THE BODY IS FOR THE LORD, AND THE LORD FOR THE BODY
January 15th, 2006
Jeremy Bergen
Texts: 1 Samuel 3:1-10
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
Corinthians 6:12-20
The call of Samuel is one of the memorable stories of the Bible in which God calls an individual for special service. Like Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, the boy Samuel is an unlikely choice to bring the Word of God to God’s people. We learn that “the word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” Perhaps like our own time, the people of Samuel’s day assumed that God only rarely addresses us directly.
But I want us to look at this story a bit differently this time. Notice how the scene is set. Besides the fact that Eli was the priest in whose house Samuel was serving, we are told something else about Eli: he was nearly blind. Samuel’s physical situation is also noted. Samuel “was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was.” The ark was the physical manifestation of God’s covenant–or relationship–with the people of Israel. And Samuel is lying just a few feet from it. Then comes a voice, calling to Samuel. Nothing visual, which would have been hidden from Eli. Just a voice, which could have been heard by Eli but is addressed to Samuel as he lies in his own bed. Samuel gets up runs to Eli and asks why he has called. Eli explains he did not and tells Samuel to lie down. Samuel runs back, lies down and hears the voice again. Again the text notes that Samuel gets up, goes to Eli and is told to return to his bed and lie down. This happens a third time, and it occurs to Eli that the Lord may be calling Samuel. So he instructs Samuel to lie down again and if the voice comes again, to say “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” The fourth and final time, the formula is different, and we read the remarkable passage: “Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before…” The Lord stood there. What can this mean? That God has arms and legs? No. But the narrative has prepared us for such a startling physical image. All this getting up and lying down, running from room to room, the proximity to the ark, has set the scene such that we can see that Samuel is addressed as a whole person–soul and body. The call is physical, real, in a particular place and time. It matters where Samuel’s body is; and when he truly recognizes that the Lord is present, it is as if there are two bodies in the room. The Lord “stood there”–person to person with Samuel in the full sense. And in this moment of intimacy, when it was like God was there physically, that Samuel responds and really enters into relationship with God. I would like us to reflect together on something this story evokes–what our faith affirms that bodies are for. Or, if we can’t paint a complete picture, at least a framework for thinking about this.
God calls out to the whole Samuel–body, mind and spirit. In his body, Samuel was available to hear God’s call. This may seem obvious. How else might God address someone? But bodies are not uncontroversial things. In fact, just how important bodies are has been a contentious issue throughout Christianity. Is our body just a temporary shell, which we want to discard and get rid of as soon as possible? That is, is salvation just for the soul, apart from the body? We will see in a moment some of the beliefs the Corinthians held on questions like this, and how Paul responded to them.
But of course we have deep anxieties about the body today. I hardly need to say that advertizing, movies, social pressure, and so on all conspire to present ideal bodies and remind nearly all of us that we don’t have them. Attention to sexuality, in its many forms, is an example of anxiety about the body. Is sexuality just an instinctual thing that we have in common with animals? Just for procreation? With whom are sexual relations acceptable? Is it good in and of itself? That is, what is sexuality for? But our anxieties over bodies isn’t limited to sexuality. In our society, as in others, social divisions often occur around the colour of one’s skin. Are differently coloured bodies different? Religious traditions of all kind are concerned with the status of what goes in bodies, and what comes out. Thus, sex and food become religious concerns; for Judaism, for Christianity.
One particularly intense occasion for contemporary reflection on bodies is the current exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre called “Bodyworld.” If you have not seen it, you may have seen ads in the paper or at bus stops. Someone invented a process of essentially preserving human bodies through a process called plastination; in which the tissues of a dead body are sealed in their original form such that they do not rot. In the Bodyworld exhibit, bodies that have been plastinated are presented in various poses and from various perspectives, like statues in motion, in order to give the viewer a close look at how the body is put together. One can see vividly how the muscles of the whole body work together as someone throws a javelin or twirls on skates. One can see a vivid cross section of the internal organs, or a pregnant woman. One exhibit is called “drawer man” in which square sections of the body are pulled out, like drawers, for the viewer to see what is inside.
I confess that I have not seen the exhibit and have some reservations about it. I don’t know that I want to see it. My questions about the exhibit aren’t the only ones that could be raised, and I’m sure there’d be a diversity of view on it in the congregation. Let me also say that I think that the donated bodies of those who have died ought to be used for research and, in some cases, for education. But, I have some discomfort with bodies as the raw material in what is partially an art exhibit. Should we be looking at bodies in these ways? One of the things the organizers note is that the people whose bodies are on display consented to they being used in this way. But they were also promised that their would not be recognized. No one viewing the display would come face to face with a plastinated and identifiable form of their deceased uncle Ralph, for example. This is perhaps understandable. But is this separation of body from personal identity a good thing? Are bodies just bodies? Should we indeed practice seeing them as objects, apart from the whole person? For me, this is the source of unease with the exhibit. It seems that in the Bible, body and personal identity are held closely together. This is so in the first case because God both fashions human beings from the dust of the earth and breaths into them the breath of life–these are aspects of one action of God. And secondly and even more significantly, because God’s promise to us is that our bodies will be glorified in the resurrection. From the Samuel story, I have suggested that bodies make us available to others: to God firstly, but we can extend this to other people. Thus, we have the possibility of being in relationship. From the Bodyworld reflection, I think we can see that we also have an intuitive sense that bodies are also connected to identity. Availability to another, relationship, personal identity, these are just some of many aspects of what bodies are for.
Do we just “have” bodies, or are bodies simply a part of who we are? When you think of yourself, is the “you” just your mind, or just your soul, or just your body? Or all of them together? When I remember my grandmother (or oma) who died when I was 16, I call to my mind an image of her; the memory of being in her presence, of being hugged by her, of being welcomed to her house with a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Though she has died, she is still real to me in my memory, in part because these memories are concrete and physical. My oma’s physical presence, which is now just in my memory, is still part of her identity, who she was and how I knew her. In our bodies, my oma could be present to me and I to her. Like Samuel whose body made him available and open to relationship with Go
d; so our bodies make us available and open to each other. We are not ourselves in isolation from one another, but in relation to one another and to God. Our identities consist, in part, of our relationships and our bodies are part of what make relationships possible. But all seems a bit abstract. Let’s take a closer look at what Paul says to the Corinthians, on one level, about food and sex, but on another simply about bodies.
Most biblical scholars think that the phrase “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both one and the other” refers to a slogan that the Corinthians held, but that Paul rejects. On the one hand, the idea of God destroying the stomach might be taken to deny the resurrection. A few verses later, Paul responds that just as God raised Christ, so God will resurrect us by his power. But food was also a contentious issue for the Corinthians, as we learn in chapter 8, because of the question of whether Christians could eat meat sacrificed to idols. There Paul explains that since idols really have no power whatsoever, the meat sacrificed to them is just meat. But, just because Christians are therefore permitted to eat this meat, if such activity is a stumbling block for those new Christians who are trying to leave their lives of idol sacrifice behind, then for their sake it would be best if other Christians also didn’t eat that meat. The framework is not a legalistic one, but rather what serves the good of the community. When the Corinthians say, in our passage this morning, “food is meant for the stomach,” they are suggesting that food is just food, so it doesn’t matter what we eat. It doesn’t matter what we eat if we lived in isolation from each other–but we don’t, so it does matter. The message of Paul in response suggests your body is not simply your own to do whatever you want with. Rather, your body is for a purpose–it is for the Lord and the Lord’s body the church–and so how you use it really does matter. This is so not only in the exhortation to refrain from eating certain things in a given context such as food sacrificed to idols, but also to the importance of participating in a certain kind of meal–the Lord’s Supper.
As I move from food to sex, I should say that I am not really preaching about sexual ethics. One could preach about that from this text, but that would be a second step. The first is what I take to be the central theme here, and the theme throughout our passages. Just what do we, as Christians, believe bodies are for?
Some Christians in Corinth believed in a strong separation of the body from the soul. They believed the body was transient. Now, for some this meant “do whatever you want with your body.” Give in to desires for sex, food, whatever. These people reasoned that we have freedom in Christ, and what we do with our bodies doesn’t have any ultimate consequences since we leave the body behind when we die, so there’s nothing wrong with visiting prostitutes. For other Corinthians, the belief that the body was ultimately unimportant lead to nearly opposite practices. They concluded that things associated with the body were inherently bad and thus they focused on the things of the spirit. Thus, some took this to an extreme and stopped, on principle, having sexual relations with their own spouses.
Paul is critical of both extremes. The “do whatever you want” folks are wrong because they are looking at the question only from the perspective of the isolated individual–i.e. what I am allowed to do. What are my rights? But we are not isolated from each other. We are members together in the body of Christ; we have our identities in one another. So, what I do with my body affects other people with whom we are together the body of Christ. This is how our identities work; and specifically how our identities work in Christ. Paul does not say, “don’t be sexually immoral because I say so.” He frames a new way of thinking. Paul challenges us to think about not only what is allowed, but what is beneficial. He pushes the Corinthians to think how their actions might be harmful to others in the community–how indiscriminate sex undermines the integrity of community because it implies that our identities can be separated from our bodies.
The fact that we are embodied people means that we can be available to other persons. We can be gifts to them, and they can be gifts to us. But only if we treat them as persons. When two people are truly present to each other in this holistic way, then they can find this relationship is part of their own identity. I think of my relationship to my oma here, which is really a part of my identity. This possibility of being present to another is the case for embodied relationships that are not sexual, and for those that are. When one person treats another–a prostitute in this case–as an object, this denies his own identity as fully body and soul. In this case, the body is not the possibility for truly being available to another person because the one paying the prostitute has made the body “just a body,” the body is just an occasion for fulfilling its own desires. Timothy Radcliffe, a Dominican monk and teacher, writes that Paul here shifts our idea from “sex as merely a bodily function to being the possibility of presence and union with another, and from the context of sexuality as being merely one’s individual relationship with another to that of our belonging in the Body of Christ.”
Paul is also critical of those who think that anything to do with the body is bad. You have your identity in Christ, Paul says. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit–the physical and the spiritual together. God has created your bodies, and Christ has redeemed them. The grace of God in Christ is the fact that in Christ God took a human body; God became a human person. When I discussed the call of Samuel, I suggested that Samuel’s body is what made him available to God’s call, to relationship with God. Now, turn this upside down. God’s taking a body–that is, what God does for us in Jesus Christ–is about God making himself available to us, available for relationship with us. This is remarkable. God experiences what it is to have a body, and does so for our sake. God knows that a relationship is most intimate when two persons are facing each other body to body, person to person. Here the identity of the one is partly made up of the identity of the other. And it is this intimacy that God has with us, in Jesus Christ. And because of this, our bodies are redeemed. Our identities are transformed. Our bodies are not our own. Just as God raised Jesus Christ, so God will raise us too, in our bodies. We are not closer to God when we deny our bodies, since God has made our bodies good but also for relationship with Christ and with others in Christ. It does matter what we do with our bodies, and whether we use our bodies, including our sexuality, in a way that builds up the body of Christ, the human community, or in a way that tears it down and breaks it apart into isolated units. Do we use our bodies to put ourselves into a genuine relationship with Christ; which is to say, into genuine relationships with other whole persons who are fellow members of the body of Christ?
What are bodies for? Ultimately, the body is for the Lord, for communion with God our creator and redeemer, and for communion with others, in God; and to make this possible, the Lord is for the body.
Listen again to the words that opened our service. As I read the words of the Psalmist, think of the intimacy with which God knows you, and knows you in your body. Think of how this intimacy stamps your very identity with the love of God; and how such a body loved by God can make possible community with others in God.
[Read Psalm139:1-6; 13-18] Amen.