When I was a young man the children at church called me Magnum PI.  I was a lot thinner then, had more hair, was in much better shape, and many of the children had soon-to-be-diagnosed eye problems.  Also I wore a lot of Hawaiian shirts (as I do now), and had a cheesy moustache (ditto).  No one has called me that for 15 years.  More recently folks have sworn I am a doppelganger for Pittsburgh Steelers coach, Bill Cowher.  Even the Schwann’s guy, delivering meat to my neighbor, yelled across the way, “Dude, did anyone ever tell you you look just like coach Cowher?” “No,” I replied.

            Lately, when I look in the mirror in the morning, the man I see bears an unsettling resemblance to Khalid Sheikh Muhammed – and not the good photo of him, but the one they took at his arrest, the one where he looks like the “Time-to-make-the-doughnuts” guy in a gorilla suit. Twenty years has produced a frightening personal descent. I’m glad we don’t take many photos in our family.

            To have a human body is to be in a state of accelerating- decline, despite our best efforts at calcifying, anti-oxidizing, and replenishing. A golfer is usually past his prime at 50, a running back at 32, a lady gymnast at 17.  My grandmother Bryson, recently dead at 87, was in vigorous health (it seemed) until the day before she suffered a massive stroke.  My first intern, Kevin Wolfgong (who was a better man at 20 than I am at 44), died of cancer last week. He was 36.  Some bodies last longer than others, and some have more vigor, but a human body is a decaying thing – a temporary vessel.

            The Bible understands this, addresses it.  Paul, whose body bore up under the ravages of beatings and thousands of miles of hard travel, talks in II Corinthians 5.1ff of “groaning” in the “earthly tent” of our physical bodies.  In I Corinthians 15.35-58 he describes in detail how our earthly bodies are just the seed to be planted, ultimately giving way to a permanent and glorious resurrection-body.  Ecclesiastes 12 begins with the poetic and yet unrelenting description of how our bodies fall apart, and one-by-one our systems shut down.

            To live in a human body is to live in a decaying thing.  But we are not our bodies.  Our bodies are where we are, not who we are.  Adam and Eve had bodies fashioned from existing organic matter – but were alive because of the breath of God.  We are Soul-and-Spirit, eternal.  The thing that once looked (a little) like a Television detective, and now looks like a fat, hairy terrorist is not me, only that which houses me.  My oncologists, and gastroenterologists, then, are not unlike my mechanics – they work on the thing I use to get around in, until it won’t work any more and I get another (better) one.

            I think we have to get that.  We have to understand the truth that we are not our bodies, in order to begin to understand the verse above from Philippians 1.  Read it again.  Notice that it has only one qualification – the terminus of Jesus’ day.  Would that be the day of the second coming, or the day of our meeting him in paradise?  I believe the answer is: whichever comes first.  Until then we are each a work in progress.  God is fashioning us, forming us.  That is what he does with us humans.

            Think of the qualifications that are not mentioned.  The verse does not say, “He who began a good work in you will perfect it until:

            …you are too old, or

            …you are in a wheel-chair, or

            …you are on a respirator, or

            …you can no longer raise your head from the pillow.

            The process of sanctification is in no way tied to our physical health.  As long as we live, all of us who belong to God are in the process of becoming, of growing.  That which is really us – that eternal part – is just beginning to bloom.  See how forward-looking that verse is: “will perfect”… “until the day”…

            Four, or forty-four, or ninety-four, we are, all of us, still children, still in the process of becoming of who we will, one day, eternally be.

Beloved, we are children of God, and it has not yet appeared what we shall be…I John 3.2
For I am convinced of this very thing: that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.  Philippians 1.6