"IT'S NOW O.K."

(Sermons on 1 Corinthians - 6)

8/12/01 - The Rev. Alan Jackson

SERMON

Last week you looked at chapter 5 and there found a member of the church in Corinth who was carrying on an incestuous relationship with his father's wife (presumably his stepmother). Now, that was not only a violation of Jewish law, it was against Roman law as well. Hence, we have Paul's comment about the kind of sexual immorality "that does not occur even among pagans." But what troubled Paul far more deeply was that the folks in that church seemed genuinely delighted that they were such a tolerant and inclusive congregation. As long as this fellow paid his dues, they evidently didn't care how he behaved.

Before we get to feeling a bit too righteous for our own good, let's acknowledge our own responsibility in this regard. None of us is going to stop a Catherine Zeta-Jones from shacking up with Michael Douglas, making a baby, then deciding, "Oh well, we might as well get married." That kind of stuff is going to go on. But we do have an obligation, even if it is only when we see our kids reading about that sort of shabby morality in People Magazine, to say to them, "That bothers me, and I'll tell you why." Have you talked to your kids candidly about your moral convictions? (I'm talking here to parents of all ages.)

Paul certainly didn't mince words. He advised the folks in Corinth to excommunicate the man immediately, with the hope that this act of "handing him over to Satan" (to use Paul's words) would wake him up to the gravity of his offence. Now, if Ted felt badly at being stuck with a tough assignment in chapter 5, I trust he'll take comfort in knowing that chapter 6 is no "walk in the park" either. But as I said at the outset of these studies, this book is likely to push all sorts of "hot buttons" and challenge some of our more dearly held prejudices. And of course, Paul wastes no time in getting to them in today's lesson.

After closing chapter 5 with the admonition to "Expel the wicked man from among you," he begins chapter 6 by saying, in effect:

"While we're on the subject of church discipline, let's talk about your apparent addiction to litigation. You folks seem to have a remarkably worldly attitude when it comes to handling your grievances among yourselves. You assume, because the world's standard says ‘Take him to court,' that you should operate that way in the body of Christ. Let me remind you that you're supposed to be operating by a different standard! However, you have obviously placed such a high value on winning your case that you're blind to the long-range loss that you suffer when you refuse to work out your differences in a Christian context.

"By your litigious attitude you make it very difficult for the Lord to be able to say to you, ‘Well done… You have been faithful over a little matter, I will now set you over much more.' You saints are destined to be justices in the greatest supreme court of all time; yet at this point you haven't even mastered the rudiments of justice tempered with grace among yourselves. Shame on you! I find it incredible that you can't seem to find anyone in the faith with enough wisdom and maturity to arbitrate your disputes. The trouble is that you don't want to be bothered with the responsibility of confronting each other in love. That's why you take each other to court.

"It's your attitude that is killing you spiritually and tearing you apart as a body of believers. Oh, you have gladly accepted the doctrine of justification as it applies to you personally. But since you're willing to cut each other to ribbons in civil court, you prove in practice that you really do not believe in forgiveness or reconciliation."

Then in verses 9-10 Paul moves from a personal diatribe on the foolish behavior of the Christians in Corinth to a brief but sweeping and general pastoral pronouncement for the whole church. He writes, "Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God?" Paul categorically asserts that if we fail to make the connection between right behavior and right words, then we stand to forfeit our claim to the kingdom of which we say we are a part. It's not enough to say you're a believer. You have to act like it. Wake up!

Paul then identifies those who have no claim to the kingdom. "Do not be deceived," he writes. (And I don't think Paul would have said that if it weren't a real possibility.) "Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."

Now, that can hardly be construed as an exhaustive list. There are a number of "sins" not included there. But those sinners do represent a life that puts self-service and self-gratification and self-aggrandizement ahead of devotion to God. That's why Paul lists sex sins and property sins and sins that destroy the mind and sins that hurt others.

"And that is what some of you were," he says at verse 11, getting back to the folks in Corinth. "So when it comes to listing those ‘sinners' on the outside, this is no place for a holier-than-thou attitude. Because the only difference between you and ‘them' is that you've been washed, sanctified and justified. And it was all done for you. It was a free gift. True, you took that initial step. But remember, the step you took was simply to receive the gift. You didn't earn it."

Then at verse 12 he makes the astounding claim that, because of that gift, you and I are free to do anything. "Everything is permissible for me," he writes, " – but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me – but I will not be mastered by anything." Then he spends the balance of the chapter dealing with the complex problems of sexual immorality. And believe me, things haven't changed much.

Some time ago I came across a newspaper article, an Associated Press release, with the headline "It's now OK to choose to be a single mother." The article began: "The definition of ‘unwed mother' has been stretched with time. Joining big-time unmarried moms, a growing breed of white middle-class women are taking on pregnancy without husbands or shame. "Before, the big freak out was, ‘Oh my God, I'm pregnant.' Now the big freak out is ‘Oh my God, I'm not, and I'm still single and getting older,'" says Ciel Benedetto, administrator of the Santa Cruz Women's Health Center in California."

The article featured the picture of a woman named Lange Burnett holding her baby. It went on: "One night with a stranger gave Lange Burnett, 31, the baby she'd wanted for a year. Burnett's daughter, Jade Thiele, was born last Valentine's Day. "I feel like meeting Jade's father was God's gift," says the Dallas make-up artist.

"I had asked the Lord for the right person to come along. When I met Jade's father one evening, I actually heard a little voice saying, ‘this is the golden one.' It was a one-nighter and that was it," she said. She describes the man she chose to father her child as "extremely intelligent, handsome and athletic."

It was her curiously mixed set of standards that baffled me. On the one hand, Miss Burnett used stock-in-trade religious phrases to describe her search for her "golden one." He was "God's gift." She had "asked the Lord for the right person to come along." She "actually heard a little voice" (presumably God's). And yet the standards by which she chose him were that he was "extremely intelligent, handsome and athletic." It apparently mattered little to her (or to God, as far as she was concerned) that this man might have been a bed-hopping, moral cretin with any number of latent socially transmitted diseases and the sexual ethics of a rabbit in heat. Those things didn't count, it would seem, as long as this "golden boy" met the strikingly worldly standards of acceptability: namely intelligence, good looks and athletic ability.

As I read it I thought: Something is fundamentally wrong with this picture. This article heralds a new age in which it is now OK to have a one-night stand and make a bastard child without the slightest twinge of guilt or moral compunction. It's true – we are free moral agents. We're free to choose what we do with our lives. But we are also answerable to God for how we use that freedom. Then I remembered Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 6:12, and something clicked. "Everything is permissible for me – but not everything is beneficial."

The headline of that article "It's now OK" is a pale reflection of the deep truth in Paul's words. As a Christian, everything is OK. But that does not automatically make everything good for you. Nor does the freedom you have in Christ guarantee that you will not become enslaved to those things you freely choose. The Corinthian culture to which Paul was writing, like the culture in which we live, sends messages which are repeated with such regularity and intensity that, like it or not – agree with it or not, those messages gradually move in on our conscious and subconscious and take hold. And a prime example of this, in both Paul's day and ours, is in the area of sexual ethics.

Now, is there a Christian answer to the dilemma of deteriorating sexual ethics? Paul says that there is; but it may not be what you expect. One answer to the crisis in sexual ethics is to withdraw into legalism. Another solution is to give in and go with the prevailing social mores, which amounts to little more than libertinism. Paul, however, threads his way between those two extremes, because legalism and libertinism can both be forms of slavery. Both legalism and libertinism offer what may seem at first an attractive kind of security; but both turn out to be fundamentally inadequate.

On the one hand, legalism in its extreme form offers the security of always telling you what to do and what not to do. Not only does that absolve you of responsibility for making moral decisions. If a decision turns out to be a bad one, you can always blame the authority figure for telling you to do the wrong thing. The weakness of legalism, however, is that when you subject yourself to the kind of system of regulations that dictates your every move, you give up your freedom of choice. And Paul says in verse 12, "Everything is permissible for me – but I will not be mastered by anything."

On the other hand, libertinism in the extreme offers the security of never having to answer to anyone for how you behave. The only rule is: "If it feels good, do it." The weakness of libertinism, of course, is that in giving in to whatever feels good at the time – never listening to anyone but yourself, you cut yourself off not only from your neighbor, but also from your heavenly Father.

Paul, however, offers a middle way, an alternative to both legalism and libertinism. But as you might expect, it's a paradox. In verse 13 he says, "The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." That is to say: We were made for the Lord, and so the Lord living in us is the only answer to our deepest longings. When you give your heart to Christ, in some mysterious way he becomes part of you and you become part of his body, even though you maintain your own identity.

Listen to Paul again in verse 15. "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!" Paul is passionately concerned here with the abuse of the mysterious, wonderful gift of our sexuality. In that day, in Corinth, prostitution was the most common form of sexual abuse. We in our day seem to have only achieved a slightly higher level of sophistication in the ways we prostitute ourselves (including our sexuality). That's why, at verse 18, Paul urges us to run away from sexual immorality as fast we can. And its not just because sexual immorality violates the bodies that Christ redeemed at the cost of his life. It desecrates the place within us that the Holy Spirit calls home.

Eugene Peterson in his paraphrase, The Message, puts it this way: "Don't you see that you can't live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works!"

In the seventh grade I learned a poem by William Henley entitled "Invictus" – words that have troubled me ever since. It reads:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Beneath the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody but unbowed.

It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll. I am the master of my fate! I am the captain of my soul!

To which Paul replies, "No, you're not! You are not your own. You were bought and paid for in full – and at what a price! Cash on the nail. Whatever your life is worth today is God's priceless gift to you. Therefore, honor God with your body."

The venerable Heidelberg Catechism puts the matter this way:

Question: What is your only comfort in life and in death?

Answer: That I belong, body and soul, not to myself, but to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
  

amen

 
Your assignment for this week is to read 1 Corinthians, chapter 7.

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