God Knows – sermon on January 18, 2015
1 Samuel 3: 1-20 Little Samuel was helping the Lord by assisting Eli. Messages from God were very rare in those days, but one night after Eli had gone to bed (he was almost blind with age by now), and Samuel was sleeping in the Temple near the Ark, God called out, “Samuel! Samuel!” “Yes?” Samuel replied. “What is it?” He jumped up and ran to Eli. “Here I am. What do you want?” he asked. “I didn’t call you,” Eli said. “Go on back to bed.” So he did. Then God called again, “Samuel!” And again Samuel jumped up and ran to Eli. “Yes?” he asked. “What do you need?” “No, I didn’t call you, my son,” Eli said. “Go on back to bed.”
Samuel had never had a message from God before. So now the Lord called the third time, and once more Samuel jumped up and ran to Eli. “Yes?” he asked. “What do you need?” Then Eli realized it was the Lord who had spoken to the child. So he said to Samuel, “Go and lie down again, and if he calls again, say, ‘Yes, Lord, I’m listening.’” So Samuel went back to bed.
And God came and called as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel replied, “Yes, I’m listening.” Then God said to Samuel, “I am going to do a shocking thing in Israel. I am going to do all of the dreadful things I warned Eli about. I have continually told him and his entire family they would be punished because his sons are disrespecting God, and he doesn’t stop them. So I have vowed that the sins of Eli and of his sons shall never be forgiven by sacrifices and offerings.”
Samuel stayed in bed until morning, then opened the doors of the Temple as usual, for he was afraid to tell Eli what the Lord had said to him. But Eli called him. “My son,” he said, “what did the Lord say to you? Tell me everything. And may God punish you if you hide anything from me!” So Samuel told him what the Lord had said. “It is the Lord’s will,” Eli replied; “let him do what he thinks best.”
As Samuel grew, the Lord was with him and people listened carefully to his advice. And all Israel from one end of the land to the other knew that Samuel was going to be a prophet of the Lord.
1 Corinthians 6: 12-20 Don’t you realize that this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom. A number of you know from experience what I’m talking about, for not so long ago you were on that list. Since then, you’ve been cleaned up and given a fresh start by Jesus, our Master, our Messiah, and by our God present in us, the Spirit.
Just because something is technically legal doesn’t mean that it’s spiritually appropriate. If I went around doing whatever I thought I could get by with, I’d be a slave to my whims. You know the old saying, “First you eat to live, and then you live to eat”? Well, it may be true that the body is only a temporary thing, but that’s no excuse for stuffing your body with food, or indulging it with sex. Since the Lord honors you with a body, honor him with your body!
God honored Jesus’ body by raising it from the grave. He’ll treat yours with the same resurrection power. Until that time, remember that your bodies are created with the same dignity as Christ’s body. You wouldn’t take the body of Christ off to a whorehouse, would you? I should hope not.
There’s more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, “The two become one.” Since we want to become spiritually one with the Lord, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever—the kind of sex that can never “become one.” There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for “becoming one” with another.
Or didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? 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. So let people see God in and through your body.
God Knows – sermon on January 18, 2015 by Rev. Doreen Oughton
Have you ever gone through a period where you felt like you didn’t even know yourself? When you thought and felt and acted in ways that you never thought you would – in ways that surprised you? Perhaps it was a happy surprise – you took on challenges when you expected you would cower in fear, you spoke your mind in defiance of all your training to be polite and demur, you changed a baby’s diaper even with your father’s voice running through your head saying it was women’s work. Or maybe it was a discomfiting surprise – lies slip off your tongue just a smooth as you please; you lash out in violent rage beyond your imagining, you struggle with assignments in college even though you were a star student in high school. The pleasant surprises can be exciting as we joyfully make room for this new knowledge of ourselves, but the shadow parts that show up can really throw us off.
Forming an identity is part of our developmental work, something that becomes especially prevalent in the teenage years, as kids try on different attitudes and behaviors like they try on different outfits. Once we get through those years, we enter adulthood with a stronger sense of self. Perhaps we get to know someone, and feel known by them, and it is the most amazing feeling, this intimacy as we fall in love, this sense of being completely at ease in showing ourselves, and confident that we have seen into the depths of our beloved’s heart and soul. We join our lives together, confident that we know what we are getting into.
It strikes me that all of the scripture passages this morning are related in some way to the idea of knowing and being known, and some of the ambivalence around that. We have the lovely Psalm 139, where the knowledge is one-sided. God knows us, knows us from top to bottom, beginning to end. Yet God’s knowledge is too wonderful for us, so high we cannot attain it. And though God’s thoughts are precious to us, they are a mystery, and more abundant than grains of sand. You may notice, though, that the reading skips over verses 7-12. Some of it is in our prayer of invocation – “where can I go from your spirit, where can I flee from your presence?” We don’t always want to be seen and known so deeply, especially the parts we’d like kept in the shadows. Verse 11 of the Psalm says, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,” but no, even the darkness is not dark to God, the night is bright as the day.
As much as we long to be known, we also fear it. It makes us vulnerable. A mask is a protection, but there are no masks before God. What is the fear about? Perhaps that if we were truly known, people would want to flee from our presence. Is that what is happening with the Psalmist – she is trying to flee from God before God can flee from her? But the Psalm goes on about how we are so well known by God because we were made by God, carefully, lovingly. And when we come to the end, we are still with God, who never fled from us, was never even tempted to do so.
In the passage from 1 Samuel, again the set up is uneven – God knows Samuel, though Samuel does not know God. The introduction, I imagine, is not a welcome one to Samuel. Because though Samuel does not know God, he does know Eli, and the message God gives is that Eli and his family will be punished. Samuel is known not only by God, but by Eli, who knows that Samuel is afraid to give him God’s message. I find Eli’s response to the message so remarkable! What a difference it must have made for Samuel and his willingness to get closer to God. When told that sacrifices and offerings would not be enough to earn God’s forgiveness, that he and his family would have to endure terrible things as punishment from God, he simple says, “it is God’s will. Let God do what seems best to God.” Samuel trusts Eli, and Eli trusts God to do what is best, even if it hurts him. Eli accepts both the mystery and goodness of God.
And then we have the passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthian, which talks at length about knowing and being known in the “biblical” sense. So here is the situation. Paul is writing to a faith community that he founded, in response to letters he’s received from him and perhaps some stories he’s heard about them in his travels. In bringing people to Christ, Paul emphasized a tremendous freedom. We don’t need to live our lives by the law, because we are saved by the sacrifice of Jesus, by believing in him as our Messiah. Now for Paul, that means we go beyond the letter of the law. If the law requires us to give 10 percent of our income to charity, our salvation in Christ inspires us to give 20 percent. But some of the Corinthians think that since they believe in Jesus, and their souls are saved, it doesn’t matter what they do with their bodies.
Paul is specifically addressing the practice of temple prostitution, which was common among the non-Jews in the large bustling city. The pagan temples had prostitutes, and sex with them was part of pagan worship. For the Jewish people, avoiding such sexual acts was part of what set them apart religiously and spiritually. But here we have some new followers of Christ, excited that they are no longer bound by Jewish law, having transcended it, going off not only having sex with a prostitute, but worshiping in a pagan temple!
I chose a contemporary translation of the passage, but you can see in your pew bibles that this is one of those passages that warns against fornication. However according to several scholars, the modern translation makes it more clear that Paul is not talking about sexuality in the context of loving and committed relationships, which he is not. In fact he lifts up the sexual act, in the right context, as a way of two becoming one, a symbolic expression of how we become one in Christ and one with Christ when we have been sanctified and justified in his name.
Our bodies matter in our faith. Just as the pagans worshiped with their bodies, so do we; but Christ asks us to do it in a different way. We are not to see our bodies as split off from our hearts and souls, but to understand them as one. Our bodies need food, but ought not be ruled by our physical appetites. When we look at another person so deeply that we see ourselves, or even the Spirit of God in them, and they see the same in us, and we bring our bodies together, it can be an act of worship. But if we are ruled by the sexual appetites of our bodies, it is a betrayal of our faith. We are not sharing with someone we know deeply; we may even have trouble seeing beyond our own desires. This, says Paul, is no way to live. It is about use and abuse, turning another person and yourself into objects. And to me, one of the loveliest parts of this is Paul calling them out on having lost sight of themselves, of not knowing who they really are, body and soul. They are God’s own, their bodies are temples – precious, glorious offerings to be cherished.
Paul talks about the particularity of sexual sin, saying it is different from all others in the violation of the sacredness of the body, making a mockery of the divine model of becoming one. And yet there are other ways we violate the sacredness of our bodies. Paul mentions stuffing ourselves with food, and I would add that a lot of the things we eat may not even qualify as food in God’s eyes. Or maybe we don’t stuff ourselves, but instead starve ourselves, denying ourselves proper nutrition or pleasure. Or maybe we dishonor our bodies with criticism and judgment.
We talked earlier about the ambivalence of being so completely seen and known by God, the wish to sometimes hide in the dark, fleeing from divine light. But I suspect that if we could see ourselves through God’s eyes, we would be floored by our glory. For don’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit, which abides in us right to the end.
In closing, I want to share this poem, by Keith Bates: I stand before you Nothing to hide; Nothing can be hidden. You see my heart and mind – The maelstrom of sins Conceived but not born And you love me Nothing is hidden, But you love me. You see a spark of goodness, The divine image, Someone to die for.
