You may be familiar with the old American hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By:”

There’s a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar,
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling place there.

In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

Well, back in the early 20th century, there was a parody that became popular:

Long haired preachers come out every night

Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right  

But when asked about something to eat

They will answer in voices so sweet:

You will eat by and by

 In that glorious land in the sky  

Work and pray, live on hay  

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

(1911 “The Preacher & The Slave” by Joe Hill)

Now, I’m sorry to say there’s some good reason for this parody of a preacher who, when it comes down to it, is callous about the struggles of those less fortunate than he. What’s important is the salvation of the soul, after all, so don’t complain about your lot in life – it’s probably been ordained by God anyhow, right? We’re all going to die … so somehow that makes it okay if I hasten your death through neglect.

Too often our Christian religion has been used to turn away from the physical for the sake of the purely spiritual, to deny the urgent day-to-day needs of our bodily lives together in the here-and-now on earth and insist we just keep our eyes lifted up to the heavens and the promise of reward in the after-life. Too often this has also been deployed hypocritically to encourage those who are poor to deny their needs, but not the rich.

But when you actually look at Jesus and what he taught and how he acted and the story of his life and how he changed the lives of those who learned from him, it should be impossible to have such a severe separation of the spiritual from the bodily, the heavenly from the earthly. Especially when it comes to the needs of people who are suffering.

Jesus was all about making sure people are fed and nourished and healed – physically as well as spiritually. Both/and, not either/or. Jesus’ prayer was for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Central to this for the early church is how to understand the very being of who Christ was and is. Jesus’ followers came to believe not that he was some ethereal light beam floating around an inch above the surface of the earth before withdrawing back to heaven, but rather that he was the total embodiment of the divine as a human of flesh and blood and nerve and muscle and sinew, of tears and laughter and hunger and thirst, of savory and bitter and sour and sweet and salty, of love and love and love and love. He was this astonishing union of divine and human, not one as opposed to the other.

So, when we hear our scripture reading for today – about Jesus’ ascension into heaven after his resurrection appearances – please don’t for a moment think this means that the goal of Christian life is to evaporate into the ether.

As we have been exploring this Easter season, the strange and wondrous stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances recounted by his disciples after his death, are all very much about his body, as the site of sanctification. There is the story of Thomas touching the wounds on the resurrection-body of Christ, to show how his resurrected being bears them without being born under by them. Or the other stories where Jesus’ disciples encounter him in resurrection-form and recognize it’s him when he breaks bread to share, or fries fish for breakfast, or draws out the abundance of the earth. These are stories that just as physical as they are ethereal.  

When Christ’s resurrection-body then does finally take his leave and ascends into the realm of light and air and spirit, he makes it clear to his disciples that they should keep their attention to the here-and-now, in the earthly realm, in the among and within and between of life-together. The Holy Spirit, Jesus told them, would come after he had gone, to animate their community and empower them in their lives together. When that Spirit came, the early church came to understand their community itself to be the body of Christ on earth. As that body of Christ animated by the Holy Spirit in their midst, they continued to share the love of Christ by caring for the hunger and health of those around them, both physically and spiritually. 

What they came to understand about who Jesus was and is, helped them to understand who they are and can be. So the early church became Christians, which means “little Christlings.”

This is about the union of heaven and earth, of body and soul.

The theologian Karl Barth wrote that a Christian understanding of who we are as people in Christ is that we are “ensouled bodies” and “embodied souls.”

Ensouled bodies and embodied souls.

Not a separation between body and soul, but a union.

Now, as people of faith we know that the stuff of the earth and of the body is not all there is, and that earthly and bodily concerns are not at all the end-all and be-all of existence. This can be tremendously freeing. But it doesn’t free us from responsibility. We should not for a minute think we get to deny the urgent physical needs of one another, for health and nourishment and safety. On the contrary, Christ calls us to care.

When we start to see how it is true that we are ensouled bodies and embodied souls, we start to see how everyone else is as well, imbued with dignity and worth as children of the living God.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, June 1, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.

You can watch video of this sermon here.