CORINTHIANIZED 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 Rising nearly 1900 feet above the sea behind the city of Corinth is a rock known as the Acrocorinth, on top of which is a temple dedicated to Astarte, the Phoenician deity whose orgiastic cults had shocked ancient Israelites. During the First Century CE, there were reports of more than 1000 temple prostitutes working in connection with the worship at this shrine talk about a program to recruit new members! The morality at Corinth was so low that to corinthianize was a term used meaning to debase. And the libertine aspect of Corinthian life was an issue for the early church. If we were to read back to the fifth chapter of the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, we find a situation where a member of the church there had married his stepmother, which was something that even offended the non-christians of the city. The actions of this member brought disrepute on the whole community of the church and created a situation Paul felt he needed to address and this leads into our Lesson for today. The Christian faith, as Paul understood it, proclaimed that humankind in Christ was no longer subject to religious law as the path to salvation. This did not mean that Christians should not keep the law in general but simply that keeping the law, and Jewish ritual law in particular, was not the road to God, or to put this somewhat differently, that one does not win salvation by the scrupulous keeping of religious law we are saved by grace; God loves us, however and whoever we are. The problem in Corinth, however, was that some of the Christians there took this teaching as license to do anything that they wanted to do, including giving themselves to the sexual immorality of the sort that was 1
common in Corinth. Yes, yes, the Christian is free from the law all things are lawful to me but this doesn t mean that one should just do anything one wants not all things are beneficial. A Christian should not give himself/herself into servitude to vice simply because s/he is free to do so. When I first looked at the Lessons for today and began to consider what I would write for a sermon, I thought I might start with some criticism of Paul for his attitudes about sex and sexuality. I don t think that they were especially healthy, but more than that I believe that they have done incalculable harm throughout the history of Christendom. At the same time, Paul lived in a particular time and place and was affected as are we all by the people who were his contemporaries and the ideas which were current and which impressed him as true. I ve already mentioned that Corinth was a pretty raunchy place, where prostitution was rife even to the point of being a prominent religious practice. Paul would have shared the Jewish revulsion regarding the licentiousness of the pagan world, and this may well have accentuated his very un-jewish exaltation of celibacy which came to him, I suspect, out of a Greek education which upheld the ideal of the mastery of bodily desires by the power of the spirit. In many ways, Paul s position on matters of sex and sexuality in writing to the Corinthians was more strict than that of the rabbis, but again, this may be the result of the situation he was addressing. And we should understand this. If fornication means no more than sex between unmarried people, Paul may not have been all that concerned about it. But writing to the Corinthians, he had prostitution on his mind when he uses the term, prostitution in general and temple prostitution in particular. And in this light, Paul might not be as sexually repressed and 2
uptight as we may be inclined to think and may even be a friend to women in his opposition to a sex industry that for the most part exploited women. Furthermore, it should be observed that passages from Paul s Letter to the Romans that seem to condemn homosexuality are, when properly translated, actually condemnations of pedophilia and male prostitution. So far as anyone can tell, Paul had no understanding of homosexuality as faithful same-sex relationships. What we can say about Paul is that he believed that unregulated satisfaction of sexual desires has moral consequences. The point he wants to make is that the body is not meant for immorality and that what we do with our bodies matters, not just for reasons of community health or the keeping of social rules, but because our relationship to God is affected when we become self-indulgent and elevate our own satisfaction above our respect for other human beings or allow our desires to become compulsions that master us and make us their slaves. But even as I try to give Paul his due, it cannot be denied that he is off his rocker when he says, Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator (read here the patron of prostitutes) sins against the body itself. This is just nuts! Does not drug and alcohol and nicotine addiction offend against the body? Does not overeating and eating foods that are bad for the health of the body have this effect? What about not exercising? We could go on and on this way. When Paul puts sexual compulsion over other compulsions which harm the body, he tells us more about himself than about our spiritual condition in Christ. In what I have been saying so far, I have done my best to be fair to Paul and to be sympathetic to what he wants to teach his readers. And we must acknowledge that he would never in his wildest imaginings have thought his occasional letters to churches 3
would become holy scripture, read in churches and seriously considered by Christians some 2000 years after he put pen to paper. His letter was to the Corinthians specifically, just as your last letter or email or text was to whoever you sent it to. We need to keep this in mind if we re going to understand what he wrote. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the writings of Paul and their misunderstandings, especially on the topics of sex and sexuality, have had bad consequences for subsequent generations of Christians and others as well. Last Sunday s newspapers were full of articles about people whose views on sex and sexuality have been strongly influenced by what I would say are mis-readings and misuses of St. Paul s opinions on these matters. The New York Times had a piece about Archbishop Timothy Dolan, soon to be Cardinal Dolan, a big jolly fellow, except when the subject is same-sex marriage or abortion or sex education in public schools, all of which he adamantly opposes. On our side of the river is a big not-so-jolly fellow, our governor, also a Roman Catholic, who is expected to veto the effort to gain the right of marriage for same-sex couples in New Jersey. Then there s Rick Santorum who compares homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia and polygamy and would like to again bar gays from the military, who opposes abortion under almost all circumstances and blames feminism for much that ails our society, all of this, again, going back to a reading of the Christian faith from Paul that is lacking in discernment and which makes more of what Paul writes than the apostle did himself. All this is to say that our world and our lives can be profoundly affected by biblical traditions that owe more to the time they were written than to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. 4
In closing, I want to emphasize that there are positive messages to take from Paul s observation that our bodies are members of Christ, which is his way of saying that what we do with our bodies matters before God and, further, that our faith is not about disembodied spirits but about real life in the real world, where people go hungry and thirsty, where people have sexual appetites, where bodies are abused and misused and women s bodies not least of all, and where many people are brought up to feel ashamed of their bodies and their sexuality in particular. And one other takeaway: that it is wrong and against Christ to exploit another human being, whether sexually or economically or any other way, and that there are many ways for a person to prostitute herself/himself in this world. Glorify God in your body, says Paul. That is advice to think about and understand for the good that it can do. Amen. Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 15, 2012 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5