Why We Need Skin

Christian Faith as Bodily Presence

Thanks for your patience as you’ve awaited this week’s Thursday devotional (you’ll read below why I’m slightly tardy). I have two announcements to make. 🎉🎉🎉

First, starting next week, I will begin publishing a weekly “Monday Office Hours” post for paid subscribers to the Low-Level Theologian. As you may know, there has been a generous group of individuals who have supported this project up to now. A thousand times over: thank you! While the Thursday devotionals will continue for everyone, these Monday posts will be more academic (or “teachy”) in tone and content. Naturally, as a professor, author, and pastor, I’m constantly asked good questions. This is where I’ll try and respond. As well, “Monday Office Hours” will be a space where I’ll seek to offer my audience my best recommendations for sources, books, podcasts, and thinkers on topics we all wrestle with.

Second—and most importantly—my new book, A Teachable Spirit, is set to be released on April 29th by Zondervan. I am beyond excited for this work to finally be in print. It represents years of thinking around how followers of Jesus can become humble learners in a world and in a church increasingly marked by political tribalism, ideological entrenchment, and prideful arrogance. Christians, I contend, should be the humblest learners in the world. I believe this is a timely book for our moment. And I would love to invite you to walk with me through it.

With that, I have a special offer…

For the first time in my writing journey, I will lead an 8-week reading group through A Teachable Spirit consisting of reflection prompts, opportunities to ask your burning questions, additional resources and content, and all the good stuff I couldn’t fit into the book. It will finish with a live Zoom call. If you pre-order A Teachable Spirit, you get:

• Three free months of access to my “Monday Office Hours” posts. This will include access to the reading group for A Teachable Spirit (running from May 5th to June 23rd, 2025).

• The introduction and first chapter so you can begin reading before April 29th.

• The audible version of the second chapter, also on April 29th.

Once you have pre-ordered the book, sign up for your three months of free access to “Monday Office Hours” and the reading group for A Teachable Spirit by filling out this simple form. (***FYI: If you’re already a paid subscriber to the Low-Level Theologian, you’ll automatically be given access to the “Monday Office Hours” and reading group. Just pre-order the text. You are good to go.)

Thanks for letting me share. I’m excited for you to read A Teachable Spirit. But, today, we continue discussing how Jesus can be our model for good and healthy relationships. Go in peace.

---

The technological shifts we see in our day-to-day existence are wreaking incredible challenges at our attempts at cultivating the deep and abiding relationships our souls crave. We can access more information than at any point in human history at a speed that feels almost magical. Even conceptualizing being this spontaneously informed would have been unimaginable to the ancient mind. Underneath this shift has been a trade: bodily presence has been swapped for digitized knowledge and information.

Some of this has enriched our lives, for sure. Few of us should complain about our newfound capacity to learn about anything at a moment’s notice. Or that a pizza can be ordered at a whim. We should all thank God for this. Lord knows you are reading this because the internet has made it possible. But there’s equally something to be grieved in it. In many cases, we are actually trading genuine, in-the-flesh relationships for what can be accessed through screens.

The New Testament knew nothing of the social arrangement that has become our lives. That world—the first-century of Jesus, Peter, Paul, and the early church—required bodily presence for much of God’s work to be done. Ministry, in large part, could only be done by being with someone.

This is powerfully illustrated in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. In the second chapter of this vulnerable epistle, Paul gives some of his most poignant thoughts on how the gospel of Jesus Christ impacts and reshapes the human community. By speaking to the Jews (what he calls “the circumcision”) and the Gentiles (what he called the “uncircumcision”; both in vs. 2), he passionately outlines how the work of Christ has the power not only to save us from sin, death, and condemnation; the death of Christ actually brings people together in a kind of intimacy that these groups had never shared with each other. Paul writes:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. (vs. 14-18)

Paul’s language we read here would have given the church in Ephesus a compelling vision for the kind of multiethnic, multigenerational, and multicultural gatherings that should be expected when Jesus Christ is the center. In Jesus, Paul is arguing, people are actually brought together in shared life.

In the digital spaces of our current world, we see very little of this kind of embodied reconciliation. More than anything, digitized relationships seem to be fracturing and separating us at a speed that feels unstoppable. Just as when the humans built a tower in Babel to try and bring the world together, we have built our own towers (that provide our speedy wifi) to try and do the same. The result isn’t different. Rather than bringing humans together, the towers we always seem to build end up pulling and pushing us apart. The human heart doesn’t need a technological fix.

Photo by Womanizer Toys on Unsplash

For me, one of the more unique aspects of what Paul writes in Ephesians 2 is his passing comment that “he came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who are near.” (v. 17) Keep in mind that Paul is explicitly writing about Jesus. Paul, oddly, seems to be saying that Jesus had come to Ephesus to preach the Kingdom of God. There’s only one problem. The historical Jesus—the one described in the four Gospels—never went outside a physical radius of about ninety miles during his 33 years of life. This area is the size of what we would know as New Jersey. The furthest North Jesus is recorded as going is to Tyre and Sidon (just north of Galilee). The furthest south he went was Egypt (as a refugee child). But, for sure, in the Gospels, Jesus never traveled to Ephesus.

Why would Paul say that he did?

Indeed, Paul is not ignorant of Christ’s earthly life. That is not what Paul is talking about. Paul knew precisely who had gone to Ephesus to preach the kingdom of Jesus. He himself did. In Acts 19, we read of Paul entering this Roman colony where he would declare with passion what Jesus Christ had done in dying for the world to set it free from its bondage.

My guess—and I’m certainly not alone in this—is that Paul isn’t exposing some ignorance he had of the earthly life of Jesus. Paul is offering us a glorious lesson about the Christian life. When Paul showed up to preach in Ephesus, it was as though Christ himself was arriving to proclaim the love of God. The bodily presence of Paul represented the spiritual presence of Christ to the people of Ephesus. Christ came and preached. It just happened to be that Christ came to Ephesus through Paul.

Paul’s statement reflects both a high Christology (that Jesus, indeed, was divine) and a high anthropology (that people, indeed, do God’s work by showing up). For our own moment of time, this represents an undeniable critique of the way that we have opted to live our digitized lives. We send texts, not our bodily presence. Don’t misread this: some of this is necessary and needed. Nor should it be shamed. Social mobility has meant that we often must rely on disembodied communication. But we’ve soon started treating digital presence not as an exception but as a rule.

Yes, Paul wrote letters when he couldn’t be there. Sometimes, we have to rely on the technology of the day to do relationships as best as we can. But don’t miss how many times Paul mentions in his letters that he is dying to be with the very people he is writing to. These letters were necessary. But the heart should drive us to be together.

This has been a very painful week for our family. One of our nearest and dearest family members tragically died unexpectedly. The levels of grief that come with not being able to say goodbye or “I love you” just keep coming. The day this tragedy happened, our little family in Eugene all decided to gather together in our home for the day. Waves of emotions came and went. One moment, we cried. One, we laughed. Next, we shared memories. What was most healing, though, was not in what was said. What mattered, above all, was that we were together in a room. Bodily together.

This is, most certainly, why Jesus did not leave a letter for his disciples after his resurrection. There is a reason Jesus waited forty days before ascending. What the disciples most needed was not a love letter or statement of purpose. They needed Jesus Christ, in the body, scars and all, to come and be in their midst. They didn’t just need his ideas. They needed his body to be with them.

Today, as our family grieves, I am reminded of the bodily presence of the Christian faith. Please, in the name of Jesus, do whatever you can to not replace the embodied presence we so desperately need as we gather each week for the bread and wine, the preached Word, the awkward greeting time, the singing, the smells, the physicality of it all with some podcast or video. Certainly, life has forced many of us (due to illness or being not-able-bodied) to have to access God’s community through means that may likely not be desired. But if possible—in Christ’s name—be in the room. We need touch.

The Ephesians didn’t hear about Jesus through the grapevine. They were transformed by Christ because Paul showed up. Remember this. We are like that little girl who was afraid of the dark. One night, she woke up, terrified, convinced in her imagination that there were monsters and creatures in her room ready to pounce. Running to her parents’ room, they gently instruct her to breathe deeply and return to her room. As they tucked her in, they said, “You needn’t be afraid, you are not alone here. God is in the room with you.” But they miss the girls’ deeper need. She didn’t just need a message. She needed a person.

“I know that God is here,” the little girl told her parents, “but I need someone in this room who has some skin.”¹

1. As told in Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1999), 77.