Jesus and Your Fridge

Each week we review and extend the previous Sunday’s message at Westside King’s Church. As a kind of post-script to our recent thoughts about change, we took time last Sunday to consider the connection between body-image and identity with a one-off message entitled Jesus and Your Fridge. Does Jesus have anything to say to us as we stand gazing into our fridge looking for some comfort? Does Jesus care that we reach our ideal body weight?

Eating is a strangely paradoxical issue of course, for while we eat to live, unhealthy eating can shorten our lives. Common wisdom applies here: we live best when we practice moderation. And while this is understood for the most part, the issue becomes more interesting as we push deeper into the more complex issues of personal identity -- who we are versus what we appear to be. For in our culture at least, personal identity is often attached to body image.

Have you ever noticed how magazine covers (at least the one’s my wife reads) will often feature a diet program along with some sort of decadent desert recipe? This kind of strange juxtaposition makes me wonder whether the realities of over-eating and hyper-fitness are not merely two ends of the same issue. We seem quite empty on the one hand, and use food to fill an emotional and spiritual emptiness; and on the other hand we want to project an image of ourselves that appears ordered and together, typified by the fitness craze. Either way, I think, our spiritual confusion shows. So the intention this past Sunday was to drive down past the idea of healthy eating and fitness as a good (which obviously it is) and ask the deeper question: in what way do these things relate to the deeper core of who we are?

Gerald May has written one of the most insightful books about human nature that I know of, using the angle of addiction to expose the inner dynamics we all wrestle with. His book is called Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions. The truth about us, says May, is that our addictions actually reveal the incompleteness that exists within us, our personal insufficiency, and the hunger we have for life. Addictions are revealing of who and what we are. We attach ourselves to behaviors or ideas in the hope that such will solve the ache, heal the fear, bring us love. But these ways can never provide what they promise, because they never address our deepest soul. We become “lost”. But May says that despite the obvious problem of addictions: “[they do] not make us unacceptable in God’s eyes. Far from it; our incompleteness is the empty side of our longing for God and for love. It is what draws us toward God and one another.” I believe that this insight is one way to ask a better question. As to the tension between over-eating and hyper-fitness (addictions of different sorts), perhaps we should be asking this: just what is it that I am looking for? Who am I and what do I need?

As a Biblical touch-point, we considered how the central section of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount addresses the issues of identity and performance. Although Jesus is speaking to different issues than ours (we are far more conscious of the over-weight/fitness idea than practically any other culture in history), he does speak to an enduring human struggle, especially the way we tend to go about manufacturing our identities, ignoring the real truth about ourselves. Why not take time to read Matthew chapter 6? Take note of the many ways Jesus addresses his audience on the question of appearance versus reality. You will find that he shines the spotlight on matters different from what they were used to, and by extension does the same for us. Perhaps, after all, the deeper issue on the weight/fitness question is really identity.

The gospel of Jesus proposes that since we are known to God in all of the various dimensions of our true being (the vast reality of ourselves that lies below the appearance), who we really are is the most important consideration. Body health is a practical question, but body image reaches more towards the spiritual.
The take-away from this discussion should simply be this: by all means, live healthily. Eat right and exercise. But as you work through this practical life issue, realize that the real you is loved by God no matter what image you project, or what emptiness you are trying to fill. And as you work to order your physical life, don’t forget the spiritual life and the question of identity.

This coming Sunday, we begin a series of messages on the vision of Westside King’s Church, a series we are call The Method in the Madness. We hope that you can join us at 9:29 or 11:11 am.

Bob