To Whom Does Your Body Belong?

Freedom! What does the world do with such a thing? Well, take a look around you. What do you see? Sure there is the freedom that we all enjoy as citizens of this country. Freedom from a tyrannical government, freedom to live our life and not be constantly told what we can and cannot do. We are free to get an education. We can put that education to work with the career of our choice. And with that career of our choice, we can enter what was once known as the American Dream. Free to marry a spouse, to have as many children as we want, to live in the house of our dreams, and to drive what ever car we can afford.

However, this freedom can be taken way out of context, and in our present society has done so. Freedom has been defined to include living however we want with no consequences. We hear the mantra of the abortion industry, “My body my choice.” And this mantra has been incorporated into every aspect of human life. I am free to put into my body anything I want. I can eat what ever I want. I can drink whatever I want. I can have sex with whoever I want regardless of their sexual identity, and a person doesn’t have to admit to being HIV+ anymore. I can smoke whatever I want. I can snort whatever I want. I can inject whatever into my body that I want. I can watch porn all day if I choose. I can even terminate an inconvenient pregnancy just because the baby will make me fatter, or get in the way of my career, or I just don’t want a child.

The text that confronts us today is Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. What we know about this letter is that Paul is trying to correct some issues within the church, especially that of licentiousness. Corinth was a port city. It was very instrumental for north and south trade. Julius Caesar rebuilt the city in 29 BC and it served as the seat of a proconsul and the capital of the senatorial province of Achaia. The new city was populated by people from various parts of the empire, many of them retired soldiers from the Roman armies. And many of the folks who relocated there were freedmen from Rome, whose status was only a cut above a slave. Many Greeks also comprised this population who brought with them their many ties to religious, philosophical, and cultural differences from those of Rome. There were also many various cults from Asia and Egypt. Due to these diverse cultural differences, Corinth was a city much like Las Vegas, LA, or San Francisco. Hedonism was the lifestyle of choice and it was a cesspool of immorality. An interesting fact of the Old Corinth was it had such a notorious reputation that to “Corinthianize” could mean to “fornicate” and “Corinthian girl” was a way of referring to a whore. It was so bad that clay votives of human genitals were offered to Asclepius, the god of healing, in the hope that that part of the body, suffering from venereal disease, would be healed.

The church in Corinth was suffering from the mindset of the people of the city. They had bought into the lies of the world. There was the beginnings of gnosticism growing that believes that the body is corrupt, but the soul is not. So it was held during those days that one could satisfy the desires of the body and still be at peace with God. For the corrupt and evil body will be brought to nothing in death, kind of like a snake shedding its skin that he leaves behind. Yet the spirit/soul escapes condemnation by God because it is not corrupt or inherently evil.