#83 Your body is not the enemy, sin is + Dr. Kelly Kapic

We can talk about sex for a little bit if you want. This body that you gave me, God, is riddled with desire.

What do I do with that? If only I was just an angel and I didn't have genitals. Jesus is a sexual creature who's never unfaithful.

To have genitalia, to have desire is not bad. My will is only so strong. How do I navigate the holiness that you want me to attain?

Sin's the problem. Your physicality is not. It's hard to be like, God, I know you love me. God, I know you made me beautifully.

All these things, but what do you do? Hello, hello.

Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the

Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding

God easier. These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion.

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Thank you so much for listening. Now, let's get to the show. Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host,

Cassian Blino, and today we're gonna talk about our bodies, the roles of them, the temptations in them, what we're supposed to do with them, how do we handle them, what do we do with Jesus's body, because he has one, but all of that and the spiritual struggles that come along with it.

Like, why does it feel like my mind and spirit want God, but my body keeps betraying me? This is a topic that hits near and dear to me.

I feel like I'm a young woman. I struggle with this, but I don't know where to put the struggle. I don't know how to be guided through it.

So I brought an expert, Dr. Kelly Capik. I'm so glad that you're here. You wrote a book on this. You wrote a 40 -day devotional on this, but more than that, you're a systematic theologian from Covenant College, and you're known for bringing deep theology down to the live embodied experience, which we'll get into.

Your work focuses on embodiment, limitation suffering, spiritual formation, community, and you're the award -winning author of You're Only Human, and the book

You Were Never Meant to Do It All that you graciously shared with me. Thank you. And essentially, these are books that are arguing that God's designed human with limits, with needs, with desires, and physicality on purpose, not something that we have to deal with.

Welcome to the show. Thank you, Cassie. It's great to be with you. How did you get into the body?

What's going on there? I've never had a theologian talk about the body, and I'm so glad that you're here because it's something

I've always wanted to talk about. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's some theological and some personal reasons.

Okay. I'll give you the short theology and the short personal versions, and maybe you wanna talk about more.

Theologically, I'm very convinced that a lot of us, particularly people with evangelical background, et cetera, just have a very weak doctrine of creation, and that really affects us in all kinds of ways.

And sometimes people are like, no, we talk about creation all the time, and I always say - Coming out swinging, all right. Well, the problem is people say, we talk about creation all the time, but then when

I ask, well, what did, maybe in Sunday school or in church or whatever, what were you talking about?

And it was always, how old is the earth and how did God make it, right? And it's not that those aren't valuable questions.

They're actually just not the most important. They're not even near the top biblically. And so that in the last 150 years has so reshaped our imaginations and reduced our understanding of creation that things like why we have bodies is so important, which is really important biblically, kind of get neglected counterintuitively.

So I think we have an underdeveloped doctrine of creation. And also I just, for me, the humanity of Jesus has become so important without in any way undermining the full divinity of Christ.

And so those two are my big theological concerns. And then I'll tell you the personal and then we can go any direction you want.

My wife and I were married in 1993. We were married almost nine years before we had kids and then had two kids.

And in 2008, my wife got cancer. And it was a form of cancer that normally much older women get, like in their 80s and she was in her 30s at the time.

And that was scary and that was really hard. And long story short, after a year, by God's grace, surgeries and stuff, she was declared cancer free.

And we thought, praise God, that was really hard. We have the emotional, the physical scars, et cetera, but you are faithful.

And then in the summer of 2010, she called me from the side of the road. She had just been, she's involved in, she was the president of MEDR -US at the time, an international relief and rehabilitation organization, doing

God's work, basically. So like, God, leave this woman alone. And she called me from the side of the road and said,

I don't think I can drive home. My leg's not working properly. And from that day in the summer of 2010 to this day, there's never been a day without pretty massive pain and fatigue.

And it took us six years to get to the Mayo Clinic and figure out the two underlying issues. And the short version is there's nothing we can really do about it.

So pain and fatigue is part of her life. So with her encouragement and a grant that God provided out of nowhere, a few years in,

I was able to do research and write on suffering. And so the body became very important and chronic pain was one of the main things.

And so I wrote a book called Embodied Hope. And that real, just starting, in order to take suffering seriously, you can't actually have a good holy view of suffering until you take the body seriously and value the body.

And because a lot of Christians don't value the body, it's why we have difficulty making sense of suffering.

And so anyways, after doing that, maybe counterintuitively, I was finally ready to talk about the goodness of the body and limits after talking about the reality of pain.

So it's more of an answer than you expected probably, but there you go. There's some theology and some personal stuff.

That's why I'm interested in the body. I'm sensing some waterworks in this conversation already. But it's so interesting.

I mean, I talked about suffering and I've talked about divine hiddenness. I've talked about a lot of that. But the approach from the body, it feels like it's been ignored.

In my Sunday school mind, kind of like what you said, is we are created from dust and then it's sin.

Just everything about the body and the flesh is sin. You need to stay as ethereal and holy and spiritual as possible to stay connected to God because God is not the physical man next to me.

So every ailment feels like just again, like another detail of this fallen world.

And so it's hard to appreciate, see the role, know what to do with the body.

So this is really interesting. I guess my question, and we can kind of just get right into it, is

God made us with bodies. He created us from dust that we see in Genesis.

And he even calls it very good. But he wants to be in communion with us.

Why didn't he just make us spiritual? Like why didn't he just make us like spiritual angels? Like why do you think we have a body?

I mean, we have a body because God gave us bodies and it's non -Christian influences that make us think angels and quote unquote spiritual is better.

That's not a Christian perspective at all. Yeah, no, and it's very common.

It's very common in Christian circles. But the biblical God is the God of creation who makes it.

And as you know, like people wanna debate about creation. There's two things everybody, no matter what your denominational background is, that everyone should get from Genesis one is that God made it all.

And as you just reminded us, he's like, oh, that's good. Oh, that's really good. Oh no, and what he loves is his creation.

He loves the physicality of it. He's got no problem with that. And one of the fundamental, without skipping hours of conversation, one of the fundamental proofs of this is not just the creation narrative, but is that the son of God becomes human and him taking on real flesh and blood and being genuinely human, not pretending, but really human is not sinful.

To have a body is not sinful. That's not the problem. God is a creator.

He has no, he's not compromising being God by entering into creation. God's problem is not creation.

God's problem is sin, which distorts the goodness of our physicality. Even the new heavens and the earth is gonna be physical.

It's not non -physical. Interesting. I don't even know where this thought process came, but like having a body was a fallen form compared to an angel.

Yeah, I mean, it's very common. In the ancient church, they were dealing with it. There's a fancy word for it called

Gnosticism. Starts with a G, G -N -O -S. But the Gnostics basically said this early on.

Even in the Bible, like 1 John, scholars will talk about how 1

John is attacking what they call proto -Gnosticism, like before Gnosticism, where John's having to say like, your flesh is not bad.

But anyways, the Gnostics said, the material world is bad. God is spiritual, so the spiritual is positive, which led them to basically undermine the full humanity of Jesus.

And they really said Jesus looked human, but he really wasn't. It's called

Gnosticism, to only appear to be human. And even though we would never, most

Christians wouldn't say that, when you hear the way we talk about Jesus, it was like he wasn't really tempted.

If you start asking like, did he have to go to the bathroom? Did he have belly laughter?

All these kind of very earthy things, we start to feel like it's irreverent.

So for, yeah, or silly and then even offensive. So for example,

Tertullian is an early church father. And when he is responding to this very problem, he has this whole book called

De Carne Christi, On the Flesh of Christ. And it's really interesting, because he starts talking about Mary's afterbirth.

And I think it's so interesting, because imagine your pastor during a sermon talking about Mary's afterbirth and it having significance.

And because we're like, that sounds irreverent. That sounds bad. Well, what - I've never once thought about that. Exactly. And there's, we can talk about more and anyways.

And he said, what he's trying to do is pick something that people will think is gross. And they're going to say, no,

God is spiritual. God is good. He does not associate with what's gross, with what's bloody and earthy.

And Tertullian is like, no, no, no, no. The one who made all, this is all beautiful to him. He's got no problem with it.

And he's trying to, is very important theologically to say, Mary is the mother of the

Lord Jesus. Mary is, and John Calvin and the Reformation, others all defend this. Mary is not holding a pod.

Jesus really is genuinely Mary's son, even as he's also the son of God.

He gets his full humanity from Mary, which by the way, tells you women are super important.

But yeah, there's so much going on there. So, but his whole point is, if you're embarrassed about his birth, you can't benefit from his life.

And similarly, they're embarrassed of his death because that's very, and all I have to say, the physicality of Jesus is central to the

Christian faith. And until you come to terms with his physicality, we can't come to terms with our physicality.

Sorry, these are too long of answers, but. No, they're perfect answers. This is insane.

I've never thought about the afterbirth of Jesus, the grossness of Jesus, because I hold him literally on a pedestal.

When it comes to like, he didn't fart. He didn't, he wasn't a dirty baby. Like he didn't, but you have to understand that like every part of our, like I'm asking, every part of our physical experience, he experienced.

Everything that's not sin. And so that, it raises very interesting questions because I mean, that's, and the

Bible's explicit about that, right? He's like us in all ways, yet without sin. And where this becomes revealing is when you start to slow down and really explore it, you realize, oh, without saying it, we do consider like our bodies simply to be sinful.

Yeah. And we think very earthly things are sinful. And the larger book, you know, this book, you were never meant to do it all.

And that comes from a bigger book called, You're Only Human. For me, one of the just pastoral implications is this is why we confuse.

I'll give you the fancy term and then I'll explain it. But we confuse finitude and sin. So we start to feel like our limits are actually bad.

The fact that you can't be everywhere and do everything and know everything, we as Christians start to feel guilty about.

But God never intended you to be able to be at all the ministry events. He didn't intend for your body to be in 10 places at once.

He gave you a body that needs sleep. And we start, even in Christian circles, we start to act like sleep is a weakness rather than a gift.

Sleep is an act of faith saying, God, I'm not God. I'm a creature. You made me this way.

May you continue to reign and rule as I sleep. Sleep is a daily reminder of the goodness of our

God and the limits of our body and our bodies being good and limited. Hold on a minute.

I've never thought about that. I never thought I actually had shame about having physical needs, needing sleep, needing rest, only being able to be kind of surrounded with technology.

It's a little bit different, but I only have 24 hours in a day, even 16 if I'm efficient.

But the physicality of my life, it's so funny because it reminds me of a conversation that I had with my sister.

And I was dealing with some sin and some temptation and I was talking to her about it. And she's like, this is bad.

You should get it out. This is the one thing in your life that's bad. Stop doing it, repent. And I was like, is it the one thing?

I'm sure there's other things I'm doing wrong. And she's like, there's other things you're doing wrong. You should stop that. And I'm like,

I don't mean like I'm a bad person, but it's like, surely there's something along the lines of like,

I could have been nicer. I thought about a thought. And maybe that was just me being like inherently, even though I can't see it,

I'm being sinful because I'm just a human on earth. And those are just thoughts that I don't even know where I learned them.

Yeah, and part of what's so fascinating is, and this might sound contradictory.

I actually believe that you and I, I'm from the reformed tradition if it means anything to listeners, but I grew up Catholic.

Anyways, I won't tell you my whole story, but so there is a sense in which I think you and I are more sinful than we even know, right?

If you start to explore motivations and actions, and as you mentioned, thought, word, and deed, 100%.

I think we're more sinful than we know, but also I think we're more glorious than we also know. And when we only -

Point to it. Yeah, well, when we only focus on the bad, even the bad becomes a problem.

The only reason that it's a bad or sinful, the only reason the sin makes sense is because of how glorious we are, right?

And so sin is a problem because we are made for good. We are made to lift one another up with words of encouragement and grace.

And so when we slander one another, that's why it's so tragic. God didn't just make a bunch of rules, like, here's a bunch of laws,

I just wanna see if you'll follow them. God, as the creator, made the universe - That's such a funny way to put it. Yeah, but he made the universe to work in a certain way for what we'd call shalom, for peace, for fullness.

And so sin's a problem, not because God's like, oh, you didn't follow my rules. It's like, because God knows how he made the world.

And so when you and I go against the way he made it in thought, word, and deed, it doesn't just affect us.

It actually affects our relationships, but it even affects the cosmos. And it affects the whole thing so that creation itself groans.

But all of that doesn't undermine the fact that it matters because we're glorious creatures, which is why our sin can be so tragic because we have power to do horrendous things.

But we're glorious, right? The terrorist took airplanes into the buildings in 9 -11, but you also had humans running into that building to save other people's lives.

And they're not even Christians. Humans are amazing creatures, but we're just creatures.

And our problem is not that we're creatures. Our problem is that we're creatures who have sinned. And those are different things.

Before we get into sin and temptation, which we're definitely going to get into, it's interesting that you mentioned how glorious sleep is and how wonderful that is.

And I'm definitely guilty of this. What happens when we don't get it? What happens when we don't drink water?

What happens when we don't take care of our bodies? How does that affect us spiritually? Because I was really only focusing on it affecting us.

Now I'm getting sick. Now I'm a little bit grumpier. Now my work isn't as good. But I never once connected it to,

I'm not as good of a Christian as I usually am. And maybe those aren't the right words. Right.

Yeah, in some ways, just even substitute Christian for human. I'm not able to function as a human as God made me in the same way, right?

Yeah, there's so much to say. In some ways, even when we start to talk about the spiritual versus other things, it probably is a sign we're already off on the wrong track, right?

Because the physical affects the spiritual, the spiritual affects the physical.

This is a lot with suffering. But take, I'll give you a simple example. So my day job is I'm a college professor at a place called

Covenant College. It's a great institution, listeners, send your kids here. But anyways, we kind of joke that you can, if such a thing could exist where you could trace sin, you know, among the student body, during times like midterms, it's going way up.

Right? People are not getting the sleep they need. They are highly stressed, right?

And all of a sudden they start to do crazy things, right? And not just crazy things.

Self -hatred is on the rise during those times, right? All kinds of sinful things.

The reality is when we're exhausted, we have less ability to navigate the challenges and temptations of life.

We are more vulnerable in those situations. And God, part of it's amazing.

God made us to be able to handle stress with adrenaline rushes and stuff. So you and I under panic situations can do incredible things.

We can, we had worked for 36 hours straight. But the problem is when we try and make that a lifestyle, and that's what's happened is nowadays we've tried to make the level of productivity and efficiency very, very high in a way that fosters anxiety and stress as a lifestyle.

And that has massive spiritual consequences for us. Running my own podcast,

I'm always moving too fast. I'm finding guests, I'm editing episodes, I'm creating reels or guesting on other shows.

Not to mention, I just live in a world that moves fast. Notifications, trends, endless to -do lists. You know what feels like a blessing in all that?

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Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now back to the show. I absolutely struggle with Sabbath because I have work to do.

I have things I need to keep up with. It's just simply too much. Like God gave me such a hunger, such an ambition.

And it feels like betrayal for me to be quote unquote lazy. But this is such an interesting take on Sabbath and advertising rest because I'm like,

God wants me to rest. No, God wants me to work or else like, what am I here for? But this is interesting, just like the impact of like why.

Yeah, and again, it's one of those fascinating things where we don't even know how much we've been influenced culturally, right?

When we go to a different culture and you see versions of Christianity where you're like, oh, that's syncretism.

I can't believe they're worshiping like that. That is clearly that culture. In the Western world, we have no idea how profoundly our understanding of Christianity has been reshaped by this exaltation of efficiency and productivity.

So that all of a sudden, one of the 10 commandments about rest, we're like all the rest matter, but not that one.

That one, that was all like, that was just a pat. And it's fascinating to me that, if you've come from a legalistic background and people were crazy on the

Sabbath, I understand people like, I don't know. But when I'm in just broad like evangelical land and I said, what if God made you for six days to work?

And then there's a day where you should sleep, you should worship with God's people, you're supposed to feast with God's people, enjoy

God's creation, not work. And people are like, no, that's too, and I will just say my students come in often feeling guilty if they're not studying on Sunday, which tells you what they've been trained to think.

And those who start to really value a day of rest, they are far more radical about it than I am.

And a lot of other people, like, cause they're now super protective because they have discovered the joy and delight of having a day to just not do work in the quote, unquote, work and I'd use that loosely.

I'm a professor for me working in my yard is not work on Sunday, but if you're a landscaper working in your yard is probably work on Sunday, right?

So it's just, it's not about legalism. It's just about our bodies to get back to your main concern are meant to function in certain ways.

And we just think, no, you should be able to go all the time and we can feel it.

Our bodies actually can't do that for very long. I guess I just like have an image of my head of what the disciples lives were like, they were wandering between cities and healing and working and talking.

And I imagine Jesus right after or right before, what is it? The two loaves and the five fish, like he's mourning the loss of his friend.

So he's in the state of exhaustion and he chooses to feed people. And so I think like you see that kind of savior and you're like, that's the expectation, that's the bar.

And I'm gonna keep showing up even when I'm exhausted because that's how you really love other people. But then you look at Elijah, who

God's like, just take a nap, just take a nap, have a snack and then you won't be suicidal anymore.

What would you? No, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, no, what is, how do we take that?

Even Jesus, when you read the gospels, actually it is surprising how often Jesus goes off by himself and he goes off to pray.

And it is interesting that even in the boat, there's a storm around and Jesus is in a deep sleep.

Jesus, there are nights where we're told about Jesus basically having super restless nights and praying through them like, and it's often interesting how they're linked with big decisions or big events, like the choosing of the 12 disciples is right prior to that in Luke's gospel, you get this sense of he is wrestling in prayer about this.

So there are times of sleeplessness, but it's very interesting biblically, there's a theology of sleep.

I talk more about this in the book, You're Only Human, but it's, the idea is actually, the reason biblically why you and I sleep is because God never does, right?

That you find this again and again in the Psalms, he never does. So like Cassian, you're in Hawaii and there's a lot of military bases.

It makes me think in military terms, when you're on the front lines, if you're out there, you cannot sleep unless you have a buddy with you who's got your back and they're watching out.

And so you can get a little bit of sleep while they're watching. And there is, and I'd wanna qualify this and say it in a non -offensive way, but there's a sense in which

I honestly don't know how non -Christians sleep, because the weight of the world is actually on you.

And as Christians, we betray our faith when we act as if the weight of the world is on our shoulders.

And every night is an act and opportunity for us to exercise our faith and say, now

I lay my head down to sleep, right? And Lord, you gave me this much energy in this day, but it's done.

And I need you to continue to uphold the universe. And I praise you that I am not in charge. Whoa. That pattern is what prepares us even for Sunday Sabbath, which prepares us for a heavenly rest.

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. The theology of sleep.

That's good. It matters to me, because I don't know about you, but I struggle to sleep. That's why I started really thinking about it.

It's not like sleep is easy for me. I wake up at three in the morning anxious, especially when my kids were younger.

Now they're adults. But well, even that, whether it's work stress, family stress, financial stress,

I'm like everybody else. And so in that sleeplessness, I had to start thinking through it.

And so it's not that I'm saying I get to sleep full eight hours, but it helped me to start understanding how

God thinks of sleep, and what's going on there. So how has this view of the theology of sleep helped you when you wake up and you have poor sleep?

Yeah, it helps me to go, some of it has been revealing to me because it reveals to me, oh,

I really do think the weight of the world is on my shoulders. And it's as if I think if I'm not being anxious, if I'm not feeling anxious about something, it's like I'm not doing the work of it.

And God doesn't need me to be, it's kind of like when my wife and I got married, and in that first year of marriage, we had no money or anything.

And there would be occasionally like, we wanna go out to dinner, not a fancy dinner. And I wanted to go, but it was this weird thing, thanks to my wife took a little bit to realize that this was happening.

But it was like, I made us feel guilt and shame. In order to go out to dinner, it was like it was my penance, right?

Where it had to make us feel bad enough, but then we could go, but now we felt bad about it or something like, there's this weird thing that can happen psychologically.

And I think that's not a perfect analogy, what we feel at three in the morning, but this anxiety can betray the fact that we think we have to do something.

And if we're not doing it, God's not in control. And so for me, it's really helped to think when

I wake up and start feeling overwhelmed, I'm like, okay, God, I laid at your feet, right?

And it is a time of prayer, but I'm not bad if I just go back to sleep too, or try and go back to sleep.

Here it is, it's at your feet. Now I'm gonna go back to sleep or try. That's a good thought process.

I think that's helpful. I feel like I don't struggle with sleep. I sleep like the dead. Oh, good. My arms can go off and -

You're still young. Just wait. No, but I do like stress about it, like anxiety and control.

And I think that that thought process that you just shared can even help me. Like what control do I truly have that God doesn't have more of?

I'm gonna tee up a whammy, and this is gonna be bodily temptation and sexuality.

And I think that this, to me, as a woman who's not married, means a lot. But before we get into that, do you mind just explaining simply what embodiment is?

I feel like I should've asked this at the beginning. Oh, that's okay. Yeah, embodiment's this fancy term for we have bodies.

We are. And not even just that we have bodies. There is a very real sense, you would wanna qualify it a little bit, but that we are our bodies.

I like the language of embodies. I have a book called Embodied Hope, which is about us as embodied creatures.

But what we also don't wanna do is think that I'm not my body in some profound way.

And we do get this temptation in our culture where we'll look in the mirror and say, that's not who I am. And that's more platonic than Christian.

And anyways, that might relate to something. You mean when somebody says that we're spiritual beings having a physical experience? That kind of thing?

Well, it's even just like we look in the mirror and you think, I'm overweight or I'm whatever it is.

And you think we're trying to create a distance between quote unquote ourselves and our bodies.

And I do think that you can make a legitimate distinction between body and soul, but you've gotta be very careful doing it because we are our bodies.

The Christian hope is not the immortality of the soul. Biblically, the

Christian hope is the resurrection of the dead, bodily resurrection.

Whoa, okay. So I wanna just do a little bit of a side because you brought up something and it's like self image.

Yeah. And for like, I've struggled with that. Seeing yourself as like not the ideal version of what you want and having this like disdain for how you look, but being like inherently

I'm valuable. Inherently I'm a child of God, but unknowingly separating that the child of God within me is valuable, but the body that encompasses it isn't.

How do you marry those two? Because like this is getting in some like much deeper trauma, but I think that it's relevant, especially like I'm going back to therapy for this reason.

Yeah. And it's hard to be like, God, I know you love me. God, I know you made me beautifully. God, all these things, but what do you do?

Like, is it just a spiritual attack? Is it just like the culturization of how we see female body?

Is it just a fad of just like my body doesn't fit like the stereotypical version of beauty?

Like Jesus had a body, I have a body, but I'm trying to separate myself from it.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, the short answer to a bunch of the things that you just said is yes.

And it is so many cultural forces, social media is massive, obviously, and all this.

I mean, the data we're getting is massive in terms of the consequences of these things. And what's interesting is body shame has obviously been off the charts for women, particularly younger women, not only younger women for a while.

What's fascinating is it is quickly rising for men too, which is fascinating because part of it's like, we have objectified women in all kinds of deeply problematic ways for, well, for millennia.

And now it's kind of like, you know what? Our solution is just to make men miserable too. So you actually have a ton of, whether it's the workout gym guys and all of that, a lot of the same body image stuff is starting to really take root in men.

That's not an excuse. That's not to diminish the female thing. In some ways, I think women can speak into this and then to men's lives, because you guys have often been dealing with it for longer.

But all that to say, yeah, part of it, this is a sign of our weakness of creation.

We, like, you know, listen, God, who made

Cassian? God made Cassian. And he really likes the way he made you. He really likes the size and the shape and the hair and the eyes.

And he actually delights in you. And when I say you,

I mean you as an embodied creature. He has no problem with you as embodied.

The reason God wants to deal with the sin in Cassian is not because he hates you. It's not because he doesn't like your body.

It's because he loves you. And he wants to liberate you from the sin that is hurting you, including you as embodied.

But he does not want you to look like somebody else. He made you you.

And so we are actually, the counterintuitive thing is, it's actually offensive to God that we belittle his good creation.

I'm like, God, why didn't you make me taller? Why didn't you make me strong? Yes, there are things we can do.

But anyway, that's a lot, but. I'm gonna cancel my therapy, actually. I'm just kidding.

But it really matters. This is real for all of us. Yeah. No, I mean, insert anybody's name.

That was powerful. Yeah. Yeah, we, I mean, the idea that God, there's a chapter in the only human book called, does

God love me? And it's interesting. I'll have students in my office sometimes.

And it's not uncommon to have challenges with parents or different life things. And at some point

I'll often ask them, do you think your mom or your dad or both parents, depends on the conversation, but do you think they love you?

It doesn't matter how hard it's been. Every student always says yes, without hesitation.

And so what I've learned to ask then is a follow -up, as I said, but do you think your dad likes you?

And it's amazing how often, and when you ask that, the tears just start to roll. Yeah.

And I think it's parallel with our view of God. If you ask Christians, do you think

God loves you? We all instantly say yes. But it's just like with our parents, we're like, of course he loves me.

He's God, he has to. It's like your parents. Like, of course my parents love me. They're required to love me.

But if you say, do you think God likes you, actually likes you, we're very uncertain.

Even as we read about that our God rejoices over us with singing, right?

And this whole image, anyways. And that betrays some deep problems, right?

Until we start to see that our God delights in us and the reason why he's upset about sin is because he wants our freedom, not because he hates us, right?

Then we start to, it's a path of liberty. Something else is going on there.

Oh my gosh. That is, does God, he loves me, but does he like me? Yeah.

I think I, it was a long time ago, but I was in some conversation with someone and they're like, I don't think that we even struggle with loving

God. I think we struggle with accepting that God loves us. And that's where we're like, most of our worries is like accepting

God's love. And that broke me, but it is like, how could he?

How could he? You know, like, does he love me? Sure. Does he like me? I wouldn't like me if I was him.

I'm a wretched human being. Like, sure, like my sins aren't that big. But like, again, looking at like the whole, like some of the whole, it's like, if you put it on all this effort to make me

Cassian and yet watch the things that I chose and they weren't God, that's hard to continue liking that person that you put so much effort into.

But that's just my human brain looking at it, not a godly amount of love. Yeah, it is really, it's kind of like sometimes in Christian circles, you get this idea that to be truly spiritual, you need to be an extrovert.

You need to want to share your story with a lot of people and you need to be really energetic all the time.

That's not biblical. God doesn't like extroverts more than introverts. You don't have to become an introvert if you're an extrovert or extrovert if you're an introvert.

He actually really does like us. And he likes, like some of us are gifted in art and whatever it is, we have all of these gifts.

It sounds cheesy to say like God really gives us all gifts, but I really, really mean that. It's not just like the celebrity

Christians. It's like all of us. And he delights in our laughter.

He delights in our skills. He delights to see us grow and use gifts. And until we can see that, it really is just a form of slavery.

But he is a father who's trying to, who loves what he made and is really upset that the good things he's made have gone sideways.

And he wants to liberate us from sin, death, and the devil, all the darkness, right?

That we might enjoy him, his creation, and one another. Yeah.

Okay, what about sex? One more thing before we talk about sex. Think about how powerful it is when you have a friend who sees your crap like fully and it comes out and then their response is literally embracing you and hugging you and kissing you on the forehead and saying,

I love you. Right? It's so powerful. In the early 20th century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about the importance of confession.

And as a Protestant said, one of the things that we've done is we threw the baby out with the bath water when we got rid of confession.

And he talked about one of the things that's hard for us is we confess our sins to God. But have you ever noticed like sometimes it doesn't feel like it takes, like you don't really feel forgiven.

And Bonhoeffer, you know, this is my language for what Bonhoeffer's saying, but he's basically saying, it's because you're not even praying to God anymore.

You're like, ah, I did this again, I did this again. You know, sometimes when we ask for forgiveness, we feel forgiven.

And so Bonhoeffer says, here's one of the powerful things. When you confess your sins to a fellow believer, no, they need to be trusted and et cetera.

And you tell them and you look in them in the eye and you tell them the honest truth about your sin. We're about to talk about sex.

That could be, you know, it's a very common area of struggle for people. And they discover the hardness.

And as a good Christian friend, they avoid the temptation of saying, oh, don't worry about it, Cassian. Or don't worry about it,

Kelly. It's not that big a deal. Don't do that. We're tempted to do it. You gotta take the sin seriously and just say, oh,

I see it. And that is a problem. And in Jesus' name, you are beloved daughter and son and he loves you.

And his response to this sin is embrace. Because God makes us holy not by going far away, but by going towards us.

It's another area where we screw it up, where we think, you know, God is so holy, he can't be in the presence of sin.

We say that kind of thing all the time and I know where we get it. But the problem is that fosters the problem of like, well, of course, and when you've sinned, how can you enter into God's presence?

When biblically, the whole idea is, really, God can't be in the presence of sin? Well, the eternal son of God, sent by the father and the power spirit, becomes one of us and lives with sinners.

And the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in your and I heart. So God's, yeah, he can't be in the presence of sin.

So the way he deals with it is by going toward the sin in order to deal with it. He makes himself at home with us in order to change us.

So all of that to say, to conclude the Bonhoeffer, when the friend looks you in the eyes and says, you are forgiven and you are loved, it makes it more believable that that's how

God views us. And there's something about the physical embodiment of your friend in Jesus' name, extending his love and grace, even physically with a hug, that makes his love more believable.

And I think that's very important. All right, we can talk about sex for a little bit if you want. How do

I deal with that? How do I deal with that shame of God coming into a place that he's like, this is it, this is the best thing, this is the holy thing.

It's like, yeah, but I'm dishonoring it. Like, oh, this body that you gave me,

God, is riddled with desire. What do I do with that? Like how this embodiment almost feels like a curse sometimes.

It's like, if only I was just an angel and I didn't have genitals, you know? Like, why did you give this to me?

I understand the potential to be perfect, but my will is only so strong.

How do I navigate the body that you gave me, God? And how do

I navigate the holiness that you want me to attain? Yeah, I think all of those are super good questions and just very honest questions.

I think they're questions that thoughtful Christians have had for millennia, literally, where at some point it really is like,

God, why did you give us, why did you make us sexual creatures? Because there is, you know, the study on the chemistry, the biology of the whole thing, it's, we're learning more and more just how powerful these things are, right?

Well, there's a bunch going on there, right? And one of the things that makes it so hard in our day is marriage rates are going way down, but also when people do get married is much later.

And the years of some of the strongest impulses are often young, right?

It's not that it goes away. I know 70 year olds who are really struggling, right? But there's just a bunch of things going on.

But to make a long story short, Jesus has bodied, right?

Jesus is embodied. And by the way, not just, you know, 30 years on the dusty roads of Galilee, but Orthodox Christianity claims that he now ever lives as our human savior.

It's really interesting theological questions like where is Jesus? But Orthodoxy says he's somewhere.

He really is. He didn't shed his body when he ascended. And that is how serious

God's love is for us as humans is he is now, the son has become fully human.

And so he leads the human response to God now. Jesus is not, this is another podcast, but Jesus is not just worshiped.

He's the lead worshiper, right? He is the one who's loving God for us.

But I know that's too much for right now, but I would just say Jesus is a sexual creature who's never unfaithful.

And it tells us like to have genitalia, to have desire is not bad. How do we respond to that?

How do we think about that? And it's, there's a lot for us to be thinking about it, but the way we handle it is not by denying our bodies, but by taking it more seriously.

So things like even practical things like, yeah, you're not gonna handle temptation well on your own.

You need a community, right? You need the body of Christ to be able to handle your and my individual bodies.

Community, light is the way you handle these things. Transparency is the way you handle these things.

Darkness, secrecy, none of those things are helpful to us in this.

And so when we delay marriage or, and again, a lot of people are just called to singleness for their whole lives, but when we try and think of our sexuality in isolation and without the body of Christ, it's just crushing.

Like we need, I'm sorry, I keep going, but maybe as a practical example, one of the things that my alum,

I've been teaching at Covenant for 25 years and I've learned from alum is one of the hardest things after college is something they miss that they never knew they would miss.

And that is physical touch. When they were in college, it's not unusual, walk across campus and seeing a couple of friends hugging or people greeting each other, these warm embraces, people squish together on the couch, rolling, wrestling in the grass, whatever it is, it's constant.

Don't even think about it. They live in these dorms and halls together. And then all of a sudden, culturally we say, if you wanna be a real grownup, you should live on your own, right?

Or you should get out. And all of a sudden you have these single people who go and then they will say, I can literally go not just days, sometimes weeks without legitimate physical touch, healthy physical touch.

And when we don't have healthy physical touch, we are all the more vulnerable. It's like not getting sleep, all the more vulnerable for inappropriate touch, right?

And so one of the actual really practical things the church needs to do is to honor physical touch and make sure we in healthy, appropriate, public kind of thing, but healthy touch is important.

And that's part of why the scandal of abuse, physical abuse in the church is so bad is because that is wicked.

And now we have to be careful of over -correcting where now we think no one should touch anyone.

That's a problem too. So you can't have inappropriate touch, but actually we're supposed to think of one another as sisters and brothers with appropriate, healthy touch.

My students who are single need to be parts of families, need to be embraced in healthy ways.

That is a gift and important to them and to the rest of the community. So it's not about denying physical touch.

It's about how do we get healthy, appropriate touch? Oh, yeah, that, you know,

I had like a super vulnerable conversation with an Orthodox priest, Father Michael, and I adore him.

And I was being, you know, like, hey, it's tough. Like I'm not married and I'm almost 30. What do I do with this?

Like, where do I place this like beautiful thing that God's put inside me that's going untreated? Like I thought I was gonna be married at 25.

And he's like, yeah, totally, Kaz. Like you weren't meant to be single this long. It sounds like, like you are in your like prime in just a biological sense, prime years to be reproducing.

Of course you're struggling. You weren't meant to be single. Like you were made to have communion and have a marriage.

Of course you're struggling. And it was, I don't know, I think like the first time I'd heard a church leader be like,

I get it. Like, and I'm not gonna shame you for it. And I'm not gonna like not touch it. He didn't condone it, but he obviously was like, no,

I understand, I understand. And when you fail, because you're human, we're here.

Because, and it was really beautiful the way, and like, I'm Protestant, but I'm also raised Orthodox. And so I kind of get this like beautiful mix.

And he's Orthodox. And so he's kind of speaking my language. And he's like, I don't like the

Protestant view of legalism when it comes to shame, when it comes to sin of just like, you either get it right or you are wrong.

He's like, I treat it more like a chronic illness that you need to continually come back to church as like the cure.

And I think that was such a human approach to like, yeah, you're sinful. It doesn't mean we're gonna lock the doors.

It's we're gonna keep them unlocked because you're gonna be coming back. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like when you said, someone earlier said to you, well,

Cass, you have this area, you need to deal with it. Because that's your big thing or like, our fundamental problem is not sins, it's sin, right?

It's this lingering challenge. Because otherwise, we start to think of sin as like, well, if I just, it's almost like you're,

I don't know, you're trying to deal with some rot at some different points in the tree, and you don't realize it's a deeper issue than that, right?

And so it leads to, it's kind of this American mindset that, you know, it's like, well, if I just,

Ben Franklin had this whole list of virtues, and he thought, well, I'll focus on this virtue for a week and I'll crush it, and then

I'll add the next virtue. And by the end, I'll be great at all of them. You know, as a Christian, you're like, yeah, that's it, that's stupid, it's not gonna work.

And he discovered, it don't work, right? Because it's not about just effort, we have some deeper issues going on.

Yeah, yeah, I, yeah, I mean, this is just, this whole conversation is giving me so much grace about it all, versus like understanding like, gosh,

I'm just really dropping the ball, and you know, it's like self -image and temptation. And it's like, man, like,

God is like really trying to be with my body, he's not here to like punish my body, he's not here to like show how horrible it is, and I can't wait to die so I don't have this frickin' body anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's interesting, think about how we start to think

God wants us to hate our bodies, and how radically different it is to realize

God is offended when we hate our bodies. That's 100 % different. So when

Paul says, you know, just real quick for listeners, Paul does talk about, you know, the flesh and the spirit.

And you can be, you can, it's understandable if in our day you read that and you think that means Paul's like put to death our physical bodies, like our bodies are bad, but the spirit is good.

That is not what Paul's talking about, though. When he's contrasting flesh and spirit, and it's a longer conversation, but he's not contrasting the material and the non -material.

Flesh represents life in rebellion against God, and spirit represents life in submission to God.

It is not about physical versus non -physical. But I can understand why a lot of people in our day without any background read it that way, and so they think the goal is to hate our bodies rather than to realize worship is meant to be an embodied reality for human creatures.

It's always meant to be that way. Worship is meant to be embodied, so like we shouldn't look at it as worship is purely spiritual.

We should look at it as worship is purely physical. Cassian's never worshiping except for Cassian, because Cassian's embodied.

There's no worshiping Kelly apart from Kelly, right? And so even the idea of we die and are with Christ until the resurrection.

When theologians talk about it, it's called an intermediate state, and there's some debate about that, but I think you can argue for that pretty well biblically.

But theologians say, yes, we go to be with God in a sense, quote -unquote, with our soul, but that is an unnatural state.

We are longing and we are waiting for our body to rise so that we fully rise, right?

So anyways, without getting into those debates, we are made now and for always to be embodied creatures, and that as embodied is how

God made us to relate to him, one another, and the rest of the earth. He does not want us, need us to worship him in any other way than embodied.

And in fact, there is no other way. And when people start to talk in certain mystical forms, depends what we mean by mystical, and like, anyways, you quickly can move away from classic

Christianity. Into what, Gnosticism? Yeah, forms of Gnosticism or just kind of other things.

Like we are made to worship Christ, and the we is you and me sitting here right now.

We're not trying to get past our bodies, we're trying to get past, we're trying to deal with sin.

And I just wanna keep saying sin's the problem, your physicality is not. Yeah, it is insane to think that like Jesus has a physical body, right?

He didn't leave it in the tomb, like he still has it. And then you think like, okay, so I'm gonna be, and then you get into like the nitty gritty, like, okay, so I die today, so this is the body

I keep in heaven, or do I go back to baby? If I die at 90, do I get the 90 year old version, or can

I downgrade back into it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, when I get to heaven, we won't know each other as husband and wife.

If you are married, it's just gonna be, so you get into those like details, which I think are distractions when you start going down like the details.

Yeah, and it's amazing how little we know, right? There are theologians that debated, back in Augustine and others was like, well, it's like when an infant dies, right?

Or something like that. Well, do they come? And the idea was basically it was like 25, I can't remember the age, but it was like the ideal age.

Even back then, like there was a, you have your vigor, you have your strength, you have your whatever. Those are all, those are sometimes interesting, sometimes they're not worth us speculating about, because it is speculative.

But it is interesting that the biblical image though, is ultimately, not that we're going off to heaven, but that the biblical ultimate hope is heaven comes down to earth.

This world is, that is actually what the book of Revelation is teaching. That's what the Bible is teaching, right?

That ultimately it is not us going and disappearing, it is heaven coming down, so that God's will on earth will be done as it is in heaven.

God, Jesus is the King, and one day this place will be shalom, the way

God meant it to be. Oh my gosh, I feel like you're talking with friends and you're like, we're gonna party at my house?

You wanna come here, into this earth? We could go to your house in the heaven? No, no, my place isn't nice.

It's not as nice as yours, God. Let's go to your place. That's funny. Whoa, the physical. He's like, no, no, that's my place.

You guys screwed it up, because you had a bunch of ragers and you trashed the place, but I'm coming back to make the place nice.

Yeah, because he likes what he made. How do people buy this devotional?

How do they get this into their hands? Yeah, my stuff would all be, it's all real publishers.

It's all, you know, I'd go on Amazon to make it easier for you. I mean, because of publisher pressure,

I now have a website, kellykavik .com, but just go to Amazon if you type in Kelly Kapik. The books you and I've been talking about really are,

You're Only Human, which is a full book, or there's a, You Were Never Meant to Do It All.

It's a 40 -day devotional. But those who are dealing with suffering and pain, the book Embodied Hope would probably be more helpful.

Do you have a favorite that you've written so far? Embodied Hope and You're Only Human are my favorites.

Yeah, I just had a book that came out literally just yesterday called Christian Life. I've been working on since 2014.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's another conversation. But no, for the most personal and pastoral books for me are

Embodied Hope and You're Only Human. And it's been super encouraging to hear people who are not pastors or, you know, talk about the implications for their lives.

It's really helped me feel like, it's just what I wanna do with my life. I wanna be a theologian who helps just everyday people.

So that's the hope and the goal. So you can pray for that. I will pray for that. But I feel like you've already helped me so much, just like with reshaping my view of the physical.

So thank you. Thanks for coming on here. And, you know, we had show notes and we barely followed them.

This conversation was easy. Thanks for, you know, this is wonderful. So, Dr. Kavik, thank you so much for coming on and just directing people and just doing what you're doing.

Because I feel like you're really simplifying a lot of the complicated, especially for me. You know, if this is for anybody, I think it's for me.

That's great. Thank you so much, Cassian. You've been great. Well done. Nicely hosted. Thank you so much.