Second Sunday of Epiphany 2012

Epiphany 2, Year B | Corinthians 6:12-20| January 15th, 2012

 

The Feeding of Bodies

It is January 15th. Roughly 15 days ago, many of us made our New Years Resolutions. It’s been two weeks. How are your resolutions going? As a relatively new spiritual leader, I’ve been looking at the world with fresh eyes and I’m quite fascinated with time of the year. There’s this world-wide spirit of change and hope. And as a Christian, I have my own hope for the New Year. I look forward to experiencing the Kingdom of God here on Earth. I don’t know exactly what that looks like in our life here at Grace Church. But maybe that started on January 1st, when the whole world dedicated itself to change.

I’ve spoken to many people in this community about their Resolutions. Some have expressed a renewed resolve to practice mindfulness and living in the moment. Some have said that they want to be a better listener in the New Year. Some have committed to remembering how blessed they are, every day, and not to focus on small problems. And, of course, there have been a plethora of people renewing their commitment to keeping their bodies healthy.

January 1st was the first day of massive ad campaigns for Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, fitness clubs, and diet food. The front aisle of Walmart is filled with Atkins bars, workout clothes, and all sorts of things that healthy people are supposed to use. Perhaps not surprisingly, we’ve figured out how to commercialize New Year’s Resolutions of health and fitness. The Christmas stuff moved out, and the five pound weights moved in. Or maybe I’m just more aware of it all, since it was my own resolution to develop healthier habits in my day-to-day life.

Much like Christmas, the Church answers back to the secular world with a particular sentiment that Weight Watchers cannot provide here in this season of Epiphany. And it comes to us first, from a sort of surprising, alarming source – our reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. What a fantastic reading from 1st Corinthians this morning, right? Good ol’ Paul. He delivers the grit. Fornication! Prostitutes! Oh my.

It’s easy to get caught up in the more controversial aspects of Paul’s letters. After all, he was writing to communities that were into quite a bit of mischief and needed Paul’s not-so-gentle guidance. He was a source to be trusted for these struggling Christian communities. Paul knew all about the Law as a Pharisee and a Hebrew born of Hebrews, as he describes. He persecuted Christians. But his conversion experience was so powerful that he turned his life around in an instant. Jesus revealed Himself to Paul. Paul’s turnaround would rival anyone’s New Year Resolution. Paul’s new Christian life was a great January 1st moment. He was resolved to serve Christian community, so the Corinthians trusted this voice.

And sometimes this voice delivered some difficult news. It was Good News, but it wasn’t always what his readers wanted to hear. Today’s reading from one such letter, is an excellent example. And today, Paul is relating some good health guidelines to the Corinthians. There’s no talk of vegetable servings or eight glasses of water a day, but there are still things that very much apply to our own mission of a healthy life in Christ.

Paul is trying to express that we are more than just what our bodies do. Paul is trying to do the very difficult task of teaching what relationship our bodies have to God. He uses the example of eating food. Now, Christians can eat things that they could not when they were Jewish. All food is permitted under the law. So you can eat and eat and eat like a Roman, but that doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can do something, doesn’t automatically give you the authority to do it with abandon.

Tyler and I went on a cruise last year with a large group of friends. It to celebrate the completion of my General Ordination Exams. Because of the celebratory nature of the cruise, there was a tendency for our group to overindulge in the massive amounts of food. Essentially, every day we would eat until we were sick. We were taking theologian, Thomas Aquinas’s advice – who cautioned that rejecting the pleasures of food, given by God for the nourishment of our bodies and spirits, constitutes one of two types of sin opposing the virtue of temperance: “the sin of insensibility.” Or at least that was the seminarian justification for such eating. But Thomas Aquinas points out that there are many places in Scripture where food is akin to celebration. We often refer to our Eucharist as a “feast.” There is one reference in Isaiah that I especially like: “Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food” (Isaiah 55:2). There are ways to enjoy food and delight in it the way the good Lord intended our bodies to delight in it. Thanks, God.

Thomas Aquinas’s second sin that opposes the virtue of temperance, by the way, is gluttony. This is what Paul is warning the Corinthians against. But why would God care about how much we eat? It seems like a pretty standard biological need that has nothing to do with our spiritual well being, right? Paul isn’t just talking about eating or fornicating specifically. He is not saying that these things are inherently bad. It’s when these things are done without thought, without respect. He is talking about managing our bodies as temples. Think about this. Our bodies are God’s important creations. Our bodies are so special that God chose to be born into one – to live and breathe and eat as a human. Our bodies are as sacred a place as this sanctuary, because THIS biological mess is where Christ our Savior, God made Flesh, met the world as a human being. We take pretty good care of this sanctuary. We commit sextons to polishing and vacuuming, an altar guild to washing and preparing, florists to decorating, experts to voice the new organ, and many more. Teams of people swarm this place during the week to make sure that this place is a fitting tribute to our Lord whenever we come to meet God here. I’m not sure we can even take care of our bodies as well as we take care of this place! And at the same time, we know this won’t last for all of eternity. This building, eventually, will not be here. (Although we hope it lasts a good bit longer.)

We are called by God to consider our bodily forms as something to be treated with such respect and care. Paul says that sinning outside of the body is one thing. But sinning against the body, mistreating it in any way, is a sin against the Holy Spirit that lives inside of you. It shows a lack of appreciation for the gift with which God has blessed us. And this gift is especially wonderful and rare, because it is fleeting. It is bound by time and won’t last forever. In the scheme of things, you’ll be without a body a whole lot longer than you’ll be in one.

Sometimes though, bodies can feel burdensome and don’t feel like much of a gift. Oh, the things we could do if we didn’t have the limits of these stupid human forms. It seems like bodies never want to cooperate. They get tired and achy and sometimes they even quit altogether. Some blessings from God apparently feel like curses. But the blessing of a body is not in what it does, not in what it accomplishes. The blessing of a body is how God is honored by the body. It is how you wake up and listen to the Lord, and follow Jesus – all within our very human limits. It is the way of living moment to moment, rather than the results of living, that honors God in our bodily temples.

While we’re talking about our individual bodies, our skin and bones, we might as well talk about our corporate Body – capital B. The Body that we form in this community, here, today. A people gathered into the Body of Christ just as cells are gathered together into the physical body. We form the same kind of body I’ve been speaking to in this entire sermon – one to be cared for as a precious creation of God. Our community could consume a lot, use a lot of resources up, and feel fine, but should we? We could stop doing stewardship campaigns because they’re such a hassle and vestry meetings because they sometimes go late… and just let ourselves go, but do we? We could even stop polishing the wood and the brass and just let nature take its course. Instead, we make a choice; sometimes a weekly choice, sometimes a daily choice sometimes… an hourly choice. We choose to come into the Body of Christ and participate in that miracle of Christian Community. We make a choice not just to survive as a worshipping Body, but to grow and learn and make mistakes and fulfill our Call together. WE hear the voice of Jesus calling us to follow Him and we follow, not only as an individual, but as a whole. Mysteriously, Jesus knows exactly who we are and what we are and calls us into this Body by name.

 

Our bodies can do a lot of things. They can love and they can fight. They can jump and they can sleep. They can eat like a Roman… They can be an afterthought in our day to day life and turn into the vehicle of one’s schedule. Our bodies can hold us back.

Our bodies are a miracle. Our bodies, physical and corporate, were created by God for a purpose. Different bodies have different purposes, but all purposes that are given by God are blessed by God. So we must resolve ourselves to care for this body. We must not “eat” for this body, but rather, feed our bodies.

Whatever your New Years resolution is this year, I hope that you will join me in turning inwardly to Christ, and feed your bodies well.

 

The Rev. Meghan Holland