{"id":674,"date":"2021-04-27T07:35:23","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T11:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=674"},"modified":"2021-04-27T07:35:23","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T11:35:23","slug":"fearfully-and-wonderfully-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2021\/04\/27\/fearfully-and-wonderfully-made\/","title":{"rendered":"Fearfully and Wonderfully Made"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Soma Sema<\/em>.

Those may not seem like fighting words, but they seriously riled up the first generation of Christians two millennia ago.

Soma Sema<\/em> was one of the slogans of a group of influential intellectuals who called themselves Gnostics.  The name comes from the Greek word gnosis<\/em>, which means \u201cknowledge.\u201d  The Gnostics considered themselves the original Wise Guys, or \u201cpeople in the know.\u201d

The Gnostics\u2019 signature idea was that all spiritual things are good, while all material things are evil.  Therefore the existence of the universe itself must be considered a terrible mistake.

According to the Gnostics, God never intended to make mountains, and waterfalls, and armadillos, and star clusters, and jogging paths through beautiful stretches of woods.  A second-rate spiritual being \u2013 certainly not the True God \u2013 somehow messed everything up by creating a cosmos.

Human beings, unfortunately, became trapped inside physical bodies.  The Gnostics saw the human body as a kind of wretched outer wrapper afflicted by unruly appetites, bad breath, and bodily fluids.  Soma<\/em>Sema<\/em> was essentially a first century Gnostic bumper sticker (or chariot sticker, perhaps?) that proclaimed their key teaching.

\u201cSoma\u201d is the Greek word for body.  You might remember somatic cells from high school biology.  \u201cSema\u201d means grave.  For the Gnostics, Soma Sema<\/em> meant \u201cyour body is a tomb.\u201d  It\u2019s a prison.  And you\u2019re trapped inside.

Your lifelong job is to break free.  True spirituality means abandoning the constraints of your body and everything else here on earth, so you can go to heaven as a pure spirit.

Therefore, according to the Gnostics, nothing here on Earth really matters.  Not politics, getting married, helping the poor, painting houses, building hospitals, digging wells, writing poetry, campaigning for justice, or loving your neighbor as yourself.  All those things are a colossal waste of time.

To which the earliest Christian teachers responded in unison: That\u2019s absolute rubbish<\/em>.

The Apostles\u2019 Creed \u2013 the earliest known Christian statement of faith \u2013 begins with these words: \u201cI believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth<\/u><\/em>.\u201d  God made the world.  Which means God is seriously into stuff<\/em> \u2013 like elbows and chocolate and goldfinches.  God loves the world so much, in fact, that God the Son lived here as a human being for something like three decades, and still retains a human body.

What does all this mean in the here and now?

It means your body is most certainly not a tomb.  So stop treating it like one.  Don\u2019t despise its limitations and impulses.  Exercise and eat well.  Make peace with your height, your shape, your frailties, and your age.

Our culture blares all kinds of messages about our bodies, and many of them are right out of the Gnostic playbook: You\u2019re too fat. You\u2019re too thin. You have too many wrinkles. You have too many zits. You ought to feel ashamed of yourself because you don\u2019t have perfect abs.

Have you ever hoped that one day you might see an actual miracle?  Just look in the mirror.  The author of Psalm 139:14 writes: \u201cI praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.\u201d

The Good News is that a good God has made an awesome world in which creatures like us can experience deep joy.

Even with less-than-perfect bodies.
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Soma Sema. Those may not seem like fighting words, but they seriously riled up the first generation of Christians two millennia ago. Soma Sema was one of the slogans of a group of influential intellectuals who called themselves Gnostics.  The name comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means \u201cknowledge.\u201d  The Gnostics considered themselves the original Wise Guys, or \u201cpeople… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[217,221],"class_list":["post-674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-creation","tag-gnostics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":676,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions\/676"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}