WHEN LESS IS MORE

Mrs Hosier and I have a thing about snowdrops.

Almost as soon as Christmas is past we begin saying, “Not long now till the snowdrops appear,” and we eagerly await these first harbingers of spring. There is something magical about the perfect white flowers, tinged with green and yellow, suddenly emerging from the deadness of winter. I love them.

Today we visited Kingston Lacy which is justly famous for its carpets of snowdrops. They were magnificent, but almost too much. For me the magic of the snowdrop is in suddenly coming across a clump in the woods, or seeing them burst into life at the side of a road. It is this sudden, and subtle, appearing that most powerfully demonstrates that winter will not win. To see them in great swathes, like some more common and less romantic flower, diluted their magic for me.

Some strands of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity like their encounters with God to be like a field of oil seed rape – overwhelming, unavoidable, and ubiquitous. But I’m not sure that is really how God reveals himself to us in this age. It seems to me that God tends to appear amongst us like snowdrops at the end of winter. This is the God who chooses to be sought out – we need to keep our eyes open. And this is the God whose appearing is so overwhelming in part because it is so subtle. This is the God who suddenly brightens our vision, in the way a drab roadside is suddenly transformed by a patch of brilliant white flowers. This is a God who does not want us to become effectively anaesthetized to the mystery of his presence by an artificial planting of spiritual experience.

One day we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Until that day our eyes are not capable of encompassing his glory. Yet in his mercy he reveals himself to us, and the winter cannot win.

I pray that in your church tomorrow – and in mine – you receive a glimpse of this God, and that your heart and soul are gladdened by his beauty. The winter cannot win.

BUNNY LOVING

A couple of weeks back I was out walking with Mrs Hosier and we saw a pair of otters. I was rather excited by this, as although otters are once again well established across southern England I had never before seen one in the wild. Later that same day I was turning over the compost heap in our garden (a therapeutic activity, even if not a street-cred building one) and dug up a rats nest. When the kids came home from school I told them about both these incidents and they were rather less interested in the otters than distressed that I had killed some baby rats, which seemed the wrong way round to me.

Some of our local political representatives and other interested parties are currently fighting proposals for a much needed piece of road improvement as it would mean destroying a rabbit colony on a roundabout. According to the MP concerned, the bunnies are more important than the major traffic congestion in the area. This also seems the wrong way around to me.

As a family we have been enjoying the BBC’s terrific Human Planet series. As we do not have a TV, we are watching this on iPlayer on my laptop, so it is hardly the most de luxe viewing platform; but even so, the footage is stunning, and the series brilliant. The episodes I have watched so far have included scenes of humans killing things, but it seems strange to me that this warrants a “Guidance: Contains some upsetting scenes” warning. I don’t recall getting a similar warning before programs that show humans killing humans. Which also seems the wrong way round.

I’m fairly keen on animals – the dogs, ferrets, snakes, lizards, snails and tarantula that share our home are evidence of this – but I also have a fairly robust attitude towards the natural world. At the risk of offending my more squeamish friends, rats generally should be exterminated, rabbits should be eaten, and if an Amazonian tribe needs to kill some monkeys to get by, well who am I to object?

It has often been observed that the English are a bit funny about animals. I think I’m inclined to agree.

THE CHURCH & THE ELDERLY

The report released earlier this week about the poor state of care for the elderly in the NHS is merely a symptom of our wider cultural attitude to getting old and towards the old. These are attitudes that we also need to face in the church, because we can all too easily find we are simply aping the culture, rather than acting in a biblically consistent way.

A few years back I put together a paper on euthanasia, and thought I would extract and adapt a few sections from that in light of these issues. As I see it there are three particular cultural problems we need to face up to – not only so that the care offered in hospitals might improve, but so that the church might be what she should be.

1. We are market-driven

We live in a society driven by capitalist principles. While offering an efficient economic model, essential to these principles is the notion of productivity. If something is not productive our cultural conditioning is to downsize it. The old and the sick (and embryos) are not productive, and so our cultural conditioning is to regard them as without value.

This logic is undoubtedly often at work in our churches. Our mission emphasis, with its focus on growth, expansion and taking new territory, is vulnerable to being subordinated to market principles rather than to the pattern of scripture. It is too easy to focus on the fact that, “What we really need is a few more strong families and couples.” Why? Because it is these people who are productive! They bring resources of finance, experience, and energy to the table. This attitude is entirely understandable. If we are to plant new churches or grow existing ones we need productive people to make it happen. But there is surely a challenge in the attitude of Christ and the teaching of the epistles that would encourage us to honour the weak over the strong. In the first shall be last ethics of the kingdom is there not a challenge to deliberately reach out to the old and sick rather than the young and productive? As Bonhoeffer expressed it, “[There is a] false assumption that life consists only in its usefulness to society. It is not perceived that life, created and preserved by God, possesses an inherent right which is wholly independent of its social utility.”


2. We have a cult of youth

There is a striking irony that at a time when the population of the UK is ageing and for the first time in our history there are more over-60s in the population than under-16s we have a cult of youth. Rather than being “a crown of honour” (Pr. 16:31) grey hair is considered something to be dyed away. The market – and the church – seems to be driven by the whims of the young rather than the wisdom of the old.

Our increased longevity and the increase in the time and money available to pursue leisure activities has led to a remarkable cultural shift in how we understand ageing. Arguably the identifiable stages in our development – adolescence, middle-age, old-age – have shifted upwards by ten to twenty years. Education continues longer and later than in previous generations. Marriage and the birth of children is more typically an activity of those in their thirties than those in their twenties. Adolescent behaviours persist into people’s thirties (dress style, leisure activities, etc.) and those in their sixties prefer to be described as middle-aged rather than old. The overwhelming cultural tone is that old age is something to fear, or be ashamed of, rather than honoured and embraced.


3. We consider the old as unattractive

The old appear unattractive because they are not productive and because we have a cult of youth. Old age represents all the things that people do not want to be.

We must also recognise that the old are considered unattractive because they often are hard work. Relating to someone with Alzheimer’s is hard work. Old people can be a parody of themselves – they can be cranky and short-tempered, they can be fearful and conservative. The elderly can be as demanding to work with as small children or teenagers but without the prospect that one day they will grow out of it!

Because we value productivity and have a cult of youth the only older people who receive admiration are those who manage to stave off the impact of ageing. In church life words of admiration tend to be reserved for those in their seventies who are still travelling the world and completing the Telegraph crossword. (Although as a pastor I can find this group frustrating – they are too busy resisting old age and travelling the world to help with our old people’s work!)


Taken together, these three cultural factors mean that we are inclined to sideline old people who are unproductive, non-youthful, and unattractive. This is a problem in church life, and in wider society it creates a climate where we do not care for the elderly as we should and where euthanasia seems an increasingly acceptable idea.

We need to do better than this!

SOCIAL SHIFT: SLAVERY & ABORTION

How does society change?

This is a question that occupies many of us, and lies behind a surge in publishing and blogging by Christians concerned with the impact made by the gospel. It is also one of the questions that lies behind what we are doing with the Everything conference. The trouble is, we quickly run into semantic difficulties, as well as analytical and theological ones when we ask this kind of question – with commentators like James Davison Hunter and Everything keynote speaker Andy Crouch urging us to be cautious about using words like “impact.” When Christians pursue an agenda of cultural “impact,” “change,” or “transformation” we often end barking up the wrong trees.

However, change does happen, and we want change to be for the good rather than the ill.

An outstanding example of social change, often quoted by evangelicals, is the work of William Wilberforce in seeing British involvement in the slave trade ended. One of the things that is interesting about this example is the way in which it involved a shift in both public opinion and in the attitude of those holding institutional power. Both these shifts were necessary for the big social change of the abolition of slavery to occur.

A way to visualise this is to imagine institutional power (Government, media, and so on) as a pivot, and public opinion as a lever. When Wilberforce began his campaign against slavery in 1787 it was as if he was jumping up and down on the short end of a long lever, and as a consequence nothing moved. But over the course of decades the position of lever and pivot shifted, so that by 1807, the pressure Wilberforce applied was sufficient for the British Parliament to pass legislation abolishing the slave trade.

In the balance between public opinion and institutional power it is often hard to tell which is driving the other. For example, does the media form public opinion or follow it? This is a debate as intractable as the one between the degree to which nature or nurture are responsible for human behaviour. We might not be able to resolve this debate, but we can say that both are important! In considering a case like the abolition of slavery, it is interesting to consider how the position of lever and pivot shifted.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade
Up to 20 million Africans were taken across the Atlantic between the 15th and 19th centuries to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations that made Europe rich. In the mid-18th century this trade was taking about 85,000 Africans a year, and was known as the “triangular trade” as merchants sailed to Africa with rum, guns and textiles, and then from Africa to the plantations with slaves. The return journey was then made to Europe with sugar and coffee.

In many ways slavery was hidden in Britain. A judgement made in 1772 stated that English law did not recognise slavery and therefore a slave who set foot in Great Britain was automatically considered free. As there were no slaves in Britain, most people were unaware of the slave trade. Slavery was a truth the average coffee drinker didn’t have to face, as he stirred a spoonful of sugar into his addictive drink. Moreover, the slave trade was given a veneer of respectability by the fact that no-one called themselves a slave-trader, they were “adventurers” in the “Africa” or “Guinea” trade; shackles were called “collars”; British slavery was run by the “Company of Merchants.”

Yet in this period there were more than thirty slave forts in Ghana, maintained by all the leading European powers, and the most important of these was Cape Coast Castle. Philip Quaque was chaplain of this fort for 42 years in the second half of the 18th century, and provides evidence that those involved at the sharp end of this trade were not immune to its horrors. In all the time Quaque was chaplain not one officer took communion: “The only plea they offer is that while they are here acting against Light and Conscience they dare not come to that holy table.”

In order for the slave trade to end there needed to be a shift in the pivot – the institutional powers that supported slavery needed to be moved. And at the same time the lever also needed adjusting – rather than being an unpleasant reality that could be ignored, public opinion needed to be shifted to the point where it no longer considered slavery acceptable.

For us in the 21st century West, the slave trade is simply inconceivable, but this was not always the case. One of the challenges the abolitionists faced in changing public opinion was that it was very hard to gather evidence about the trade. Former slaver John Newton was a helpful source of such information, and leading campaigner Thomas Clarkson gathered physical evidence – collars, thumb-screws, diagrams of slave ships, and so on, and showed them at public lectures. As their influence grew, the abolitionists organised a boycott of slave-grown sugar - the first ever consumer boycott - which was joined by more than 300,000 people.

The long campaign of informing public opinion, and changing public perception, was key in seeing the slave trade abolished. Yet it was also vital to gain the influence of those in the corridors of power. It took a network of influencers to shift the position of those with influence. In the end, legislation was passed because that is what a majority of MP’s decided to vote for – the arguments against slavery had prevailed against the institutional arguments of the status quo and economics, as well as over the popular imagination.

Thinking the unthinkable
It is hard for us to imagine a world in which slavery is anything but unthinkable – it is not a subject that needs debating! Yet there are serious social issues which we do debate because the lever of public opinion and the pivot of institutional power make them possible. For example, in the UK there are about 200,000 abortions every year. Can we imagine a world in which this becomes as unthinkable as the slave trade is to us now? For that to happen there would need to be a shift in the lever of public opinion, and in the pivot of institutional power. It might look an impossible task, but the seemingly impossible has been achieved before.

There are many parallels between the slave trade and abortion. The abortion industry is making somebody a lot of money, but this is a ‘trade’ that is virtually invisible. As with the slave trade in the 18th century it is easy to pretend that abortion isn’t really real. As was the case with the slave trade, public opinion needs to be informed and mobilised so that abortion can no longer be ignored. Abortion needs its Thomas Clarkson’s. And as well as shifting the lever of public opinion there needs to be a shift in the pivot of institutional opinion, which at present seems to be more pro-choice than pro-life.

Producing these shifts will not be easy, but rather than being daunted by the scale of such a task we should be encouraged by the way everyone of us can be involved in seeing this shift of lever and pivot. There will be some (not many) who are able to exert considerable influence in the centres of institutional power, or to influence those in such places. These people should be prayed for, and encouraged in their labours. But for every William Wilberforce or Thomas Clarkson there need to be hundreds of thousands of the ‘everyman’ – the equivalent of those hundreds of thousands who joined the boycott against slave-grown sugar. And this means there is a part for us all to play. As Archimedes famously said, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

SEX TALKS 13: NOT JUST PLUMBING…

I hope that I have been able to convince you that your body is a long way from just being a tube of plumbing, and that this must have a big impact on how you think about sex.

Let’s finish this chapter by looking at a scene from the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation. In Revelation 5, the apostle John has a vision of heaven, with the Lamb of God – Jesus – being worshipped by heavenly creatures. These sing a song of worship to Jesus:

"Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth."

Do you see what this song says?

What Jesus has done for us didn’t come cheap, but at great cost – he died for us. And what Jesus has achieved for us isn’t cheap either, but magnificent and amazing – we are going to reign with Christ forever!

Now, if you can grasp the scale of what all this means you are not going to screw things up by screwing around with sex. If you can really get it in your guts that your body is not just the result of random acts of evolution but the beautifully planned handiwork of God you are going to think carefully about what you do with it. If you catch hold of the vision of Revelation and see that your destiny is to reign with Christ forever, and to serve as a priest before him you are not going to want to do anything that compromises your relationship with him.

Your body is not just plumbing. It is a beautiful temple for God.

GAY WEDDINGS - ANOTHER CHIP IN THE WALL

Todays news that the Government is to change the laws regulating civil partnerships so that gay couples can "marry" in church is hardly surprising - it was always going to be the next step in the long march to normalising homosexuality. The BBC quotes Peter Tatchell as saying, "Permitting faith organisations to make their own decision on whether to conduct same-sex civil partnerships is the democratic and decent thing to do. The current law prevents them from doing so, even if they want to. No religious institution will be forced to perform civil partnerships if they do not wish to do so."

I would probably argue in favor of Tatchell's first two sentences. If civil partnerships are a legally recognized entity, then religious groups should be able to reflect that if they want to. However, the last sentence is the obvious problem - if religious institutions are permitted to perform civil partnerships, it is simply inconceivable that at some point they will not be compelled to do so.

When civil partnerships were first created it was clear that while carrying many of the same rights as marriage, this was a different estate from marriage. This was why owners of B&B's might have thought they could refuse a non-married couple from sharing a bed, even if they were in a civil partnership. When tested by law, the courts have of course decreed that such a thought is unacceptable.

It is therefore inevitable that if civil partnerships are permitted in religious institutions it will only be a matter of time before the fact that a certain religious institution refuses to carry out such a ceremony is tested in the courts. And the courts will rule that the religious institution is wrong - because civil partnerships carry all the rights of marriage.

And then it will not only be hoteliers who face fines, or worse.

Of course, a truly liberal state would be one in which religious institutions could perform civil partnerships or not as they wish, and not face legal sanction in either case. But I don't think we are that liberal.

SEX TALKS 12: FLEE SEXUAL IMMORALITY

We are to flee all sexual immorality, because sexual sin is different from other sins. Paul writes, “Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.” Sexual sin is different from other sins because it has a much bigger impact in defining our relationships with others – and as members of the body of Christ, being a Christian is all about relationships.

Think about it this way… Sex is good, holy and desirable within marriage, because sex in some way defines the relationship between husband and wife. Husband and wife are meant to have sex together, and this sexual relationship is meant to help them live together fruitfully, faithfully and sacrificially. Sex in marriage is meant to result in kids – without sex there wouldn’t be any children. But parents are not meant to have sex with their kids – that is not good, holy and desirable – it is despicable and wrong. So the relationship between parents and their children is defined by the fact that this is not a sexual relationship, even though it is a relationship that would never have existed if there hadn’t been sex.

Get it?

The fact that some relationships are meant to be sexual and others are not then spreads out beyond the immediate biological family unit. Whenever we have sex with someone we are not meant to it screws things up, and when things get screwed up sexually they tend to get more screwed up than they would be by anything else. If someone who is part of a church has an affair with someone else in the church this screws things up far more thoroughly than other kinds of sin because sex is more central to how our relationships are defined than anything else.

We are also to flee sexual sin because it places us under the mastery of another, when Christ is our master and has purchased us at cost. Paul says that if you sleep with a prostitute you become “one body with her.” When you have sex with someone you in some way come under their authority because part of you sticks to them, and part of them sticks to you. This is good and right when it is husband and wife, but wrong when it is anyone else. And the fact is, you don’t even have to be physically sleeping with someone to be mastered by them – if you are stuck on porn then it has become your master, and it is not meant to be.

Sexual sin is also a denial of the goodness of the body. This might sound strange, because people will often describe ‘sexual liberty’ in terms of it being like doing sport – as something that is just a healthy physical activity. But this simply reflects a wrong understanding of what God created our bodies for. If we understand that we are meant to glorify God in our bodies we will understand this means that doing anything that doesn’t glorify God is actually to sin against our bodies, and deny their goodness. If our bodies are going to be raised to new life in Christ, and we are going to reign with him forever, then we shouldn’t screw around with our bodies now. If our bodies really are temples of the Spirit we need to treat them with incredible respect.

SEX TALKS 11: WHO ARE YOU JOINED TO?

While we can look ahead with excitement to the day when we get our resurrection bodies, the reality is that if we followers of Jesus we are already members of his body. We somehow have become joined to him.

Being joined to Christ in this way then defines what else we can join our body to – which explains what Paul says about prostitutes in 1 Corinthians 6. Prostitution was rife in Corinth and the Greek and Roman world. It is also rife in our world. It is no harder to find a prostitute in any town in our world than it was in Corinth.

Going to prostitutes was standard practice in Corinth, but it is not standard practice for Christians! It is just not possible for a Christian to join himself to a prostitute. How can you join with someone who is not herself destined for resurrection? How can you deny your primary joining – which is to Jesus?

SEX TALKS 10: A CASE STUDY IN THINKING ABOUT THE BODY

It is in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that we get one of the clearest biblical messages about how we should think about sex, especially in chapters 5 to 7.

In these chapters Paul applies body language to the individual but always has the bigger body – the church – in view. Paul lists some things that believers cannot do. The reason that followers of Jesus cannot do these things is because they deny the sacrifice of Christ, which cleanses us from our sin. They are also things that damage community – they are the kind of actions that weaken relationships, break down trust, and start fights. And they are also things that undermine the witness of the church, as non-believers look on and say, “You Christians are no different from the rest of us – you are all hypocrites.”

The things Paul lists include non-sexual sins: idolatry, stealing, greed, drunkenness, dishonesty, slander. But there is a particular focus on sex: sexual immorality, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution. Basically, Paul is saying that followers of Christ must not be involved in any sexual activity outside marriage.

Why?

Because of the change Christ has worked in us
If you are a Christian you have been born again. You have been raised to new life in Christ. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. You can’t take something that is now sacred to God and use it in a way that is impure.

The Corinthians were saying, “All things are lawful for me” but this was a twisting of grace. As those who have received the grace of God anything is permissible for us, so long as it lines up with us being “in Christ.” In the end the question is not whether something is lawful but whether it is good. Does what you do reflect what Jesus has done in you? Does what you do help you to love Jesus more and become more like him? If it doesn’t, don’t do it.

Because Christ is our master
Christians are not to be mastered by anything but Jesus. Often, what is described as ‘freedom’ is actually slavery. This is especially true when it comes to things like sex. It might look like freedom to indulge all your sexual desires, but if this means you are in reality a slave to your sexual desires you are not really free.

Paul writes, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.” By becoming a Christian you have chosen to submit yourself completely to Jesus and his will. This is why the New Testament often describes Christians as slaves of Christ. Now, you don’t just get to follow the urges of your body – you do what your master requires of you – and this includes living in sexual purity.

Because in Christ we will be raised to new life
Paul quotes a Corinthian slogan, “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.” It seems that the Corinthians were taking a slogan about food and applying it to sex – saying, in effect, “The body is meant for sex and sex for the body. And what we’re doing with our bodies doesn’t matter, because God is going to destroy them anyway.”

If you think the body is basically trash, which is going to get destroyed so that your spirit can be liberated, then it really doesn’t matter what you do with your body. But this is wrong!

It is wrong because our bodies are not meant for destruction but resurrection! This is why Paul writes, “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.” If you think that Jesus died only to ‘save your soul’ you haven’t understood the gospel. Jesus died to save you – body and soul. Your body isn’t just a lump of useless DNA that is going to get burned up – it is something beautiful that God made and Jesus died for.

Just as Jesus was raised from the dead, we will be raised with him. Jesus was raised to life with a physical body – but without the limitations we experience at the moment in our physical bodies. The Christian hope is that one day we will get bodies like his. Bodies that will still be physical, but will never age or get sick or die. We will live in a new heavens and earth that are physical as well as spiritual. Our bodies are precious!

SEX TALKS 9: WHY IS SEX SUCH A BIG DEAL?

If we are going to glorify God in our beautiful bodies then how we behave sexually is massively important.

Sex goes to the very heart of what it means to be human. It goes to the heart of our relationship with God and with other people. Who you have sex with and who you don’t have sex with is very important!

Think about it – none of us would be here without sex. That might be a pretty gross thought, as thinking about the fact that your parents had sex is pretty gross, but its true. Even if you were born as the result of IVF that was still in some ways sexual – your biological father had to provide a sperm sample; his sperm and your mothers egg had to get mixed up together. There is no way around it: No sex = No you.

How we think and act sexually is also important in that so much of where we get our sense of identity from is tied up with our sexuality. We all tend to define ourselves by sexually conditioned terms: virgin, married, gay, straight, bi…

But as well as being partly inevitable, this way of identifying ourselves sexually is also massively limiting. As followers of Jesus, it should be our identity in Christ that defines us over and above everything else. It is this identity – “I am in Christ!” – that then shapes how we think about everything else, including sex.

And here’s the thing – How we behave sexually is not an indifferent matter. It has a huge impact upon the body.

SEX TALKS 8: GLORIFYING GOD IN OUR BODIES

We might get an idea of what glorifying God in our bodies looks like when we look at those people who are totally uninhibited in their bodies. Think of a great athlete, who can do things with their body that would be impossible for the rest of us – the power, speed, and grace with which a truly gifted athlete can pass a ball, jump a hurdle or turn a somersault. When I see athletes like this it always excites me and it feels somehow spiritual, because what these guys are doing feels something like worship – there is a discipline and a freedom about their bodies which just seems to shout out praise to the creator, even if they don’t know who he is.

Something similar goes on with little kids. Young children clearly don’t have the same kind of skills and power as trained athletes, but there can be a bodily freedom in children that is similarly glorious. Last summer I set up a sprinkler on our lawn and my kids spent hours jumping over it – and it was glorious! They were so completely lacking in self-consciousness. They were just enjoying their bodies and what their bodies could do. They weren’t worrying about how they looked. They weren’t having to check themselves out in a mirror every few minutes. They weren’t worried about who might see them. They were just being glorious!

To glorify God in our bodies means that we have something of the athletes devotion and the child’s freedom before God. It means we use our bodies in a way that is pleasing to him and has him cheering us on. It means we are not inhibited before him but stand confident and happy in his presence. It means we truly believe that God looks at our bodies and thinks they are beautiful.

SEX TALKS 7: BEAUTIFUL BODIES

Paul also goes on to say that our own bodies are sacred: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” In this case, the “your” is singular – Paul is speaking to the Corinthians as individuals. This means that just as we are meant to treat the body of Christ – the church – with respect, we need to be careful what we do with our own bodies. If you are a Christian your body isn’t just yours – Jesus has bought it, at a great cost, on the cross, and the Spirit of God is at work in you. So what you do with your body really matters to God.

A lot of us have body issues. Lots of us don’t treat our bodies as precious to God and beautiful in his sight, but as something that is ugly and painful.

Is there anyone who looks in the mirror and wouldn’t like to change something about their physical appearance? We have all done it – all of us feel that our hair is too straight or too curly, our noses are too big or too small, that we are too short or too tall. Many people live in mental agony over the state of their body. Some people really hate their bodies. Self-harm, eating disorders, and just plain old embarrassment are commonplace. Why? Because we don’t really believe our bodies are beautiful – but God does.

If you think your body is a piece of junk you are likely to treat it that way. I’ve heard so many women say things like, “I thought I was ugly and worthless, so I made myself sexually available to anyone who would have me just so I could feel some love.” This is tragic. I’ve known so many guys who live in constant terror of other people pointing out their physical imperfections, and so are always putting up a front to try and look like something they are not. This is sad.

Rather than consider our bodies as junk, the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians (and us) that we are to glorify God in our bodies. What does this mean?

SEX TALKS 6: THE BODY OF CHRIST

Because our bodies are this mixture of the physical and spiritual, one of the favorite New Testament illustrations used to describe the church is ‘the body’. The church is not a building, or sacred space, but people who are joined together to make a “living temple.” The church is Christ’s body, which is indwelt by his Spirit.

This means that we are to be body conscious – we are meant to treat the body of Christ with respect. Sin defiles the body, so the Bible instructs to live in a way that is pure. The way that Christians sometimes behave is like self-harming the body of Christ. We are not meant to stuff Christ’s body with junk food, or make it anorexic, or cut it with a razor blade – we are meant to cherish and honor it. Jesus loves his body!

Paul writes to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” The thing to understand here is that when Paul says “you” he is talking to the whole Corinthian church. In Greek, the “you” is plural – the church is God’s temple, where his Spirit lives.

So the church is very special to Jesus – it is his temple, his body. He loves it, so we better look after it!

SEX TALKS 5: BODY AND SOUL

To understand sex properly we need to understand our bodies properly, which means seeing the connection between our bodies and our souls. Sex is obviously physical, but it is also very definitely spiritual. You see, what we do with our bodies is not merely physical because we are not only physical – we are embodied spirits.

Understanding this is very different from what we have been taught. What we have been taught is that the body is merely a bag made up of molecules and memories. Our bodies and minds are hugely complex, but without God in the picture we are just tubes of DNA – put food in one end, defecate out of the other, and try to cuddle up with other tubes of DNA in order to make new tubes. Our brains are simply the computer centre that enables us to survive in a random world by growing food, building sewage systems, and finding someone to make babies with.

This view of the body is so dominant in our culture that it is very difficult to escape it. If it is what we believe then we will inevitably end up using our bodies like plumbing. If all we are is a piece of pipe evolved to make more pieces of pipe then we may as well follow our urges and have sex with whoever we like – only now, because of effective birth control, we can do it without having to worry about producing any pesky pieces of pipe that might get in our way and disrupt our lives.

The Bible gives us a very different account of our bodies. According to the Bible our bodies are not just tubes of DNA thrown together by the random action of evolution, but precious vessels made in the image of God. This means that we are not only physical but spiritual – and that the physical and spiritual are completely intertwined. Its not like you could take a scalpel and separate the spiritual from the physical – we are embodied souls.

SEX TALKS 4: BODY CONSCIOUS

The Greeks were like us in lots of ways. Like us, they were very body conscious – they loved looking good and were hooked on sports and pimping themselves. And like us, they lived in a highly sexualized society. Most of the time we don’t even notice this – we are like goldfish swimming round a bowl and not noticing the stuff we are swimming in. But keep your eyes open and notice what is passing in front of them – look at the ads on TV and in magazines, the videos on MTV, the pictures people send around on Facebook – sex is everywhere.

There is no assumption any more that sex is something that should only happen in marriage. A massive proportion of babies are born to women who are not married. Most people seem to have multiple sexual partners. And when people come to church, they pretty much always come screwed up about sex. As a pastor it sometimes feels like I spend most of my time trying to help people untangle the knots that sex has tied in their lives.

We might not be quite like the Spartans, but we are pretty much the same as the Corinthians.

If instead of being Corinthians, we are going to be Christians, we need to get a right view of the body.

If we don’t understand our bodies properly we are going to make one of two errors – either we will be like the Corinthians and reject morality, or we’ll be like those caricatures of frigid Christians and reject sex. Neither of these options is good.