September 30, 2012
Thinking Theologically About Modern Life: Sex
By The Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
Morningside Presbyterian Church, Atlanta
Thinking Theologically About Modern Life: Sex
1 Corinthians 13
Morningside Presbyterian Church
The Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
September 30, 2012
Thinking Theologically About Modern Life: Sex
1 Corinthians 13
Morningside Presbyterian Church
The Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
September 30, 2012
So, let’s start with a story.
A preacher goes to a new call at a new church in a one stop-light sort of town. (This is not an autobiographical story in any way. I’ve never lived in a small town.) When he arrives to his new call, the only church in town, his sole means of transportation is his bicycle. So you can imagine he was absolutely devastated when his bike went missing within the first few weeks of his arrival. He was inconvenienced by this loss of his transportation, but more than that, he was devastated by the nature and character of Christian community of his new town – his is the only church, so he concludes the thief must be a member of his new congregation.
He calls an extraordinary meeting of the elders of the church and tells them of the theft and how it has shattered his view of his fellow townspeople. One of the elders intrepidly offers a plan.
“Pastor,” he says, “You are right. Ours is a small community and this is the only church. So certainly the thief must be here on Sundays. If you confront the congregation with the theft, the thief will know something is up and hide the bike. So I propose this solution: preach a sermon on the Ten Commandments. When you get to ‘thou shalt not steal,’ bear down really hard on that one. Elaborate on the punishments of hell that await such ne’er do wells, and as you do, look around at the congregation. Surely the one who is guilty will be squirming with the awareness of what the consequences of his actions may be. That way, you will know who the thief is and we can recover your bike.”
The preacher and the elders murmur amongst themselves and conclude that this is a brilliant plan.
Sunday morning arrives and the preacher is in fine form. He is preaching up a storm on the Ten Commandments and the perils of hell when suddenly, he ends the sermon, pronounces the benediction and abruptly leaves the sanctuary.
A few minutes later the elders follow him to the manse, absolutely eaten up by curiosity. Finally one of the elders voiced their question, “Preacher, it was going so well – I was even becoming a little afraid of hell myself and I didn’t steal the bike – why did you stop?”
“Well,” the preacher replied while shoving clothes into a suitcase, “I was preaching my way toward, ‘thou shalt not steal,’ but as soon as I got to ‘thou shalt not commit adultery,’ I remembered where I left my bike.”
The moral of this story is this: whatever we have to say about sin, in any form, we do well to begin by looking at ourselves first.
I begin with this caution because for reasons that we will discuss in a moment, sex and the discussion of morality and sin surrounding it, seems to draw a disproportionate level of interest and indeed judgment in the modern church.
Recently I read Ann Patchett’s wonderful novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. It is a beautiful novel and it was set in a home for unwed mothers in Kentucky in the last century. What often struck me was the sense of shame and disgrace that was visited on the young women in the story.
Indeed shame and disgrace seems to be a recurrent theme in the church’s treatment of sex and sexuality. To read it and in fact to hear about it from persons of a certain age is to remember a period in which the norms were very closely and tightly defined and any variance from the norm – an unwed pregnancy, or a physical and emotional attraction to a person of the same gender – might indeed bring disgrace upon one and one’s family.
And indeed if disgrace is what we remember, then we know that it arises out of the shortage of grace, not from God, but from ourselves for each other.
If the church is to be a place of honesty about the myriad issues of sex and sexuality, we must also be a place of grace. Even as I stand here, I am monumentally aware that we range in personal history from those who have no experience sexually, to those who waited for marriage, to those for whom marriage is not an option but a life of covenant commitment is, to those who have a great deal of experience but have perhaps received little commitment. For all of us, Jesus Christ offers grace upon grace, with no qualification for receiving it. Indeed to read the stories of the bible is to see a God who offers grace – unconditional love – to the whole of creation.
So any theological conversation about sex will be grounded in grace.
With that said, the Bible and faith have a lot to say about sex. What I’d like for us to do for the next few minutes is first to reflect on the context of scripture for a while, and then to consider what claims our faith may place upon our lives. Finally, I want us to end by remembering that the physical expression of love is a gift from God.
So, let’s place a little context around scripture. There is a fair amount about sex in the early parts of the Bible. And we don’t worship a capricious God, so there is a reason for many of the prohibitions surrounding sex in the Bible. I’m going to try to cover a lot of ground here, so this is going to involve some gross simplifications. Basically, the issues that lead to much of what we encounter in the first five books of the bible are idolatry, property rights, and the maintenance of creation.
First idolatry – this one may seem a surprise, but remember this: Yahweh, the God of Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel, as well as their husbands, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is a jealous God who tolerates no rivals for worship. This is pretty plainly stated. And yet the Hebrews and proto-Hebrews lived in places where the indigenous pagan religions were religions centered on fertility. What this means is that the people all around God’s people were concerned with ensuring the fertility of the earth by participating in rituals around fertility. I’m trying to be delicate here, but essentially what it boils down to is that the people God was trying to form into God’s people were surrounded by alternate opportunities, shall we say, for worship in the form of cultic expression of sexuality. Which is to say that a male would go to the “temple” and there meet a “priestess” who would help him to participate in the fertility cycle of the earth, thus pleasing the gods and goddesses who assured the continual cycle of birth, death and rebirth that surrounded the agriculture of the day.
The Hebrews were the beginning of the radical notion of monotheism, and the God of the Hebrews, our God, took no delight in cultic prostitution and forbade it for his people. So, much of the expression of sexuality that is being fenced out in the early books of the bible is sexual expression tied to idolatry – the worship of other gods, in this case, through sexual practice.
Second, property rights – this one is pretty offensive by our standards today. Women were the property of their household, as were slaves and children. In some ways this served as a protection for their rights because God had expectations for the heads of households that are, in fact, laid out in the law. But the prohibition against adultery that we encounter in the Decalogue as well as elsewhere has to do with creating communities of trust and well-being where households function harmoniously within and peacefully without. And so in good communities with good relations, one did not steal the property of another household and violate it. That would destroy the shalom of the community. Our modern understanding of adultery as the violation of the covenant commitment that adults make to one another has very little to do with the ancient understanding of the preservation of the household for the preservation of the male line.
Now quickly that last problem of keeping creation going – this one has less to do with the bearing of children than it does with same-gender relations. In the early portions of Scripture, there is a thread of thought that is known as creation theology that is built around a conviction that creation is incredibly delicate and ordered and that only rigid maintenance of certain boundaries can prevent the devolution of creation back into the chaos from which God called it into order. Think of the days of creation of Genesis: on the first three days, God created places, and on the second three days, God created things to occupy those places. So there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. Through the maintenance of this order, the chaos, or formless void, is kept at bay. This is the source of a lot of the ritual ordering and abomination talk of such books as Leviticus and Numbers.
So that is a crash course in the issues that underpin the prohibitions surrounding sex in the Old Testament: avoidance of idolatry, preservation of property lines, and the maintenance of the created order.
Those are not the issues that the church is facing today. If these are your issues, I’ve got some books for you, but this isn’t what we’re facing today.
The issues that are important to us today are these, I think: in a world that sometimes seems hypersexualized and on occasion, cheap, how do I live my life with integrity and commitment, how do I teach my children if I have them, to grow up to be persons of integrity and commitment, and in the meantime, keep them from doing something really stupid that will alter the course of their lives dramatically.
Let’s take these two in reverse order, starting with the kids.
Parents have an innate covenant commitment to seek the best for their children by virtue of choosing to have them. The rest of us have an acquired covenant commitment that we signed on to when we said “yes” to the baptismal vows when the babies are baptized. That covenant commitment is to help children to know who Jesus Christ is and what the Christian life is about and to be deeply and personally concerned for their wellbeing.
And perhaps one of the most important things we can realize is that children are not adults. So the content of what we see, say and hear is received differently by young people than it is by old people, which all of us over say, 20, should consider ourselves.
We all encounter more distorted images and expectations of sexuality than we probably should, but adults do so with a somewhat formed sense of ethic and identity.
Children and adolescents, on the other hand, are still in the process of forming ethics and identity. It is vitally important that the church be clear in its expression that sex and sexuality are not bad or sinful and yet sometimes something God meant for good can be made hurtful.
Here’s where I meddle: if you are a parent, set the tone. Turn off “The Bachelor/ette” or whatever its current permutation is if it’s on in your home. Explain that there is a difference between entertainment and commitment. Read a book about discussing sex with children if need be and answer questions with grace and kindness. If you need help formulating a Christian way to talk to your children about sex and sexuality, come to me and we will get together the parents who need information and get the experts in. We have made solemn vows to help you through this awkward age. We promised this and we will do it.
Now, back to the adults. I have set aside my own blushes and given you as candid a description as I can of what underpins much of what the Bible teaches about sex and sexuality. Let me close that portion of the sermon by saying much of the issues that the writers of the Old Testament were concerned about remained enough of a problem that Paul sought to establish some ground rules for the newly forming Christian churches that he ministered to through his correspondence. So, yes, Paul does deal with cultic ritual practice in his letters. And inasmuch as we don’t worry with these things, some of what he has to say can sound antiquated. His point is good, “look, that’s how the pagans do it, and you don’t want to be confused with a pagan so act like this.”
That’s where some of the passages about women covering their heads comes from – I could go on, but I won’t. It does seem though, that since our issues today are not ones of idolatry, property rights or single-handedly keeping chaos at bay from the world, that perhaps the source of a uniquely Christian sexual ethic for modern life can come not from teachings about how to avoid being confused with the pagans, but from what the Bible teaches about love.
Every aspect of what it means to be a child of God is grounded in love. Indeed, the imago dei – the image of God in which we are made – is the image of God as love. That is why the heart of the law and the Prophets, as Jesus said, is the commandment to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That is what it means to be human.
And that is the basis for a human sexuality – that we seek to love God and love our neighbor. What that means is wanting the best for our neighbor. Where sex is concerned, that means a ethic that is grounded in love – not a shallow, facile understanding of love, but love like what Paul wrote about.
Paul wrote that wonderful hymn to love for a congregation that wasn’t being very lovely. And that’s important. Sometimes sex is the fullest expression of human love. And sometimes it is very unlovely. When it is the latter, we know our calling – to live love in ways that give witness to what we believe about Jesus Christ.
That’s important. Because I worry sometimes that we can confuse grace – the free expression of God’s unconditional love for us – with an “anything goes” mentality. And yet, God means our lives to be for the reconciliation of the world – that God is using us to show the ways in which God loves us.
You know what love is? Well, Paul didn’t much seem to – he just described what love looked like: it’s patient, kind, not envious or arrogant, or boastful or rude. It believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
When I said that I would preach this series, many folks commented to me that we’d have a full house today. One of my colleagues suggested that I should switch the sex and money sermons and not tell anyone. (I think you’d have noticed.) As I heard all of the jokes – and a few tips – that have been offered, I was musing with an old friend of mine – she’s about eighty-four - about the interest that the sex sermon had garnered. And as I was talking about it, I said, “You know, everyone thinks that the sex sermon will be interesting. My goal now is to make it boring.”
To which she dryly replied, “I assure you, it isn’t.”
That’s rather the point. And that’s how God intended it to be!
The full expression of love is a gift – and so God intended it to be.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
Thinking Theologically About Modern Life: Sex
1 Corinthians 13
Morningside Presbyterian Church
The Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
September 30, 2012
Thinking Theologically About Modern Life: Sex
1 Corinthians 13
Morningside Presbyterian Church
The Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
September 30, 2012
So, let’s start with a story.
A preacher goes to a new call at a new church in a one stop-light sort of town. (This is not an autobiographical story in any way. I’ve never lived in a small town.) When he arrives to his new call, the only church in town, his sole means of transportation is his bicycle. So you can imagine he was absolutely devastated when his bike went missing within the first few weeks of his arrival. He was inconvenienced by this loss of his transportation, but more than that, he was devastated by the nature and character of Christian community of his new town – his is the only church, so he concludes the thief must be a member of his new congregation.
He calls an extraordinary meeting of the elders of the church and tells them of the theft and how it has shattered his view of his fellow townspeople. One of the elders intrepidly offers a plan.
“Pastor,” he says, “You are right. Ours is a small community and this is the only church. So certainly the thief must be here on Sundays. If you confront the congregation with the theft, the thief will know something is up and hide the bike. So I propose this solution: preach a sermon on the Ten Commandments. When you get to ‘thou shalt not steal,’ bear down really hard on that one. Elaborate on the punishments of hell that await such ne’er do wells, and as you do, look around at the congregation. Surely the one who is guilty will be squirming with the awareness of what the consequences of his actions may be. That way, you will know who the thief is and we can recover your bike.”
The preacher and the elders murmur amongst themselves and conclude that this is a brilliant plan.
Sunday morning arrives and the preacher is in fine form. He is preaching up a storm on the Ten Commandments and the perils of hell when suddenly, he ends the sermon, pronounces the benediction and abruptly leaves the sanctuary.
A few minutes later the elders follow him to the manse, absolutely eaten up by curiosity. Finally one of the elders voiced their question, “Preacher, it was going so well – I was even becoming a little afraid of hell myself and I didn’t steal the bike – why did you stop?”
“Well,” the preacher replied while shoving clothes into a suitcase, “I was preaching my way toward, ‘thou shalt not steal,’ but as soon as I got to ‘thou shalt not commit adultery,’ I remembered where I left my bike.”
The moral of this story is this: whatever we have to say about sin, in any form, we do well to begin by looking at ourselves first.
I begin with this caution because for reasons that we will discuss in a moment, sex and the discussion of morality and sin surrounding it, seems to draw a disproportionate level of interest and indeed judgment in the modern church.
Recently I read Ann Patchett’s wonderful novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. It is a beautiful novel and it was set in a home for unwed mothers in Kentucky in the last century. What often struck me was the sense of shame and disgrace that was visited on the young women in the story.
Indeed shame and disgrace seems to be a recurrent theme in the church’s treatment of sex and sexuality. To read it and in fact to hear about it from persons of a certain age is to remember a period in which the norms were very closely and tightly defined and any variance from the norm – an unwed pregnancy, or a physical and emotional attraction to a person of the same gender – might indeed bring disgrace upon one and one’s family.
And indeed if disgrace is what we remember, then we know that it arises out of the shortage of grace, not from God, but from ourselves for each other.
If the church is to be a place of honesty about the myriad issues of sex and sexuality, we must also be a place of grace. Even as I stand here, I am monumentally aware that we range in personal history from those who have no experience sexually, to those who waited for marriage, to those for whom marriage is not an option but a life of covenant commitment is, to those who have a great deal of experience but have perhaps received little commitment. For all of us, Jesus Christ offers grace upon grace, with no qualification for receiving it. Indeed to read the stories of the bible is to see a God who offers grace – unconditional love – to the whole of creation.
So any theological conversation about sex will be grounded in grace.
With that said, the Bible and faith have a lot to say about sex. What I’d like for us to do for the next few minutes is first to reflect on the context of scripture for a while, and then to consider what claims our faith may place upon our lives. Finally, I want us to end by remembering that the physical expression of love is a gift from God.
So, let’s place a little context around scripture. There is a fair amount about sex in the early parts of the Bible. And we don’t worship a capricious God, so there is a reason for many of the prohibitions surrounding sex in the Bible. I’m going to try to cover a lot of ground here, so this is going to involve some gross simplifications. Basically, the issues that lead to much of what we encounter in the first five books of the bible are idolatry, property rights, and the maintenance of creation.
First idolatry – this one may seem a surprise, but remember this: Yahweh, the God of Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel, as well as their husbands, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is a jealous God who tolerates no rivals for worship. This is pretty plainly stated. And yet the Hebrews and proto-Hebrews lived in places where the indigenous pagan religions were religions centered on fertility. What this means is that the people all around God’s people were concerned with ensuring the fertility of the earth by participating in rituals around fertility. I’m trying to be delicate here, but essentially what it boils down to is that the people God was trying to form into God’s people were surrounded by alternate opportunities, shall we say, for worship in the form of cultic expression of sexuality. Which is to say that a male would go to the “temple” and there meet a “priestess” who would help him to participate in the fertility cycle of the earth, thus pleasing the gods and goddesses who assured the continual cycle of birth, death and rebirth that surrounded the agriculture of the day.
The Hebrews were the beginning of the radical notion of monotheism, and the God of the Hebrews, our God, took no delight in cultic prostitution and forbade it for his people. So, much of the expression of sexuality that is being fenced out in the early books of the bible is sexual expression tied to idolatry – the worship of other gods, in this case, through sexual practice.
Second, property rights – this one is pretty offensive by our standards today. Women were the property of their household, as were slaves and children. In some ways this served as a protection for their rights because God had expectations for the heads of households that are, in fact, laid out in the law. But the prohibition against adultery that we encounter in the Decalogue as well as elsewhere has to do with creating communities of trust and well-being where households function harmoniously within and peacefully without. And so in good communities with good relations, one did not steal the property of another household and violate it. That would destroy the shalom of the community. Our modern understanding of adultery as the violation of the covenant commitment that adults make to one another has very little to do with the ancient understanding of the preservation of the household for the preservation of the male line.
Now quickly that last problem of keeping creation going – this one has less to do with the bearing of children than it does with same-gender relations. In the early portions of Scripture, there is a thread of thought that is known as creation theology that is built around a conviction that creation is incredibly delicate and ordered and that only rigid maintenance of certain boundaries can prevent the devolution of creation back into the chaos from which God called it into order. Think of the days of creation of Genesis: on the first three days, God created places, and on the second three days, God created things to occupy those places. So there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. Through the maintenance of this order, the chaos, or formless void, is kept at bay. This is the source of a lot of the ritual ordering and abomination talk of such books as Leviticus and Numbers.
So that is a crash course in the issues that underpin the prohibitions surrounding sex in the Old Testament: avoidance of idolatry, preservation of property lines, and the maintenance of the created order.
Those are not the issues that the church is facing today. If these are your issues, I’ve got some books for you, but this isn’t what we’re facing today.
The issues that are important to us today are these, I think: in a world that sometimes seems hypersexualized and on occasion, cheap, how do I live my life with integrity and commitment, how do I teach my children if I have them, to grow up to be persons of integrity and commitment, and in the meantime, keep them from doing something really stupid that will alter the course of their lives dramatically.
Let’s take these two in reverse order, starting with the kids.
Parents have an innate covenant commitment to seek the best for their children by virtue of choosing to have them. The rest of us have an acquired covenant commitment that we signed on to when we said “yes” to the baptismal vows when the babies are baptized. That covenant commitment is to help children to know who Jesus Christ is and what the Christian life is about and to be deeply and personally concerned for their wellbeing.
And perhaps one of the most important things we can realize is that children are not adults. So the content of what we see, say and hear is received differently by young people than it is by old people, which all of us over say, 20, should consider ourselves.
We all encounter more distorted images and expectations of sexuality than we probably should, but adults do so with a somewhat formed sense of ethic and identity.
Children and adolescents, on the other hand, are still in the process of forming ethics and identity. It is vitally important that the church be clear in its expression that sex and sexuality are not bad or sinful and yet sometimes something God meant for good can be made hurtful.
Here’s where I meddle: if you are a parent, set the tone. Turn off “The Bachelor/ette” or whatever its current permutation is if it’s on in your home. Explain that there is a difference between entertainment and commitment. Read a book about discussing sex with children if need be and answer questions with grace and kindness. If you need help formulating a Christian way to talk to your children about sex and sexuality, come to me and we will get together the parents who need information and get the experts in. We have made solemn vows to help you through this awkward age. We promised this and we will do it.
Now, back to the adults. I have set aside my own blushes and given you as candid a description as I can of what underpins much of what the Bible teaches about sex and sexuality. Let me close that portion of the sermon by saying much of the issues that the writers of the Old Testament were concerned about remained enough of a problem that Paul sought to establish some ground rules for the newly forming Christian churches that he ministered to through his correspondence. So, yes, Paul does deal with cultic ritual practice in his letters. And inasmuch as we don’t worry with these things, some of what he has to say can sound antiquated. His point is good, “look, that’s how the pagans do it, and you don’t want to be confused with a pagan so act like this.”
That’s where some of the passages about women covering their heads comes from – I could go on, but I won’t. It does seem though, that since our issues today are not ones of idolatry, property rights or single-handedly keeping chaos at bay from the world, that perhaps the source of a uniquely Christian sexual ethic for modern life can come not from teachings about how to avoid being confused with the pagans, but from what the Bible teaches about love.
Every aspect of what it means to be a child of God is grounded in love. Indeed, the imago dei – the image of God in which we are made – is the image of God as love. That is why the heart of the law and the Prophets, as Jesus said, is the commandment to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That is what it means to be human.
And that is the basis for a human sexuality – that we seek to love God and love our neighbor. What that means is wanting the best for our neighbor. Where sex is concerned, that means a ethic that is grounded in love – not a shallow, facile understanding of love, but love like what Paul wrote about.
Paul wrote that wonderful hymn to love for a congregation that wasn’t being very lovely. And that’s important. Sometimes sex is the fullest expression of human love. And sometimes it is very unlovely. When it is the latter, we know our calling – to live love in ways that give witness to what we believe about Jesus Christ.
That’s important. Because I worry sometimes that we can confuse grace – the free expression of God’s unconditional love for us – with an “anything goes” mentality. And yet, God means our lives to be for the reconciliation of the world – that God is using us to show the ways in which God loves us.
You know what love is? Well, Paul didn’t much seem to – he just described what love looked like: it’s patient, kind, not envious or arrogant, or boastful or rude. It believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
When I said that I would preach this series, many folks commented to me that we’d have a full house today. One of my colleagues suggested that I should switch the sex and money sermons and not tell anyone. (I think you’d have noticed.) As I heard all of the jokes – and a few tips – that have been offered, I was musing with an old friend of mine – she’s about eighty-four - about the interest that the sex sermon had garnered. And as I was talking about it, I said, “You know, everyone thinks that the sex sermon will be interesting. My goal now is to make it boring.”
To which she dryly replied, “I assure you, it isn’t.”
That’s rather the point. And that’s how God intended it to be!
The full expression of love is a gift – and so God intended it to be.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
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