Word Seven: Love
A
Sermon on The Seventh Command, Song of Songs, Matthew 5:27-31, John 8:1-11
By Griff Martin
For
the Sixteenth Sunday Following Pentecost (10 Words Series)
September
29, 2019
For
the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
Incarnate and Resurrected God, we
ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and
breathing new reality we can all together experience. Make us aware of your
presence here in this space and in these words God, for if we are present to
you then nothing else will matter, but if we are not present to you then
nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the
Comforter. Amen.
When
it comes to matters of preaching and spirituality and sexuality and sex, I have
to make a confession: this is very much a “longtime fan, first time caller”
type situation.
Why?
Why,
despite a deep belief that sexuality and spirituality are deeply connected, two
of the truly best gifts from God, why have I so rarely preached sex and when I
have preached it, why have I so rarely been direct about sex? It comes
down to three words that are going to be pretty important to our sermon this
morning: fear, guilt and confusion.
Fear
that a sermon on sex might trouble the waters that are already most troubled
(see the front page of the paper most week, a new world of sexual freedom, “Me,
Too,” religious institutions falling apart because of abuse… and that is just
the news. Bring our personal histories here and choppy waves soon become
tsunamis), fear that I don’t know enough, fear that I might say the wrong thing
on a delicate subject, fear that this is a subject that, as I have aged, has
become more gray and less black and white (which is why our children and
students are worshipping separate today; they still need a black and white
sermon on this. I preach and teach this subject very differently to them)… Guilt
and confusion that I am preaching on a demon and an angel that I have not personally
tamed yet, guilt that this is a place I am still often both confused and in
total awe of the mystery and beauty… Guilt and confusion because I know a
sermon on sex is Pandora’s box because there are a lot of different reactions
to sex within a human community… all sorts of baggage we are bringing here this
day.
Add
to it that I preach in a community my parents attend and I don’t think they
want to hear me talk about this anymore than vice-versa.
So,
let’s start in the obvious place… Cinnamon rolls. A few weeks ago, to get ready
for the start of school, Abby was making a batch of her homemade cinnamon rolls
with maple icing; they are a godsend and a miracle. The problem became obvious
quickly: we were out of cinnamon, but had already made all the dough and it was
rolled out and it was back to school night and there was no way I was going to
H-E-B on the night before the first day of school. So, Abby texted our neighbor
to ask if they had any cinnamon, which they did. Abby spread it out on the
cinnamon rolls and then said, “Griff, does this smell funny?”
It
did. It smelled less like cinnamon and more like Christmas; or better yet, one
of those really tacky Christmas scented candles that never hits the right aroma,
an odd blend of Christmas trees and cinnamon sticks and gingerbread and fire
(in theory, this should smell like Christmas; in practice, though, it fails).
It was then we looked at the bottle and realized that our neighbor had not
given us cinnamon, she had given us cinnamon plus blend. Which is not cinnamon.
Even worse, we could not really tell what the “plus” was… What other spices had
been added in here and were now part of our cinnamon plus rolls?
Welcome
to the tangled and difficult relationship of the church and sex; a relationship
where there is a lot of plus added to an important gift God gave us. And it’s
those three words again: fear, guilt and confusion. When it comes to sex, we
probably all carry a bit of fear, guilt and confusion in that the church at
large has tried to put a lot of rules around sex, has tried to control sex, has
limited sex, and has really messed things up (and we are now reaping the
consequences). I think the church knew sex was powerful; it had potential to be
quite a competition with the church and with God, and so the church put a lot
of boundaries and rules around it that have taken us back to fear, guilt and
confusion. Just think about the entire history of purity culture (True Love
Waits, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Promise Keepers and How
Far Is Too Far) and what it has created in our world.
And
welcome to the Seventh Word, Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery. Which is very much
a Cinnamon Plus Spice Blend, because we have added quite a bit onto this
command. We added premarital sex, we added masturbation, we added anything that
was outside the very small world of traditional heterosexual norms (and hear
this: we act as though the traditional heterosexual norms are the norms for so
many, when in practice, they are not as normal as we would love to think… again,
Christmas candles. In theory great, in practice they fail).
And
here is the truth we must face: all that “plus” that we have added is not
there.
The
7th Word is quite basic, and I will be very upfront: it’s the least relevant
Word, and the one that calls for the church to reimagine and evolve more than
any of the other 9. To put this command into context, we need to remember this
command (as all 10) is really centered on those to whom it was first given: men.
And it prohibits having sex with another man’s spouse for reasons of property
law and inheritance. This command does not protect intimacy, trust, or love and
it was never intended to; it was about who owned who, property laws, and
if you got someone who was not your spouse pregnant, what did that do to
inheritance laws? And I am – and I hope you will be – unwilling to accept any
sexual ethic in which women are treated as property (and it’s sad that that is
even still up for debate, but again, look at the purity movement which tells
females their bodies belong to their dads and future husbands).
To
add to the struggle with this command it’s the least practiced in Scripture.
Jacob has Rachel and Leah. David and Solomon have many, many wives, hundreds of
wives. One of the women in Jesus’ lineage acts the part of a prostitute in
order to get pregnant and secure her place in order to survive, and another of
the 4 women in Jesus’ lineage seems to be sex workers (and then add Bathsheba,
a victim of sexual assault… 3/4 women in Jesus’ lineage have stories we don’t
want to talk about out loud in church). Abraham has Hagar as a concubine. Onan
is punished because he refuses to have sex with his deceased brother’s wife.
And that is just the start. We have relationships and marriages made by force,
by capture, by assault (a verse in the Torah commands a woman to marry her
rapist). And if you follow Scripture’s teachings on sex in a truly literal
fashion, the only consistent ethic you really get is that sexual activity
outside of marriage is allowed for men as long as it’s not with another man’s
wife.
Let
me warn you, if you are looking for a book to get clear and precise sexual
ethics, don’t turn to Scripture. It’s 50 shades grayer.
And
yet, as a Christ follower who very much believes in the importance of
Scripture, I do think the Bible gives us a sexual ethic – it’s just one we have
long missed and neglected. Think with me here…
First, I think we need to rethink our understanding
of sex and sexuality. Our sexuality is bigger than simply intercourse; our
sexuality is about connection, it’s about beauty, it’s about desire, it’s about
love, it’s about others, it’s about wholeness, which means it is very much
connected to our spirituality. Listen to that again… these are sexuality and
spirituality: connection, beauty, desire, love, others, it’s about wholeness.
Which is why some of the most connected and sexual
people we know are the ones who are not engaged in intercourse. It is the words
of Thomas Moore (whose book The Soul of Sex should be required reading);
in that book, he writes, “If we could recover a sense of the holiness of eros
[sexuality] and it’s creative, divine place in the nature of things, we might see
how absurdly small our view of sex has been, and we might reinstate it without
moralism at the center of life, where it can offer vitality and intimacy of
unrivaled power.”
Our sexuality is very important to our spirituality.
Second, Jesus. You all know me well enough by now to
know that I am a true baptist in that I stand by our guiding principle that
everything has to be viewed through the lens of Jesus. And Jesus in the Gospels
does not say a whole lot about sex, although he does seem to make an argument
that this command might need some evolving. His words: “You have heard it said
you shall not commit adultery, but I tell you even looking at a woman lustfully
is adultery in the heart.” Which certainly has sexual components to it, but I
think the main lesson there: don’t look at a woman as an object; don’t look at
another person as a sexual object. Looking at someone as a conquest is the
surefire way to destroy and destroy and desecrate your sense of sexuality and
your very soul. Love each other more than that.
The other text worth mentioning is when the woman
caught in adultery is brought to Jesus by the religious leaders and they want
to stone her to death. Now don’t miss there who is brought to Jesus – the woman
caught in adultery. Last time I checked, it still takes two to tango, and yet
they only bring the female. And does Jesus give some great lecture and sermon
on sex? No, he does not. Actually, a clear reading of that passage shows the
far greater guilt of the accusers, of the religious men.
Now, there are other virtues and boundaries Jesus
gives that I think help us to develop healthy sexual ethics. Jesus actually
gives us the one ethic that then forms every other ethic: love. The best ethic
the church will ever come up with is this question: is it loving? Think about
it. The Great Command, for starters. Love in its purest form, or all the
evidence we have of Jesus standing up against folks being abused, treated as
victims, treated as property, commanding all are treated equally in love.
Beyond that, Jesus commands honesty and loyalty. Jesus loves creativity. Jesus
loves beauty, community and mystery. I think all of that very much helps us to
begin to develop a Christian sexual ethic.
Finally, we are way more obsessed with sex than
Scripture is, and also more than any other human culture ever has been. And as
I said a minute ago, Jesus rarely talks about sex, so don’t you think he is
very confused when he looks at the church today and this is the main thing we
talk about? Talk about majoring on the minors.
And here is why I think this matters: The world and
our understanding of sexuality and sex is changing very fast with a bigger view
of sex, a less binary view of sex, and celebrating all our beautiful
orientations. And I think for the good, because so much of what we are learning
about sexuality today is about freedom and wholeness. However, our obsession
with sex (really, with each other’s sexuality), is keeping us from being
relevant to that which really matters.
Now don’t mistake me for throwing open all the doors
and windows; I do think the church needs a sexual ethic. And it needs to be
based on the things Jesus thought most important: that it’s not pure lust, if
it’s faithful to what you have committed to in your relationship, that it’s
honest and open and true, that no one is harmed, that is honors beauty and
mystery, and above all, that it is loving.
And it’s your business. Let me tell you this: if
your sex life, your sex practices are not pure lust, if it is honest and open
and true, if you are not being harmed and not harming another, if you honor
beauty and mystery, it’s faithful to what you have committed, if your sex life
is loving… then congratulations. It’s
good and you should be thankful for that and allow that to guide your life to
something deeper. And this, this really important last thing: it’s no one’s
business but yours. It is not for Facebook or Instagram or the church coffee
hour; keep it to yourself. Our obsession with knowing what happens in each
other’s bedrooms (and note, this is not your orientation, this is your practice)…
our obsession to know what happens in one another’s beds says way more about us
wanting to know than it does about what is actually happening.
To quote a voice I never anticipated quoting in this
particular sermon, Whoopi Goldberg. In the latest Vanity Fair, she shares her
rules for a dinner party: “Nothing is taboo in conversation. Talk about what
you want to talk about, except your personal sex life. No one wants to hear
about that.” Amen, Whoopi (again, words I did not except to say this Sunday).
And I hate having to say this, but I know
statistics. If you are in a relationship where you are being sexually abused or
harmed or used as property or without consent, that is not a good sexual ethic.
It’s not love, and the church will help you out of that because that is when
it’s our business.
However, as a whole, I think maybe it’s time we move
from the sheets to the streets. I think for too long the church has been known
as the bastion of purity culture and is oddly obsessed with being the purity
police. And while we have been spending a lot of time talking about sex and who
is with who and in what way, the world around us has literally gone to hell.
And it gives us a bad reputation. Think about the people you know who only talk
about sex: they make you feel creepy, not loved.
And there is so much more we need to talk about.
Maybe instead of gossiping about who is sleeping with who, we should be
concerned that people are sleeping on the streets. Maybe instead of talking
about who broke whose heart, we should be talking about families that are being
broken apart at the border. Maybe instead of pointing out what we think is
wrong with someone else’s relationship, we should work on improving our own.
Maybe instead of oversharing our sex lives with one another, we should be
sharing our very selves. Maybe we should stop treating each other as pure
bodies and see one another’s souls.
Sex and sexuality are really beautiful and important,
and they matter to our spirituality. It must be treated as the gift that it is:
the mystery of connection and the beauty of love and the pleasure of delight.
But don’t forget the image of the finger pointing to the moon. The finger
points to the moon, but it is not the moon. We might have been a little
confused about that recently. Our sexuality can certainly point us to the
divine, but it itself is not the divine.
And maybe we begin by doing some better defining. We
actually can work with adultery and this original context, and with a bit of
creativity, we can come up with a really good guiding word, maybe by even
wrestling with this very command; shifting it a bit. Stay with me.
After all, property laws and inheritance at their
core have an element of care to them: care for your neighbor and care for
yourself. So, what if adultery stays true to that caring? What if the
prohibition of adultery is about a command to truly love the people that we say
we love? To quote Joan Chittister, “Adultery is not love, [adultery is] when we
take someone’s life and love and use them and go on our way.” What if we
stand up against anything that takes another’s life and uses them and instead
stand up for love? What if that – love – is our guiding ethic for all of life,
including sex?
What if this guiding word helps us to get to love, true
and pure love. Love where we see one another as beautiful mysteries, where we
see faithfulness as a commitment to one another and one another’s mutual
growth, where we see one another not as conquest but as community, where we
allow sexuality to guide us closer to God, where we exchange rules for
relationship, where we choose people over doctrine, where our justice is aimed
at those who are abusing and our compassion at those who are hurting?
To me that seems like a sexuality that God might use
to lead us out right onto the streets; to do that work that is actually our
work.
The Seventh Word: Thou Shalt Not Commit
Adultery. The Seventh Word: Love fully with all of you while honoring the
humanity of another.
Amen and Amen.
artwork: Image Eric Kilby, Embrace Sculpture
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