6:12 "All things are lawful for me," but not all things are beneficial. "All things are lawful for me," but I will not be dominated by anything. 6:13 "Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food," and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 6:14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. 6:15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 6:16 Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, "The two shall be one flesh." 6:17 But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.
6:18 Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 6:19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? 6:20 For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
‘Love
God, and do what you want.’
This
was a saying of St Augustine, who lived from the year 354 to 430.
But
the church in Corinth,
brought
into existence 300 years before Augustine,
might
have liked this statement a lot too.
Paul
founded the church in Corinth,
and
he had some problems with it.
Corinth
was a Roman colony far out in the backwaters of Greece.
It
was a former military colony.
It
had, if you will, a reputation.
Sin
City.
It
was like the Las Vegas of the ancient world.
Paul
founded the church in Corinth,
and
then left to found other churches in other cities.
But
the Corinthians were problem children.
He
had to keep writing letters back,
telling
them to get their act together.
The
Corinthians really missed the boat on some things.
They
had some what we would consider interesting opinions.
One
of these was that because they were spiritual,
because
they had been given the Holy Spirit
and
could do all sorts of interesting things like speaking in tongues,
that
the things of the body didn’t really matter.
Maybe
they were misled by the teaching
that
the food laws that the Jewish people had lived with for years
didn’t
apply to those who were in Christ.
They
had all sorts of statements such as ‘All things are lawful for me,’
and
‘Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food,
and
God will destroy both one and the other.’
And
so they believed that they also might satisfy other hungers as well,
even
to the point of patronizing the temple prostitutes
that
the other Corinthians patronized.
After
all, if they were free in spirit,
what
did it matter what they did with the body?
This
was not a body-affirming spirituality,
it
was a body-denying spirituality,
which
manifested itself in body-affirming behavior.
Did
you get that?
The
body and the things of the body were not important,
they
didn’t really matter,
it’s
what was inside that counted.
We’ve
heard that statement, right?
And
it’s true, but sometimes true statements can lead us astray.
Christianity
has often been misunderstood as a body-denying spirituality,
especially
by some Christians.
But
this is not true at all.
Christianity
has a body-affirming spirituality.
This
means that the spirit is not divorced from the body,
and
everything the body does counts,
the
body has everything to do with the spirit.
This
is true because of the incarnation.
For
God himself loved the world so much
that
he himself took flesh.
He
himself adopted the bodies we wear.
The
Son served the Father in the body,
and
gave his body on the cross for our sakes.
Again,
true statements can sometimes lead us astray.
We
know that our bodies belong to us.
‘It’s
my body.’
And
this is true.
It’s
true because our bodies
should
be free from violence, from coercion,
from
control by other human beings.
And
this is most clearly seen today in sexual matters.
Indeed,
the #me too movement has come about
because
too many people have used other people’s bodies
as
objects for gratification, to show their power,
and
our bodies should be free from that, because it affects the spirit.
Well
we might think
that
St. Paul himself would have understood us,
that
in focusing on the Corinthians’ sexual lives
he
was not being prudish or prurient,
but
articulating a truth,
that
what people do in the body has much to do with their spirits?
And
that God does not desire people to do violence to another,
or
to coerce another, or to control another?
But
as I have stated,
in
another way our bodies are not our own
to
do with as we please,
but
instead they belong to God,
and
we are to freely do as he pleases.
God
does not coerce or control us,
instead
he calls us to glorify him in our bodies,
as
St. Paul says.
In
baptism we have been made members of his body,
that
is, our bodies are extensions of his body.
We
are to freely do what he did.
And
through our bodies he does what he does today.
He
serves, he forgives, he encourages and blesses,
he
feeds others, he himself prays, he himself gives bodily comfort and sustenance.
Martin
Luther says,
‘Creatures
are only the hands, channels and means
through
which God bestows all things.’
This
is how we are to be with our bodies.
To
do no violence, to avoid coercing another with word or deed,
to
not control another,
but
instead to use our bodies to bless others.
The
negative, what we are not to do,
needs
to be balanced and perhaps overbalanced by the positive.
If
I were to have you take away something from the sermon,
it
would be what St. Paul says,
‘Glorify
God in your body.’
We
are to glorify God by what we do –
in
how we eat: we do not live to eat but we eat to live.
in
how we speak: to build up and not tear down others.
in
how we behave: not to control others but to bless and comfort them,
never
denying them their selfhood.
We
are to glorify God with where our feet take us, what our hands are set to,
what
our eyes look at and our ears hear,
with
how we use our time and money.
It
may well sound hokey,
but
when we ask ourselves,
Does
this glorify God?
our
actions might be different.
If
you disbelieve this,
think
of those who are manifestly evil in the world,
and
then ask yourself whether things would be different
if
they honestly asked themselves the same question.
If
the answer is yes,
then
perhaps we should ask,
If
it’s true for them, why isn’t it true for us?
Augustine
said, ‘Love God, and do what you want.’
This
is what that means -
When
we love God, we desire to glorify him.
Then
our freedom becomes not a freedom from,
but
a freedom for,
freedom
to glorify God, freedom to serve others.
