Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

1/15/06 - 2 Epiphany

The Rev. Sarah Ball-Damberg

Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 6:11-20

Some of you may have a friend like one of mine, a dear friend who loves you deeply, and who therefore respects this whole church-going thing you're into, but who's quite sure it isn't for him or her. On a day like today, your friend probably woke up late and then settled down with the Sunday paper while contemplating his or her brunch options.

You, on the other hand, wrestled yourself and possibly other members of your household out of bed early, made yourself presentable, and rushed out the door to get to church more or less on time. While your friend was getting ready to tuck into a nice hot stack of pancakes and start the crossword puzzle, you were getting an earful from St. Paul about fornication and prostitutes.

You may be wondering right about now, "What are we doing here?" You may also be wondering how on earth we're supposed to convince these friends of ours that this is the more joyful way to spend the morning.

The answer to both of those questions has to do with our bodies. As a society, we seem to spend a lot of time thinking about our bodies, even to the point of obsessing over them. A random survey of magazine covers at Kroger the other day suggests that we pay particular attention to the area around our eyes and mouths, our stomachs (if you're reading Shape) or our "abs" (if you're reading Men's Health), our upper thighs, and our hair. Bodies, and making them over, are the subject of popular entertainment - lots of folks apparently tune in to shows like Nip/Tuck and Extreme Makeover. And how would we know what to eat for breakfast if it weren't for the cereal boxes telling us this one's good for our hearts and that one's good for our waistline?

None of that, however, really counts as thinking about our bodies. That's thinking about our body parts.

That's not at all what Paul has in mind when he talks about bodies. When Paul says "body" he means the whole person, the complete package, the sum of all parts - physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional - all held together, energized, and sustained by the Holy Spirit. Even more importantly, Paul isn't talking about individual bodies in isolation from one another. He's talking about individual bodies who have been washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. He's talking, in other words, about our bodies which have been bound together in baptism and made part of the Body of Christ.

Christians are focused on the whole body in a way popular culture can't touch. My ethics professor was fond of quoting a Jewish friend of his who said he couldn't possibly be interested in a religion that didn't tell us what to do with our pots and pans and with our genitals. I would guess that observant Jew appreciates St. Paul even if he disagrees with him on some of the fundamentals.

Hence the problem with fornication (which, by the way, I had to look up in the dictionary - it means sexual relations between a married man and an unmarried woman). There's no convenient line dividing our physical selves from our so-called "real" selves. What we do with our bodies, says Paul, we do with our selves. Once we understand that our entire self belongs to the Body of Christ, we can't go back to thinking of ourselves as body parts. We can't let one frivolous impulse or appetite determine what we do and who we are to the detriment of our whole self. After all, the freedom to do whatever we want with whomever we want no matter the consequences isn't really freedom at all - it's being enslaved by our compulsions.

Our faith lays claim to our bodies - to us -- in a way that frees us to be for God and for one another. We are all about the body. Think about how often the subject has or will come up in just the short amount of time we're together today. We heard Paul's impassioned words to the members of the church in Corinth, exhorting them to remember that their bodies are part of Christ's body, so what they do to themselves they do to Christ.

When we all gather around the altar in a few minutes we will give thanks to God who "in the mystery of the Word made flesh" let us see His glory in His Son's face.  We will partake of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, given for us. If we are sending out a Lay Eucharistic Minister to take communion to someone who isn't able to be here, we will affirm that "[w]e who are many are one body because we all share one bread, one cup." And what we mean by that, of course, is that we are "living members of the Body of [God's] Son" - together, we are the Body of Christ.

What we do with our bodies is inextricably bound up with our lives as  Jesus' disciples. Some of you may have heard Bishop Curry preach on discipleship at our diocesan convention a couple of years ago. He told us to pay attention to where our feet went every day, because where our feet took us revealed something about the kind of disciples we were.

The same goes for our hearts. Martin Luther wrote "What your heart clings to, there is your god." The eighth verse of Psalm 63, possibly one of the most stunningly sensuous prayers ever addressed to God -- "my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you. . ." - the 8^th verse of that psalm says "My soul clings to you, your right hand holds me fast."

Paul is deeply concerned about what Christians do with their bodies. He's pretty clear about what not to do - fornication is a violation of the individual and corporate body. But, then, listen to what he says: "For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body."  That is an astonishingly radical directive. That means it is given to us to be able to glorify God in our bodies.

We say equally something audacious in our burial service. At the very beginning of the liturgy we say, "As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. After my awaking, he will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God (BCP, 491)." I'm always astonished by that - by the sheer brazen confidence with which we -- in our bodies as our full, whole, entire selves -- expect to see God. In person. That just does me in.

It is given to us to glorify God in our bodies. Scott reminded me last week that orthodoxy means "right glory." So here we are, gathered together, to do orthodoxy - to give right glory to God. That's what we're doing when we gather here week after week to praise God and be fed by God's Word and by God's Body and Blood.

That's what we'll be doing here tomorrow, too. Every year Durham gathers for a march to celebrate the life, work, and witness of Martin Luther King, and every year for the past several years, that march ends right here in this room.  If tomorrow's gathering is anything like the last several years have been, this hall will be filled to bursting with music, speeches, and raucous, joyful noise. We'll be standing side by side with our neighbors, giving glory to God in our bodies.

What we do with our bodies matters because it has been given to us to give glory to God in them. It has been given to us to breathe and eat and sleep and laugh and cry and be outraged and be overjoyed and to love and nurture and be tired and rest and gather to praise the One who created us to glorify Him in all that we do.

And as for what to say to those friends of ours who don't yet understand what drives us to gather together here Sunday morning after Sunday morning - don't worry about it. You don't have to know what to say. We don't bear the burden of proof, but the obligation to witness to the joy of glorifying God. Joy speaks for itself. And it's contagious.

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