Morning Sex

This past Sunday morning I was headed to our church’s gathering in Franklinton; I had a little extra time and decided to take a different route than I normally would.

The Sunday morning drive is sometimes harried, especially when winter weather drops in like an unannounced toothache. Then there are Sundays, like this past one, where the February winter is held at bay by an invisible push from the Gulf Stream, and my drive is peaceful, verging on languid.

I was stopped at a light on Sullivant Avenue and noticed only one woman in her early twenties walking east on the sidewalk on the south side of the street, where the sidewalk was still snow covered in the shadow of brick buildings that restrained the sun’s rays. I was moving west.

The light changed and I pushed the accelerator a leisurely 20 mph and rolled past the young woman and in a brief moment our eyes met. She had eyes that had transfixed themselves like this in the past; they were thirsty eyes. My car rolled casually past her and with body language that dripped of desperation she turned toward me as I looked across my shoulder.

Traffic was nearly non-existent; it was a few minutes before 9:00am. With more desperation the woman turned west, pleading with an invisible something that I would come back. In my naiveté it had never occurred to me that women work the streets on Sunday mornings because men are trolling on Sunday morning.

My heart ached, and I wondered why Jesus’ Church met in buildings on Sunday morning when he necessarily was compelled to go through Samaria to meet a woman similar to this one.

I watched in my side view mirror as I continued west on Sullivant toward the place where our church gathers. The woman had dropped her arms to her sides with outstretched palms pleading.

A couple blocks later I rolled up on another traffic light and I could see a block or two ahead that two cars were stopped at the light. Another young woman in her twenties was standing at the driver’s window talking; her hair hanging in curled strands still wet from a morning shower.

I was just a hundred feet away when the woman walked to the other side of the car and got in; her body language spoke of an activity that was as common to her as changing socks.

Again, I wondered, why is the Church of Jesus meeting in buildings on Sunday morning?

What I observed on Sunday reminded me of a letter the Apostle Paul wrote to the believing community at Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 6:16 the letter says, “…do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.””

I don’t want to pontificate about the two women on Sullivant Avenue; I want to understand what something like this has to say to the Church of Jesus. The two women were doing what they were doing to survive in the moment they were in, as I think was the Samaritan woman Jesus encountered at the well.

In writing to the Church at Corinth, Paul was admonishing them collectively to measure their actions when it comes to sexual sin. This is the Church he was speaking to, not a woman on Sullivant Avenue selling her body. In this same part of the letter to the Corinthians Paul explains that sexual sin damages one’s body and not just in the physical sense.

Paul then asks a rhetorical question: “…do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” Paul asks the question because he wants the Corinthians to understand that they, collectively and individually, house the presence of God within them.

Paul was making a clarion call to holy living to people who were struggling acutely with living holy lives, particularly in the area of sexual purity. He could have just as easily been writing to practically any church in America today.

Sometimes I almost forget about the Minor Prophets in the Old Testament; you know, those somewhat obscure little books toward the end: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, etc.; books that speak of gigantic fish swallowing men.

Over the past week or so I’ve been reading these small books looking for something big that I can let sink into my heart; something that demands obedience of me, because I need stuff like that to keep me from being swallowed by a gigantic fish.

This morning I was reading in Haggai. Haggai was written during a time when the exiled Hebrew people were returning to Jerusalem with an eye toward rebuilding the Temple. God in his providence provided the freedom for them to return, as well as the means of rebuilding the temple.

Haggai 1 reads, “In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest…” Haggai is the voice God uses to speak to his people in Jerusalem.

Not all is well in Jerusalem when the Hebrew people return; there are many distractions to which God has something to say through Haggai.

“Thus says the LORD of hosts: These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the LORD.” Though the people had a divine mandate to rebuild the Lord’s house, the Temple, they had busied themselves with living and rationalized that it wasn’t quite time to rebuild the Temple.

“Then the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?””

The Temple lay in ruins while God’s people, the very ones he’d chosen to return to rebuild the Temple, spent their days and nights and lives building their own houses. I must confess, doing that kind of thing is probably one of the easiest things is the world for me to do; remodeling a bathroom (which I’ve done), painting the house (which I’ve done), landscaping (which I’ve done), insulating the garage (which I’ve done) and those other items on my “to do” list.

I look at the physical, the tangible and pour time, energy, effort and money into assuring that it all looks good; it all is just exactly what I want it to be. I must be like the Hebrews were like who had come back to Jerusalem. Before they could get down to the business of repairing the Temple, they had to make sure they had nicely paneled houses to live in; regardless of the fact that God’s dwelling place among them was uninhabitable.

Imagine that, God’s house uninhabitable by him!

Haggai continues, “Now, therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.”

The busyness of life for the Hebrews resulted in an insatiable appetite for everything except God, yet nothing was fulfilling. I’ve been there, I’ve experienced that! It’s like drinking water from the ocean to quench your thirst. The more you drink the more you have to drink.

Then God speaks, “Thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the LORD.” God wanted, and has always wanted a dwelling place among his people. From the beginning when he created paradise on earth and placed man in it, God has desired to dwell with his people. He wants the same today, and he’ll want it ten million years from now, if I read Revelation 21 correctly.

More from God, “You looked for much, and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? declares the LORD of hosts. Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house.” The prosperity the Hebrew people desired actually profited them little and what they brought to God he blew up! That sounds crazy!

“You thought you were bringing me something of value,” God could have been saying, “but it’s a pathetic pittance, it amounts to nothing, and in my eyes it really is nothing. I don’t want your money, I want you; I want to dwell with you—be your God and you be my people.”

I read Haggai and it struck me that so many of us within the Church today are like Israel of Haggai’s day. We’re consumed with building our houses, filling them with furniture and décor, always acquiring more, changing the color of the paint on the walls, the type of carpet on the floors, changing lamps to match a bedspread, and curtains to accent it all. All along the way the existing furnishings and décor were fine, except to our eyes. I have done this.

So often we do all of that to the neglect of the House of God, the Temple that is our body. We neglect to build up the internal decay of our lives, which reminds me of the women on Sullivant Avenue, who wear a certain type of clothing and a certain type of make-up to present themselves to paying customers, when on the inside their souls are in ruins.

Without realizing it, many who profess faith in Christ have caused the Temple to lie in ruins as we pursue materialism and wealth and possessions and houses and cars and garages to fit them all in. All the while God is waiting for his Temple, both collectively and individually to be built so that it is inhabitable by him. Jesus expresses himself through the collective body of his Church.

God was speaking through Haggai to the Hebrew people and admonishing them to take a look at themselves, take a look at the fact they had done for themselves what they would not do for God. Then God called them to climb the hills, bring down wood and build a house so that he would be glorified.

What would it take for us to build the House of God, the Temple of our bodies, both collectively and individually so that God is glorified? It’s a spiritual building that needs to take place. It’s a spiritual building that says “I’m going to build my soul and let God build my soul.” It’s a spiritual building where the pursuit of materialism is abandoned and the pursuit of the heart of God in obedience is valued above all else.

We’d have to divert our affections away from much of what we invest in and direct them to God; we’d have to allow him to direct what we build and how we build.

But I fear we’re more like the Hebrew people of Haggai’s day than we realize; now is not the time to build the Temple, the House of God, we’ve got more important stuff to be working on. We’ve got paneled houses to build—literally and figuratively.

While the Church meets in buildings on Sunday morning men troll for women who have a cry of desperation furrowed on their faces. Christian hearts far too often are indifferent and apathetic which reflects that the Temple that God should be dwelling in lies in ruins.

If God truly had a dwelling place in the Temple of our hearts we’d be like Jesus when he had to go through Samaria. Just as Jesus met the woman at that well, we too would meet ruined women on any street in any city in America. But for now another car with the promise of cash looks better on Sunday morning than the Temple of God.

As followers of Jesus we are collectively and individually the Temple of God that reveals the true Christ in us. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?