If you are male and of a certain age, you will remember the little cartoon stories that ran in every comic book or came wrapped around your Bazooka bubble gum – stories about a 97-pound weakling who was always about to approach a curvaceous bathing beauty but was invariably upstaged by a six-pack set of sculpted abs. Those cartoons were ads for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding system, and, in each one of them, after our 97-pound weakling had kicked a beach chair to vent his anger, he sent for the Atlas system, built his body, and went back and grabbed the girl, who now swooned over this glorious new muscle man. So simple, so straightforward, so successful: acknowledge your weakness, get motivated, buy the system, and come back victorious.
Charles Atlas claimed that the ads were versions of his own story, and called his system “Dynamic Tension Body Building.” The idea was that you did not need weights or barbells or other equipment, but that if you opposed muscle to muscle in your own body, you would gradually build that body, naturally and without injury. Nothing to lift, nothing to carry, just pushing one muscle against another, one force against another. It surely did work for Atlas. If you want to see the results today, look at the statue of Alexander Hamilton in front of the Treasury Building downtown; Charles Atlas posed for that. Dynamic tension bodybuilding gave that man a physique that was widely admired. And he sold millions of copies of his dynamic tension bodybuilding instructions to scrawny kids reading comic books.
Now one look will tell you that all this juvenile comic book reader and bubble gum chewer ever did was to read the little stories and dream a bit. I never sent for the course, I never got into bodybuilding, though I do think I did very well indeed on getting the girl! But when I think about the theme our pastor has laid out for us – “We Are Some BODY” – I wonder if there is something to be learned from Brother Atlas. I wonder if there is a spiritual bodybuilding exercise that might be effective. Dynamic tension, the pitting of muscle against muscle, force against force. If we as the church are to be the body of Christ, then what exercises might we use in order to build ourselves into an effective, attractive, and vigorous body? We are, says the theme, some BODY. Ah, but are we the 97-pound weakling or are we the sculpted abs that win the admiration of others and take home the victory?
Sometimes, in our culture, the church looks very much like that 97-pound weakling. Despite our rich heritage, despite there being thousands of churches around, despite a plethora of preaching and a slew of singing, many people see churches as weak, irrelevant, and pointless. Relics of the past, nice to have around when you want to hatch, match, or dispatch, but not the robust leaders of the culture. Parents have told me that Sundays can no longer be reserved for church, because schools and athletic teams and everybody else uses that day for their pursuits. Even a casual listen to the banter coming from my radio tells me that most folks treat the day of worship as a day of sleep and of casual recreation. On Sundays you can drive with reckless abandon on streets that during the week are clogged and congested, because sleeping in is the priority.
And the weakness of the church is not just about Sabbath observance. Deeper, it’s about justice, it’s about morality, it’s about what it means to be a person of integrity. Our culture does not value spirituality. It values material success, it applauds athletic prowess, it smiles on sexual excess, and it thinks you are impossibly bigoted if you have a love for God. We have been reduced, many of us, to the status of the 97-pound weakling of Charles Atlas’ cartoons, frustrated because we get little acceptance and little respect. We just don’t seem to count. Someone once tried to tell Russian dictator Joseph Stalin that what he was planning to do with his army would be opposed by the Pope; Stalin’s contemptuous reply was, “The pope? How many divisions has he got?” Today I suspect we hear the world saying to us, “The church? How much influence have you got?” The church is a 97-pound weakling that does not matter much.
Against all of that, however, today we pose the dynamic tensions built into the third chapter of the Ephesian letter. You cannot read this chapter – in fact, you cannot read Ephesians – without being struck by the place of the church in God’s plan. And, more than that, you cannot avoid the impression that the church, the body of Christ, is supposed to be strong and victorious, powerful and intense. In the passage you heard this morning, there are so many strong words: boldness, confidence, power, fullness. Not words you associate with 97-pound weaklings. But the church, at the center of the will of God, and the instrument of the power of God. I think there are some dynamic tension body building lessons here for us. And we don’t even have to send off and pay for them! They are right here in the Scriptures.
I
The first dynamic tension I notice is that this body, the church, is intended by God to be inclusive. It is to be multicultural, multiracial, multinational, just plain multi. We were never intended to be simple little cells of similar souls; we are to be inclusive, all-embracing, and all-transforming. Listen to the language of the Scripture: “ … to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ … to make everyone see what is the plan … through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known ….” Everything in these sentences is about a wide reach and an all-inclusive embrace.
And so here is the first dynamic tension that will build the body: in this fellowship we run counter to this world’s practices and values. In this community we create something not readily found in the world at large. I ask you, where else but in the church will there be a community of people of all ages, all races and cultures, all social and economic conditions? Where else but in the church can you find a gathering that is so wide open that the millionaire and the pauper sit side by side and share in community? I love the story that is told of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, years ago, where an observer noticed that at the communion table there stood, side by side, a rags-wearing woman off the streets and the Chief Justice of the United States. Where else, I ask, can this be true, but in the church? A dynamic tension.
The challenge to us today, if we are to build the body, is to let that dynamic tension work for us. It’s a tension because some of us bring the world’s values with us to church, and don’t much like it when somebody different shows up. Years ago I was at one of our sister churches as a supply preacher, and as the deacon and I sat in the church office before worship I noticed a beautiful rendering of an architect’s conception of what the church building would ultimately look like. But I also noticed that only about half had been built, so I asked whether there were plans to complete the structure. The deacon shook his head sadly and said, “I doubt we’ll ever do it. Nobody lives around here any more.” I could hardly believe my ears; I had fought through traffic to get there. The church was at the intersection of two major streets, and all around were attractive homes. So I questioned him: “Really? Nobody lives here any more? Lots of houses up and down these streets.” His reply was a classic: “Oh, well, what I mean is there’s nobody anymore that’s white and Southern Baptist.”
Great God, what a tragedy, that we should conceive of the church as a club for our clan rather than as nurture for the nations! If we are to be some BODY, then let us allow this dynamic tension to work for us. The world says, “Stick with your own kind, you’ll be more comfortable.” The church says, “Come, join with us, and see the rich variety of the wisdom of our God.”
II
But there is another dynamic tension that can lead to bodybuilding. There is something else tucked away in this Scripture that goes so counter to everything the world stands for, runs so contradictory to what people in this world expect. This dynamic tension will build the body as nothing else can do.
I speak of love. The simple and yet not so simple matter of love. How lyrical the apostle is as he sings of love – that we be rooted and grounded in love. That we experience the breadth and length and height and depth of love, all its dimensions. That we may know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. He is obsessed with how much this body is to be marked by love.
Martin Luther King spoke of the church as the beloved community. He meant that we are those whose lives have been profoundly shaped by the power of God’s love, and so, beloved as we are, we have also the strength to love.
I call this a dynamic tension because love is not the hallmark of the world. Love is not the dominant characteristic of our culture. If you are a worker, you live in a competitive environment, in which you work to get ahead of everybody else, or lose out if you don’t. That’s not love. If you are a student, you live for your grades, and in every classroom there are top dogs and there are low dogs, and you want to be among the top dogs. I’m not especially proud of this, but when I was in seminary, we took the MMPI, Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory, I guess to see which of us seminarians thought he was going to outdo Jesus. Well, I accidentally learned my score, which was not supposed to be divulged. And when I learned I had the best score in the whole student body, I walked on cloud nine for days! I was better than my colleagues! On paper. In reality, I was not better than they, I was a greater sinner than they, because my focus was on my achievement and not on how best to love my brothers and my sisters, not on how to model love on the seminary campus, not on being the beloved community!
It’s an insidious business, this thing of our competitive culture, where we get very caught up in who is making the most money, who drives the best car, and who takes the most exotic vacations. But what do we see in the church? At its best we see a crowd of folks who give their money, use their time, offer their talents, and do it all so that the world might know, as they know, the love of Christ. The height and depth and length and breadth of the love of Christ.
If we want to be some BODY, if we truly want to build this body, then I tell you the world is starved for love. Your neighbors and mine are waiting for us to invest in them. And they will join us, if they know we love them. Has it not been rightly said that they will not care how much we know until they know how much we care? A dynamic tension that will build this body – keep on loving one another, investing in one another, reaching out to the strangers, seeking and caring for the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely. That’s dynamic tension bodybuilding.
III
But now I can almost hear you saying, “Fine words, preacher. Nobody can disagree with this. We ought to embrace the tension and include those the world doesn’t like to include. And yes, you are right, we ought to embrace the tension and just go ahead and love the unlovely and rise above all this competition stuff. Sure, all of this is unarguable.”
“But preacher, you have not reckoned with this: I’m scared. I am afraid. I’m frightened I won’t know what to say when I try to share my faith with somebody who is different. What if they ask me questions I cannot answer?”
“And I am afraid, too, that I’ll fail when they put too many demands on me. What if my neighbor tells me she is lonely and could use a friend, and I don’t want to invest that much time? What if my co-worker tells me to go mind my own business and shut up about that religion stuff? Preacher, I don’t know if I can face rejection and failure like that.”
And I understand. I really do. When I was pastor at Takoma Park, on two occasions we attempted to do a religious census of our neighborhood. We worked at enlisting people who would take a Sunday afternoon and go door to door trying to find out who was not a part of anyone’s church. A pretty simple task, really. But you know what? We got a thousand and one reasons for not doing that. “I’m not very good at meeting new people.” “I don’t want to get that personal with people I don’t know.” “I think a person’s religion is his private business.” And some statements that got closer to the truth, “I feel intimidated talking about my faith.” “What would I do if somebody got hostile?” And my all-time favorite, “Some of them might be Muslims and they might try to get me to come to their mosque.”
Well yes, tensions. But the body is built with tensions. And what it comes down to is that we need to embrace these dynamic tensions. We need to build confidence born of faith. Confidence and boldness born of faith. Here, for me, is the crux of the matter; as Ephesians puts it, “In Christ Jesus our Lord … we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him.” Boldness and confidence.
I conclude this morning with a simple plea – that you and I look with boldness and confidence for new ways to build this our beloved church. It’s not about what we feel comfortable doing; it’s not about what we think we can handle. Our faith is in Christ Jesus and not simply in ourselves. Our confidence is in the power of God and not merely in our own powers. And so can we not begin to think creatively about new and fresh ways to build this body? Boldness and confidence.
What if, in addition to holding Bible studies here in the church building and in some of our homes, we found more public places – shopping centers, storefronts, recreation centers – to engage those who need to know Christ? I know of one church that holds Bible study sessions in a bar on Friday nights! What do you think that takes? Boldness and confidence. But who can give us that boldness and confidence? Does that come out of our own hearts and minds? No, it comes from Christ Himself.
What if, in addition to sharing fellowship and food on Wednesday nights, we identified pockets of hunger around us and offered counsel and sustenance? It would take boldness and confidence, but who is the source of those things? Christ Himself.
What if, in addition to housing a school and offering religious education to our children, we took ourselves out to the playgrounds and the sidewalks and did on-the-spot teaching? One church downtown does pushcart Vacation Bible School; all their materials are loaded onto a cart, and off go the workers to playgrounds to encounter the children there. Oh, I know that takes boldness and confidence. But again, who is the source of boldness and confidence? Christ Himself.
No doubt there are scores of ideas, many things we could do to reach out for the sake of the Gospel. All of these things will be contrary to what the world expects. They will be in dynamic tension with the world’s values. But they will also satisfy the world’s hungers, slake the world’s thirsts, and build our Kingdom muscle.
I like that 97-pound weakling, don’t you? He identified his dissatisfaction, he knew what he wanted, he studied the instructions. And he became victor instead of victim.
And as for kicking the chair and becoming a champion, well, just listen to this, “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
