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Sermon for Epiphany 2, Year B, 2000

Trinity Church, Princeton

Reading: 1 Corinthians 6:11b-20

Fornication
is out of fashion.
Not, I suspect, the act,
but certainly the word.
After all, when was the last time
you heard it spoken
in ordinary conversation?
It's not something
we like to talk about,
especially in church.

And I did my best
to avoid it too,
when I saw what was in the New Testament reading
set in the lectionary today.
When I was asked to choose
between the Old and the New Testament readings
for the eight and nine a.m. services,
I chose the Old.
I'd far rather preach
on Samuel
and Eli.
Because we all know
that the church has been damaged
by the sex obsessions
of some conservative religious folk,
who have made us a laughing stock
in the real world that we have to live in
every day.
And people have been damaged
by some of the hate
incited,
not always deliberately,
in the name of piety.
And some of us
have been damaged
as well.
All in all,
it seems that talking about sex
is better left
to the expertise
of the medical profession,
and the privacy of our homes.

But as I began to prepare the sermon,
it began to sink in
that maybe
we shouldn't keep avoiding this,
maybe this reading from I Corinthians
is important to talk about,
even from the pulpit.

Most scholars think
that I Corinthians
is a letter to a community
in a bit of a mess.
Its seems from the outside
to be doing okay,
the church is alive and well,
but if you were to go and talk with a few of its members,
you'd soon discover
that there were all sorts of problems,
things like divisions between church members,
power games and lawsuits,
money paid for ministry,
and sex.
Some relatively trivial and easily dealt with,
others a bit more difficult.
The apostle Paul decides
that something needs to be done about things.
But travel is a bit more difficult than nowadays, and while he's got a visit
planned, or so he says at the end of the letter,
and something needs to be said, sooner, rather than later.
So sooner it is,
and he writes this letter.

All sorts of rumors have reached him,
and one of them is,
to use the modern expression,
that people have been sleeping around.
It's no big secret.

And if you ask them about it
they'll tell you there's no big problem. After all, the whole point of this
Christian thing
is that God loves us, and forgives us,
the whole point
is that those old Jewish laws
don't apply to us any more.
This Christian faith
is about freedom,
haven't you heard?

But hang on, says Paul. Wait a minute.
What you say is true, as far as it goes,
but being free
doesn't mean that everything you do
is a good idea.
What you do matters, and there are good things you can do
and there are bad things,
things which are sensible
and things which are dumb.
And sleeping around
falls into
the dumb
category.
It can hurt you,
it can hurt other people.
And it's not just about diseases,
which were no doubt
as much a problem then
as they are
now.
You see,
this
is not
just about sex.
That's the extreme case.
It's about what we do with our bodies
every minute
of every day.
Because our bodies
have something to do with God
and the way
that we are made.

The way we clergy sometimes present Christianity
you could be forgiven for thinking
that faith is all about
what you do in your head.
We've bought into
that ancient dualism
between minds and bodies,
spirit and flesh.
And of course here in Princeton,
what we do with our minds
is very important.

But what Paul wants to say
and what I began to realize as I thought about it
is that faith is about more than our minds.
Faith is about the whole of us,
and that includes our bodies.
Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, Paul writes.
God is not just "out there",
but "in here",
deep within us,
present in all our physicality.
We can use our bodies to glorify God,
or we can use them in other ways,
ways
which undermine
the very integrity of who we are,
before God,
and before ourselves.

One of the best books I've read in the last year
is by Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, a priest up in Massachusetts.
It's called "Holy Hunger - a memoir of desire",
and is the story of her struggle with overeating,
and of the spiritual struggles
which went with it.

Let me read a little bit of what she wrote,
"It's as much a mistake to assume that compulsive eaters love food or love
to
eat it as it is to assume that sexually promiscuous persons love the
partners
that they seduce and discard. In my years of compulsive eating, I never
loved food. I craved it, I needed it, I felt greedy for it, I used it, but
I
never loved it. I would have loved to have loved it. I would have loved to
know what it was I really wanted, what it was that I really felt. But since
I
had no clue what, if anything, I really loved, and since it surely wasn't
food, I
never paused to give thanks for the plants and animals whose bodies I
consumed. I never considered with gratefulness the human labor that had
gone into growing, harvesting, or preparing the food that was in my hands.
I
never paused to contemplate what I was about to eat; to notice its texture
and temperature, color and shape. I never tasted the food with full
attention, never swallowed it with delight. I certainly never understood
how
the act of eating - even solitary eating - might deepen my connection with
other human beings, with the natural world, or with God."

Our bodies
are an incredible part
of who we are.
We can use them in ways which end up
destroying us
or we can use them in ways
which are truly life-giving,
ways which help us connect
to the life-giver of all.

Glorify God in your bodies,
write Paul to the Corinthians.
And just a little later, in the middle of all the things
we would rather not talk about,
we find something which begins to make sense
of what this glorifying God in our bodies
is all about.

For just a couple of chapters later,
we find that wonderful narration
of the Lord's Supper, the Holy Communion, the Eucharist
the very words
which we repeat
week after week, year after year.
This is my body. This is my blood.
Take them
in remembrance of me.

We taste, we swallow, we take in
God.
Our bodies
become one
with that holy body.

And in that act,
whatever we have done,
that broken body of Christ
cleans and fills and satisfies our bodies,
and our minds and our spirits,
and we become
the holy body
of Christ
on earth.

Amen.

Raewynne J. Whiteley
16 January, 2000