First Sunday of Luke
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 6:16–7:1
Today Paul hands us one of the hardest challenges we’ll ever encounter.
Did you catch it?
It’s subtle, because he doesn’t come right out and say, “Here’s how I’m challenging you.” Instead, he makes a statement about who we are. And that’s exactly what makes it a challenge. We now have to find a way to become who Paul says we already are.
The truth is, we fall far short of what Paul sees in us.
Here’s what he says:
“You (all of you) are the temple of the living God.”
On the surface, that doesn’t sound like much of a challenge. Misread it, and it sounds like a humble platitude: you all are nice, godly people. How Minnesota-nice of Paul to say so.
But Paul isn’t handing out compliments.
He’s making a claim about our identity.
And if what he says is true, then it changes everything.
A temple is not simply a nice building. A temple is a place where God dwells. It is a place that belongs to God because God has made it his dwelling place.
And Paul says that we are that place … we are the temple of the living God.
And here’s where it becomes a challenge. Since we are God’s temple, we have to live like we’re God’s temple.
It’s no longer nice little saying!
In context, Paul is drawing a line between believers and unbelievers, a contrast he compares to light and darkness. He reminds us of our temple status, and then spells out what it requires: separate yourselves from evil, touch nothing unclean, cleanse yourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.
If I had to put that in modern English, I’d say it like this:
Stop play-acting at being a Christian. If you’ve accepted baptism, so now it’s time to walk the walk.
Because baptism isn’t merely something that happened to us in the past. Baptism tells us who we are now.
We have been united to Christ.
We have been buried with him and raised with him.
We have become, in Paul’s words, a dwelling place of God.
The truth is, the Christian life is the lifelong process of learning to live inside that reality.
That’s why being a Christian is a seven-day-a-week job … not something reserved for Sunday morning, or worse, for whenever Sunday morning happens to be convenient.
So, what’s actually at stake here?
We’re essentially good people, aren’t we?
We believe in God, so do we really need to commune every week? Do we really need confession? Do we have to fast every Wednesday and Friday? Is time set aside every single day for prayer really necessary?
Those questions feel reasonable to us.
And that’s the problem.
We think we’re generally okay.
If we skip confession, no big deal.
If we sleep in on Sunday, no big deal.
If something else comes up, it’s fine to let it take priority over church.
If we become a little less attentive in prayer, a little less careful about what we consume, a little more comfortable with our anger, our pride, our resentments, our appetites—well, we’re only human.
And of course we are.
But we’ve made our peace with staying comfortable, and comfortable is not the same thing as well.
The Church asks something much more radical of us.
It asks us to consider the possibility that there is something wrong with us that we cannot fix by ourselves.
Our culture doesn’t particularly like that idea.
As twenty-first-century Americans, we’re trained to think of ourselves as basically healthy, basically competent, basically in control. If something is wrong, there’s a solution. Find the right expert. Buy the right product. Develop the right habit. Optimize yourself.
We’re very comfortable with the idea that we need improvement.
We’re much less comfortable with the idea that we need healing.
But those aren’t the same thing.
The Orthodox Church begins with the conviction that something has gone wrong in us.
The Fathers speak of this as the sickness of the soul. The Fall has wounded our communion with God. We are created for life with God, but we have become accustomed to living apart from him. And the result is that our desires become disordered, our passions begin to rule us, and even the good things in our lives can become substitutes for God.
We don’t merely occasionally do bad things.
Something deeper has happened.
We have become accustomed to living in ways that are contrary to what we were created to be.
And this brings us back to Paul’s words.
“You are the temple of the living God.”
Look at the tension in that sentence.
Paul tells us what we already are, and then tells us to cleanse ourselves.
He tells us that God dwells in us, and then tells us to remove the things that don’t belong there.
He tells us that we have already received an extraordinary gift, and then calls us to spend the rest of our lives becoming capable of living according to that gift.
This is why the Christian life is not simply about being a “good person.”
It is about restoration.
It is about becoming again what we were created to be.
Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos calls this the “Orthodox method” in his book Orthodox Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers (though I think “soul-healing” gets closer to what he means by psychotherapy).
And one of the crucial steps in that method is recognizing that we are sick.
Because until we recognize our sickness, we have no reason to seek healing.
And until we recognize our need for a physician, the Church will always look optional.
This is why the Fathers so often speak about the Church as a hospital.
Think about what happens when you go to a hospital.
You don’t go because you’ve decided that hospitals are morally superior to other buildings.
You don’t go because you’re trying to prove that you’re a better person than the people who don’t go there.
You go because something hurts.
You go because something isn’t working the way it should.
You go because you need a physician.
And this is where the Church becomes something much more than an institution, a denomination, or a weekly gathering of people who happen to believe the same things.
The Church is the place where Christ, the Physician of our souls and bodies, gives us the medicine of immortality.
The Eucharist is not a reward for people who have successfully become holy.
It is medicine.
Confession is not a punishment for people who have failed.
It is medicine.
Prayer is not a religious chore we perform to prove our devotion.
It is medicine.
Fasting is not about earning God’s favor.
It is medicine.
The disciplines of the Church are not arbitrary hoops God has placed in front of us to see whether we’ll obey.
They are the means by which we learn to live as the people God has already made us to be.
And this is why St. Peter of Damascus gives us such a simple but profound place to begin: a daily inventory.
Every evening, sit quietly with the day that just happened, and ask yourself:
Where did I live today as though God were not present?
Where did I allow anger, pride, resentment, lust, greed, fear, or vanity to take up residence in me?
Where did I fail to love another person as Christ would have loved them?
Where did I choose what was comfortable over what was true?
And perhaps most importantly:
What was happening inside me when I did those things?
Because the goal isn’t to make a list of sins so that we can beat ourselves up.
The goal is diagnosis.
You can’t heal what you refuse to see.
And when we begin doing this honestly, night after night, the Holy Spirit begins to move in us.
We stop measuring ourselves against the person we think we are.
We stop asking whether we’re “basically fine.”
We begin to see the distance between the person we are and the person God is calling us to become.
And strangely enough, that realization isn’t supposed to lead us to despair.
It leads us to the Physician.
Because the Christian message is not:
“You are sick, and that’s terrible news.”
The Christian message is:
“You are sick … and Christ has come to heal you.”
The Church does not tell us that we are broken so that we will feel ashamed.
It tells us that we are sick so that we will stop pretending we don’t need a doctor.
And perhaps this is the deeper meaning of Paul’s words.
He’s asking us to recognize what God has already begun in us.
The temple may need cleansing.
The temple may need restoration.
The temple may have been neglected.
But the temple belongs to God.
And so the question before us isn’t simply, “Am I a good Christian?”
The better question is:
“Am I allowing God to make me into the person he created me to be?”
That’s a much harder question. But it’s also a much more hopeful one.
Because it means that every confession, every prayer, every fast, every Divine Liturgy, every act of repentance, every attempt to forgive, every time we turn away from a passion and toward Christ … all of it is part of the same work.
God is restoring his temple, which is us
So this week, begin simply.
Tonight, before you go to sleep, take five minutes.
Look honestly at the day that has passed.
Don’t defend yourself.
Don’t condemn yourself.
Just look.
Where did you live as the temple of the living God? And, where did not live as the temple of the living God?
This is what it means to seek healing.
And the purpose of knowing that we are the temple of the living God is not to congratulate ourselves on what we have become.
It is to begin, with God’s grace, to become what he has already declared us to be.
“You are the temple of the living God.”
May God grant us the grace to live as though it were true.
Amen.