January 15, 2006 - Second Sunday After Epiphany - Father Andrew Green

FIRST READING: 1 Samuel 3: 1-20
PSALM: 139: 1-5, 12, 16-17
SECOND READING: 1 Corinthians 6: 12-20
GOSPEL: John 1: 43-51

One of the most ancient ways of inviting folks to Communion is a simple statement the priest says, after the Consecration of the Bread and Wine, when he will lift them up and say, "Holy Things for God's Holy People". I want you to hear this sermon in that context. I want you to hear this sermon about Holy Things for Holy People.

I am not entirely sure, but the Church seems awfully full. I don't know if people were aware we were going to be talking about fornication! I used to work for a priest who rarely ever titled his sermons. The only time that I know that he did it was once during the Vietnam War and once when he was preaching about sex. It's amazing how the Church filled up when the paper published that he was going to be preaching on sex. I am not really preaching on sex, but the word is in the lesson a couple of times.

The Scriptures are incredibly rich with a variety of things, but they actually all tie together. In the Gospel, we have Jesus calling Philip and Nathaniel. We are in the first chapter of John's Gospel. Andrew and Peter have already been called, and Jesus calls Philip and says, "Come, follow Me". And, immediately, Philip tells his friend, Nathaniel, and, after making a snotty comment about Nazareth, he says to him, "Come and see! Maybe nothing good comes from Nazareth". I would almost expect to hear that from people who hear I am from Merced, "Can anything good come from Merced?" But there have been people here from Fresno, so I don't want them to feel like they are . . . . Well, you know!

"Come and see!"

Jesus calls us to follow Him, and those who follow Him are asked to go out and to talk to other people and say, "Come and see!" Jesus' message to us is to follow Jesus. Our message to others is to come and see Jesus. Why? So He can let them know, "Come, follow Me". We are not asking people to follow Andrew, Stephanie, or anybody else. We are asking people to come and see if, in this place, if in the Body of Christ, they see Jesus and are called to follow.

Now, I think that should take a lot of burden off of evangelism for Episcopalians, because our job is not to have this whole plan to lay out for people, telling them what their life will be like from hereafter; but we invite them to come and see.

Then, we have this reading from First Samuel, and the reading from First Samuel has a line in it that I love, "I am about to do a thing in Israel that will make both ears of those who hear it tingle". I would love to be able to say, "I'm going to preach a sermon at St. Paul in the Desert that will make both ears of those who hear it tingle!" I love the line!

What is God doing? God is cutting off the priestly line of Eli. It's not a happy thing He is doing. Why is He doing it? It says in this reading, "because your sons blasphemed Me, and you did not restrain them". Not entirely accurate, but close. If you read the chapter preceding this one, you find that Eli did warn them once, but didn't do anything else.

Priests, at that time, were fed by the Temple. When someone would bring an offering in for the Lord, they would burn the fat of the offering. They would create smoke that rose up to God like incense, symbolizing their offering. Then they would boil the rest of it - I think this is where corned beef and stuff ultimately came from!? - and the priest would go to the pot before anybody else got some, and they could take a fork, and stick the fork in, and, whatever stuck to the fork, they got to keep. Notice - that is after it's boiled, O.K.? But Eli's sons, Phinehas and Hophni (in case there are any baptisms coming up, and you need names for your sons!) - Phinehas and Hophni would demand that they get their cut of the meat before it was even offered to the Lord. Talk about presumptuousness! They wanted to make sure they got their share and were not willing to trust that God would provide for them; and, second, even though we know - because there is a whole line of people that are cut off now - that Hophni and Phinehas were married with children, they decided that they would also take a cut out of the women waiting to go into the Temple. And so their behavior was unacceptable, and, as they were priests in God's Temple, God had ordered Eli to deal with them. Eli said to them, "Why are you doing this?", and that is all we hear from Eli!

They were Holy People, and they were not behaving like Holy People. They were taking advantage of their position and squeezing it for every perk they could get out of it. Does this sound familiar?

And then we get the fornication passage! Interestingly enough, as I was preparing this sermon, I was listening to something on NPR yesterday, and they talked about the Californication of literature. I thought, "Did they know this was coming up in the Lectionary?" It is the idea that it is more important that there be movie possibilities for a novel than it be good literature.

Do you think that Paul, in his travels around the Mediterranean, spent a great deal of his time wondering what the Corinthians were eating or who they were sleeping with? Do you think he spent a lot of his time organized like that? If you do - I mean, if you think that, you are in the wrong place, O.K.? No; I don't believe Paul did, but Paul did found this congregation; and he had an emotional connection to them. He trained their leaders, and then he left. As time went by, they had disputes and divisions within. They had folks from outside coming and preaching in ways that didn't seem like how Paul preached, and so they wrote a letter to Paul. This First Epistle to the Corinthians is actually Paul responding to some very specific questions they had about what was going on in their Church; and, because he founded them, they were asking him to kind of reconcile these disputes. Are you with me so far? Good. Those of you who are asleep, snore a little louder! No, seriously . . .

So Paul is responding to questions, so what we have here, first, is a quote, and there are several quotes in here, although not all of them are in quotation marks. "All things are lawful for me". Somebody had come into that congregation and had begun to tell them, "Well, you know, if you were buried with Christ in baptism, and then you were raised with Him in His resurrection, the Law has no hold on you anymore, so anything goes. All things are lawful. You are a new creation in Christ. The Law of Moses doesn't control you. You don't have to live according to that". And, the truth is that it is accurate, to a point.

There is another quote in here - the one that is not in quotes - which talks about that food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for food. O.K.? I mean, I guess! I mean, food is not meant for my eyes, to speak of. If you see me running around with chopped liver stuffed in my ears or something, you will know I have been experimenting!

Again, this is correct, to a point, but with each of these quotes, Paul is digging and dealing with what is behind them. "All things are lawful for me", and then Paul replies, "but all things aren't beneficial". All things aren't helpful for me. Food is made for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both! They are ultimately not that important. You have to figure out what is important and stick with it, first.

So, what is going on behind the scenes here is that there are some Greek-trained preachers - some Greek-philosophy-trained preachers - who have an idea that, "Spirit - Good; Flesh - Bad". O.K.? And so, because we who have been baptized into Christ are people of the Spirit, we don't really have a connection with the physical stuff anymore; so it doesn't have any hold on us. So, even if we take advantage of everything possible in the physical realm, it doesn't touch our Spirits. And Paul is challenging us. This idea that anything we do is O.K., he says, "Well, legally, all things are forgivable by God, but not everything is helpful". And somebody who is using this quote, "All things are lawful for me", is not somebody who just happened to fall into sin and is not somebody who just happened to get into trouble and make a mistake, it's somebody who sat and said, "Oh! Well! I can do it this way, and God can't get me for it!" And Paul is trying to explain to them that our forgiveness, based on the death and resurrection of Jesus, is not about us planning and getting a list of the top sins we want to commit, and going out and doing them, knowing that we have already been forgiven - it is to let us know that, when we mess up, God is not going to turn His back on us. Phinehas and Hophni were not folks who just kind of made a little mistake, a judgment call. They were folks who were trying to squeeze every bit of an advantage and pleasure out of their position, at the expense of God's people. And that is not right.

So, if you ever hear somebody say to you, "Oh yeah; you are part of that Episcopal Church; those are the folks who think anything goes"; let them know that they are really missing the point. Paul is telling those Corinthians that, yes, we are spiritual beings, but we are spiritual beings who have a physical body that matters. What we do matters. And, in everything we do - whether it is eating or whether it is in our intimate relationships - all the things that we do should be glorifying God. We should be glorifying God with our bodies.

Now, if this seems a little bit materialistic and a little bit earthy, remember the beginning of John's Gospel, which is some 34 verses ahead of this - "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us". The spiritual and the physical got connected in a very special way at Christmas, and it meant, not that we were free from everything, from any obligation; but it meant that God was with us in everything we have to deal with, and that God was there to forgive us for our sins, to lift us up when we fall, and to empower us by the Holy Spirit to be the people God called us to be.

God is asking us, in this context, to be Holy People. Holy People are not people who never make a mistake, but Holy People are folks who do not plan on making mistakes, as a rule. God asks us to be Holy People. God asks us to live carefully with our appetites and our desires; to live faithfully in our intimate relationships; and, in everything we do, whether it is in the kitchen, the bedroom, the Church, or the office, we should be glorifying God with all our might, with all our heart, and with all our Spirit.

In my mind, that is a tremendous context in which to put this story about the calling of some of the first disciples. We are called to follow Jesus, and we are called to invite other people to come and see. We want them to come and see a people who really are the Body of Christ. We want them to come and see a people among whom Jesus is alive and lifted up. We want them to come and see a people who glorify God with everything they have.

AMEN