Sure enough, before the dawn of the next day, a catastrophic hurricane slammed the island.  The winds were ferocious.  One ocean-going steamer had clocked them at 150 miles per hour two days before.  But, when the hurricane made landfall, the anemometer at the Galveston weather bureau blew away when the velocity reached 100 mph so that no one will ever know just how intense they became.  What is known is that, at the storm's height, a wall of water some twenty feet high surged over the island raking whole neighborhoods off the map.  Between six and ten thousand people died that day in Galveston making what is now known simply as the hurricane of 1900 the worst natural disaster ever to strike the United States.

One reason so many died is because, just one day before the storm, everything appeared to be fine.  Even as the leading edges of the storm surge began pushing water up into the streets, people were lured to the beach in bathing suits to entertain themselves in the unusually high waves.  It was what they couldn't see beyond what only appeared to be that was about to kill them.  (Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm, Crown Publishers, 1999)

Something I found myself thinking about this past week, quite literally, as I sat in the doctor's office.  Just before the appointment I'd been studying the passage for this morning's sermon.  Since I use the lectionary for my preaching guide, I later found it rather ironic that the text for this Sunday included the words, "by the mercies of God . . . present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship," and was humbled to the point of repentance by the doctor's report.  A report indicating that, while pursuing more the more "holy" spiritual ambitions of my calling, I have led my physical body down a very dangerous path into a sad state of disrepair.  Cholesterol and triglyceride numbers through the roof.  We won't talk about weight.  It speaks for itself.  I have good blood pressure on my side and a few other indicators within normal range not to mention a nurse for a wife who is now something like a nutritional hawk hovering lovingly over me even when I can't see her.  But, the numbers were alarming enough that the doctor ordered medication and a radical change of diet and wants to see me again in thirty days to monitor progress.

I had a number of emotional reactions to the news.  The first was, quite frankly, a little bit of fear.  And, that's not altogether bad.  Fear can be a gift if, like a storm warning, it arrives soon enough.  A mild depression then followed.  But, I came back to the church and conducted staff meeting and somehow found that I then felt better although the staff may now be in need of therapy.  But, one emotion, which I expressed to the doctor and which seems to have predominated this week, is nothing less than anger.  I've really tried.  Not just this year.  I've tried all my adult life.  And, genetics aren't on my side.

My paternal grandfather died of complications from a stroke in his eighties.  My father underwent triple-by-pass surgery when he was just nine years older than I am now.  And, I have very clear memories of the pictures of my Schmucker ancestors on the wall of my grandparents' home.  You know, those oval-shaped turn-of-the-century portraits in black and white.  I especially remember the men.  The ones I seem to resemble more and more as time goes by.  Dark-cloaked bulks with bowling ball heads.  Not a lean one in the bunch.  You know, with a name like Schmucker, it's got to be . . . well fed.

But, frustration and a little anger, too, because every time I turn around it's a new diet on the shelf.  Oh, I can take you all the way back to the days of Scarsdale. My friends who knew me well jokingly referred to it as Scarfsdale.  And, now, what to do? Do, I bust the sugar or de-carbohydrate or pump the protein? I cannot tell you how maddening it is to wake up one day and realize you've done nothing more than follow one fad after another into one more layer of fat.  Before I go any further, may I make a gracious request of you? This is actually a sermon and you will hopefully see that in a moment.  I'm going somewhere with all of this.  So, please don't mail me your favorite fat-busting recipes.  I really don't need them.  I know the rules.  That's not the problem.  Besides, just think about it.  Please think about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of even well intentioned recipes with sub-titles that read something like, "guaranteed to transform hippos into hunks." I've had my share.

Which is another part of the problem, too.  We live in a culture that literally worships thinness.  I know obese people who can tell you heartbreaking stories of prejudice every bit as mean as racial segregation.  Tragically, the desire for perceived social acceptance that only thinness allows has driven more than one young woman to practice self-hating eating disorders that became nothing more than a back door to suicide. 

I ran into an old friend on an airplane recently who hadn't seen me in about a decade.  His first comment was, "boy, you've put on a few." Which made me want to say, mimicking Winston Churchill, "yeah, and you've gotten uglier in your old age but at least I can still lose weight." I really don't think he meant to be rude.  I think it just came naturally to him.  But, I'm not naïve.  I know that one of the not-so-subtle factors that can play a part in everything from social status to employment opportunities is how good you look.  I even have a friend here in Dallas who employs a personal trainer who told him, flat out, "it's not how much you weigh that matters in the long run but how good you look." As if to say, "who cares if you are about to be pulled out to your death by the undertow of hypertension as long as you look good in the suit you go down in!" Sad to say, by more standards than I'd care to admit, the trainer is right.

So, sometimes I get angry.  I find myself just wanting to give up trying.  Combine bowling ball genetics and a profession of which eating is such a large part, if you will, and I honestly think that I am sometimes more likely to die slumped over a buffet than a Bible.  But, none of that a good excuse over against these words, "your bodies a living sacrifice."

Interesting words, if you think about them.  At least to a fried-chicken loving Baptist who, in his spiritual DNA, has this dominate gene that keeps subtly saying to him, "the most important thing is a man's soul." A way of thinking reinforced over and over by preaching and teaching that said the only thing that mattered was eternity as though this moment was somehow separate from it.  Spiritual trainers who drilled the mantra, "the only thing that really matters is where you go after you die not the body you travel in until then." And, there's just enough truth in that to allow it's misuse.  But, if the only thing that matters is the soul housed in this body, then why does the scripture devote so much of itself to instruction regarding the care and use of the house? And, in particular, why these words, "your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship"?

This can get confusing.  On the one hand, we proclaim a gospel that defines a person's worth by virtue of their status as the creation of God alone regardless of what form that creation has taken.  No matter what size, shape, color, age, sex or physical ability, every person is of immeasurable worth to God and we ought to engage ourselves in the battle to transform social systems that institutionalize prejudice in any form.  But, that gospel also calls us to take seriously the gift of our bodies.  To take them so seriously that we surrender them on the altar of daily sacrificial service to God in "holy and acceptable" ways.  Our bodies may not ultimately matter.  But, what we do with them says everything about what we ultimately value.

Think for a while of what we might live like if we believed that what we did with our bodies was of no significance.  Like the Gnostics of old we would so segregate the physical from the spiritual that ethics would go out the window altogether.  We might find ourselves thinking something like, "church is church but business is, well, you know, business." Or, "I know I haven't stood at an altar and pledged sacred vows, but, I really love this guy.  I mean, we even pray before after we have sex."  Or, "those few extra pounds that threaten my health and effectiveness, well, you know, they're just part of getting older."

But, over against that way of thinking, these words, "by the mercies of God present your bodies a living sacrifice." Mercy that, interestingly, led the Son of God to sacrifice, his body for our souls.  Where might we be if Jesus had said, "I love you but since love is just the way you feel then saying it is good enough and there's no point in sacrificing my body to prove the point"? And, what does it say about the condition of our soul if, in the way we conduct our physical affairs, there is no evidence of self-sacrifice to God as an act of gratitude for His mercy?

It is only in our thinking that there is such clear distinction between the physical and the spiritual.  I find less and less evidence in scripture that God views His creation so casually.  God loves this physical world as well as those who live in it and has commissioned us to be good managers of it as well as to be sensitive to those who live in need in it.  Which is why He was so concerned with things like social justice and feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and imprisoned and housing the homeless, that He even went so far, in the Sermon on the Mount, as to declare our participation with Him in doing so as the only sure evidence that He had transformed our souls.

And, that is also why I wonder what those of us who think ourselves spiritual should think and do about the fact that children still go hungry in the shadow of one of the wealthiest business districts on the planet.  And, why I cannot help but wonder how it is that a school district, in the same city which is home to some of the largest and fastest-growing evangelical congregations in the world, will cut ultra-modern professional sports arenas multi-million dollar tax breaks while, at the same time, allowing students at a high school less than three miles away to go without essential equipment and teachers. 

The worship of God involves the integration of all that we are, physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual in the act of serving God in every activity of life.  There is warning in that.  Worship relegated simply to what happens in the pew robs everyday work of its sacredness.  But, therein lies promise, as well.  All of life is sacred.  Which means that every detail of life, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can be an act of worship to God if we give it to Him as an act of sacred service.

An older minister once said to me that, "one of the most spiritual things you can sometimes do is get a good night's rest." It was his way of affirming what this text has said.  In this life we cannot separate what we do physically from who we are spiritually.  Physical acts are spiritual events.  And, the more I understand that, the more grateful I am.

What that means is that you are not just being spiritual when you are at church.  To be spiritual means to live all of your life as an act of worship.  That means that you are being spiritual when you are studying algebra, cooking a meal, changing a diaper, preparing a spreadsheet or playing a football game, if, in the doing of it, you are giving the best that you are as an act of sacred service and worship to the God who gave Himself for you.  Jesus even said that the greatest commandment was to "love the Lord your God with all our heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind . . . and your neighbor as yourself." (Matt. 22:37-39)

Think about it.  Everything we do was, by divine creation, intended to be involved in the worship of God.  Which brings us full circle.  If we live without regard to our physical actions as being spiritual events of spiritual consequence, whether that be in the way we care for ourselves or those in need around us, are we any less foolish than those who play in the rising tide before a storm simply because we cannot see beyond what appears to be to what really is?