In church on Easter Sunday. The sermon is about life. But more specifically, life in the resurrected body.
When they are not hurting us, we don’t think of them. When they’re shivering or sweating or aching, we dismiss them. When they don’t embarrass us by tripping or stuttering, or missing that fly ball or limping across the finish line dead-last, they don’t matter.
But Resurrection says they do. Our bodies matter. Matter matters.
The sophisticated world of that time begged to differ. Learned men of Athens listened to Paul’s intriguing ideas and may even have considered them, until he got to the part about the resurrection of the body, and that was a speculation too far. Bring back bone and muscle and blood and dung? Please! Everyone knew—or at least the thinkers knew—that real life was in the mind. That’s where the “know thyself” takes place. These bodies are mere vehicles—slave-guardians at best, mangy diseased dumps at worst. The sooner we ditch them, the better. Until then, they are nags to ride or wild beasts to master. Or (if you’re the hedonist at the other end of the gnostic spectrum) east, drink, and be merry because indulgence of the body will make no dent in your soul.
The platonists and neoplatonists agreed. So did the sophists, who could argue from both sides because no side was ultimately true.
So do transgender advocates who locate identity entirely in the mind.
So, even, do educators who focus on reasoning and cognition, to the exclusion of recess, art, or practical skills.
So does Satan.
Sitting still on the pew, I experience my body. It’s not doing anything beyond its normal functions: blood pulsing, oxygen flowing, gut squeezing.
But on the molecular level it’s a hive of energy: red corpuscles trek single-file through threadlike capillaries, freshening every cell with oxygen. Acids are breaking food particles into proteins and sorting potential energy from waste. Muscle fibers are breathing and brain synapses are firing, weaving thought from sound waves that ride the air, while light pours through the pupils and prints moving patterns on the retina . . .
Every square inch of me is alive. Body and mind together; it’s all me. My body doesn’t hold me prisoner. It holds my joy.
Tears fill my eyes. He does not disdain or disregard this body—on the contrary, he loves it. He has big plans for it, and is so determined to carry them out he even became a body. He descended way, way down, all the way to particle level. He formed his own body, grew it, birthed it, walked it through a short life span, and took it to the grave—torn, shamed, and bloodied. But then . . .
The forests and fields are excitedly whispering that someday the sons of God will be revealed. Will they eat and drink? With pleasure! Will they work and play? That’s what bodies do best. Will they 
copulate? No, because the practical need to multiply no longer exists, but more because they were made for a pleasure even more intense. It was planned from the first moment in Creation when “Let there be” brought forth earth and sky, water and rock, root and leaf, feather. fin and flesh. He breathed in the Fall and breathed out the New Creation, no longer bound by time. On a church pew on Easter Sunday, I smell that rarified air. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting—
“For our song of application, turn to hymn number 276 as we stand and sing. ‘Up from the Grave He Arose’.”