.

Jerusalem and Athens are only about 700 miles apart, but the philosophies which they gave to the world are light years apart.

The Greeks taught that the physical world was inferior to the spiritual realm. They believed the soul was eternal, but the physical body was just a temporary shell. In fact, they saw the physical nature of life as a hindrance to becoming more spiritual.

When Socrates came to the time of his dying, he rejoiced that at last his soul would be free of what he called the prison house of his body. To the Greeks, the soul and body were separate and unequal.

That is not what the Jewish faith teaches, and it is certainly not what Jesus believed. The Creation story is the foundation of the Judeo-Christian faith.  We begin with the core belief that God created all that is and pronounced it good, very good.

The Bible never says Jesus came to save our souls and nothing else. Jesus knew that our bodies were as much God's creation as our souls.

One day they brought a man to Jesus who was paralysed, and Jesus healed him by forgiving his sins. At other times, Jesus worked physical cures by delivering a person from the evil oppressing them.

We find throughout the Gospels a Saviour who restores human life, body, soul, and spirit.

The Greek heresy that divides life into physical and spiritual has infiltrated our thought in many negative and devastating ways--like Christianity becoming such a sex negative faith.

There seems to be a deep fear that somehow gay and lesbian people are having too much fun with their bodies so we must be bad, since sex is a physical act and not a spiritual one.

But if God created our sexuality then celebrating it is as sacred as prayer. Forgetting that, leads to all sorts of abuse, distortion, and dysfunction.

In the biblical parable in Genesis, Adam and Eve  became ashamed of their bodies after they disobeyed God. Or to say that another way--our experience of shame is always rooted in our brokenness, not in God's disapproval.

Nothing speaks more loudly against the heresy of bodily shame than the physical resurrection of Jesus.

Central to the Christian faith is Jesus' celebration and redemption of the physical life of humanity. Note that celebration is the word I paired with redemption. Too often the church has linked our redemption with repression.

As a child I used to like playing with the hose we used to water our garden.  I used to love trying to cover up the flow of water but I found this only gave it more power and made it spray out of control getting us all wet.

That's the way it is with repression. What we repress is empowered. What we celebrate, we can control by the choices we make.

I was sitting in a cafe in a small village in France a few years ago, and I watched an French mother pour a little wine in a glass and then, fill it with water. She then handed the glass to her son who must have been about 10 years old.

I was shocked Then, I remembered that drinking wine was only a moral issue for Protestants. I also recalled that Protestants are over a dozen times more likely to become alcoholics than the French are - as they get children used to wine at an early age, thereby demystifying it and making it seem normal.

Countries which have celebrated wine as a source of pleasure and a gift from God have a very low rate of alcoholism compared to our society and American Society which practiced state sanctioned prohibition and now church sponsored repression. Too often, we use alcohol to cope or sedate.

Food is another amazing thing. The English are become as embarrassingly obese as the Americans, but I'm not sure it is all because of what we eat. We are much more likely to die of heart disease than say the French with their heavy sauces and fatty foods.

In England, we eat more but enjoy it less. In places like France and Italy, a meal is a joy, a blessing, a gift to be savoured and celebrated, not a source of guilt, anxiety, and shame.

I have a friend who says that if you bless food before you eat it, all the calories are removed. That's probably not accurate, but giving thanks for food may be the healthiest beginning to a sensual feast.

Too often, we simply fill our stomachs so we can rush off to do something. Or we use food to try and fill an emotional need. We have forgotten entirely the idea from the Early Church that when we gather around the table, we have a love feast.

Many gay men exercise and sculpt their bodies in the gym, but usually it is not an act of celebration; it is an act of shame. It is because we have been shamed into thinking we are fat or unattractive or defective if we don't have a certain body type.

Some women are overweight as a subconscious act of resistance against the expectations of the male dominated culture. But reacting to their expectations gives those expectations just as much power as fulfilling it.

Art, music, the smell of baking bread, the feel of the sun on your face on a spring morning, the caress of a child's lips on your cheeks or a lover's lips on your neck. These are all gifts of God.

They are the gifts of a God whose Spirit possessed the flesh of a man we called Jesus. The church once knew that the sensual was sacred.

After all, we didn't make prayer or meditation sacraments. Oh, they are vital for our spiritual health, but the church made sacraments of water, and  bread  and wine. Those physical elements became means of grace.  So, too, our bodies and the glorious world in which we live are means of grace.

They are tangible ways the living God

·       touches us,

·       caresses our souls,

·       makes love to our Spirit,

·       renews our humanity.

I believe it makes God mad when we fail to appreciate the sensual gifts of life that are ours.

It makes God mad because our lives are diminished if we forget that we have a sensual Saviour who came to bring us life and life in all its abundance.

I don't know about you, but I'm still enough of a fundamentalist that I really want to stay on God's good side.  Let's stop insulting the Artist of creation and stand for a moment before the beauty of all we have been given and just sigh for sheer joy.

This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.