Oh No! Not Another Sermon About Sex!

Sermon delivered on the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, January 15, 2012 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: 1 Samuel 1.3-20; Psalm 139.1-5, 12-17; 1 Corinthians 6.12-20; John 1.43-51.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Given our epistle lesson this morning with its emphasis on avoiding sexual immorality, I see that you are all eyeing me warily, wondering if that is the main text on which I will preach. Yes it is, but you can relax. I am not going to lecture you on the evils of premarital or extramarital sex. Growing up in the 60s and 70s and being steeped in the “enlightened” thinking of that era that encouraged us to do our own thing and free ourselves from all those outdated, arbitrary, and old-fashioned rules and mores about sexual deportment, I used to hate hearing the occasional sermon on passages like today’s epistle lesson because most of the time it sounded to me like Paul was obsessed with sex and wanted to rain on my parade, so to speak, so that I wouldn’t have any fun. So I said to myself, “Why not pass on the favor to St. Augustine’s?” Seriously, I couldn’t have been more wrong about Paul (and Scripture in general), and I hope you will agree after hearing what I have to say. This morning I want us to look at what today’s texts point to beyond the issue at hand. Specifically I want to continue to develop the themes of baptism in the Spirit and new creation that we started to look at last week to see what we can learn about being  faithful disciples of Jesus.

In this morning’s OT lesson, we are told that the word of God was rare in the days of Eli. It’s important for us to remember that the story of Eli and Samuel occurred in a dark period of Israel’s history known as the period of the Judges. I don’t have time to go into why this period was so dark but the book of Judges sums up the problem quite nicely. It ends with this rather stark verse: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit” (Judges 21.25). In other words, everyone had the freedom to do their own thing.

And we get the implications of this because it seems that increasingly we too are living in an age where we have no king (I’m thinking of Jesus, not our elected leaders) and everyone does as they see fit. This gets to be more than a little worrisome because there seems to be a direct correlation between people doing their own thing and the diminishing availability of the word of God. Why is this? We remember Jesus’ sobering words that it is out of the human heart all kinds of evil come (cf. Mark 7.20-22) so we realize that doing our own thing may not be the healthiest thing for us to do, especially if we see the word of the God becoming increasingly rare in our own lives or society. We remember Paul’s warning that one way God’s judgment manifests itself is for God to give us up to our own evil desires (cf. Romans 1.18-32) so that we see an acceleration of moral decay. This is exactly what seems to have happened to Eli in today’s OT lesson. He had been so busy doing his own thing that it dulled his ability to hear God’s voice so that it took him three times to realize that young Samuel was hearing God call to him.

If we are at all interested in taking our relationship with God seriously and if we care at all about other people, not to mention ourselves, we had better pay attention to what is going on here. As the creation narratives of Genesis remind us, God created us in his own image, not so that we would be free to do our own thing, especially given the human race’s track record, but to be wise stewards of God’s creation and to reflect God’s glory into the world by how we live our lives. Of course we humans didn’t get that memo and decided we would rather play God and reflect our own glory into the world instead of God’s, and it has been going downhill ever since.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, thanks be to God, and this brings us to today’s epistle lesson because Paul is reminding the Corinthians and us about the Good News we have. The presenting issue is sex but Paul is really schooling the Corinthians on what it means to be good stewards of God’s gifts and the hope that we all have as Christians. Before we look at what Paul says, we need to put this passage in its proper context. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul has just taken the church to the woodshed, admonishing them for allowing one of their members to carry on a sexual relationship with his stepmother, apparently all in the name of Christian freedom. And in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul goes on to talk about the proper context for sexual activity, which of course is marriage. Sandwiched in between is today’s text where Paul helps us get our minds right about the proper use of both our bodies and the freedom we have in Christ.

In today’s lesson Paul uses the ancient teaching technique known as the diatribe in which Paul cites the opinion of an imaginary interlocutor and then refutes or qualifies it. In doing so, we notice two critical points he is making. First, Paul takes on the mistaken notion that true freedom means doing anything you want, doing your own thing. Not so, says Paul, because not everything is beneficial for either the individual or the group. For example, if you want to tear apart a church, just encourage the minister to have an affair with one of his or her parishioners and see what happens. Freedom does not mean license to do what we please. We see Paul saying something similar in his letter to the Romans. “What then?” Paul asks. “Shall we go on sinning so that grace might increase (i.e., so that we give God more chances to forgive us)? Certainly not! How can we who have died to sin go on living in it” (cf. Romans 6.1-13)? No, if we are going to be in union with Christ, we have to crucify our sinful desires (cf. Luke 9.23) so that we can become like him and Paul is reminding us about that here and in Romans (and elsewhere).

Second, in using the analogy about food and the stomach and God destroying both, Paul takes on the classic pagan disdain for the doctrine of the bodily resurrection and demolishes it. We all know this argument because it is used in its several variations by many in our own culture today. It goes something like this. What we do with our bodies is of no consequence because when we die, we are through with our bodies forever. That means we are free to eat what we want, have sex when and with whomever we want, and generally do anything to our body that we want. Sadly this is the kind of thinking that can also result when Christians teach that a disembodied eternity is the end game. This is also where we get the rather bizarre notion of “victimless crimes” like prostitution, etc. At the root of this line of thinking is the old gnostic heresy that our body and other created things are not important while “spiritual” things are.

“Not so!” cries Paul. “Don’t you know that your body is not yours, but God’s? Don’t you know that your bodies were bought at a terrible price so that your alienation and hostility toward God could be ended forever? Don’t you know that your body houses God’s Spirit who lives in you? Don’t you know that God intends to redeem you by raising your mortal body from the dead and equipping you with a new one that is fitted to live in the promised new creation that Jesus’ resurrection announced? In other words, Paul is telling us that our body is important and that we have a future and a hope in God’s new creation because of Jesus’ death and resurrection [read 1 Corinthians 15.42-44, 51-58]. Paul is also reminding us that we have God’s Spirit living in us, the very Spirit we saw last week that we receive at our baptism, to help us become the human beings God created us to be, humans that have God’s image restored in us so that we reflect God’s goodness and glory into the world just the way God intended, i.e., the way of Jesus.

If all this is true, then as Paul reminds us here, why would we want to defile our bodies and the Spirit living in us by having sex outside of marriage, the only context God intended for us to have sex when he created us (cf. Genesis 2.24)? Think about it in this way. Most of us would be horrified to open a messy home to a visitor or to purposely offend him while he is visiting. So we take the time and effort to get our houses ready for our friends to visit and we do the things while they are visiting that bring honor and happiness to everybody involved. If we understand how to do these things on a human level, why would we who believe that we have been bought with the price of Christ’s blood want to do the things that would offend or hinder the Holy Spirit living in us, the very seal of God’s promise to us that he has redeemed us in Christ (cf. 2 Corinthians 1.21-23)? It just doesn’t make sense. Living faithfully with the Spirit living in us is hard enough as it is. Trying to live faithfully without the Spirit living in us is impossible.

But we will miss the deeper meaning Paul has in mind here if we get fixated on sex or read passages like this as list of Christian dos and don’ts to be properly moral (or immoral). What Paul has in mind here is the greater truth of God’s promised new creation that is ours in Christ. That is why our body and what we do with it (or don’t do with it) matters. We see this truth clearly illustrated in today’s psalm and implicitly in today’s gospel lesson when Jesus essentially tells his new followers that he (and by implication his body) is going to be the new Temple where God dwells and heaven and earth intersect. Elsewhere in Scripture, we see the body’s importance illustrated powerfully in the Incarnation of Jesus. Think about it. The body must be important because God took on our body to save us and restore our relationship with him! The body’s welfare is surely one of the reasons the gospels focus on the healing and feeding miracles of Jesus. The body is important! That is also why bodily resurrection matters because God promises to redeem our fallen and mortal bodies by giving us new resurrection ones. The body is important! We miss this entirely if we focus on what Paul is saying about sex and ignore what Paul tells us here and elsewhere about the fact that God has bought our bodies with a price and has big plans for them. This, BTW, is why Christians have traditionally buried their dead and do not believe in defiling dead bodies in any way, let alone live ones. We believe the body has a future, not in its present condition but in God’s new creation.

When, by the help of the Spirit living in us, we understand this, it will fundamentally change how we read the Bible and see our world. Paul is telling us that while rules matter, we need to think about why we do what we do (or refrain from doing). Putting to death our sinful nature depends on us thinking about and reflecting on what urges and behaviors need to stay and which ones need to go. When we keep the end game of new creation in mind with its goal of a fully restored humanity that reflects the glory of God in his promised new creation, it gives us a framework to help us better assist the Spirit as he shapes us gradually into the image of Christ so that we can become like him. This is surely what Paul has in mind when he tells us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians. 2.12-13).

This knowledge will also help us fight the increasingly prevalent form of gnosticism that is enjoying popularity in our culture by proclaiming the radical love that God has for the totality of creation and made manifest in Jesus Christ. Our culture increasingly wants to consign religion and faith to the “spiritual realm” so that we are focusing more on how to get to heaven than on how to allow God to use us as agents of his healing love and new creation right here and now. If we focus on “spiritual things” or a privatized spirituality, we are much less likely to be a nuisance to the powers and principalities of this world who encourage us to do our own thing, and all in the name of a freedom that kills because it leads us to activities that dehumanize us and inhibit the Spirit’s presence in us. But when we get that our body and all of God’s creation is good and that God has acted decisively on our behalf in the death of Jesus, it changes our focus and makes us look around at God’s good but fallen world. We will be concerned about not only our body but others’ bodies, and not necessarily in a sexual manner. So for example, hunger and injustice and all other kinds of dehumanizing activities will become increasingly intolerable for us as well as a false morality in the name of freedom that can lead only to death.

And on a more personal level, when we understand that the body has a future and is important to God, it will help us deal better with our own bodily sufferings and infirmities and that of our loved ones. When I watched my mother actively die over a three day period, I kept reminding myself, with the Spirit’s help, that this wasn’t the end game for her and that made all the difference in the world. Don’t misunderstand. Watching her die was painful beyond description. But in the midst of death and grief there was the hope of life and new creation. Just as in today’s OT lesson, God’s lamp did not go out for me and neither will it for you if you pay attention to it. Don’t let anyone or anything rob you of the hope that is ours in Jesus.

But to have that hope, you need to do your homework. You need to wrestle with the whole of Scripture and think and reflect deeply on these issues, both as individuals and together as Christ’s body. Otherwise, you can be assured that the powers and principalities will move to cut you off from your very source of life, God’s Spirit living in you. If they succeed, you will be more inclined to do as you see fit, which will not bode well for any of us. But when, by God’s grace, you are blessed with the faith and knowledge of what God has done for you in Jesus and stand firm in the promise of new creation by the power of the Spirit, you will be ready to be the human God created you to be and you really will have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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