Going to the Gym with God (Part 3): On Walking with the Lord

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One time as part of some research I was doing for a sermon, I spent some time calculating how much walking Jesus did during one of his usual ministry trips. The distance from the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem, for instance, is approximately 123 kilometres. If we assume a healthy walking pace of 5 kilometres per hour, and further assume that Jesus walked for 8 hours each day (leaving lots of time for preaching stops, rest, meals, and what not), then a trip from Galilee to Jerusalem would have taken him about 3 full days of walking.

In the three years of his public ministry Jesus visited Jerusalem at least four times, and perhaps as many as seven. Assuming these were round trips, this could mean that he logged as many as 984 kilometres on the road, by foot, in three years. And that’s just counting his trips between Galilee and Jerusalem. He also travelled from town to town in the region of Galilee while he was ministering there.

He did a lot of walking, is my point.  

Living as we do in the automobile age, we tend to forget the fact that every time one of the Gospel writers tells us Jesus journeyed up to Jerusalem, it would have taken him 3 straight days of walking to get there. And from what we can tell, he did this as naturally as you or I might nip on down to the corner store for a carton of milk on a Saturday morning.

During the covid-19 pandemic, I’ve been doing far more walking than I’ve ever done before. This is partly because there’s not much else to do, but mostly because, what with all the gyms being closed, I’ve needed to find some other way to get exercise and stay healthy. 

Walking, incidentally, is a great way to do both these things. Even at a mere 30 minutes a day, it will boost your immune system, increase your levels of vitamin D, reduce your risk of cancer, alleviate symptoms of depression, lower your blood pressure, tone your abdominal muscles, strengthen your back, and improve your blood circulation.  The list of walking's health benefits, in fact, is so long that you’d almost think our bodies were especially designed to do it.

If Jesus’s ministry is anything to judge by, it looks like they were.

This is certainly what I’ve been learning as I’ve increased the amount of time I spend on foot these days, anyways. Sometimes I can almost sense the joy in my muscles as I put them to this particular use, as if they were each individually happy to be doing the thing they were so clearly made to do. 

And for all I know, they are. They say that heavy muscle work (like walking) releases serotonin into your system, a feel-good hormone that boosts your mood and reduces your stress levels. Not only this, but I’ve also noticed I’m far more aware of my neighbors than I ever was when I just zipped past them in the car; I’m more in tune to the trees and birds and bunnies I share the neighborhood with (we have a lot of wild bunnies in my neighborhood); and I’m generally more at peace inside whenever I get back from a long walk.  Add to this the fact that it’s about as cheap a workout as you can possibly get, and it may be that walking is, in fact, the perfect exercise.

It certainly was in Jesus’s day; and this brings me at last to the real point of this post. Jesus couldn’t have covered as much ground as he did in the three short years he had to proclaim the Kingdom of God, unless he was in relatively good physical condition.  And the flipside of that point is equally true, that all the walking he did would have had to have kept him that way.

Centuries of seeing Jesus depicted as a “Swedish Supermodel” has maybe influenced the way we think of him so strongly that it’s hard to imagine him like this, but the Gospels suggest that whatever else was true of him, Christ must have had calloused feet and strong sinews.

He was physically fit, I mean. He would have had to have been to do the ministry God had called him to do. I don’t mean, in making this point, that there is something intrinsically Christ-like in physical exercise, or that if you’re not physically fit then you’re not Christ-like. Far from it. As I’ve said in previous posts, everyone has different temperaments and constitutions, with different body types and different movement needs.

But that’s why it’s so wonderful that Jesus’s exercise of choice, it seems, was walking. Except for those of us in very specific situations that make walking impossible (and the Gospel reminds us, too, that Christ had boundless compassion for people in such circumstances), we can all do it. Regardless our present level of fitness, regardless our athleticism, regardless our body-type, a 10-minute stroll out of doors is in reach of us all.

We could start today. If we did, who knows, but we might find ourselves getting in shape for the ministry God has called us to do; and we may just discover that it was no accident the Bible chose the metaphor of “walking,” in particular, to describe a life lived fully for Jesus, when it told us that we should “walk in the light, as he is in the light.”

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On Getting Something Good from God, a Devotional Thought on Psalm 67

The other day I was praying through Psalm 67 and it struck me how closely this psalm ties together the blessing of God and the mission of God. It starts with verse 1, where the psalmist prays that God would “be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us,” a prayer that is redolent with echoes of Numbers 6, and the traditional priestly blessing that Aaron was to pronounce over the people. Here we have the same invocation of blessing, that God would provide for and prosper his people. The very next verse, however, gives the motive for this prayer, and the purpose behind God’s blessing: “so that [his] ways may be known on earth and salvation among all the nations.”

This is not a connection that usually gets emphasized now adays when we talk about the blessing of God. At least, I don’t often hear these two things brought together as tightly as Psalm 67 brings them together.  Usually we think about God’s blessing—and hear I mean his material blessing, because as we’ll see, that’s what’s in view in this Psalm—in terms of our own personal security, prosperity, and needs. God gives us the things we need, we think, so that we’ll have the things we need.

Certainly our Heavenly Father loves us more dearly than even the most perfect earthly father ever loved his children, so no doubt there’s something to this simple one-to-one correlation. Jesus himself said as much in Luke 11:13.  

But Psalm 67 points to a deeper, and more profound purpose underlying the blessing of God: when he blesses us, it is so that his salvation will be known to all the nations of the earth (v.2). If and when God provides for his people, it’s because he wants them to content for their witness—specific, concrete, glorious acts of God they can point to as they bear witness to him among the nations. This is underlined by the next three verses (3-5), where the focus is completely on the psalmist’s desire to see “all the peoples praise God.”  He’s on a mission, this Psalmist is, and the blessing of God is simply fodder for the canon of that mission, fuel for the engine, as it were.

Verses 6 and 7 make the connection clear again, just in case it was missed the first time.  Verse 6 describes the results of God’s blessing—the land is yielding its bounty, the crops coming in and the grain bins full—because God has blessed his people.  And then verse 7 reminds us one final time why He’s done so: so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.

The application here, I hope, is obvious. When we pray for God’s blessing in our lives—and we can think here of the specific blessings we’ve been praying for lately—if we want to pray with hearts in tune with Psalm 67, we should be praying not simply that God will give us what we need just so that we have what we need; rather we should be praying that God would give us what we need, so we have more, and richer opportunities to bear witness to him among our neighbors, colleagues, co-workers, and friends.  

And when he answers those prayers, if we want to receive his blessing with hearts in tune to Psalm 67, we should receive it with hearts ready and willing to make known among the nations what he has done.

Going to the Gym with God (Part 2): On Being Some Body

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As a child growing up they used to tease me by calling me “fat.” Today I weigh all of 175 lbs, so this might strike some you as odd, but it’s true. Apparently I was chubbier than your average baby and it took a bit longer than usual for me to lose all that padding. Add to that the fact that, as I mentioned in a previous post, I was never especially interested in sports as a kid, and suffice it to say I had a "pudgy" reputation that dogged me well into my middle school years. 

In every photo of my childhood I've ever come across, it's clear I was actually just an average kid with a normal BMI. Even so, back in those days everyone knew that if you wanted to set  Dale off, all you had to do was call him fat.

It’s interesting for me to realize how the slings and arrows of early childhood stick deep and linger long. As I young adult, I never really felt at peace in my own body. I always had this lurking fear that there was something fundamentally unacceptable about it. As a result, I never felt at home in the gym, at the ball diamond, on the basketball court. 

It was probably both a blessing and a burden, this distorted self-image. Looking back, I expect one of the reasons I’ve learned to enjoy sports, and movement, and exercise the way I do today, is precisely because I was haunted by this desire to prove all the name-calling ghosts in my past that they were wrong. Whatever may have been true of my body type as a baby (I probably thought subconsciously) that didn’t have to be true of me now.

Of course, this is a blog post about the theology of exercise, not a therapy session. The only reason I’m sharing all this here is that, if we’re going to talk about the theology of exercise we’re going to have to talk at some point about the bodies we exercise with. And truth be told, I grew up with a sort of love-hate relationship with my body. I loved it, in so far as I fed it, took care of it, kept it from harm.  But I hated it, to the extent that it never seemed to look or feel the way I thought it should. 

I have a sense that I am not alone in this experience. We live in a world where idealized images of beautiful bodies are flung at us from every corner. From the click-bait on our newsfeed, to the magazine rack in the grocery store, from the posters in the shop windows down at the mall, to the billboards lining the freeway, we are bombarded with messages about what a body “should” look like, and continually asked to measure our own bodies against that ideal.

No wonder if we find it hard to be at ease in our bodies, what with the world screaming at us that they don’t measure up.

This is probably why struck me so profoundly the day I realized that I don’t have a body; I am a body.

That sentence may sound strange to some readers. Indeed, throughout this post I’ve described my body as a “thing” that was other than me. I said that I’ve never been at ease “in my body,” as though the body were just the casing for my “self,” and I described myself “taking care of my body,” as though it were something distinct from who I actually was.  This is how we usually speak about the body. It’s a vessel that “contains us” in some way, but whatever else it is, it’s not “us.”

So imagine my surprise when, a number of years back while studying for my Masters of Divinity, I came across this line in a book by theologian Marianne Hicks, in which she argues that theologically, our embodiment is essential to our human nature. 

“My physical reality is both the matrix and communicator of my psychic life,” she writes. “I do not have a body; I am one.  I do not have a soul or psyche, I am one. ‘I’ come into being and live and grow in the process we call life, in the inextricable interconnection of matter and spirit.” 

Hicks is touching here on a deeply biblical idea.  When Genesis 2:6-7 describes the creation of human beings, it uses the Hebrew word nephesh: “the man became a living being (nephesh).” Genesis uses the same word to describe sea life (1:20), the great sea creatures (1:21), land animals (1:24), birds (1:30), and human beings. What all these things share in common is that they are all living bodies brought to life by the creator. Unfortunately, the closest Greek term we have to nephesh is psyche, which often translates as “soul,” and so nephesh is often misread as though it only referred to the “spiritual” aspect of human life. When read in context, however, it’s pretty clear that the word actually denotes both the living matter that is your body, and the spirit that animates it.  

The point here is that, from a biblical perspective, we are not just “souls” contained “in a body.” Rather we are the very flesh and bone that stares back at us when we look in the mirror. We are more than just bodies, to be sure, but we whatever else we are, we are those bodies.

There is potential healing here, I think, for those of us who, like me, have struggled with a vague dis-ease about our bodies. A biblical understanding of the body assures us that the creator actually intended for us to be embodied like this. More than that, it reminds us that when we say “God loves you,” we mean he loves your stubby toes, too (if you happen to have stubby toes), and your gangly arms (if they happen to be gangly), your knobby knees (mine are particularly knobby), or whatever it is that makes your body so distinctly you. 

Like it does for all our relationships, the love of God has life-giving power to heal even our relationship with our own bodies.

And in that healing, we can take our next step towards a robust theology of exercise, which is, after all, why I started this blog post in the first place. Because you don’t have a body, you are a body. And as bodies, all the movement and play, the stretching and lifting, the sweating and running and breathing hard—all the things our bodies do when we’re exercising well—these things remind us of this fundamental fact of our human nature. We are the bodies we use to do those things. In that remembrance we may start to discover (at least in part), what God had in mind when he made us of the dust of the earth in the first place and breathed into us the breath of life. 

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Giving Something Good to God, a devotional thought on Psalm 51

 This morning I was reading Psalm 51 as part of my time with the Lord. It’s a very well-loved Psalm, and the central verse, “Create in me a pure heart O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me” has found its way into songs and sermons alike. 

Reading it this morning, however, I saw something towards the end that I’d never really thought about before. In verse 16, the Psalmist asserts that the Lord does not delight in sacrifice or take pleasure in burnt offerings. He’s referring to the system of animal sacrifice we find in the Old Testament Law—a system that the Lord himself instituted—and his point is not that the Lord rejects these offerings, only that they are meaningless unless there is a genuine heart transformation behind them.  “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  In other words, God’s not interested in phoney-baloney shows of empty religious devotion that have nothing to do with the real condition of our heart. He’d rather, actually, we didn’t sacrifice anything, and give him a repentant heart, than have us put a flashy gift on the altar while our hearts are still miles from him.

Well: so far, so good.  But here’s the part I noticed anew this morning. Because in the very last verse of the psalm it calls on God to bless Zion and rebuild Jerusalem, and then, it says, if God does that, then (and presumably only then) “burnt offerings will delight Him and bulls will be offered on the altar.”  It’s strange because verse 16 seemed to imply that God didn’t really want this kind of sacrifice, but then here, in verse 19, we see the Lord truly delighting in it again.

What’s changed, I wondered this morning, from verse 16 to verse 19?  Well: the only change I can see is that in verse 18, the Lord acted decisively to bless and restore his people. He healed them, and only after doing so did he delight in their offerings. The reason that stood out to me is because it suggests our acceptable offering depends entirely on God to make it acceptable. Only if he moves in us, and among us, to restore us and heal us—only then could we ever offer any sacrifice to him that he would be pleased in—and when he does that, he actually enables us to make the pleasing sacrifice to him.

Anyone who has been following Jesus for a while will probably see where I’m going with this.  Because if you’ve come to know Jesus, you will know how, before his Spirit came upon you and got to work on you, you didn’t really know how to offer anything pleasing to God, and how it’s only been as the Spirit of God has been restoring you that you’ve become able to make any kind of offering that does please him.

The whole Christian life, in other words, beginning to end, every sacrifice and offering and gift and act of service we ever make, if it’s going to be pleasing to God, it has to come from God first, and go back to God, through God. We are, in this sense, merely conduits of the life of God, giving back to him only what we’ve already received from him, and—thanks be to God—because it came from him in the first place, we can rest assured that as we give it back, it will truly be pleasing in his sight.  

Going to the Gym with God (Part 1): An Introduction to the Theology of Exercise

Sometime back in 2010, when our kids were young and we needed as many opportunities to keep them active as we could find, my wife and I signed up for a family membership at the local YMCA. I had never had a gym membership before that. Although I would occasionally make New Year’s resolutions to start each day with a 100 push-ups (which generally only lasted till February), I never really thought about myself as particularly athletic. As kids, my two brothers were into every sport imaginable, whereas I gravitated more towards the arts.  Shane and Scott are the jocks, Dale’s the artist; that was the story on the three of us. 

All this is to say that signing up for a membership at the Y was about as unlikely a thing I could have imagined myself doing back in 2010.  However, besides the fact that my kids needed the recreational activities it provided, I had just completed a 5-year intensive masters program in theology, which involved a lot of sedentary reading and writing, and I had just started an intense job as a new pastor at an up-and-coming church plant, which involved a lot of mental and emotional energy. Whether I realized it or not, I really needed the regular workout and low-key social interaction I got each week at the gym. 

Some ten years later, I have come to see how important it is for me as a pastor, as a Christian, and as a growing disciple, to maintain a regular routine of weekly exercise. I try to start and end each weekday with a good half hour of physical exercise and try to fit in a 5 mile run on the weekend. If my schedule is disrupted and I happen to go more than a week or two without a good workout, it doesn’t take long before I start to feel it mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The YMCA has taught me, in other words, that for me there is a mysterious connection between getting physical exercise and staying spiritually healthy.

It may strike some readers as odd, connecting my growth as a Christian to a regular discipline of physical exercise the way I did just now. Certainly, in the pre-YMCA days, I would have found it an odd combination. Christianity is something that happens in the head and the heart, isn’t it? What does Gold’s Gym to do with Jerusalem?

I want to be careful in what I say here. There’s a danger I might be misunderstood as saying that unless you’re shredded like Arnie you’re not a good Christian; or that pumping iron somehow makes you a better one. If it sounds like I’m saying that, I’m not communicating well here at all.  God in his wisdom gave us all unique body types, unique constitutions, and unique temperaments. Throughout this post, you can feel free to substitute whatever form of physical exercise works for your constitution and body type—whether it’s running a Tough Mudder race or taking the dog on a leisurely walk through the park.

When I say there’s a connection between getting regular exercise and growing as a Christian, I don’t really have any specific kind of exercise in mind.  It could be tossing a soft ball with the kids; it could be tossing a 90-pound medicine ball at the gym.  The point is just that there is something about physical movement and heavy muscle work that’s good for you, and the “good” it does you is spiritual as well as physical. 

In saying this I don’t’ think I’m saying anything radical, or new, or unbiblical. There’s a verse I think about often when I’m exercising. In 1 Timothy 4:8, Paul is giving his young protégé Timothy some advice for being an effective pastor, and he says, “Train yourself to be godly, for physical training is of some value, but goodliness has value for all things.”

Paul’s point here, of course, is that godliness is the preeminent goal of the Christian life, and he uses physical training as an analogy for what it takes to grow in godliness (i.e. just like you have to work out to get buff, so too you have to work at it to get “buff” in holiness….). Because of this, it’s common to gloss over what Paul actually says about “physical training” here; or even to misread it, as though he is suggesting that physical exercise doesn’t matter, because godliness is the most important thing.

But that’s not, strictly speaking, what he says.  Strictly speaking, he says that physical training is of some value. Presumably, he means that it has intrinsic value—it’s better to be in good shape physically than not to be—but it also has analogical value, in that it reminds us of the importance of godliness (which, unlike physical fitness, has value both for this life and the life to come).

That’s my quick Coles notes on the verse, anyways.  

And if my reading holds water, then notice two things.  A) 1 Timothy 4:8 affirms the value of physical exercise (though it places a clear limit on that value. It’s very possible to be a thriving, growing, holy Christian without being in physical shape); and B) the primary value physical exercise has is in helping us understand, on an analogical level, what it means to get ourselves into spiritual shape. In a mysterious way, physical exercise can serve as a “lived object lesson” in spiritual formation, helping us to grasp and to grow in the disciplines necessary for a thriving spiritual life.

I grew up in a “read-your-Bible-pray-every-day” evangelical tradition; so even as I write this, I have to admit that it all feels a bit strange. Does physical exercise really have something to do with spiritual formation? 

Of course, there are branches of Christian tradition where there is nothing at all radical about connecting these two dots, where the link between physical training and spiritual growth is self evident. The YMCA itself was founded by a Christian, a guy named Sir George Williams, who believed, among other things, that developing a healthy body was an important part of the Christian life.

If you grew up in a faith tradition something like mine, however, where the connection between the physical and the spiritual were minimized—or if you grew up with no faith tradition, and never really considered the possibility that physical exercise might have something to do with your spirituality—I hope you will join me here at terra incognita over the next few weeks. We will be taking some time to develop a theology of physical exercise, so to speak, in a blog series that I’m calling, “Going to the Gym with God.” 

This post is, after all, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the myriad connections between physical training and training in godliness, and my hope is that, when it’s all said and done, we’ll all find that next stroll through the park, or that next session of jazzercise, or that next game of golf—or whatever your exercise of choice—more spiritually edifying than we ever would have imagined.

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Surprised by Joy, a song

I went looking in the strangest of places

In fleeting dreams and the thrill of the chase

And just when I thought I had glimsped your face

You vanished away without a trace

And I went looking in the strangest of thrills

At breakneck speeds with no time to kill

But the goblet got drained and it never got filled

Cause the higher I climbed the harder I fell

But in the scent of Russian olive breeze

The Holy Spirit brings me to my knees

I found you in the rain on a windowsill

A cross-shaped shadow on a holy hill

Cause you were alwyas there 

In the corner of my eyes

But somehow you know 

I didn't recognize it

You have so many mysteries 

That you use to disguiese it

In the sparkle of a baby's smile

In the spark when lovers reconcile

He had no clue this little boy

That all the while he was kissing the face of joy!

Of Joy!He had no clue this little boy

That all the while he was kissing the face of joy!

And I went looking for the strangest of fun

For something new somewhere under the sun

And just when I thought my searching was done

I looked for you there and discovered you gone

But in a scent of Russian olive breeze

The Holy Spirit brings me to my knees

I found you in the rain on a windowsill

A cross-shaped shadow on a holy hill

Cause you were alwyas there 

In the corner of my eyes

But somehow you know 

I didn't recognize it

You have so many mysteries 

That you use to disguiese it

In the sparkle of a baby's smile

In the spark when lovers reconcile

He had no clue this little boy

That all the while he was kissing the face of joy!

Of Joy!He had no clue this little boy

That all the while he was kissing the face of joy!

Joyful, Joyful we adore thee

God of mercy Lord of Love

Hearts unfold like flowers before thee

Opening to the Sun above!

Cause you were alwyas there 

In the corner of my eyes

But somehow you know 

I didn't recognize it

You have so many mysteries 

That you use to disguiese it

In the sparkle of a baby's smile

In the spark when lovers reconcile

He had no clue this little boy

That all the while he was kissing the face of joy!

Of Joy!He had no clue this little boy

That all the while he was kissing the face of joy!

Walking through Covid with the Book of Joel (Part VIII): 2020 Vision

Feast of Fools, a song

Calling all you sinners 

To this Feast of Fools

Where the tables all get turned 

And we're breaking all the rules

So put your best dress on

And come and be made new

When the master breaks the bread

And pours the wine

At the Feast of Fools

Where the king waits on the guests

The Feast of Fools

Where the greatest are the least

The Feast of Fools

Where the last become the best

And the broken are the blessed

At the feast, the Feast of Fools

Calling all you thirsty to 

Come and taste and see

The tables are all laid out 

With milk and honey

And all you have to pay to eat 

Is just your heart's poverty

When the Master breaks the bread

And pours the wine

At the Feast of Fools

Where the king waits on the guests

The Feast of Fools

Where the greatest are the least

The Feast of Fools

Where the last become the best

And the broken are the blessed

At the feast, the Feast of Fools

Calling all you vagabonds

To come and have a seat

The table's overflowing 

With good things to eat

And all it takes to be here

Is to let him wash your feet

When the Master breaks the bread

And pours the wine

At the Feast of Fools

Where the king waits on the guests

The Feast of Fools

Where the greatest are the least

The Feast of Fools

Where the last become the best

And the broken are the blessed

At the feast...

Where the king waits on the guests

The Feast of Fools

Where the greatest are the least

The Feast of Fools

Where the last become the best

And the broken are the blessed

At the Feast of Fools

Walking Through Covid with the Book of Joel (VII): O, Canada

Rainbow Round Your Throne, a song

Will pink be a colour in the rainbow round your throne?

Will indigo and pastel blue?

Will every perfect colour that ever you imagined

Render their praise to you?

Will we radiate a billion brilliant colours

No eye has seen, no man has known

Will we scintillate, will we shimmer will we shine?

Just glimmers in the rainbow around your throne?

Around your throne, around your throne,

We're glimmers in the rainbow round your throne

Around your throne, around your throne,

We're glimmers in the rainbow round your throne

Will pearl be a jewel in the crowns laid at your feet

Will amethyst and garnet too?

Will all the priceless bneauty that ever you imagined

Glitter to adorn you?

Will we radiate a billion brilliant colours

No eye has seen, no man has known

Will we scintillate, will we shimmer will we shine?

Just glimmers in the rainbow around your throne?

Around your throne, around your throne,

We're glimmers in the rainbow round your throne

Around your throne, around your throne,

We're glimmers in the rainbow round your throne

Will sleepless nights 

Of wondering what the future's gonna bring

Will every heart's desire

For things to work out right

Will all the times we wondered

Who are you and who am I

Become the light 

That we see in your light?

Around your throne, around your throne,

We're glimmers in the rainbow round your throne

Around your throne, around your throne,

We're glimmers in the rainbow round your throne

Around your throne, around your throne,

We're glimmers in the rainbow round your throne

Around your throne, around your throne,

We're glimmers in the rainbow round your throne