Last week, I sat down with our first and second grade Sunday School class to prepare for Youth Sunday, today. This is something I try to do every month: visit with the class that’s preparing to help lead worship, talk about what we do in church, and help them write the prayers we use.
So we had a great conversation about what we ask God for, and what we thank God for. Then I asked about reading the scripture lessons – and all of the first and second grade students readily volunteered their older brothers and sisters. So I went back to my office, pulled up the readings for today,
and winced.
and winced.
Because, I admit, I don’t usually strike up a conversation with our teens and pre-teens – much less their younger brothers and sisters – about immorality, prostitutes, and bodies. In fact, it’s something many of us are not comfortable talking about in church, even if it IS in scripture.
But here it is, this morning,
regularly scheduled in the lectionary,But here it is, this morning,
on one of our regularly scheduled Youth Sundays,
and here we are, talking about it.
Hey! Paul is saying,
Pay attention to what’s going on with your bodies!
I’ve been teaching you about the wonderful gift of freedom you have in Christ, and I know you’re listening because I hear you going around, telling each other delightedly: I am allowed to do anything, now!!
Great. But now this freedom is getting you into arguments about eating meat from the temple or only vegetables. You’re arguing among yourselves about whether it’s more free to marry or stay single. And you brag about your freedom to welcome someone in your congregation who is living intimately with his stepmother.
Pay attention!
If you think this is what freedom’s all about, you’re turning Jesus Christ into a prostitute!
Do you suppose there was a shocked silence in the Corinthian congregation when the reader got to that point in Paul’s letter?
There should have been.
Think about your body for a minute.
Do you love your body?
Does it feel beautiful, and holy, and wonderful?
When you want a spiritual experience, do you think first about your body?
How many of you answered “no” to at least one of those questions?
Me too.
Paul wants us to answer yes.
And I think God wants us to answer yes.
But so much of the world around us wants us to answer, “no.”
Every other ad on television has something to say to us about what’s wrong with our bodies – so that the marketers can sell us something to “fix” them.
Many of us learn from a very early age that we’re not beautiful – too tall or too short, the wrong shape, the wrong color hair, too much or not enough of it…. And of those few who do learn early that they are beautiful – many are taught to fight their bodies in order to stay “beautiful.”
The bad news isn’t the hype itself. The bad news is that if we believe the hype, it’s a spiritual disaster.
Seriously.
Have you noticed, perhaps, that your body is with you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every week of the year?
Your body is the only article of faith you can’t ever leave behind. It’s the revelation of God that quite literally walks around with you.
Paul said it: your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you...
Your body is the church in the world. The temple, the physically holy space that is with us always. Our bodies are the holy presence of God everywhere we are.
At work; at school.
In traffic.
At the doctor’s office, at the lunch meeting, when we’re in a fight with a family member.
When we’re checking our email, or watching TV.
And, very definitely, when we’re in bed.
It’s no accident that scripture asserts that physical intimacy is a spiritual union.
The holy presence of God is embodied within you, being you, no matter what.
This is precisely why we talk to our kids about sex, and why we hope they will talk to us. It’s why we talk about sex in church.
And also about details of food, and illness, and other things that make us uncomfortable. Things some might say should be decently kept to oneself.
Because our life of faith, our relationship with God, are not just what we pray and hear and say here on Sunday mornings. This is the least part of it, honestly.
Our relationship with God matters most in the places that aren’t church. And our bodies are there. Our bodies are us, the temple of the Holy Spirit, holy and valuable to God, eating, sleeping, making love, singing along with the radio, checking email.
Paul is mad at the Corinthians because they have forgotten that every cell of our bodies belongs to God.
And when we forget that – when we forget that our hunger, our physical pain, our strength, even the nerve endings and skin and heart of arousal – belong to God, we slip unintentionally into abuse. Into neglect of the holiness of our bodies, and worship of the things which are not God.
And we miss this wonderful, extraordinary gift:
that our bodies are the gift of holy physical presence that we can never misplace or lose.
Think about your body, right now.
Your body that aches sometimes, that doesn’t always cooperate, that changes when you least expect it, that offers delights of taste and touch and smell.
What is your body doing right now?
….sitting…..breathing….turning breakfast into muscle and bone….making meaning out of sound waves in the air….perhaps touching someone else’s body…pumping blood and life through your heart and limbs and skin…fighting infection… breathing….
Close your eyes. Occupy your body.
And listen:
LORD, you have searched me out and known me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
For you yourself created my inmost parts;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I will thank you because I am marvelously made.
Your works are wonderful, and I know it well. I will thank you because I am marvelously made.
Know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own. You were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
Go ahead and open your eyes, again.
Go on breathing, occupying your body,
the temple of the Holy Spirit that can never be closed to you, the real holy presence of God in all the places you are.
In the end, I’m glad we’re talking about this on Youth Sunday.
Because this gospel truth shouldn’t be kept from children, and most especially not from teens. It’s one we need to know, one we might even best learn from the youngest of our children.
Your body is holy. A wonderful revelation of God’s love for you.
And if we hear it here, absorb it with our bodies, here,
maybe it will help us pay attention to our holy presence on Tuesday mornings, and Friday afternoons, early in the morning and late at night,
in all the places we are.
Emily, You rock. Thanks for standing up for youth this Sunday and sharing the Gospel through the Epistle of the day.
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