rich’s blog

This is a not-exact copy of my recent message “Christianity & Sex.”  Use it wisely  

Prayer: 

Lord.  Grant us your Spirit, grant us your peace.  Open our hearts to you.  Receive this time we give you right now as an offering, and guide us through it.  Receive this message as an offering, and take away my voice if I mislead us.  Deepen our love.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen. 

 

Introduction:

Well.  I don’t know about you all, but I have been thinking about sex all week long.  And what’s different about this week from others is that I’ve been wondering what we followers of Jesus can say to the world about sex.  I’ve been wondering what we have to say, what Christianity has to say about sex that no one else can say.  

 

I mean, typically the things we say are fairly negative, right?  Or at least cautious. “Don’t do this or that”, “Be careful of this or that!” “Christians shouldn’t…whatever.”

 

We are really great at drawing up lists about what we should and shouldn’t do…and why not, right, because we have passages like the one from Colossians–many of them, all of which seem to imply that what Christianity has to say about sex is basically negative.  There’s a lot of stuff that shouldn’t be done, and there you go.  That’s not the conclusion to what we have to say about sex, and it’s certainly not the beginning.

 

So I hope that this morning we can leave with a slightly more complete–frankly more constructive, more helpful –Christian picture of sex and sexuality than a list of “don’ts,” in order that when the topic comes up–which it will, because sexuality is one of the most basic things about us, and the devil wants to cripple us through it, and society wants to manipulate us with it–when the topic comes up I want us to know–and maybe even share with others, maybe even remind ourselves–that Christianity is not silent on the topic of sex, and what it has to say isn’t all negative. 

 

But we should probably acknowledge a few things first, right? 

 

A Few Things: Maturity 

First of all, maturity would be a help today. We’re talking about sensitive things today, that give rise to all sorts of emotions in us, and I guess I’d ask that we be mature.  That doesn’t mean we don’t joke, or don’t laugh nervously now and then, or be lighthearted; but maturity does mean acknowledging that God cares about these things, they need to be discussed, so let’s just discuss them, cool?  Are we okay with that? 

 

A Few Things: Graciousness

I’d also ask that we be gracious.  I may very well challenge someone’s sensibilities this morning.  You know sensibilities–what we think is appropriate or inappropriate given a certain context–say, what can and can’t be said in a church service.  If I do challenge your sensibilities, feel free to let me know.  But let me be very honest in reminding us that following Jesus means positioning ourselves to have our sensibilities to be challenged.  What we don’t give God access to becomes a much more difficult thing for the Spirit to transform.  So let’s be gracious, open, and trust that God is with us here in this place that is safe.  I will be sensitive this morning, but I may not mince words so, if you have kids who are at a repeating-whatever-they-hear stage, maybe nursery isn’t an unreasonable option this morning. 

 

AFT: Generations

I also think it’s worth pointing out that there’s like three generations of humans in this room.  It’s hard to talk about Christianity & sex in a way that connects equally well with someone in their 40s, 70s, and 20s.  A 67-year-old may not need to hear the same stuff regarding sex that a college student in the year 2008 needs to hear.   If I were talking to Middle Schoolers I’d talk about oral sex, which many studies say is a huge problem with middle school age kids; if I were talking to those living in retirement homes, I’d talk about STDs, which are a huge problem in retirement homes. 

 

And 75-year-olds ask different questions about what it means to be a sexual being than a 35 year old asks–although maybe not too different, because the 60 to 85 year olds actually have sex as often as 18 to 60 year olds, which highlights the fact that we tend to roll with a lot of stereotypes, and that we actually need one another’s perspectives on these things, need to be able to talk with one another honestly, and frankly, about sex.  God didn’t give us the church, each other, so that we could talk about everything except sensitive private stuff, so that we can help each other become like Jesus in every area except the ones we don’t want to talk about.  

 

So if in fact something doesn’t connect with you, I’m sorry–pray that it connects with someone else, and builds them up to look more like Jesus, so that together we can present Jesus to the world.

 

AFT: Wounds

Lastly, sexuality is for many of us a place wrapped up in wounds, in hurts, in insecurities, and guilt that many of us haven’t really brought to Jesus.  This topic is dangerous ground; because when we are wounded, we attack, or run, or freeze, you know.  I hope to God, pray to God, that we can hear, today, and that today might start something in those of us who are wounded, that might lead us to the one who holds all healing in his hands. 

 

Getting Started: 

So, (X) read to us from Song of Solomon, which, man.  Sexy stuff, right?  Let’s look at bits of that passage again:

 

My lover is radiant and ruddy, outstanding among ten thousand. His head is purest gold…His eyes are like doves…His lips are like lilies dripping with myrrh…His arms are rods of gold…His body is like polished ivory…His legs are pillars of marble…His mouth is sweetness itself; he is altogether lovely.  This is my lover, this my friend…

 

Nice, right?  Then there’s this: 

 

How beautiful you are and how pleasing, O love, with your delights!  Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. I said, “I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.” May your breasts be like the clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine.

 

And she responds. 

 

May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth….Let us go early to the vineyards…to see if the vines have budded, if their blossoms have opened, and if the pomegranates are in bloom—there I will give you my love.

 

These two are overwhelmed with each other, right?  And not just admiring one another’s virtues, but really boldly wanting to get it on.  Making love is like drinking delicious wine, getting a bit tipsy on lovemaking with one another.  I would love to see what this book is like in one of those children’s bed-time Bibles, you know?  

 

If I dared suggest, though, in say, 1300, that Song of Songs was talking about sex, I might have been kicked out of the church.  Because between a certain way of reading the Old Testament–which emphasized that Old Testament things were basically only important because they revealed New Testament truth–and Christianity’s history of belittling physical stuff–bodies and food and clothes and all this physical stuff

 

–between these two things, people tended to read this book and see not a passionate story about sexual partners and their desire for one another, but instead, a book about how much Jesus loves the church.  Which is nice, because Jesus does love the church, but isn’t really appropriate.  

 

So sexy stuff in Song of Songs, right?  Crazy.  It reminds me of what I heard on the radio the other day. 

 

The Radio:

So, I was listening to the radio, and I heard this song by Mariah Carey.  It’s a catchy little song, really, but overtly sexual.  There’s a lot about it that is negative and outright unChristian for a number of reasons.  The title of the song is called “Touch My Body.” And our friend Mariah doesn’t want her body touched because, you know, she’s really sad and needs hugged, or she’s about to fall onto glass or something. 

 

One section reads: 

 

“Boy you can put me on you like a brand new white tee.  I’ll hug your body tighter than my favorite Jeans.  I want you to caress me like a tropical breeze, and float away with in the Caribbean Sea.”

 

And maybe this song is about Jesus, but I don’t think so.  Other parts of the song are even more overtly sexual.  But apart from the fact that Mariah Carey isn’t supposed to be authoritative in our lives the way the Bible is, and apart from the fact that as far as poetry goes, “Touch my body” isn’t anywhere near Song of Song’s league, what’s the difference?  

 

The Basic Difference: 

The basic difference between “Touch My Body,” between any number of Marvin Gaye Songs, or half of what any of us might hear on the radio–and I say basic meaning “foundational,” the “before we talk about anything else” difference–between Song of Songs and any other love poem society throws together–is that Song of Songs was given to people inside a book that reveals the history of the world, and the history of the world starts with the fact that God made the world.  

 

God made bodies, God made sexuality, God made breasts and penises.  God made them.  

 

And God worked it out so that we have Song of Songs–a sexual love poem–within the Bible so that we understand that anything we do with these bodies, especially sex, begins by acknowledging that God made bodies and all creation, and because of this, what we do with them matters. What we do with them matters and really ought to take God into account. 

 

And my guess is that Mariah Carey doesn’t care much in this song what God thinks about how she’s using her body.  She just wants it touched, right? 

 

So Important…but not too important:

But we should check ourselves a little, because yes, bodies are incredibly important, God made them and is glad we have them and wants us to use them well. But they aren’t too important.  Paul talks about this in the first chapter of Romans.  He talks about the way people were so excited about how wonderful creation was–it revealed God’s power, it inspired awe–the same sort of things we can feel today when we see something beautiful and amazing, right? 

 

Paul shares that “although they (meaning, you know, our ancestors) knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles” (all the things God had made, right).  And because of this, “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”  

 

Paul is highlighting here part of our human story, which is that we have at times over-appreciated God’s great creation.  Loved it so much, that we decided to give to creation what was owed to God as its creator.  Bodies are important, but they aren’t too important.  Paul goes on to write about how not only sex, but more or less everything, got really messed up because people did this. 

 

We can’t stop there: 

And we actually can’t stop there, if we’re Christians.  Because not only is there the little fact that God made our bodies, and cares about what he made, and what we do with them, Paul tells those of us who have cast our lot with Jesus even more pointedly in 1 Cor 6 that “see slides”  Paul asks us if we’re aware of this, that together we form the body of Christ, and individually we are parts of that body, then what should we do with ourselves?  Should we, say, sleep with a prostitute–(and those come in both male and female, team) His answer:” “Never! see slides”

 

This whole last part of 1 Cor 6 is Paul reminding us that not only did God make our bodies, and that because of this they are good and important and what we do with them matters, but we who have joined with Jesus have united ourselves with the Holy Spirit.  We are not only made in the image of God, we have been “remade.”  Paul talks elsewhere about us taking part in “new creation” and we are “new creatures.”  Before we are anything else as Christians, we are united in Jesus.  This isn’t something that comes out in the sinner’s prayer, but there is a change in that Spiritual part of who we are, which affects the physical part of us.  

 

Listen, you are not like a non-christian.  Paul is trying to remind the Corinthians, and us, that there is something different about us, different about our bodies.  The reason sexually immoral things are a “no” is because God first said “yes”– “yes I will give you my Spirit and unite you to myself, and yes I will recreate you, and yes I will resurrect your body someday, and yes I will buy you back from evil, from death, and from sin.” 

 

“You are not your own, you were bought with a price.”  So what?  “So honor God with your bodies.”  Paul is not a mean uncle saying no! no! no! all the time; he’s a wise friend explaining to us that there are certain truths about us that demand we respond to them in a certain way.  “You Christians,” Paul says, “are basically already married to Jesus. Are you cheating on him?” 

 

A More Basic “Yes”

Behind every single list of “don’ts” in the Bible, every “no” that we see in passages like the one from Colossians that was read to us, there stands a more basic “yes.”  

 

God made your wonderful body, Jesus pursued you and gave his body as the ransom to get yours back.  You’re very nature is different from someone who isn’t a Christian, because your Body is saturated with the Holy Spirit and theirs isn’t.  Christians act like Jesus, and Jesus honored God with his body.  

 

The “Don’ts” are secondary–they come after the fact that “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.”  

 

But the “don’ts” are real. 

But the “don’ts” are real. 

 

The “no’s” come after all the “yes’s,” but they are just as real.  Christianity has “no’s.”  They aren’t arbitrary, they aren’t because Jesus is a party-pooper or bitter about being single, they are simply because Christians–for all the ways we are like everyone else–are significantly different in our souls, and that difference necessitates that we live differently.  

 

And we live differently by honoring God with our bodies.  This means that what we do with them, we think about.  We think about it.  And there are boundaries to things:

 

How many of us have heard that we should to enjoy sexual things until we are married, with our spouse?  Raise your hands.  Don’t raise your hands, but how many of us, knowing that, have decided to do otherwise?  

 

It’s not good.  Not because it’s “bad” without explanation, but because those of us who have united ourselves with Jesus, who hope for the resurrection that’s promised us, who have the Holy Spirit living inside us, and have been given the church to love us and support us–we are supposed to live differently form the world, conforming to Christ and not society around us. 

 

So, maybe…

So maybe (and I’ve chosen my words here), masturbating while entertaining sexual thoughts about a person you know or a stranger isn’t maybe the best way to honor God with our sexuality.  

 

Giving in to the desire for comfort and importance that sexual encounters can bring, instead of pursuing one of a thousand healthier, more Christ-like alternatives, maybe isn’t the best way to honor God with our bodies

 

Deciding that, say, waiting until marriage to be sexual with another person isn’t worth our time–or just too much work–isn’t maybe the most honoring thing you can do with your body.  And these are the less secret behaviors that we do that just make no sense considering who we are.

 

Summary So Far: 

When people ask what Christianity has to say about sex, we start by saying that God made bodies and loves them, and that what people do with their bodies matter, but that we Christians believe that what we do with our bodies matters even more, because God’s given us his Spirit, and united us with Jesus as though we’re married to him, and brought us into a community of Spirit-filled people who we actually have some responsibility to, and we’re supposed to bring honor to God by being totally sexual in an appropriate, God-honoring way.  

 

And all these things mean that Christians just don’t act sexually the way non-Christians act.  

 

Except that largely, we do.  You all may not.  But many, many Christians do, and we will be asked about them.

Wondering Why We Look So Similar: 1/5 

And I wonder why?  I wonder if it’s because we just don’t talk about these things, and because we don’t talk about them, don’t invite the support and care and prayer of one another in being different than the world–we isolate the sexual part of ourselves from real life, and so let it have its way with us.  That would, of course, require that we ask someone into our lives who can help us navigate sexual pressures and sexual parts of us, who can help guide us to live more honorably.  And we just may be unwilling to do that, for many reasons.

 

I wonder if it’s because we just don’t notice how sexually charged everything is–from what blips across our TVs during commercials to what we see while we wait in line at the store.  Or if, maybe, we’d rather not work to avoid some of these things because we fear it would make us somehow unrelatable (which isn’t true, because Jesus has done a pretty good job relating to just about every sort of person we can imagine), or maybe we just plain think some of the sex stuff around is funny, and so we excuse it.  Maybe the only socially acceptable chance we have to talk about sex and breasts and butts and penises is by joke, and so we need to excuse jokes–need to laugh at the movies that are all about them, because otherwise we can’t talk about sex at all, you know.  

 

The problem is that it’s only one or two or three steps away from excusing something, to laughing about it, to figuring it’s just not that big a deal anyway, and in the end to find ourselves in a place we never thought we’d end up.  Not us.  

 

I don’t know.  “I’m spitballin’ here,” you know? 

 

Wondering Why We Look So Similar: 2/5 

I’ll keep spittballin’, though, cause there are other things that might account for the fact that in many Christian places–maybe even here in this room, among us, in some of our secret places–we Christians just don’t look too different from the world. 

 

Wondering Why We Look So Similar: 3/5 

Maybe part of it is that we’re all desperate for comfort, and sex can be so comforting, it can be such a salve, right?  Which of us haven’t wanted to be comforted so deeply, so deeply, that we weren’t willing to trade the sometimes hard work of Christ’s peace for the temporary escape of sex, porn, making out, or fantasies.  Sex is escape from the troubles and trials of reality.  An orgasm is easier than a difficult discussion, than pulling out the weeds we have sown in the lawn of our lives.  A fantasy about a stranger, or a glance at someone’s curves is an easier thing than being honest with people who we’ll have to see in a day or a week, and be known by them.  

 

And the world knows this, the world knows sex is a great escape–we need to acknowledge it too, but we need to remind the world that you only forget yourself and your life for so long, and we need to be the proof that it’s worthwhile to seek healing in God’s love for us, and wait with hope that we’ll see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  

 

Of course, we need each other to believe all these things.

 

Wondering Why We Look So Similar: 4/5 

But as I think about it, I think the biggest reason that we look so much like the world, even though we have such different things to say about sex, even though all the “don’t’s” and “no’s” is because by-and-large, we carry around in us the same sex-caused wounds that most of humanity carries. 

 

And right now isn’t the best time, probably, to talk about these things the way we could talk about them.  

 

But we should be really honest that for some of us, the very people who were supposed to be an image of God’s love for us, the people closest to us, have destroyed our abilities to hear anyone tell us that God loves us.  Some of the deepest secrets and most terrible wounds we have, have to do with sex, and some of them we have carried so long and are so burdened by, that we don’t even realize they are crippling us.  Some of us have been wounders, and guilt disables us and destroys what God wants to do in us and through us.

 

Maybe this is not for everyone to hear, but if it is for you to hear, please risk being healed in this area.  Where you are most wounded and hurting can be the place where God uses you most to heal others.  Pursuing God’s healing of the sexual wounds we all–or most–of us carry, the ones we have both caused and have received, takes courage, honesty, safety–all sorts of things.  But if we pursue it God does show up, and the whole world is better because of it.  If God is speaking to you in some way, please listen. 

 

Wondering Why We Look So Similar: 5/5 

So we are much like the world in some ways.  Acknowledging this is important, because unless we do, our actions become disconnected from truth, and we spin around like a weathervane with no regard for where we are in life, unable to give any real direction to anyone else. 

 

Pleasure:

Look. God isn’t against pleasure.  A book about wine and sex and tasty food and luxury was read to us today–and it wasn’t Cosmo or Maxim, it was Song of Songs, it was Bible.  But pleasure is given limits and boundaries because a person cannot pursue pleasure as an ends, while he or she is pursuing honoring God as an ends.  It is very difficult to acknowledge God as God, while masturbating to pictures on the internet, while daydreaming sexually about some stranger or friend you saw that afternoon, while falling into bed with someone who isn’t your spouse.  (And these things are realities for women just as much as they are for men.)

 

It’s hard to allow our minds to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, when we are busy using them to justify behaviors we know don’t match who we are as Christians. If we are busy training our mouths to protect secrets that should be disclosed or busy training our mouths to kiss people or places they shouldn’t kiss, then we’re not busy training our mouths to offer prayer, confess sins, give voice to words of healing and comfort and peace to those who need it most–sometimes ourselves.

 

Next to Last Word: 

So we’ll leave here, and we will toss ourselves out into the sexual swamp of the world, and if no one else asks us, we should be asking ourselves about what Christianity has to say about sex, about whether or not we are honoring God with the bodies Jesus has bought back and joined himself to. 

 

We should ask these questions with the same frequency–with greater frequency even–than the world’s call to us, which is “touch my body, touch your body, touch anybody’s body”–let sex and arousal be it’s own ends, and escape into it for as long as you can, because boundaries are bad and pleasure is the end all.  We need to overwhelm that call with our own reminders. 

 

Reminders that all the “don’ts,” all the restrictions on the acting out of our sexuality, come out of and after a thousand “yes’s”–a thousand votes of confidence from God–a thousand reminders that we are Christians joined to God and should maybe live like that’s true, because we of all people have the Spirit of God to help us do it. 

 

We need each other to celebrate and affirm the “no’s” that we say to the sexual pressures we are faced with–but to enjoy, especially sexually, in a way that brings him honor.   

 

A final Word: Redemption

And let’s let redemption be the final word this morning. You’ve heard of redemption, right? The taking of one thing and giving another in its place.  Christians say this about sex: God can take every wound we have, every dishonoring thing we have done, and make good of it.  Nothing, nothing we do is outside the realm of God’s redemption.  If there’s a list of great promises, God making good out of bad is the greatest thing after the Holy Spirit and the Resurrection.

 

It is our love for one another that presents Jesus to the world.  And it is our ability to be a community that presents one another with the redemption of God that reveals how deeply different we are from those around us.  As we practice and communicate the God-honoring sexuality of who we really are as Christians, people joined up with Jesus, remember all the “yes’s,”don’t forget the “no’s,” offer each other–and those who do not yet know Jesus–opportunities to be safe and honest and genuine with you.  

 

Prayer: 

Lord.  When it comes to sex and sexuality, we need you.  We need your Spirit, we need your wisdom, we need your redemption.  Let us be a people marked by all three, who remind one another of all the “yes’s” about us, all the wonderful things you’ve done to and for us, that undergird and inform the “don’ts.”  Heal us and let us be healers.  Sanctify us and help us to offer sanctuary to each other and others.  Make us courageous.  We ask this in the powerful name of your son Jesus, who we are united to, who claims our bodies as his own.  Amen.