Abnormal and Unnatural

The scriptures referred to are 1 Corinthians 6:12-20.

One of the glories of English is its huge vocabulary, using words often pilfered from other languages. One of my favorite Facebook pages is Grandiloquent Word of the Day, from which I have discovered such gems as “jentacular,” which is an adjective meaning “of or related to breakfast.” Tea is my favorite jentacular beverage. And who was your qualtagh? That's the first person to enter your home or else whom you met after leaving your house on New Year's Day. Did you hurple last week? That is, did your shrug your shoulders up around your neck and creep about shivering in the cold? During the holidays did you reach your Yule hole? That's the last hole to which you are able to stretch your belt at Christmas dinner.

We have so many wonderful words that it really bothers me when people use words with specific meanings in place of other more appropriate words. Two long-running peeves of mine are people using either the words “normal” or “natural” to mean “good.” We have the word “good” and a plethora of synonyms to use instead. And “normal” actually means “usual, typical or expected.” It is normal for a toddlers to throw tantrums. That doesn't make it a good thing. Psychologists tell us it is normal for people to lie every day. That isn't good. In the same way, people argue that some things, like herbs and plants, are better than artificial medicines because they are “natural.” But “natural” simply means “existing in or caused by nature.” Hemlock, poison ivy and poison oak are all natural. You wouldn't recommend ingesting, smoking or even touching them. Or they excuse behavior because it is natural. Again it is natural for black tailed prairie dogs to not only kill the infants of close relatives but even to cannibalize their own offspring. It's not something you'd want to emulate. Neither “normal” nor “natural” gives one a basis to make a value judgment. They describe how common something is or how it arises.

Paul seems to be making a similar distinction in our passage from 1 Corinthians. It looks like people were misusing Paul's teaching about Christian liberty to justify sinful behavior. Paul taught that Christians do not live under the law, that is, the Old Covenant. Jesus freed us from that law and we live by the Spirit instead. Folks misunderstood this, perhaps willfully. First quoting his opponents and then making a crucial qualification Paul writes “'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.” Let's look at his point using our own legal system to illustrate.

Some people think that just because something is legal, it's OK. Yet the two biggest problem drugs in our society are tobacco and alcohol. According to the CDC, cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 people in the US each year, accounting for about 1 in 5 deaths. It is the number 1 cause of preventable deaths in the US.

Alcohol kills 88,000 people a year. That includes not only its role in liver disease, heart disease, cancer and other deaths from illness, but also car accidents, falling, fires, homicides, suicides and other “acute causes.” Which makes alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the US. And it doesn't take into account the way alcohol can ruin your life without taking it. People have lost jobs, marriages, custody of their kids, cars and homes due to alcohol. 40% of inmates incarcerated for violent offenses were under the influence of alcohol at the time.

Tobacco and alcohol are both legal. Provided you are of age, you can buy and use these substances until they kill you. They may be lawful but they are not beneficial to you.

Want to know what the 2^nd largest cause of preventable death is? Poor diet and physical inactivity. Perfectly legal.

(BTW in doing research I came across a website that purports to give the real time current death toll in America. At the top it reads: “Someone just died by:” and periodically a cause like “Hospital Associated Infection” or “Texting While Driving” or “Smoking in Bed” will pop up in red. I am assuming they have programmed the site using several “every __ minutes someone dies of ___” metrics. Then follows a list with the cumulative numbers. At the bottom of the nearly 3 dozen causes is “Spontaneous Combustion: 0.” Someone at this fundamentalist website has a sense of humor.)

In case you are interested in how the Keys compares with other counties in Florida, according to monroe.floridahealth.gov, we “smoke more, engage in considerably more incidents of binge drinking, have more car accidents resulting in death, and have unprotected sex at rates higher than the state” average. Consequently we have higher rates of Hepatitis A and B, HIV and AIDS. We have a higher death rates for heart failure, prostate, cervical and skin cancers. The percentage of adults with diabetes is higher as well.

Much of that is preventable and most of causes of those conditions are legal. The law is really only interested in preventing things that have an immediate negative effect on society. Unfortunately we humans are really bad at identifying slow or gradual threats. If it doesn't kill you outright, it must make you stronger, right? Ask someone who broke his legs if he is in fact stronger. Spiritually, maybe, but even that is not a given.

Besides being outright harmful, there is another reason to avoid some things that are legal. Paul writes “I will not be dominated by anything” in our translation. Other translations render this: “I will not be mastered by anything,” “I must not become a slave to anything,” and “I won't allow anything to gain control over my life.” Almost sounds like addiction, right? Opioids are painkillers that can be obtained with a legal prescription from your doctor. Overdoses of them alone has led to more than 20,000 deaths in 2016. If you include the heroin and fentanyl people turn to when they can't get oxycontin legally, it rises to 64,000 deaths. That's almost equal to the number of motor vehicle deaths and gun deaths combined. (Guns and cars are both legal as well.)

It turns out anything that increases your brain's secretion of dopamine can be addictive. Some people are adrenaline junkies, doing things that put their body into a fight or flight mode by doing scary (they would say “thrilling”) activities, like base jumping or rooftopping. This latest craze involves climbing high buildings and taking selfies while hanging off them. A 26 year old Chinese man fell from the top of a 62 story skyscraper doing just that. He left behind a fiance, a sick mother and a million followers on a video website.

People get addicted to gambling, which comes to rule their lives. And it's now legal at lots of places through the US. There are people addicted to shopping, to plastic surgery, and to the Internet. People get addicted to sex. I thought this was a load of you-know-what until I heard an interview with a man who described how he passed up going out with friends and other activities to arrange hook ups with strangers on apps and skipped sleep to spend hours on porn sites. Contrary to what you think, it made him miserable. It turns out addiction is not really about liking something so much you can't stop. It is, as one researcher put it, about craving. Dopamine makes you crave things, even if you don't actually enjoy them. Which reminds me an awful lot of Paul's talk of finding himself doing what he doesn't want to do in Romans 7:7-25. Paul was onto the nature of addiction 2000 years before science confirmed it.

Wisdom is knowing that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Christians should never let the law act as a proxy for ethical behavior. Nor should we fall for the “It's normal” or “It's natural” line of argument. That's the thrust of the next thing Paul quotes his critics as saying. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.” And yet, as we know, some people get addicted to food, which is really tricky because they can't obviously stop cold turkey like these other addictions. They have to learn moderation or die. There are dram shop laws that make places that sell liquor to intoxicated people liable for any damage they do. But who's going to not sell food to a morbidly obese person? However, that's not really what Paul's critics were talking about. Paul gets the subtext to their “it's a natural function” argument: they are comparing eating food with having sex.

Corinth was the Sin City of its day. It was a port city offering sailors and travelers whatever they wanted. Aristophanes actually coined a word that meant “to act like a Corinthian.” It was a euphemism for getting debauched. The temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, looked down upon the city from a hill. Everyday the temple prostitutes would come down the hill, recruiting “worshipers.” Their sandals were embossed with letters that spelled out “follow me” in the impressions they left in the dirt.

In this “anything goes” atmosphere believers in Corinth were constantly faced with temptation. Small wonder certain so-called Christians decided to give in and tried to use Paul's teachings on liberty in Christ in ways he never intended.

Paul contrasts the temporary nature of food with the permanent nature of our resurrected bodies and the fleeting union of casual sex with the everlasting union with Christ. But his chief argument is that our connection with Christ is not an external one.

Aphrodite's temple wasn't the only one in town. By virtue of the indwelling Spirit, every follower of Jesus is a temple of the true God. Our body is not our own. It has been “bought with a price.” Jesus died that we might have his life. Which in turn means we must give up our life. As Paul says in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20) And as the Right Reverend John Pritchard, retired Bishop of Oxford, put it at our retreat, “we need to learn to die. We need to learn to let go of our lives so God can live his life through us.”

We don't like losing control. That's really at the heart of fear: losing control. We don't want to lose control of our lives. Nor control of the lives of others, Bishop Pritchard added. We do like to think we have some control of others. For some powerful people, like Harvey Weinstein and other men exposed as sexual predators, that may be true. Popular actors and directors, radio and TV show hosts, conductors and dance masters can make or break careers and they used that power to extract what they wanted from the less powerful. But they were brought down by the power of the word. When light flooded the darkness of their lives, their power was broken.

Most of us have a lot less power than that, but we like to think there are a few people whose lives we can control. Yet as parents of a toddler discover, you really can't control someone. Not without their consent. We can't even control our own lives. That control can be wrested from you in a split second by an accident, an illness, or a reversal of fortune. So in reality God is asking us to relinquish what we never really had a firm grasp on. He wants us to let go of the illusion that we are the captain of our fate. We are to give it over to him. It's in better hands that way.

We are to be God's presence in whatever part of the world and in whatever circumstance we find ourselves. But we can't do that if we are in the driver's seat, so to speak. We must let the Spirit, God within us, take the wheel. We need to deny ourselves, as Jesus said; “disown” is actually a better translation. We give up all rights to call the shots in our life and let the Spirit take over.

Which is scary. If losing control is scary, giving that control over to another is especially so. It takes trust, or as we usually call it in Christianity, faith. We need to have faith in God that he will use our lives lovingly, to do the maximum amount of good with them.

In 1896, the Rev. Charles Monroe Sheldon decided to tell a story, one chapter at a time, for his Sunday evening services. They were collected and published under the title In His Steps. In the book, after he turns away a homeless man, who consequently dies, a repentant minister preaches a sermon in which he tells everyone that for the next year, before doing anything, they should ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?” The rest of the novel follows his congregants as they apply the principle in their work and in their lives. Few people know that Sheldon wrote a sequel called Jesus is Here! in which Christ appears in the same small town that is the setting for the first book, appearing “as an average man. Only different.” What I find interesting is that the book refers to the Holy Spirit 18 times as being essential to people doing what Jesus would do. Without relying on his strength and resources, a person would burn out quickly. That is why we must be in daily contact with God, read his word, pray, and weekly, at the very least, join with others in worship. Otherwise it would be like trying to participate in an Olympic sport without food or rest.

But for the title of the sequel to be appropriate, Jesus need not get incarnated a second time. We are the body of Christ. We are to be the ongoing embodiment of God's Spirit in the world. Where we are, especially where 2 or 3 of us are gathered, Christ is there in the midst. In other words, if we, the church, are here, Jesus is here. He is demonstrating his love and grace and justice and mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation through us. He has shown us how. He has given us the means, his Spirit, to do what he has done. He has given us each other, with our specific skills and gifts, to help us do it. What he asks of us is what God asked of Mary 2000 years ago: to be willing to let him work through us. If we are truly being led by his Spirit, what we do will be one and the same as what Jesus would do. By human standards living our lives in such a self-sacrificially loving way towards friend and foe alike would be abnormal and unnatural. But it would be splendiferously beneficent in any language.