A sermon on 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 by Nathan Nettleton

There is a young woman who lives around the corner from my place. She is a regular jogger, and it used to be a pleasure to catch sight of her running past my window, all clad in lycra, because she had a very attractive body – fit, healthy, curvy, and shapely. But nowadays, I find it quite distressing to see her run past. Anorexia has completely destroyed her once beautiful body. All her shape has gone, and so has the aura of health and vibrancy. She just looks sickly and brittle. It is a tragedy. Excessive discipline can be so destructive. But I also have two or three good friends who are massively obese. When they sit down, I fear for the chair, and for what might happen if the chair broke and they were skewered by broken pieces. And I fear for their health generally. There are all manner of potentially life-threatening health complications that accompany that sort of obesity. Lack of discipline can be every bit as destructive as excessive discipline.

(A word of explanation or apology. I realise that I have oversimplified the issues here. I am aware that excessive discipline or lack of discipline are not the causes of eating disorders, but merely the mechanisms.)

The ways we think about our bodies and treat our bodies sometimes reflect something of the way we relate to Jesus – not always, but sometimes. And it seems that the followers of Jesus, just like everyone else, are prone to straying from the healthy path in one direction or the other, in various areas, be it food or sex or body image or spirituality.

This is by no means a new problem. It was clearly an issue that the Apostle Paul felt he needed to address in his letter to the Corinthians, as we heard earlier. He is struggling to get his hearers to find the path Jesus calls us to which avoids the destructive extremes. He addresses these extremes in terms of how they are usually expressed in matters of faith, and he illustrates them from the ways they are usually mirrored in our bodies, in our behaviours around food and sex. So let me follow his pattern and take them in that same order.

Paul points to two conflicting understandings of the nature of the life that Jesus calls us to follow. One is that following Jesus is all about learning the rules and obeying them rigorously. Call it legalism if you like. The opposite view says that Jesus came to set us free from all rules, and that we are now free to do whatever appeals to us at the time and we take particular delight in doing those things that other people think we are not allowed to do, just to prove and celebrate our freedom. Libertarianism, if you like.

Each of these opposite positions contain some important truth. Legalism has its place. Most of us learned a lot of what we needed to know by following rules. We first learned to cross the road safely by obeying rules. Rules can get you through when you are not yet sure how to act. If you had to disarm a ticking bomb, because there was no bomb disposal expert available, but you had a book of rules telling you step-by-step how to successfully disarm the bomb, you’d be very thankful for those rigid rules, and you’d be more than willing to follow them meticulously. Rules can enable us to avoid tragic mistakes when we don’t really know what we are doing. I wish the girl around the corner had some rigid rules about nutrition that she believed she had to obey.

But libertarianism contains lots of truth too. Freedom is important. Those who live life entirely by rules are locked in a kind of childish immaturity, avoiding making their own decisions, and depending solely on external guidance. Libertarians correctly recognise that legalism results in fear and stunted growth, not love and joy and flourishing. Jesus is on about freedom.

Each of these opposite approaches to the faith carries with it a different understanding of the human body, and a different experience of the body. Legalism tends to see the body and its desires as a threat, a dangerous enemy, that needs to be policed and subdued and tightly controlled. Libertarianism, on the other hand, tends to see the human body as either irrelevant – only spiritual things matters – or as the meaning of life. Life is all about bodily pleasure, so eat, drink and make love, because that’s what your body is designed to enjoy.

To a large extent, these two positions are the critique of each other, but let’s look critically at them both before we go on. The Apostle Paul knows all about legalism. Prior to his life-changing encounter with Jesus, he was a member of the rigorously legalistic Pharisee party. By the time he is writing his letters to the churches, he is more often being accused of being a libertarian because he has so obviously turned away from his old position. He’s actually neither, but he knows and understands both.

The central problem of the legalistic understanding, as Paul now sees, is that it is grounded in a very wrong view of the character of God. It makes God out to be a self-absorbed and vindictive monster who sets irritating and even impossible rules as obstacles in our path and who takes a nasty pleasure in marking us harshly when we stumble over them. It also suggests that God despises human bodies, seeing them as dirty and dangerous and needing to be punished and disciplined and suppressed. But Jesus has shown us that such views of God are a million miles from the truth. God created human bodies and rejoiced in their goodness. God delights in our enjoyment of our bodies and longs to see us grow in freedom and maturity and into all the fullness of life. The kind of growth in faith that God longs to see in us includes growth in our ability to make our own wise and healthy choices and to enjoy and appreciate the healthy pleasures that come with being embodied people. God wants to see us growing beyond fear and timidity so that we can live boldly and creatively and joyously in freedom and love.

Islam has an interesting parallel to this conflict. Mainstream Islam, much like Judaism, has a strong sense of God’s law and the importance of obeying it. Obeying God’s law is understood as the central expression of one’s devotion to God. But there is a mystical branch within Islam known as Sufism, and some of the Sufis regard the law as something that one has to grow out of in order to go further on the path into deep spiritual union with God. Law-keeping is an early stage on the journey into union with God, and it must be left behind if one is to progress in godliness. Now this is extremely controversial within Islam, and especially when a few of the more extreme Sufis, much like some of the people the Apostle is debating with in our reading, begin asserting that all things are now permissible for them, and setting out to demonstrate it by drinking themselves drunk and participating in orgies and the like. Mainstream Islam’s response to these excesses has mostly been a fierce reassertion of the absolute importance of the law, but when he was faced with similar things, the Apostle Paul can’t just flee back to his old legalistic approach. He has to do something a little more subtle; a bit more of a balancing act.

So Paul doesn’t flatly contradict his opponents when they say, “All things are permissible to us.” He restates their slogan, and then qualifies it, twice.

“All things are permissible for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are permissible for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.

Jesus has not set us free in order that we might be free to destroy ourselves with stupid and self-destructive behaviour. Jesus has set us free so that we can choose and enjoy the very best. So what Paul is arguing is that permissibility is not an important category in healthy religion. Jesus has set us free from fearfully worrying all the time about what is and isn’t permissible so that we can instead freely choose what is healthy and life-giving and fulfilling. Paul warns us against making an idol of our freedom where we begin to think of freedom as an end in itself and so we make stupid choices as an insecure assertion of our freedom.

Paul quotes another one of his opponents’ slogans: “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.” In other words, indulge your bodily appetites because that is what they were designed for. It is clear from what Paul goes on to say that people were applying this slogan to sexual appetites as well as to food. Indulge your sexual appetites because that is what your body was created for. Once again, Paul doesn’t reject the slogan outright. He is not wanting anyone to go back to just thinking that God’s views of food and sex are all about obedience to rules. He is wanting people to see that food and sex are wonderful things when treated well, but which can be destroyed and destructive if they are treated stupidly. God is not so much concerned with rules, but very concerned with consequences. God wants the very best for you, and so God doesn’t want you short-changing yourself by sabotaging good things so that become poisonous.

The girl around the corner from me has sabotaged some good things – healthy exercise and careful eating – and they have become the means of her self-destruction. God is not angry at her for breaking rules, but God is weeping over her tragic plunge into sickness and self-hatred. God meant for her to enjoy her body, her health, her beauty, and a joyous fullness of life.

The example the Apostle Paul uses with the Corinthians is sexual behaviour, no doubt because that was the most prevalent and worrying expression of the problem in the church at Corinth. Elsewhere Paul rebukes the Corinthians for their gluttony, so I don’t think anorexia was a big problem there! But promiscuous sexual behaviour was clearly an issue. Again Paul is clear that the issue is not one of disobedience, but one of failing to recognise how precious the gift of sex is, and how easily it can be sabotaged. God cares greatly about the consequences. Paul is suggesting that if you treat sex as a casual and trivial matter, it will become trivial and the pleasures you gain from it will become increasingly trivial until they waste away to nothing. One can imagine what the Apostle might have to say today faced with the epidemic of commercial pornography that is destroying so many people’s capacity to enjoy healthy sexual relationships. Pornography is driven by a profit motive, so the way it depicts sex is carefully designed to constantly promise true fulfilment with one more click and one more purchase, but to ensure that fulfilment always eludes our grasp. After all, fulfilled people don’t buy more product, so the product must always fuel the craving and never satisfy it, and thousands of people, especially men but many women too, are having their capacity to enjoy real sex systematically destroyed by a multi-billion dollar industry. Rule-breaking is not of great interest to God, but God weeps over over destruction of our selves and of the good gifts that God gave us to enjoy and find fulness of life in. The biblical recommendation that we reserve sexual intimacy for one healthy committed loving relationship is not for the sake of limiting our enjoyment, but so that instead of spreading sex so thinly that it seems trivial we can intensify its love, its intimacy and its passion to the explosive maximum only possible within secure boundaries.

The point of all this, as I hope you are hearing, is not all about sex or food or body image. It is about the heart of the gospel. It is about setting us free from either of the destructive extremes, from living fearfully and immaturely before a God we imagine to be a harsh and vindictive legalist, or from living lives that are out of control because an addiction to the idea of freedom has tipped us into an absolute slavery to our own bodies where we can no longer say no to even the most self-destructive appetites. The good news, the gospel, is that God loves you and wants to give you the best of everything and longs to see you free to appreciate and enjoy life to the full. The gospel is that God does not want to restrict you or limit you, but to lead you into the maximum love and joy and life that are possible for you. The good news is that the pathway of life is not found by timid rule keeping, nor by dangerously pursuing pleasure, but by following the one who has shown us what the ultimate in bodily human life looks like, lived to the full and poured out for the love of others and the life of the world, Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God.