Epiphany II
1 Samuel 3:1-20
1 Corinthians
6:11b-20
John
1:43-51
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
JESUS HEALS. When we think of what Jesus did during his ministry, we think of praying and teaching and preaching, and the next thing on our list would be healing. As we read the gospels, again and again and again, Jesus performed miracles curing people of ailments, even bringing the dead back to life. Often this involved casting out demons, wicked spiritual forces, to restore physical well-being. Jesus showed us that illness and suffering are inextricably related to sin and our spiritual lives and that repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God and with other people promote healing
Jesus' healing ministry continues in the Church. Many members of our congregation can witness to the effectiveness of the Church's healing ministry, and at times have even witnessed miraculous healing, healing as dramatic, more dramatic, than any Pentecostal television show. It happens sometimes. It's weird. It's mysterious. And it does not appear to me that those who have faith are healed and those who don't have faith aren't. I don't think it works that way at all.
So I'm not arguing that faith need be our only health insurance. I'm
not arguing that we don't need hospitals and doctors and medicine. To
the contrary, these are ways God heals us, and hospitals are one of the
many gifts Christianity has bestowed upon humanity. To follow the example
of our Lord, to participate in God's work, early Christians nursed the
sick. The early Church's charity and mercy for the sick, especially during
epidemics, may have been its most critical outreach, and without it the
Church well may not have grown or even survived. 
S. Benedict
taught that the care of the sick was more important than any other Christian
duty. Before the Church, illness and disease separated the sick and suffering
from the rest of the community. Christianity instilled a belief that the
healthy were responsible for caring for the sick and suffering.
In today's epistle to the Corinthians, S. Paul explains why we care so much about the way we treat our bodies, why we try to take care of them and use them honorably. The Corinthians had a lot in common with our culture today, especially as pertains to their views about the relationship of the body and the soul. Like us, they pretty much regarded body and spirit as wholly separate realms. They thought that Christianity pertained to the spiritual and did not have anything to do with the physical. Paul's letter corrected this fundamental misunderstanding.
When Paul had first preached the gospel in Corinth, he had told the Corinthians about God's unconditional love and grace; he had insisted that Christians did not have to abide by the Jewish law. The Corinthians, therefore, assumed that their moral scruples and discipline pertaining to the body and its desires no longer needed to be observed. Specifically, in this instance, Paul is addressing the habit of many Corinthian Christians who engaged prostitutes. In the ancient world, prostitution was legal and almost universally accepted. The Corinthian Christians went to prostitutes because they saw no spiritual harm in doing so. They were merely satisfying their bodies, not damaging their souls. They believed that whatever they did with their bodies was didn't have spiritual consequences and didn't affect their relationship with God. They believed that all things were lawful for them. A better way to put it is: "I'm free to do anything."
We should recognize that kind of thinking. It's highly prevalent in our culture and by no means limited to sexual morality. "I'm free to do anything" is what we think freedom is all about; we think that freedom is doing what we want to do, that freedom doesn't entail responsibilities or restraint. The Corinthians believed that they had autonomy in Christ, that they had sole authority over themselves and governed themselves as they wished, without accountability or outside control. That's what our culture also thinks freedom is, and it's not freedom, but a form of tyranny.
I love the King James Version of the Bible more than the next guy. Much
of it is astoundingly beautiful and memorable, but the translation often
leaves much to be desired in terms of intelligibility. It especially obscures
the meaning of Paul's letters. In today's passage, for example, it is
difficult to understand Paul's argument. He's saying things that he doesn't
believe because he's having an imaginary dialogue with the Corinthians.
Paul begins his imaginary dialogue by stating the position of the Corinthians: "I'm free to do anything." Paul replies to this, "But not all things are beneficial, not all things are good for us." We should do things that are beneficial to us and, even more importantly, things that are beneficial to our neighbor and our community. A godly life is not one of self-indulgence, but of being mindful of the greater good, serving others, living for something much bigger than yourself.
Paul states again the position of the Corinthians, "I'm free to do anything. All things are lawful." Paul's response this time is, "But I will not be dominated by anything." We serve God, God alone, and we turn away from all other things that would control us. We don't want to be slaves to the desires of other people; we don't want to be slaves to our own desires. We don't want to serve mammon, or our lusts, or our personal ambition, or anything else that claims our loyalty and holds us in bondage.
Paul imagines the Corinthians saying, "Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats," or more intelligibly, "Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food." The Corinthians believed that if they're hungry or lusty, their bodily desire should be gratified. Paul responds, "The body is meant for the Lord and the Lord for the body." Our bodies belong to the Lord. We are the stewards of them. We hold them in trust for him. We try not to do whatever we want with them.
We give ourselves to God in baptism and communion. Our bodies become the hands, the feet, the arms, the legs of Christ. Our bodies are intimately linked to his. We have an intimate union with God—even deeper than sexual union.
We have received many gifts from God, and our bodies are one of them, a precious gift, and how we use it shapes our spirit, our soul. How we use our body, how we use the physical world either draws us closer to God or distances us from him. This doesn't mean that we are frigid prigs or judgmental prudes. Food and sex, bodily things, can be used to the glory of God. Christians understand that sexual love can be an act of worship. Pope John Paul II explained,
Conjugal life becomes . . . liturgical when the language of the body becomes the means to encounter, through an experience of the sacred, what God has willed for the world and for humanity. The sexual gift of self, freely offered and freely received within the covenant of marriage, becomes a way to sanctify the world.
Bodily things are good and can serve God. In recent weeks as we've reflected upon the Christmas story, we see God taking human flesh, God becoming part of his good creation, to give us eternal life, to save us. He's not saving us from the physical world. He's saving us by using the physical world. God enters the bread and wine, transforms the bread and wine, the material world, in order to give us a spiritual gift. The physical world matters. The physical world, our bodies have eternal and spiritual significance. We must not regard or treat our bodies and the material world lightly or casually.
Christianity is a very materialistic religion—probably more so than any other. It proclaims the goodness of creation. The physical world nurtures our spiritual lives. That's why the way we celebrate mass is such an intense physical and sensuous experience—movement, posture, color, smell, taste, beautiful sounds. We experience God through the material world. Our bodies are not divorced from Spirit, but filled by the Spirit—indeed, Paul says, they are temples of the Holy Spirit. We should have a deep awareness of God's presence in us and so we treat our bodies with honor. If we treat the Blessed Sacrament with reverence and awe and gentleness, we should treat our own bodies and the bodies of other people with reverence and awe and gentleness.
In Paul's imaginary dialogue with the Corinthians, he imagines them saying, "God will destroy both one and the other," that is, "God will destroy both the body and food." In other words, "how can the body or food have eternal significance?"Paul replies, "God raised up the Lord, and he will raise us up as well." In Jesus Christ, God united the spiritual and physical world. When Jesus rose from the dead, God raised the physical world. He raised our bodies. God loves creation, and he does not destroy it. He raises it. We, too, need to love it, and reverence it, and use it to his glory.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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© 2006 Lane John Davenport
