From the First Letter 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 that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 (NRSV) – November 27, 2012)
Who is you? That’s not a grammatically incorrect question. It’s a deeply important question in our study and understanding of scripture.
Who is the “you” in these words from Paul’s first letter to the Church in Corinth? Is it the individual believer? Is it the church collectively? In English, it just isn’t clear and, thus, these verses are frequently misunderstood and wrongly preached. For example, I recently read a meditation by another American clergyman (from another denominational tradition) who wrote:
The Apostle says that the believer is a temple of God. This means that our bodies are sacred and belong not to ourselves, but to God. Given the gift of the Holy Spirit in our baptism and chrismation, we are to manifest holiness in our lives – in how we act and speak and think, in how we treat ourselves and in how we treat others. Our life is to be one of self-offering, our hearts and minds given over to the sacrifice of praise and worship and thanksgiving to God and loving sacrificial service to our neighbor.
While this writer may be correct that we are to demonstrate holiness in our lives and treat ourselves and others with respect, that is manifestly not Paul is speaking about in this letter! Paul is not saying “that the believer is a temple of God” and exhorting the individual to proper conduct. The “you” in these verses is not singular; it is plural.
In the koine Greek of the New Testament there were a singular “you” – su – and a plural “you” – humin. In these verses, Paul uses the latter. He is speaking of the whole body of the church as being the temple of God, not of the individual believer. Paul is addressing an issue of corporate solidarity, not individual holiness.
Our English language used to have these forms. “You” was the plural form; “thou” was the singular. Like in modern French, the plural “you” was also used as a formal singular, used with those one did not know personally or with superiors. “Thou” was reserved for familiar usage with intimate friends and family members. As modern English evolved, “thou” was dropped from everyday usage and “you” became the only form of the pronoun for all uses save one, worship. God continued to be addressed as an intimate friend.
Societies and their collective consciences change. Overtime, we came to understand “thou” as the formal word because we applied it only to God. When our Episcopal Church liturgy was modernized and “you” replaced “thou” in reference to God, one of the complaints about the contemporary English service was that it made God seem too familiar! In truth, that had already happened through the misreading of “you” in bible passages like today’s from First Corinthians.
Misunderstanding that “you” to be an individual and personal pronoun, like the clergyman I quoted above, American Christians had come to understand their religion as a “me and Jesus” affair, something highly personalized and individualized between the believer and God. Religion was privatized with each person having their own peculiar and idiosyncratic relationship with the Almighty. Nothing could have been more familiar to the believer than his or her own independent connection to God.
At the General Convention of 2009 our Presiding Bishop said that this is “the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.” She was roundly criticized by Evangelicals but, frankly, she was right. Her statement is still true. Throughout scripture there are singular “yous” and there are plural “yous” and the meaning and application of the text may hinge on knowing which was originally intended. Reading all of the “yous” in the scriptures as singular is not simply misinterpretation of language, it is misinterpretation of religion and that, by definition, is heresy. So, too, would be reading them all as plural!
When we read the bible we must get behind the words. The text was not originally written in English, so we cannot trust the English we read to be entirely accurate. We must look behind it to the original Hebrew or Greek. We must determine, for example, whether “you” is “all of you together” (humin) or “each of you individually” (su). We need to ask, “Who is you?”
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
Do you ever wish someone whom you respect and admire hadn’t said what they said, because what they said is so hard to explain to someone who doesn’t respect and admire them, and what they said just sounds wrong, even to you? Then you know how I feel about the last response of Jesus in this conversation with Peter!
Today is the last Sunday after Pentecost called “the Feast of Christ the King.” A relatively new feast on the calendar of the church, it was instituted by a 20th Century pope and originally set in late October as a response to the Protestant celebration of “Reformation Sunday” on the Sunday closest to October 31, the anniversary of Luther’s posting on the Wittenburg chapel door. The latter, I would suppose, started with the Lutherans but has spread throughout American Protestantism; I know of Presbyterian, Reformed, UCC, and Methodist churches that mark it. I know of no Episcopal congregations that do so. Episcopalians did take to Christ the King, however, and since Paul VI moved it to the last Sunday of the Christian year, every congregation I’ve been a part of has celebrated it. With the adoption of the Revised Common Lectionary, it is now an official part of our tradition.
Although from a modern perspective, the prayer of the Pharisee is rather bigoted, but we should try to see it from his perspective and from within his culture, which Jesus shares. When we do so, we can see that Jesus is not criticizing the individual, but rather condemning an entire system of religion which divides and categorizes people. Jesus is denouncing any system, religious, social, or political, which separates people on the basis of bigotry and fear.
It may be the United States’ holiday of Thanksgiving Day, but the Daily Office continues at this time of year delivering its message of repentance rather than encouraging thanksgiving. The Old Testament lesson is another from Malachi in which the Lord speaking to the priests says that he has spread dung on their faces and put them out of his presence! The gospel lesson from Luke has Jesus predicting the end of the world. And then there’s this epistle lesson which condemns the wealthy. Just not a lot of giving thanks!
Several years ago I served in a small parish which had a very tight budget. Among its many cost-saving efforts was the reuse of altar flowers. Arrangements would be purchased and used on one Sunday, then quickly put away in the refrigerator in the basement kitchen to be used again the next week. Of course, they didn’t last as well as they might have been wished to (and some varieties of flower fared worse than others), so it was noticeable that they’d been around for awhile. In addition, if there’d been any sort of parish dinner in the interim so that food had been stored in the same refrigerator, they would often have taken on a bit of the odor of fried chicken or garlic or cheesy tuna surprise. 
Giving thanks at a time privation, that’s what these two verses from Habakkuk’s prophecy are about. Habakkuk describes a situation in which he (and all the people of Jerusalem) have lost everything. Just look at what he lists in verse 17: figs, grapes, and olives, the year-round fruit crops of the area; the fields, which is to say the annual crops, the grains and staple foods; flock and herd, which means sheep and cows. All their their produce is gone, all their livestock are dead. 
There are two passages of Scripture that I always think of when vestries or other church governing boards begin to discuss a vision for the church’s mission and ministry. One is the King James version of Proverbs 29:18a – “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” – the other is this passage from Habakkuk. I really like the image of the vision being written so large that someone running by can read it and make sense of it; the church’s vision needs to be as big, expansive, and attention-getting as a billboard.
The “valley of decision” is probably another name for the Valley of Jehoshaphat referred to in an earlier verse of this chapter of the Prophet Joel. Jehoshaphat (a Hebrew name pronounced “yeh-hoh-shah-faht”) is a compound word of two other Hebrew terms, Yahweh (one of the names of God) and shaphat (meaning “to judge” or “to decide”). Jehoshaphat, therefore, means “God will judge” or “God will decide”. Geographically, the valley of Jehoshaphat, the valley of decision, lies between the city of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.
