Second Sunday in Course 2024
Samuel was a prophet, but he was not aware of that until he was literally shaken from sleep by God. Old Eli wasn’t a prophet, but after three divine attempts to get his and Samuel’s attention, he finally either got the message or was so irritated that instead of telling Samuel to go away and go back to sleep, he gave him the best advice for all of us. If you suspect the voice you hear is divine, then tell God you are listening and then shut up and listen.
St. Paul was more than a prophet, because he had been anointed by God, who had to shake him out of his law-induced torpor by knocking him down as he was on the way to Damascus, and blinding him with divine light. But having encountered Jesus in glory, Paul then lived the rest of his life telling his congregations to do what Jesus commanded, how to love God above all things and their neighbors as themselves. And the basic obedience is to keep the ten commandments. One of these, and maybe the most challenging to keep, is “don’t commit adultery.” That’s a formal way to say that sexual expression is only good in a valid marriage between one man and one woman. There are states where it is probably illegal to say that, but it is the truth. But your body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit, so you must follow the rules or you’ll hurt yourself, spirit, mind and body.
Now St. Paul was constrained to be formal in his speech, so when writing to his most unruly church in Corinth, the Las Vegas of early Greece, he used an example that you might not understand. "Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” adding the commentary, “But God will put an end to both.” Please remember that there was no e-mail, no Internet, no AI in Paul’s day. Messages between churches had to be written down on scrolls, addressed and given to a trustworthy messenger, who might or might not actually get to the destination. Paul was likely responding here to somebody’s letter from Corinth, maybe from a leader. The original statement was from a man (almost certainly a male) in the community, a convert who probably was a customer of one or more houses of ill repute. And he was saying the equivalent of something you may have heard in our day: “a man has needs.” Meaning, of course, that we have a passion to use our sexual organs, to achieve release and satisfaction of that passion, just like we need to eat when we are hungry.
That argument has been around for a very, very long time. Back in the sinful seventies of the last century, it came out in a pop song, “you light up my life,” that ended with “how can it be wrong when it feels so right?” St. Paul is having none of this pseudo-psychological nonsense. He tells Corinth to look toward the end. That means look to the purpose of our sexual faculties. They are called “reproductive” organs for a reason. They are not toys. They are bridges–between husband and wife and between this generation and the next. Those of us who had to endure the sexual revolution of the last century, engineered by Marxists and anti-Catholics, heard over and over “if it feels good, do it.” And so many of us believed that hedonistic stupidity, fell into drug abuse, fornication, homosexual lifestyles, and even contraception and unnatural acts within marriage. We live today with the tragic results.
Let me say that I have never counseled with a man or woman who regrets entering marriage as a virgin, but I’ve met many who regret the opposite. So St. Paul is counseling the folks in Corinth that “The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” In his day, the Greek word we translate “immorality” was porneia, from which we get the word “pornography.” It meant sexual sin, sexual relations outside man-woman marriage. Paul expanded on his doctrines in his later letter to the Ephesians, and I encourage you to read that this week. (If you want to know more, or explore the true beauty of marriage as God intends with your family, get a copy of St. John Paul’s “Theology of the Body” or listen to the videos on that topic from Theology of the Body Institute. It’s a great gift, and I wish we had it when I was an adolescent.)
You teens and pre-teens, you are immersed in a culture that wants to abuse you, get you to abuse each other and teach you to act on feelings without thought or reference to God’s law. Christ, though, wants to liberate you from enslavement to your passions, so listen to Him, and talk about these things with your parents, and/or a minister.
In the Bible’s commentary on Samuel as he grew up, we read in our translation “no word of his was without effect.” Literally, the Hebrew says, “the LORD was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.” We have all had occasions to be telling someone we care about something important, like these teachings, and had our words go “in one ear and out the other.” I think “fall on the ground” is even more descriptive, isn’t it? Samuel’s words did not fall on the ground. They were understood even though they were rarely obeyed.
Well, the disciples of John heard him say that Jesus is the “Lamb of God,” which suggests the Passover lamb of sacrifice. They certainly didn’t let those words fall on the ground. They went to Jesus, who asked them “what do you seek?” He didn’t ask “what do you want?” He was asking them if they wanted something, someone who would change their lives and even call them to sacrifice. They asked him the equivalent of the last century’s expression, “where are you at, man?” What do you, Jesus, have that will change our lives for the better? He told them and they followed Him, finding out exactly where He was “at.” It stirred them so much that they told Simon that Jesus was the Messiah. And the world from that moment has never been the same.
What do you seek, Christians? Are you ready to abandon entirely the life of pleasing yourself, instead of directing those passions to be subject to the law of loving God and your neighbor? Are you ready to be where Jesus is “at,” where Andrew and Peter and John and the others are “at”? Are you ready to call others, so that we can all be together one day in that banquet that is the Kingdom of God?
