1 Corinthian 6:12-20
January 18, 2008
“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. "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. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. 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! 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." But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 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? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
When I read this passage, I find it to be one of the more profound passages of scripture. The parts I find to be profound are not so much the parts where Paul talks about prostitution, fornication, and stuff like that. What really captures me is the last few sentences where 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?” Why is this so profound? To understand you really have to understand who Paul was writing to and why he wrote it?
To whom was Paul writing? He was writing to the Christians in Corinth, which meant that he was writing to people living in a city that was much like Las Vegas is today. Back then they very easily could have said, what goes on in Corinth stays in Corinth. The Greek city of Corinth had the reputation of being the most enticing or perverted (depending on which perspective you have) city in the Roman Empire. Why? The reason has to do with geography. If you’ve ever looked at a map of Greece, you’ll notice that it is a peninsula that juts out into the Mediterranean Sea. About 2/3rds of the way down the peninsula two long inlets carve into the peninsula, leaving a small isthmus connecting the upper peninsula with the lower one. Corinth lies directly on that small isthmus.
The residents of the city were very clever. They knew that during the winter traveling around the bottom of the Greek peninsula could be dangerous because of storms. So they created a system in which a ship could travel down one inlet, be literally pulled out of the water, placed on rollers, pulled for twenty miles, and then put back down in the other inlet. It was much like a rolling Panama Canal. So, it became a major transport city that benefitted from trade coming from the east and the west of the empire. The city quickly became rich, and with that wealth came access to all sorts of pleasures. The city became a center of prostitution and gluttony. It was a place where people sought to break the social conventions of the day regarding self-indulgence. Paul was writing to people who were used to having lots of overindulgence and little personal discipline.
Paul was offering theman alternative vision. He was using the Temple of Jerusalem as a model for how to live life, and especially how to treat out bodies. He was teaching them how to keep a mind, body, spirit balance. To truly understand his teaching, it helps to first learn a little bit about the Temple of Jerusalem.
To begin with the Temple was the center of worship for all the Jews. It was considered to be where God lived on earth. The very center of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, once housed the Ark of the Covenant, which was the throne of God. But there was more to the Temple than just the Holy of Holies.
The Temple itself was massive. The only part that remains today—it was destroyed by the Roman general, Pompey, around 70 A.D.—is what is now called the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall. This wall is one of the holiest sites of Judaism, and it is a place of prayer. A thousand years ago it was integrated into the Temple Mount, which is part of the complex surrounding the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim temple that is said to be built atop a rock where, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad ascended to Heaven accompanied by the angel Gabriel. It is considered to be the third holiest site in Islam, behind Mecca and Medina.
Before the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed it was massive. It’s hard to get a sense of how large it was, but if it were plopped down in the middle of Zelienople, it would take up most of the town. It’s walls were about ten stories tall. It was a rectangle with a series of small rectangular courts and buildings forming concentric spaces toward the center, where the Holy of Holies was. The first court, the Court of the Gentiles, took up much of the area of the Temple. This is the space where the moneychangers were, who you remember from the story of Jesus turning over the tables. The moneychangers would exchange Roman coins for temple coins, since the temple tax could not be paid with Roman coins.
Moving toward the center of the temple one found interior enclosed courtyards that Gentiles were forbidden to enter. The outermost of those courtyards was the Court of the Women. Jewish women could gather there, but could go no further in. Since this courtyard was covered with a roof, but open along the sides, the women could see further in, but not go further. Moving again into the center, there was the Court of the Israelites, which surrounded the main Temple building. Jewish men could gather there. This courtyard was the place where sacrifices took place. Each Israelite was expected to offer an animal sacrifice at least once a year. The idea was that the animal was sacrificed in place of the person, who rightly should be sacrificed to God for not living life God’s way. Animals served as substitutes for humans. Only unblemished animals could be sacrificed, since their innocence had the power to take on human sin. Rising up out of that courtyard was the magnificent Holy of Holies. It was where the Ark rested. There were two bronze- and gold-lined chambers in the interior this magnificent building. There was the Court of the Priests, where priests would bring the cooked meat from the sacrifices, and then there was the interior Holy of Holies itself, where two large bronze cherubim sculptures rested. This room could be entered only once a year, and only by the high priest.
As you can see, the temple was a highly ordered space for making sacrifices and worshiping God. This is the model Paul uses for how our bodies are to be a temple. He is using this temple in comparison to us, saying that each of us is like this temple in some way, and that we need to treat our bodies like this temple.
So what does it mean that we should treat our bodies as a temple? I believe that there are at least four inherent lessons. First, he is saying, let worship take place in our temples (our bodies), but don’t worship our temples. In our culture this is a huge lesson. We are a culture that too often worships physical perfection. Who do we admire in our culture? Too often it’s movie stars and athletes. I have no problem enjoying their work, but their physical obsessions aren’t a model for people who want to live balanced lives. If you’ve ever read even one issue of People Magazine, you immediately understand the problem of looking to celebrities as models. They may be physically beautiful, but often their lives are a mess. They live in a culture of body worship, but we are called to live lives where worship takes place in our bodies. Worshiping our temples can actually keep God from living in our temples by preventing worship of God from taking place in our temples.
Second, we need to allow our bodies—our temples—to be healthy, whole, and holy spaces where God can live. I am a big believer in this. I truly believe that it is difficult to worship God if we neglect our bodies. I believe in a body, mind, and spirit balance, and too often we either neglect the physical, or we obsess about the physical. I am particularly sensitive to this because I have struggled with my health and weight pretty much my whole adult life. I became very interested in physical health starting in college, when, despite the fact I was athlete playing on one of the top lacrosse teams in the country, and was at the top of physical fitness, I had high blood pressure. I was put on what was then considered to be a good diet, which was a high carbohydrate, low fat diet. Ever since I have been somewhat obsessive about my eating habits and exercise. That doesn’t mean that I don’t lapse every once in a while, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.
I exercise virtually every day, either lifting weights, or walking between 3 to 4 miles a day outside or on a treadmill. I’m limited in what I can do because I’ve had three knee operations on my right knee and now have arthritis in it. If I do any kind of impact exercise, my knee swells up like a grapefruit. For instance, three years ago I played badminton at our Calvin softball team’s picnic, and just doing that for an hour swelled my knee so much that I had to walk with a cane for a better part of a week. Thus, I struggle like everyone else to find exercise that is interesting.
I’m a fanatic about eating healthy, which may seem surprising to some people because I am heavy. I’m what I would call a “healthy heavy,” although I’d much prefer to be a skinny healthy. I’ve struggled with my weight all my adult life, but at the same time, I very rarely ever eat junk food. I tend to eat grainy breads, lean meats, and lots of vegetables and fruits. In fact, people who have lunch with me often make fun of the fact that I’m always ordering a grilled chicken salad.
One of the things I’ve recently figured out, and it’s allowed me to lose over 15 pounds without dieting, is that we are a nation of fast-eaters and large portions. I’ve become convinced that the reason so many of us struggle with our weight isn’t that we are unhealthy or don’t exercise. That may be true to some extent, but a bigger problem is that our portions are too large and our eating is too fast. I’m basing this belief on the work of a British man named Paul McKenna, and I find his arguments compelling.
He says that one of the biggest contributors to all of our weight problems is the instructions we got from our parents. I don’t mean to put all the blame on our parents, since they were trying to raise us to be healthy. It’s just that growing up most of our parents told us to “finish everything on your plate—there are starving children in Africa.” Of course, most of us responded by saying, “Well, maybe we can send them some of our leftovers.” Still, the damage was done. Most of us now eat everything on our plates, even if we are full. The result is that we eat more than we should. How we eat as adults is very different from how most children naturally eat. Most children rarely finish their plates. They’ll eat ½ to 1/3rd of what we put on their plates, and then ask, “how many more bites do I have to take?” We now tell them, “Two bites of your vegetables.” When I was a kid, I was told, like almost everyone else my age, “Eat everything.” The result is that nowadays I feel guilty if I leave food on my plate. It feels like wasting. What makes this worse is that plates are now so big now. They are 1/3rd to ½ larger than plates from twenty years ago. By finishing off our plates, we now eat 1/3rd to ½ more food than we did twenty years ago.
We also all eat so fast. Two generations ago, meals took a long time. People weren’t in such a hurry to get here or there. The result is that people tended to sit longer at meals and eat slower, focusing more on the flavors. Today, we are in such a rush that when we eat we mostly gobble and gulp, rather than nibble and sip. McKenna talks about an experiment that showed this. A group of people were taken to a pancake house for a free breakfast. Their breakfasts included scrambled eggs, hash browns, a stack of pancakes, and bacon. Virtually every one of them ate quickly, eating everything on their plates. The same group was then brought back a week later and given the exact same breakfast. This time, though, they were blindfolded, which forced them to slow down. Every one of them ate only ½ of their meals, saying that they were too full to finish. By slowing down they ate less by giving their bodies time to tell their brains that they were full.
You can do a simple, observational experiment to test the theory about weight gain and speed of eating. Go somewhere like a the food court of a mall, and notice the different ways that heavy people eat compared to how thinner people eat. I’ve done this, and I’ve been amazed. I watch the thinner people eat, and they take smaller bites, chew longer, and take longer in-between bites. They also tend leave food on their plates. Heck, I don’t have to compare them to heavy people. I compare them to myself. I eat fast, chew quick, and always clean my plate. It’s been amazing to me that instead of dieting, and by simply slowing down my eating, focusing more on chewing slow and tasting flavors, and not eating everything on my plate, I lose weight. This is what I mean by being healthy not only in what we eat, but in how we eat.
Taking care of our bodies also isn’t just a matter of eating healthy, slowly, and exercising. I think it also means getting enough sleep, taking enough breaks, and giving our lives some pause and balance against a world that screams at us to rush here and there. We aren’t called to worship our temples, but we do have to take care of them.
The third lesson is that we need to let regular prayer and sacrifice take place in our temples. We were created to be in a relationship with God. Temples are created to facilitate that relationship with God. A temple is no good unless it puts God at the center. We are called to put God at our center—to make sure we take time to sacrifice our egos to God, to make time to pray, read scripture, read spiritual books, and do anything that puts worship at the center. We were created to be temples for God, to be places where God resides at the center, just like the Temple of Jerusalem.
Finally, we need to make sure that our temples have the right order. The Temple of Jerusalem had a definite order and discipline. Just as there were courtyards, walls, and sacred spaces in the Temple, we need to have disciplined and ordered lives that allow God to reside at the center. We need to install a kind of discipline to our lives that allows them to overcome the chaos of life in order to let God live in the center. For example, by reading this sermon, you are applying a certain order. When you worship each week, you are applying that kind of order. When you pray each day you are applying that order. Our lives can have too much order, but that’s rarely our problem. We usually suffer from a lack of order and priority.
The point of all of this is that our bodies are our temples—temples for God to reside. Our question is whether we take this seriously. Do we worship our temples or allow worship to take place in them? Are our temples healthy? Do they have the right structure and order? Ultimately, the real question is, “What takes place in our temples?”
Amen.
