From the Pastor – October 2025
In September, Wheat Ridge Ev. Lutheran Church had the wonderful opportunity to welcome Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Boyle from Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, IN. He presented on The Theology of the Body for our Lay Conference, which included a number of members from surrounding congregations. I pray that they were as blessed by his presentation as the members of WRELC were. Apart from preaching at our Divine Service, Dr. Boyle also presented a Continuing Education course at WRELC in which we had 10 pastors and Professional Church Workers in attendance. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped with these events. I believe that they were both a great success and they could not have taken place without your help!
As I contemplate upon the Lay Conference and Continuing Education course there are a number of things that come to the forefront. First among them is the importance for the Church to contemplate the things of the Body as we go about our personal and ecclesiastical life. Recognizing the Body, both our individual bodies and our Church body, the care and importance that our Lord has placed upon the Body should, in fact, govern the way in which we conduct ourselves in church practice and personal piety.
As a Church Body, made to be such not by artificial agreements or arbitrary human decisions, but instead made to be the mystical Body of Christ with Him as our head, we are privileged to care for the brothers and sisters around us. As St. Paul tells us in I Corinthians 12, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” As members, one of another, the hand cannot say to the foot that we have no need of it. Neither should we be apathetic to the sufferings that those who are sitting next to us in the Divine Service are going through. Their cares are our cares. Their trials are ours, as well. And as such, we should seek to help them in as far as we can individually and corporately. We also should not feel as if we are a burden to our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, for God has placed us in the midst of the Church, as members of His Body, that we might care for each other. In short, let your brother and sister in Christ be of service to you in the same way, even more so, that you invite them to rejoice with you during the happy times.
We must also recognize that this body that God has given to us is not an afterthought. We are more than just a soul trapped within a body for a finite amount of time, but instead we are an embodied soul. This means that to be human, to be made in the image of God, is to have both body and soul. Our final resting place is not to escape this body of death, but for this body to be sanctified and made holy, to be newly created in the resurrection on the Last Day. That is why we confess in the Apostles’ Creed that we believe in, “the resurrection of the body.”
If God deemed it as good to create this body, redeemed this body, sanctify this body, and one day resurrect this body, then the way in which we go about viewing our bodies and the bodies of those around us should be in accordance with the Word of God. This has ongoing ramifications for a number of different situations including, but not limited to: the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, marriage, sexuality, the reality of man and woman, Christian burial, adoption, church practice, closed communion, baptism, and the like. The way in which we view and deal with each of these things should be guided by what God says about them, not about what we might feel, what society might say, what the demons will lie, or about the sufferings that we undergo. Again, in short, God dictates our reality and who we are, not us!
My prayer is that we, as a Church Body and as individual embodied souls, might think more deeply about the gift of the Body. For these things are not arbitrary, but are vitally important in how we confess our faith to the world around us and how we conduct ourselves individually and corporately. Let us continue to have these conversations with each other, and I would welcome you to engage me with them as well. It is a gift to life together this life as the Body of Christ! Let us go forward with the sure and confident hope of who God is, who He is for us, and who He has made us to be in His image.
If you would like further reading on this subject check out Wonderfully Made: A Protestant Theology of the Body by John Kleinig in our Church Library.
Rev. Eli Lietzau
