Whose Are You?

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

In Les Miserables, Jean Valjean gets out of prison after 19 years. Because of his status as an ex-con, no inn will take him in. After sleeping on the streets, bitter and angry, Jean is given shelter by the Bishop Myriel. But Jean steals the bishop's silver and runs off only to be caught by the police. When Jean is taken before his victim, the bishop says he gave the silverware to him and says he forgot to take the silver candlesticks as well. The police believe the bishop and release Jean. The bishop tells Valjean that God spared his life and he should use the money from the silver to make himself a honest man. And the rest of the story tells how Jean does just that. So what does this have to do with today's passage from 1^st Corinthians? Stay tuned.

Corinth was a wealthy seaport with a reputation for sexual promiscuity that made it notorious even among the Greeks and Romans. The city's name was turned into a verb that meant to be debauched. I was there in the 1970s and you can still see the acropolis that overlooks the ruins of the city Paul visited. On that mountain there was a temple to Aphrodite, staffed by sacred prostitutes. Every day they would come down the mountain looking for “worshipers.” On the soles of their sandals were words, embossed in reverse, so that their foot prints read, “Follow Me.” And men would indeed follow them back up the mountain to show their “devotion” to the goddess of love, better known today as Venus.

This is what Paul was up against in trying to give directions to the new Christians in this original “Sin City.” Fortunately his 2 letters to this very troubled church gives us a wealth of insight into how to deal with an array of issues, from divisions to lawsuits to dietary controversies to the Eucharist and worship to spiritual gifts to the resurrection. And of course, Paul had to deal with the issue of sexual promiscuity. One church member was living in sin with his stepmother, which even the pagans thought was just wrong.

But Paul was never content to just say, “Do this! Don't do that!” There was a reason why a person in Christ lived a different kind of life than his neighbors. And that's what he is discussing in today's passage from 1st Corinthians.

He starts out by quoting things his critics said. “All things are lawful for me.” The problem here is that his opponents are trying to use Paul's idea of freedom against him. He was a zealous Pharisee before Jesus appeared to him. Paul probably used to believe the idea that the Messiah would come if only all Jews obeyed the Torah perfectly for just one day. But having been saved by God's grace despite his violent persecution of Christians, and seeing God's Spirit move even Gentiles to follow Jesus, Paul realized that righteousness did not come by trying to obey the 613 laws of the Torah, not to mention the additions the Pharisees deduced from the Torah, which they called the Oral Law. Most of these had nothing to do with ethics. And like all laws, they could tell you what is right or wrong but not give you the power to obey them. That comes from God's gracious gift of the Holy Spirit, who comes into all who put their trust in Jesus Christ. Thus the Christian is free from having to follow the law.

Unfortunately, some church members took this to mean that freedom from the law meant Christians were free to do whatever they wanted. But that wasn't what Paul meant at all. So he quotes the distorted version of his teaching and points out the flaws in it. 

“'All things are lawful for me,' but not all things are beneficial.” Let's say you had destroyed your liver through drinking copious amounts of alcohol. It is going to fail and you will die. But let's say you are fortunate enough for someone to donate a lobe of their liver to be transplanted into you by a skilled surgeon. Now, there is no law that says you can't go back to drinking. But why would you? That's what got you into trouble in the first place. Rather you should follow doctor's orders and even join AA or another support group to take advantage of the new life granted to you by the donor and the surgeon. Not everything that's legal is beneficial. Corinth was a wide open town and that might have been fun for some of its residents but it wasn't spiritually healthy or beneficial.

Then Paul again quotes what his critics say but points out a different problem with it. “'All things are lawful for me' but I will not be dominated by anything.” Going back to our analogy about the person who drinks so much his liver is destroyed, his drinking, once done voluntarily, is probably not voluntary any more. He is most likely addicted. It disrupts and rules his life. When something that once was done for pleasure comes before everything else in your life, you are addicted. It could be a substance, like alcohol or drugs, or it could be an activity, like gambling or sex. It could even be an unhealthy religious activity, like self-mortification or devotion to a charismatic leader or cult. Whatever it is, if it controls your life while also ruining it, you really aren't acting freely.

Paul then talks about something that is not merely a desire but an actual need: eating. If you don't eat or don't eat enough, that's unhealthy. But if you eat too much or eat the wrong things, that is also unhealthy. The interesting thing is that both people who eat to the point of weighing 400 lbs or more and those who are anorexic or continually dieting are both unhealthily obsessed with food. Paul reminds us that from an eternal perspective, obsession with the food or with your body are misplaced priorities. You need eat enough good food to be healthy, no more and no less. Food is a necessity but it still can be toxic if you make too big an issue of it. It too can dominate your life.

Then Paul moves to something that feels like a need but is really just a strong desire. Sex is, strictly speaking, not an individual need. In some species sex is reserved for the queen or the alpha couple and not for the rest of the hive or pack. We seem to have forgotten that the purpose of sex is reproduction. The purpose of the good feelings it gives us is to encourage enough members of the species to reproduce that we don't go extinct. And in the past it was important to have as many children as you could because they wouldn't all survive. Nowadays most will. We have better nutrition and healthcare and vaccines and that has brought infant mortality in the US down from the 135 deaths per 1000 live births it was a hundred years ago to just 5.7 deaths per live births today. With a world population of 7.8 billion, our species doesn't need everyone pumping out babies at the rate we used to. In fact, we need to ease off a little lest we outstrip the carrying capacity of the globe.

That wasn't the problem in Paul's day. His problem was not overpopulation but the persistent one of people trying to enjoy the pleasure of sex separate from its responsibility. Sex is supposed to cause people to pair off and form couples and maybe families. That's why the act causes out brains to release oxytocin which makes us bond with our lover. It is also released at birth to cause mother and child to bond. But people, mostly male, have often sought the good feelings without the bonding part. It's akin to unhealthy eating practices, like overeating and then vomiting to make room for more. Or indulging in junk foods which are formulated to be addictively tasty while giving you very little actual nutrition. Again it's guys primarily who go from lover to lover, thinking themselves superior to their poor married friends. And yet, ironically, every survey on the subject finds that married people have twice as much sex as single people. And by the way, people who are more religious have more sex than those who report having no religion! Contrary to popular belief, the Bible doesn't say sex is bad. It just says that, like anything powerful, it is good in certain contexts and bad in other ones. Like, say, fire is. It gives us light and warmth and cooks our food. So fire on a candle, in the fireplace, or on the stove is good. Fire on the curtains, on the roof or on a person is bad. Power needs to be controlled. Simply because you are free to do something doesn't mean you should.

The power a Christian is given by God is not merely freedom from what is bad and what is controlling us but freedom and power to do good. Power not dedicated to doing good will inevitably be used for evil. The recent horror film Brightburn shows how terrifying a child with the powers of Superboy would actually be. But in real life people do not need superpowers to do a lot of damage. Good old fashioned, totally human powers are sufficient, when used badly.

Paul, however, is making a deeper point. There are many sources of fire, some benign, some harmful. Fire is not sentient nor does it have a moral compass. But we have one source: God. Humans are created in God's image. We are created with a moral purpose: to love God and to love each other. We have misused the ordinary powers God gave us to turn what could have been a paradise into hell on earth. So God sent his son to live as one of us and set right our understanding of who God is and who we are meant to be. Unfortunately, since words alone are often insufficient to change minds and lives, Jesus was executed by his opponents. However he used his death to set right what is keeping us from reconciling with God. Finally he rose again to show us he was who he said he was and to give us new life and new power. The Holy Spirit is given to every Christian to call upon so as to be able to live the life God wants us to live. He wants us to live a life of love and forgiveness and reconciliation and healing and peace.

The price Jesus paid to bring this about is huge: his death on the cross and his experiencing the estrangement from God that is the natural end result of our destructive and self-destructive lives. (Mark 15:34) He took on not only physical pain but the psychological and spiritual pain of our sin in our place. Nor is taking the consequences of our deeds all he did. He gave his life not only for us but to us. So our lives now belong to him. The source of our new power in Christ is the Holy Spirit. And he is both sentient and moral.

And so a passage that people mistakenly think is Paul being puritanical about sex (and part of the mistake is thinking the puritans disapproved of sex) turns out to really be about something much larger. It is about how not only our bodies but our very lives belong to not to ourselves, but to God, who saves us.

After his unsuccessful Beer Hall putsch, Hitler fled to the home of a supporter, Ernst Hanfstaengl. There he tried to commit suicide only to have the gun wrested from his hand by Helene, Ernst's American wife. Later she became disillusioned about Hitler and, divorced from Ernst, returned to America. I wonder if she ever thought “I saved Hitler's life and this is what he did with it?” Did she ever wish that Hitler had felt an obligation to her for saving his life and that he had honored her act of mercy by dedicating himself to using his powers of persuasion to do good rather than great evil?

In contrast, Les Miserables tells of a man who, when shown mercy, becomes a new man, helping and showing mercy to others, including Javert, the police inspector who pursues Jean relentlessly. What many people don't know is that Jean Valjean was based on a real person: Eugene Francois Vidocq. Vidocq was an ex-convict who became a businessman and a philanthropist. He also is the inspiration for one of Valjean's feats of strength. Vidocq saved one of the workers at his paper plant by lifting a heavy cart off of him with his shoulders. Vidocq's re-evaluation of his life began when he witnessed the execution of an old friend who had led him into a life of crime. He saw that, as Paul said, “The wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23) Having once been under a death sentence himself, Vidocq chose to forge a new life for himself by now serving good. Vidocq became the head of an undercover police unit and founded France's first private detective agency. This former criminal is considered the father of modern criminology. He was the model for Edgar Allen Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin and was one of the inspirations for Sherlock Holmes.

God in Christ did more than stop us from destroying ourselves. He died that we might live. We owe God our life. As Paul says, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” We are not independent agents who throw God our support when we feel like it. Rather “He made us and we belong to him; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture,” as the psalmist says. (Psalm 100:3) He not only made us; he redeemed us. Through his Spirit he lives in us. As Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

We do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God. He frees us from all the things that are not beneficial but harmful to us. He frees us from all the things that dominate and enslave us. He frees us from our self-destructive ways of thinking and speaking and acting. But he not only frees us from what is bad; he frees us to do what is good and just and healing. He frees us in order that we may love him and each other. Why would we want to go back to the prison of the mindset that got us to this state? Why should we want to keep repeating the old mistakes? Why shouldn't we want to start anew and go in a different direction, one guided by his love and forgiveness?

We should be grateful that God chooses to live in us and work through us. We should be as grateful as someone who almost died only to get a new lease on life. A week ago Saturday was the 5^th anniversary of my accident, the day I almost died but didn't. It has given me a new sense of mission, a purpose which helps me face each day, despite the pain and the fatigue and the limitations I live with. I hope none of you ever have to go through that. But I do hope that you reflect on what God has done for you and how he has changed your life. And I hope that you too find in Jesus a sense of purpose, a mission for your talents and skills and gifts. After all, Christianity is about becoming Christ-like. And if that sounds, daunting, remember, we have the Spirit of Christ in us helping us all the way.