Or don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own,
1 Corinthians 6:19 (WEB)
The Temple You Wake Up In
My knees tell me about the stairs before I am halfway up them. My own reading glasses have been lost somewhere in this house since Christmas, and there’s a folding chair in the trunk of the car for the nights the school gym runs out of bleacher room. That is the body Paul calls a temple.
Corinth had a question about what people were doing with their bodies in private, and the answer that came back used the most public word available. In Jerusalem there was one temple, and its innermost room took the high priest alone, once a year. Paul uses the word one apiece, across a whole church of ordinary people.
Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you. That puts the question somewhere other than the shape you are in. What runs through your head at eleven at night happens in the same body. So does what you say to yourself in the car after you lose your temper with a kid who didn’t have it coming, the sentence you’d never say about anybody else.
Some of the people Paul wrote to were slaves, and all of them were aging on the same schedule we are. None of them had a body that was going to hold up, and he tells them anyway that God has moved into it. He is telling them who lives at the address, and the address doesn’t have to improve first.
Tonight the folding chair comes out of the trunk, and the knees say what they say on the way up the bleachers. You take the Spirit of God up there with you, into the second half, in the body that complained the whole way.
A Prayer to Remember
This is the body I have, and it isn’t the one I had. You moved in anyway, and you didn’t stop at the rooms I keep presentable for company. You’ve heard what I say to myself on the stairs when there’s nobody in the house to hear it. You haven’t left.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
