You must understand, though the
touch of your hand makes my pulse react
That it’s only the thrill of boy meeting girl, opposites attract
It’s physical
Only logical
You must try to ignore that it means more than that
Oh, oh, oh what’s love got to do,
got to do with it?
What’s love, but a second-hand emotion.
What’s love got to do, got to do with it?
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken.
These are the words sung by Tina
Turner in 1984 as she spoke into a world where hearts are broken and love had
become an emotion, not an action. It’s a world very similar to that of Paul’s.
And, when it comes to love, I want to suggest that the whole letter of Paul is
a call to love in the purest sense. That the full letter is about understanding
that love is more than a feeling. It was more than eros, the Greek word for
passionate love, and it was more than philia, the Greek word for affectionate
love, it was also more than philautia, the word for self love and it was more
than mania, the Greek word for obsessive love. I want to suggest that Paul is
calling the Corinthian church away from love as a feeling to love as a verb; to
a love that represents the cross, agape, the Greek word for selfless/universal
love and pragma, the Greek word for enduring love.
But before you say it is all
Greek to me, lets return to the scriptures and, instead of reading them in the
Greek of Paul, we will read them in the New Living Translation. 1 Cor 6:12-20.
You say,
"I am allowed to do anything"—but not everything is good for you. And
even though "I am allowed to do anything," I must not become a slave
to anything.
You say,
"Food was made for the stomach, and the stomach for food." (This is
true, though someday God will do away with both of them.)
But you can't
say that our bodies were made for sexual immorality. They were made for the
Lord, and the Lord cares about our bodies. And God will raise us from the dead
by His power, just as He raised our Lord from the dead.
Don't you
realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ?
Should a man
take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never!
And don't you
realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with
her? For the Scriptures say, "The two are united into one." But the
person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Run from sexual sin!
Don't you realize that your body is the
temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God?
You do not belong to yourself, for God
bought you with a high price. So, you must honor God with your body.
(1Co 6:12-20)
When Royce first asked me to
preach on this passage, my response was two-fold. First, I find it hard to
preach on hot topics which can tend to sway people into religious/ritual-bound
practices or complete liberalism.
Second, I warned Royce that I could not preach on these passages without
mentioning the French philosopher Foucault. When it comes to philosophers,
Foucault is not on the top ten list for Christian thinkers. But, he can help us
get a bit of understanding of classical Greek and Roman culture. Especially,
around the time of the church in Corinth.
You see there is a fascination
today with the classical worlds of Greece and Rome. One that tends to paint them
as the clean, pure and the white of the marble statues left behind today erected
to honour the Gods and heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome. We don’t see the mess
of this world, the mess that the church of Corinth was up against. One that
Foucault would write about in his book: The History of Sexuality.
In the ancient world, Corinth was
to Athens what Auckland is to Wellington. While Athens and Wellington are seen
as capital cities, both Corinth and Auckland are, let’s face it, more
important. They the true capitals of commerce, trade and travel. Corinth
separated Sparta from the main body of Greece; all transport, north and south,
had to pass through Corinth. And it had massive seaports to which sailors
flocked.
It is said that the Greek goddess
of love, beauty and pleasure, Aphrodite was born near Corinth. Aphrodite’s
temple in Corinth had over 1000 prostitutes donated by the citizens of Corinth,
men and women, to serve Aphrodite through erotic acts of lust, sex and sexual
pleasure 24/7. It was thought that by
having sex with one of Aphrodite’s prostitutes you would be serving the goddess
herself and having sex with her.
The Greek geographer Strabo
writing about 20AD talked about how the wealth of Corinth was built on sex,
lust and prostitution. He describes streets filled with sailors lusting for sex
and states a common proverb of the Greek world “The voyage to Corinth isn’t for
just any man.”
In a more contemporary source,
Dave Stotts in Drive Thru History points out that a common adjective of the
Greek world was to “Corinthinese.” To Corinthinese meant to fornicate. So, if
we haven’t got the point now, sexual indulgence was a reality of the Greek
world. Sexual indulgence was the norm of the Corinthian world.
And in this world was a church –
a church made of real people trying to escape the corruption of their own culture.
We know from Chapter 5, that this
is not the first time that Paul has written to the Corinthian church about
sexual immorality. He tells us in verse 9 of Chapter 5 that he had previously
told them to not associate with people who indulge in sexual sin.
We also know that Paul is not telling
them to not associate with the culture outside of the church. Again, he says in
Chapter 5 that he wasn’t writing about non-believers and if he was then they
“would have to leave this world to avoid people like that.”
Paul is writing about the sexual
immorality that is occurring within the church. Paul is writing about love
playing out in the church in all the wrongs ways.
You say, "I am allowed to do
anything”, “All things are lawful for me” was a popular Corinthian proverb. In
the Romo-Greek world, it singled that one’s body was one’s own possession. It was not owned by Caesar or any Parthenon
God. It was your’s for your shaping and for your pleasure.
So, at this point, what has love
got to do with it? This saying ‘I am allowed to do anything’ is simply
referring to Philautia, self-love, I am allowed to love myself. I am allowed to
satisfy myself. I am allowed to feel good.
It is then not by chance that
Paul would then say “Food was made for the stomach, and the stomach for food”.
He was referring to the pleasure element of the culture of the time – food gave
pleasure, sex gives pleasure. We satisfy the appetite of the stomach with food;
and sex in Corinth is treated in the same way – as satisfying an appetite of
sorts.
And, at this point, what’s love
but a second hand emotion? These are the feeling loves of eros (lust), philia
(affection) and mania (obsession). They all feed our own feelings, our own
desires. They give us pleasure. They are emotions, they are feelings.
And then Paul comes out of left
field and goes straight to the point – you have been called to a different kind
of love; why? Well logically our bodies are no longer our own.
They were made
for the Lord, and the Lord cares about our bodies. And God will raise us from
the dead by His power, just as He raised our Lord from the dead.
Don't you
realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ?
Should a man
take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never!
This is deep. It reminds us about
a different freedom, the freedom that is found at the Cross and the
resurrection moment. And just as God raised Christ from the dead, he is
resurrecting us and will raise us in turn not as spiritual beings but as a
completely physical creation in which his spirt will dwell because our bodies
are the temple of his Holy Spirit. We don’t have to have sex with one of
Aphrodite’s prostitutes in order to be joined to God, our bodies were made for
God, as temples where his spirit dwells.
This is big – remember, Paul
starts off “I’m allowed to do anything”. I could reinterpret that as “I am free
to do anything”. And in that, Paul is saying, in pursuing a freedom of love of
self and feeling love, you have become a salve to yourselves. You have taken on
the shackles of slavery again. Tina Turner was so right “Who needs a heart when
a heart can be broken”. Because the type of heart she is referring to is one in
which love is a feeling – whether it be in self love or passionate love. And
when we restrict love to the feeling words, we shackle ourselves to the world
again and that old saying is so, so wrong, while sticks and stones break our
bones, the words of others and ourselves in our doubts do so much damage. Love,
as a feeling, as an emotion cannot be sustained.
What’s love got to do with it?
Everything Tina. The reality is, sexual immorality is not confined to the
Corinthian church alone. I started this sermon with a reflection on the variety
of Greek words for love, many of them have connections to words today in
English. Our English words whakapapa back to the Greek – erotic, affection,
mania all have direct connections to Greek words, others such as lucidity,
pragmatic and friend also link back to the Greek words for love. But as I
suggested at the beginning of this sermon – there are two kinds of love – love
as a feeling and love as a verb.
When I look at our culture today,
what I notice more and more is a focus on the feeling of love rather than the
action of love. I think we are no different than the Corinthian church in that
we frame sex, and I am being frank here, but not frankie (who has been fixed), we
frame sex as something to first and foremost give us pleasure. And we frame
even our marriages around the feeling of love, not the verb of love.
What does this do? I would like
to suggest that cultures that frame intimate relationships around feelings of
love are gardens of risk. Why, because it is so easy, just as it was in the
Corinthian church, to pick up the adage that “I’m allowed to do anything” and
enter into relationships of sexual immorality. It is so easy to, and it’s
allowed, its legal, it is so easy to choose to lie with a prostitute so that we
get that feeling back, that arousal back. It is so easy today to enter into
affairs. It is permissible to satisfy ones own sexual appetite – after all, if
your partner’s not giving it to you, you can look elsewhere.
Paul would go on to say:
No other sin so
clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin
against your own body.
Don't you
realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and
was given to you by God?
You do not
belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So, you must honor
God with your body.
These verses that are so often
miss-interpreted as framing sex as a dirty and wrong. But we have to read these
closely and in the context of Chapter 5, Paul is saying that sexual immorality
is a sin, not sex. And most importantly Paul has the mirror on the church, not
on the citizens of Corinth.
These verses are not to be picked
up to judge those outside of the church but to reflect on ourselves, our
behaviours and our indulges. Paul is so deeply reminding the Corinthian church,
that Christianity is more than just spiritual. It is more than a religion of
rituals. Christianity is deeply physical. Hear me here, Christianity is deeply
physical.
In the beginning, God created
physically the earth and everything on it. God created man and woman; God
created the bodies of Adam and Eve. And then, to show his deep deep love for
us, God physically came to us through his son Jesus. Even the deepest of Atheists
agree that Jesus is a true physical human of history, they just disagree that
he was the son of God. Then, a display of his deepest agape, compassionate
love, Jesus died physically for us on the cross. And to top it off, Jesus the
son of God, resurrected from the dead, came physically back to the disciples
and held out his hands to doubting Thomas so that Thomas would know that this
was Christ in the flesh.
All of these acts, point to a
faith that is just as much physical as it is spiritual. Paul is reminding the
Church at Corinth – God bought all of you – the physical and the spiritual at
the cross. God bought all of you. So, realise “You do not belong to yourself,
for God bought you with a high price. So, you must honor God with your body.”
We have to realise that the
Church of Corinth was a church of real people trying to escape the corruption
of the world they lived in. We have to realise that the culture of Corinth was
corrupt even by today’s standards, but it would not have seemed corrupt by the
Corinthians at the time. It would have been seen as normal. This is the way we
live in Corinth: “I am allowed to do anything.”
And when I remind myself of that
very reality, that the people of Corinth saw their culture as normal for them.
The church of Corinth was made up of Corinthian people who would have come out
of the culture of Corinth. It is so easy to understand how sexual immorality
would have slipped into the church and how the church would have accepted it.
Paul’s challenge to them is to not make love a second-hand emotion, understand
that God has bought all of you, he dwells within you. Focus on the actions of
love you demonstrate to each other as the body of Christ, not on the emotion of
love.
When I remind myself of this
reality, I can’t help but think, what would Paul’s letter to us be? Not the
church of Corinth, but the church of Wainuiomata? We too have been called to
escape the corruption of the world that we live in. We too have been called to
not put love as a feeling first, we too have been called physically and
spiritually to united first with God. We too have been called to demonstrate
within our own valley, a church built on agape love – love as a verb, a
selfless, compassionate love. Yet, we too like the church at Corinth will find
ourselves craving to satisfy our own love of self and the love of appetite
whether it be sexual or just winning the fight against the person who wrongs
us.
But just how well we do this,
well God will be the judge of that? In the meantime, let us strive to live the
answer to the ultimate question – what has love got to do with it? Everything,
we respond, everything, in our comings and goings, in our interactions and
thoughts, at all times and in every way.
I want to finish with a true
story, retold in the movie ‘The End of a Spear’. In this movie Nat Saint and
his fellow missionaries were killed by Waodani indigenous peoples in a
misunderstanding of welcome ceremonies. Decades later Nat’s son Steve would find
himself being a missionary with the Waodani in a desire to help them see
freedom in Christ and their own culture and not be dependent on Western model
of Christianity. In a very true, and moving moment, the leader of the Waodoni
says to Steve that he can’t accept Christ, he is the one that killed Steve’s
father.
At that moment, Steve picks up a
spear, he wants to set right the death of the father, he wants to heal the pain
inside of a father lost. He wants to satisfy the appetite of passionate
revenge. And then Steve realises deeply and says aloud “My father’s life wasn’t
taken, he gave his life.” It is similar to another gospel story, one we all
agree with:
Koia anō te aroha o te Atua ki te ao,
hōmai
ana e ia tāna
Tama kotahi, kia kāhore ai e ngaro te tangata e whakapono ana ki a ia, engari
kia whiwhi ai ki te ora tonu.
For God loved the world so much
that He gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will
not perish but have eternal life.
