Cycling Meditation

Pastor’s Column, 

Madison Eagle 

May 16, 2013

Almost fifteen years ago, I began riding a bicycle on the roads of Madison County.   My motivation was to improve my health and control my weight.    I have come to see love for cycling in relation to my Christian faith.

The most significant relationship has to do with the importance of the body in a Christian worldview, and, the responsibility we recognize to be good stewards of our physical health.   According to the first story in the Bible, upon beholding the completed creation, God declared it all good.  The earth is good, the plants and animals are good, human bodies are good!  

Most important of all, in terms of the importance of the body in the Christian worldview, is the preposterous claim the New Testament and Christian tradition makes: that in Jesus, the Carpenter Prophet of Nazareth, the very Word of God “was made flesh and pitched his tent among us.”

Because of all this, those who are shaped by Christian faith can never ignore the importance of the body or deny our responsibility to and for the body—our own and those of our brothers and sisters, especially the poor.

One of the very earliest ideas about Jesus that the church very quickly recognized as a threat to the faith was the idea that Jesus wasn’t really human; that he didn’t really have a body; that he didn’t really suffer, bleed, and die on the cross.  It only seemed that he had.  This heresy was called Docetism from the Greek word that meant “to seem.”

It’s easy to see the attraction of this view.   How can God who is infinite take on the finite, we wonder?  How can God who is awesome in power be fully present in a limited and weak human being?  How can God who is the very source of life, experience death?   Yet, the teachers of the early Church quickly recognized that to accept such a view undermined much of what was essential to Christian faith and life.

I fear that many contemporary Christians are practical Docetists.   While we affirm with our lips that Jesus is fully divine and fully human, we don’t really take the human part seriously.  As a result, we don’t take seriously the goodness of our bodies and the importance of caring for them.  

There is a second respect in which cycling has become an important part of my Christian discipleship.  Surely, every authentic Christian life must include regular time for solitude in the presence of God.  Time alone on a bicycle cruising the beautiful Madison countryside is no substitute for weekly worship with the Christian community or even personal prayer. But for me, it has become a significant dimension of my “time apart” to reflect, to celebrate the goodness of life and to “hold in the Light,” as our Quaker brothers and sisters like to say, those matters of deep concern to me.

Finally, one of the things I’ve been able to do as a cyclist is to use my love for the sport as a way of raising money to support charities.

Every June, I cycle across the state with a group of 15-25 Virginia United Methodists to the church’s annual conference.   Along the way, we stop to visit as many local churches as we can.  Our purpose is to increase support for the offering that will be taken at Annual Conference. The offering funds important ministries in Virginia and around the world that serve the needs of children for better education, health care, or nutrition.  

This weekend, I’ll be riding in the 26^th Annual Tour de Madison.  It is not a charity ride, but I am grateful that it too provides aid to local groups needing financial support.  This year, for example, volunteers from Rochelle Ruritan Club will be helping out for the first time.  I can still remember how excited they were about the donation they will get for their efforts:  “Oh, that will be a great help to our college scholarship fund!”

What are you doing to care for your body?   Are you able to find time apart for solitude before God?  What creative ways do you have for “doing all the good you can, to all the people you can?” (John Wesley)