Grace, mercy, and peace to you in the name of Christ our Saviour. Amen.
The
good thing about how our liturgy is set up is that you get to hear 4 pieces of
scripture each Sunday. It gives us preachers lots of choice about which reading
we’ll concentrate on that week. The bad thing about it is that it’s really easy
to avoid the harder readings.
Because
let’s face it – the bible isn’t the easiest book to read. And a piece like the
one we heard from Corinthians this morning sounds just awful. It makes you wonder
why, when so much of the rest of the book is left out, the lectionary puts this
reading in there. I’m sure it wasn’t the easiest one to read out loud, either.
In some translations, “fornication” is “sexual immorality”, and “fornicator” is
“sexual immoral person” which, in my opinion, makes it sound even worse.
It
would be easy to simply put it aside and talk about callings. Both Samuel and
John talk about callings – how Samuel hears God calling his name but doesn’t
understand what’s happening until the priest Eli clears it up for him. Good
thing too because after accepting his calling, Samuel goes on to be pretty
important in biblical history.
Or
about how Philip calls Nathanial to “come and see” the man from Nazareth “whom
Moses in the law and also the prophets” spoke about and, upon meeting him, Nathanial
heard and followed his call to be with Jesus.
Sometimes,
though, we need to talk about the hard stuff. The stuff that makes us cringe,
or gives us goosebumps, or makes us question. Maybe that’s why the lectionary
throws these rough bits as us – to see if we’re strong enough to tackle them on
a Sunday morning. Today is going to be one of those days.
The
reason I decided to take on the reading from Corinthians is not only because of
what it contains, but because of what it follows. In the Common English Bible, 1
Corinthians 6:9-11 reads like this:
“Don’t
you know that people who are unjust won’t inherit God’s kingdom? Don’t be
deceived. Those who are sexually immoral, those who worship false gods,
adulterers, both participants in same-sex intercourse, thieves, the greedy,
drunks, abusive people, and swindlers won’t inherit God’s kingdom. That is what
some of you used to be! But you were washed clean, you were made holy to God,
and you were made right with God in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in
the Spirit of our God.”
This
is what’s called a clobber passage. It’s one of the many verses in the bible
used to propagate hate against the 2SLGBTQ+ community, supposedly giving biblical
proof that God is against two people of the same gender being together and that
if you only give yourself to God, you will be cured.
Now
Paul definitely had his hang ups with sex and marriage but if you go back to
translations before the mid-20th century, there is no indication
Paul had anything against homosexual relationships. In fact, Paul didn’t like
sex at all! He didn’t believe in it; he didn’t believe in marriage to another
person. For Paul, it was all about a marriage to God and that anything else was
completely unnecessary.
Now
I’m not here to give a lecture on sex and marriage. What I want to do today is
give a different perspective about what Paul is getting to here, in this
portion of his letter to the Corinthians, when he talks about “sexual
immorality.” I want to talk about it as a way to take back some of the power
from the people who are using the passage for hateful propaganda, and because I
think it’s important that we don’t ignore the hard parts of the bible. (If we
did that, we’d never read it!)
There
are a couple of Greek words in these verses with multiple meanings that trip
people up. These words are malakoi and arsenokoitai. Pulling from
Holly Heron’s writing in the Queer Bible Commentary, in moral discourse, Malakoi
is translated to describe those who are morally weak: for example, men who
enjoy luxury and live decadently. But it could also refer to ‘a man who allowed
himself to be penetrated’. However, to limit the term to this meaning is simply
wrong and is where all the trouble stems from.
Arsenokoitai can be understood
to be a male prostitute or a man who has sex with other men, but the term also occurs
elsewhere not in conjunction with adultery or prostitution, but economic
exploitation, thus suggesting it refers to prostitution or pimping.
If
malakoi is understood as decadence and arsenokoitai as pimping,
then the entire list of vices in verses 9-11 can be seen to revolve around
behaviors that involve excess and exploitation, behaviors that ultimately place
one’s own interested at odds with God’s covenant relationship with humankind. In
other words, Paul is not talking about same-sex relationships at all.
In
pretty much every one of his letters, his main concern is that everyone needs
to love one another in community. So, when Paul rattles on about all of these
vices, he is talking about all of the things people are doing that are hurtful and
harmful to the community. In the case of these specific verses, Paul’s underlying
plea to the people of Corinth is that just because something is legal doesn’t
mean you should do it.
What
I mean is that in Corinth during the time of Roman dominance, sexual behaviour was
very regulated, and it was assumed that if something was legal then it was also
moral. There was no distinction between legality and morality. For example, Emperor
Augustus created the adultery law which stated that if a woman was unfaithful
to her husband, then she must divorce him. Which was pretty major because then she
lost everything – no place to live, she would be shunned by the community, she
would have nothing left. However, a married man could have sex with anyone
without penalty.
In
his letter, Paul is challenging doing what you want because it’s legal. He is
trying to tell the Corinthians that just because something is legal, or moral
in the eyes of the law, doesn’t mean it’s right, or beneficial to the community.
Paul says that if you are hurting another person, you are hurting the
community, and thus hurting God.
The
key factor here is understanding that you should never use any sort of method
to manipulate another person, whether it be sex or money or anything else. In
these verses, Paul doesn’t care who’s with who and in what way. What he does
care about is if what you’re doing is raising up or tearing down the community.
In
his letter to the Corinthians, Paul isn’t really talking about sex, drugs,
alcohol, or rock and roll. He is talking about freedom. The people of Corinth
believed their freedom as Christians meant that they were free of all rules
concerning their behaviour – that they could do what they want because God gave
them ultimate freedom.
Paul’s
challenge to that, though, is that although we have freedom, we also belong to
God, that our body is a temple full of the Holy Spirit. He argues that our bodies
are not our own but are a gift from God. And not only our body, but the body of
friend and foe, neighbour and enemy, and every member of the community.
Imagine
if we treated each others’ bodies as temples. What would that mean? If we
understood every person to be a gift from God, it would certainly be harder to
manipulate anyone by any sort of method, wouldn’t it?
And
what if we treated ourselves as temples? I have heard many a statement that if
we treated our bodies as temples we wouldn’t drink or do drugs, we would eat
better and exercise more. Sometimes it’s more than that though. To treat your
body as a temple is to respect yourself, to love yourself, and to know that you
are and always will be a child of God.
May
you always remember that the Holy Spirit dwells within you. Honor this indwelling
by giving glory to God through loving yourself and one another. This is the
freedom that God has given us.
Amen.
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