1 Corinthians 6: 12-20

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. 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. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. 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! 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.” 17 But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple[f] of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

corinth: wealthy, wild

Corinth was a wealthy and wild city.  It was Vegas, Hollywood, San Francisco, and New York—all wrapped up into one. There were people from every nation living there, and it was a major port. Sailors by the hundreds and thousands came to Corinth to visit the temple of Aphrodite there. Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, invited worship that was expressed sexually. The temple and many outlying shrines were invitations for men to honor the goddess by union with one of her servant girls—of which there were hundreds.  And it was their normal.  It was the normal Greco-Roman world. 

In Corinth also was a community of Christians.  I'm sure there was a synagogue.  And these Corinthians to which Paul writes were early converts to Christianity.  And, of course, it was hard to give up their old ways.  And so Paul is addressing their "normal lifestyle."  Their worldview was about to undergo a great change because their worldview was based in what is called "gnosticism."  And gnosticism has different ideas about what it means to be a human being than Judaism.  

Paul writes to the infant Church in Corinth, telling them that though they have been saved by grace alone, their earthly, fleshly lives still mattered more than they knew. Gnosticism held that matter—the material world—was evil while “spirituality”—by which they meant “things of the spirit world”—was good.   Your body was like a "soul cage" that unfortunately trapped and imprisoned your spirit, which was all things good. Gnostic religion largely involved trying to escape the bonds of the material world so your spirit might fly into the ether and through the seven heavens, and therein find enlightenment, wisdom, and peace in those higher planes.  Because this immaterial spirituality was so important, they said the body is unimportant.  It is just "a body."  This resulted in an enormous libertinism in regard to their bodies in general, and their sexuality in particular.   Because this flesh doesn't matter, neither does sexual behavior.

Paul’s new view

In direct opposition to Gnosticism, Paul tells them that their bodies—their flesh—is of infinite value in God’s eyes. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit of God. Once we are in Christ—baptized into His body—we become bearers of His Holy Spirit. The body is not lowly, but incredibly high, profoundly spiritual. Therefore, what we do with our bodies matters tremendously and there is no spirituality other than the one including our bodies. 

Paul's emphasis of this comes as he stands especially against sexual sin.  He says that sexual sin is, in fact, worse than other sins.   Because he says in other sins you're not being joined to another person.  If you steal or lie your body isn't united to another.  Paul held that there was a mystery about sex.  And that mystery is a mystery of connection. 

And that's a very different position than the Greek world and perhaps the modern American world that wants to say it's just sex.   It's just bodies.  Paul says No.  Our bodies participate in God's eternal glory.  Remember, Jesus' body was not left in the grave.  The Resurrection is not a  resurrection of disembodied spirituality. 

Remember all those old cartoons with Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird? [My apologies to anybody under a certain age—you've probably never seen a Sylvester cartoon!] When Sylvester is losing one of his many nine lives—say he falls out a high, city window to the sidewalk below— and in the cartoon what happens?  Well, out comes the "ghost Sylvester" in a white robe, a little halo and his harp and he goes up to Cat Heaven.  That image is not Christian in the least!  That image is Greek.  It is Gnostic.  It is not the Christian vision of resurrection.  Because resurrection, remember, will not leave our bodies in the grave forever.  Our bodies, like Christ's body, will be resurrected.  This flesh will live mysteriously in a transformed existence, and will live eternally.  That ought to scare you if you look at your fingernails.  For more reasons than one. Our bodies will participate in eternity.  This idea that we've nurtured that eternity is somehow a disembodied, ghostly, vaporous spirituality for eternity—that's the gnostic idea.  It is not the Christian idea.  Not the Jewish idea either.   Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and they mysteriously participate in eternal life in the Glory of God. That changes absolutely everything. 

how responsible?

So then, to the larger question: to what degree are we responsible for what we do with our bodies when it comes to life and death issues?  Where does our responsibility begin and end?  

Now, when it comes to man's control of nature and humankind's exercise or control over nature, we have been practicing this from the beginning of time.  It began with farming and continues today with all we do to alter our physical reality—from farming all the way to pharmaceuticals.  We have rightly exercised dominion over creation—sometimes not wisely—but it is in the human toolbox to control what we can.  

We do exercise a certain control over the natural world.  And we do so inside of ourselves as well.  When it comes to end-of-life issues we immediately face a world of ethical quandaries.   There are times when we determine that it is a better moral decision to take a life.  There are times when it is justifiable to take life.  Is it better to allow one person to be killed than to have 100 or a 1,000 die? Yes, it is.  And in terms of self-defense or military defense we will do pre-emptive strikes in order to preserve lives.  

The atomic bomb, while grotesque in its destructive power, may well have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the long run.  Capital punishment—the right to kill one person so that the others can live—raises plenty of questions. I think we're of different opinions on that in this congregation. Euthanasia is another deliberate and willful practice to end life.  Now, any of you that have had to put a dog down know the horror of that event.  My wife said she's never seen me cry harder than when I had to put our dogs Buttons and Velveeta down, but it was the right time and the right thing. They were starting to suffer and ending their lives when we did is—we believe—a mercy.  But do we allow people—human beings—to be euthanized?     Well, not easily.  It raises a lot of questions.  If we have the responsibility and the means to keep somebody alive, ought not we to keep them alive as long as possible?   Well, it depends; it's a messy issue.  Some people may be in agony.  It may be better to let their life come to an end.  Moral quandary.   

These issues are terribly complex.  It would be easy to spend a week on each of these issues,  especially as I raise up the question of abortion.  It is complex and it is complicated as an issue, culturally and personally.  As I’m saying throughout this series, we need our discussion of these things to be beyond merely political.

You want to know what the official position of the Presbyterian Church USA is on this?   It is a perfect picture of our country.  The PCUSA's position on abortion is:  "We are pro-life and we are pro-choice."  That's it!   That is the official position of the PCUSA.   We are a pro-life/pro-choice denomination.  It means that we have accepted papers that say abortion in most cases is wrong, and we also support a position that says only a woman, not the State, has he right to determine the viability of a pregnancy.  Think we’ll solve this here and now? Not likely.

But at the heart of it is that the end-of-life issues in all cases create—they put us into an area of moral uncertainty.  And I would remind you—as I remind myself—not to dumb-down any issue just to make it easier to have a stance on, because that is intellectually lazy.  It is sloth to simplify something in order to make an easy decision on.  No, we have to let it live in its full complexity and then still have our foot come down on what we feel God is calling us to do as right.

Other end-of life issues: palliative and hospice care.   Perhaps you, like me, have sat with families wherein someone is in slow decline and in great pain.  Is it moral to fill them up with morphine at the end so that they are oblivious to the pain and leave this world quietly?  I think it is.  It is humane, anyway.  Anyone can rationally disagree, saying that it is wrong, that God put them in this position and it's their cross to bear, and as Jesus rejected the sponge and the drugs on the cross, so should we.   This is the position of Christian Science and some other denominations.  I don't think they're wrong for having that position.  

And then there is suicide.  Suicide numbers are going up in this country.   It is hard to get good information because many suicides are covered by family members as accidents or just kept secret.  

Is it an unforgivable sin? I for one certainly do not think so. 

grievous matters

But what of this?  Making the big decision—playing God—willfully choosing to end a life?  Is it always bad?  Is it good just because we want to think it is?  There are things in this life that we feel are necessary but they are not celebrated, but grieved.  

My father fought in World War II.  He crossed Germany with Patton's Third Army, 4th Armored Division. He liberated at least three Nazi death camps—the most notable being Ohrdruf—but he never showed anything like pride or glee in having served.  There was never the least hint of  “Hooray! we won!”  His attitude throughout his life was as one remembering a nasty bit of business that had to be done, that nobody wanted to do, and as soon as it was done,  he was just glad it was over with and could get back to living.  It seems for me there are things for which this kind of attitude is appropriate.

There are things that necessarily must be done, but aren't to be celebrated.  They are to be grieved and acknowledged as just part of living in a fallen world.  Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do and you live with the consequences. 

The problem with most of these hot topics is that when people argue about them, as with everything else, they only bring it down to the level of the political and they fight about it.   Or when they talk about it they talk about exceptional cases only, or bring up the most bizarre hypotheticals.  What they don't talk about it is 90-plus percent of the practice.  What is really going on is what happens 95 percent of the time.   

Another dimension of these bio-ethics in not end of life, but other practices—research and experimentation.  You probably heard the horrid story of how the United Way procured intact fetuses for medical research from abortion doctors.  That's terrifying.  

Then there is cloning.   A doctor that lived in my neighborhood was famous for having cloned a human ear onto the back of a mouse—yeah! it caused the mouse to grow a human ear on its back!  Is this ethical?  Is it unethical?   Why haven't we cloned any humans yet?  Well, we're not doing it because here in America we feel that it isn't quite right—it's a little bit too much playing God.  By the way: they're doing it in China.  

We don't just charge ahead blindly into every progress or advance we can imagine.  And there's a reason for this.  Behind all of this is this prior idea that our bodies do matter.  

Furthermore, in terms of human responsibility there's the issue of climate change.   To what degree are we responsible for what is happening to the planet?  If you don't admit it or if you don't want to face environmental change,  you say that it is all according to natural causes of which we are largely ignorant.  The other choice is to say we're clearly responsible for something.  And if we are to be responsible, if we're going to exercise control over nature, we also have to exercise control over ourselves and do what we can to eliminate whatever degree we're contributing to the problem.  

I, for one, am rarely enthusiastic about Chicken Little in all of her forms in our world.  There are people who love Chicken Little, and every time Chicken Little says the sky is falling they line up and they show up in droves.  I don't deny the sky might be falling but I feel that to be responsible I need to learn more.  And the panic-making, the fear-mongering never has any good in it.  But behind it, before the idea of saving the planet was ever in our popular imagination, I would say that Christians have always been mindful not to be wasteful, not to do stupid stuff with what God has given us.  We have always had a word for it: stewardship.  

Stewardship plus

Stewardship has a lot less to do with giving to the church than it does the larger issue of spirituality—which is how  are you doing with what God has temporarily entrusted to you?  Your and my stewardship—it isn't about fundraising—it is about how we behave with the controls God has given to us.   Will we behave ethically?  Do we the gifts from God? 

This includes our bodies.  The number one cause of death in this country is heart disease and we know in many cases it's largely preventable.  Less food—more exercise.  If there's such a thing as sinful eating the Church is the greatest offender!  The issue is not I have to take care of my body better so I live longer.   The real issue of stewardship begins with the idea that you are not your own.  Your body doesn't belong to you.  The text says you were "bought with a price."  The body that you think of as "mine do whatever I want with,"  is not the Christian worldview.  The Christian worldview is that this body was created by God ultimately for His glory.  And what we do with our bodies matters enormously—more than we can imagine. Every one of us is called to a level of responsibility that we call stewardship.  It is the opposite view of gnosticism, and it is quite counter-cultural in America in the 21st Century to say, this body is a temple, I am not my own.  This body is not my possession, it belongs to the Lord.  It is a temple of His Holy Spirit.   What this means is that as we exist in the Body of Christ(through Baptism) His Holy Spirit lives in us as temples.  To know this is a good step toward responsibility and stewardship. 

Eternal Bodies

Our bodies matter.  Paul says all things are lawful for me.   It's not about legalistically determining what is right and wrong and then doing what's right and avoiding what's wrong.  All things are lawful—but not all things are good.  Not all things are helpful.  Not all things are beneficial and profitable for the Kingdom.  So regarding our own bodies, and regarding how our body affects the environment and affects other people, we practice responsibility and good stewardship.  

Again and  again,  we say Lord, I turn my life over to you. We don't merely mean,  O Lord,  you can have my spirit.  But rather, Lord, I give you my heart, my soul, my spirit, my flesh, my body, Lord, all these I dedicate to you and your glory.  Lord, all that I am belongs to you!

  I think self control follows that awareness.  And this is God's word proclaimed to us—we are vessels of the Holy Spirit.  What a marvelous thing!  Our bodies are not lowly animals, but participate in God's eternal, constant glory.

Let us seek diligently to help all God’s children make the transformation from being self-serving bodies to Temples wherein God’s Holy Spirit can knowingly dwell!