Honoring God with our Bodies [Baptism, Bodies, & Masculinity, Week 2]

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

I Corinthians 6:12-20

I considered a different title for the sermon.  Something like, “Free Sex Advice from an Ancient, Opinionated Jew.”  But I went a different direction, since I didn’t want to encourage your suspicion that the Apostle Paul is an unlikely source for guidance in the life-long project of honoring God with our bodies. 

 

These readings raise helpful questions for people like us.  The Psalmist confesses that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  And so how can we receive and welcome our bodies as gifts from God, and wonderfully made?  Put differently, how do we honor our bodies, our desires, and our sexuality, without becoming slaves to every impulse that appears?   Or to raise a slightly different question: When it comes to sexuality and pleasure, how can we move from questions about ‘what can I get away with?’ to better questions about how desire and pleasure fit within larger pictures of personal flourishing and the flourishing of the wider community?

Those kinds of profound, potentially transformative, questions come directly from crusty old Paul, an ancient Jewish bachelor!  Now the particular issue before Paul and the early Christians at Corinth concerned the ongoing practice of men in the congregation visiting prostitutes for sex.  Of course women were having sex too, and perhaps even occasionally enjoying it.  But you won’t find any questions about women’s desire and sexuality in our reading.  For ancient Romans, the pleasure and satisfaction that can come from sexual expression was imagined only for men.  So we will have to listen for the ways in which the good news of Jesus Christ might speak to us in our very different time and place.

My approach to the sermon today is not overly concerned with the particular problem of men visiting prostitutes.  If you need my opinion on that, I’d probably advise against.  In fact, were we to talk about issues surrounding prostitution today, we would need to raise a whole range of issues about injustice, about sex trafficking, and about what we can do to help those who wind up in sex work.  Those are important issues, just not the ones I am pursuing today.  Instead I want to listen for how Paul’s arguments about sex, bodies, and desire might bear on the different kinds of challenges that we face.

This summer one of our favorite sites in England was the city of Bath, where Roman baths built atop hot springs sit right in the middle of the city.  Ancient baths were places for bathing, for steaming in a sauna, for exercise, for getting a massage, for a scrub, for a nap, for musical concerts, for lectures, or for business meetings.  They were therapeutic – much like a full-scale spa - places to tend to the body and to seek healing.  Our tour guides suggested that various forms of sexual connections were commonplace.  This particular bath was a shrine to the goddess Sulis Minerva.  And archaeologists had unearthed and reconstructed a massive carving of the goddess that adorned the baths.  The baths were associated with the gods.  And so care for the body, healing, health, and pleasure were all woven together with religious observance.  Keeping this in mind can help us understand Paul’s concerns about the role of healthy sexual expression for people who have received baptism.

Now I want you to at least briefly consider Paul’s arguments about sex.  I don’t think faith requires us to automatically agree with Paul.  But I do think faith requires us to follow Paul’s lead in trying to think “Christianly” about the connections between baptism, bodies, sex, and desire.  Faith invites us to imagine our sexual lives as part of our discipleship to Jesus Christ.

Paul’s basic argument is to encourage us to “honor God with our bodies” (vs. 20).  So then, how does that work?  What kinds of sexual expression and what ways of living with the body and its desires and pleasures would “honor God”?  Consider the three specific arguments Paul makes in support of the larger theme of “honoring God with our bodies.”

His first argument is simply that our bodies are important.  The Corinthians were part of a culture that viewed the physical body as less important than the “soul.”  Though they had heard the good news of Jesus Christ and been baptized into a new way of life, they continued to assume that God would “destroy” the physical body with its troublesome urges and needs.  The Corinthian slogan was “Food for the body and the body for food, but God will destroy them both.”  What they meant was that bodies need sexual pleasure like hungry people need food.  Just get what you need.  Bodies aren’t part of the salvation story anyway.  God will get rid of these troublesome bodies when we’re finally released into some kind of angelic existence, they assumed.  So Paul has to argue that what God creates and loves are material things.  What God saves and redeems are embodied people.  And just as God raised the crucified Jesus, so too God will raise us with resurrection bodies of some type.  So your physical body, in all its beautiful complexity, was not “made for porneia,” argues Paul.  Your body was made for the Lord.  Our bodies are, in fact, “temples” of the Holy Spirit.

His second argument is that sexual expression affects the health and well-being of our wider community.  Paul invites us to imagine our bodies as members of Christ’s body.  And he encourages us to pursue forms of sexual expression and sexual commitment that will enhance and affirm our role as members of wider communities.  Paul urges us to flee porneia (sexual immorality), because “All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body (v. 18).  He is not making an individualistic point that sexual sins are worse than other kinds of sins.  That kind of puritanical thinking is what fuels so much of the shame that surrounds sexuality in our culture.  Instead, Paul’s point is that irresponsible and unfaithful sexual habits bring into the congregation, into the wider community, a kind of unhealthy energy that can have a damaging effect on others.  What surprises American Christians as much as anything is the realization that sex isn’t private, but public.  That sex is a matter of community life and community health.  That sex and desire are part of our discipleship to Jesus Christ. 

His third argument is about the power of sexual connections and sexual expression.  The men of Corinth were being rather casual about their sexual connections with prostitutes.  And one way to describe our current sexual climate is an attempt to be very casual about sex.  This casualness about sexual connections is an understandable pendulum swing away from old-fashioned and puritanical approaches to bodies and desire and sex as dirty.  It is also understandable in light of the fact that those who marry are marrying much later than they were fifty years ago; and in the light of the fact that many are choosing not to marry at all.

But Paul’s view is that sexual connections and faithful devotion sit very close to one another.  That is, Paul argues that our sexual habits are part of a broader way of life that expresses our life’s deepest commitments and allegiances.  It seems to us like exaggeration when Paul warns that sex with prostitutes creates the same kind of “oneness” that marriage does.  But keep in mind the problem Paul is addressing.  The men in the congregation are visiting prostitutes at a shrine or temple that represents a rival commitment to their baptism into Jesus Christ.  Now we don’t have a local religious shrine where sex is available as a form of devotion to the local gods.  But we would be wise to see the powerful forces at work in our sexual lives.  According to Paul, our sexual lives will express either a commitment to Jesus’ way of life, which is the way of care, respect, delight, responsibility, affection and gratitude; or they will express an allegiance to a rival way of life characterized by selfishness, indifference, power, dominance, addiction and infidelity.

Of course we have not explored every question you have about what baptism has to do with sex.  But it’s important that we try to have these conversations together.  And it is wonderful to be an inter-generational congregation, especially on days like today.  These questions are important whether you’re eight, or eighteen, or forty-eight, or eighty-eight.  How do we honor the development of our bodies, our desire, and our sexuality across a whole lifetime? 

Children need to learn to love their bodies, and to respect the bodies of others.  They need to be protected from abuse of course, but protected as well from inappropriate imagery.  They need to be shown affection.  And they need to see caring physical affection shared between adults. 

Teenagers need our support as their bodies change, as they enter a stage in life where powerful urges and attractions are part of normal human development.  They need our support as they express their own curiosity.  They need to learn to honor the bodies of others.  They need help navigating a period of life when insatiable curiosity and the availability of digital imagery can be an unhealthy mix.  But perhaps more than anything, they need to know that they are loved - and that when they do make sexual mistakes there is always renewal and healing in God’s gracious ways of dealing with us.

We adults need help integrating healthy sexuality with the rest of our life commitments.  We need it whether married or single, whether sexually active or not.  We need help healing from the past.  We need help untangling some of the ways our sexuality can become twisted or misaligned.  We need encouragement to seek wise, caring expressions of pleasure.  And as we age into our later years, we will of course experience changes in our bodies and in our sexual habits.  And as we age, we might even need some freedom from the assumption that only the sexually active life can bring fulfillment and satisfaction.  Sex is important, but it’s not everything.

And then no matter what age we are, how do we honor the health, the normality, the goodness of sexual energy and sexual attraction as part of the good world God created and loves?  Some people live in terror of their sexual feelings and their sexual attractions.  Their lives look like “whack a mole” where they monitor themselves for any fantasy that might rise from beneath the surface, ready to knock it back down.  On the other side, some people live as if every sexual urge or momentary attraction should be acted upon and come to physical expression.  Think of Matt Lauer with a button beneath his desk to lock his office door, just in case the urge for sex ever strikes him during a staff meeting.

Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, is about a man who finds himself in a little community called Port William, KY, serving as the community barber, grave digger, and church janitor. The most powerful moment of Jayber’s life is when he falls in love with the school teacher, Mattie Chattham.  He’s outside in the church yard, picking up trash, when he sees Mattie in the school yard playing with the school kids.  The novel describes in great detail the power of this overwhelming energy and attraction for Jayber.  The problem is that Mattie is already married.  In one of the more bizarre twists I’ve ever come across in a love story, Jayber decides to marry Mattie in his own heart.  He pledges fidelity to her even though she’s already married.  Odd as it is, this one-sided fidelity from Jayber expresses and honors both the power of his attraction to another person and at the same time, his ability to live responsibly with the tension that this attraction creates for him.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.  Your body is designed by God for a wide variety of attractions and commitments.  And God takes delight in the way your body works and even in the tension created by an abundance of desire.  But you weren’t designed for casual, meaningless sex.  Your body is designed for caring, affectionate, responsible sexual expression within a wider community of people following Jesus Christ together.  Your body is also capable of restraint and responsibility, for forms of delight and pleasure that are not limited to sex alone.  We will, of course, experience failure and regret from time to time.  But we have been forgiven and loved and invited into a life of continual repentance and renewal.  So let us honor God with our bodies.