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Sunday, January 24, 2010
God’s good gift of sexuality
Fourth in a Series on Love, Relationships, Marriage and Sexuality: Insights from the Bible
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Song of Songs 6:4-9 Good News Version
4My love, you are as beautiful as Jerusalem, as lovely as the city of Tirzah, as breathtaking as these great cities. 5Turn your eyes away from me; they are holding me captive. Your hair dances like a flock of goats bounding down the hills of Gilead. 6Your teeth are as white as a flock of sheep that have just been washed. Not one of them is missing; they are all perfectly matched. 7Your cheeks glow behind your veil. 8Let the king have sixty queens, eighty concubines, young women without number! 9 But I love only one, and she is as lovely as a dove. She is her mother's only daughter, her mother's favorite child. All women look at her and praise her; queens and concubines sing her praises.
We are in the middle of a series on Love, Relationships, Marriage, and Sexuality, and I have deeply appreciated the responses and feedback and the multitude of Emails from the members and friends of our church. This has been an important time of reflection for me, as well as for Judy and me, as we have identified and reaffirmed what has worked for us in our forty four and a half years together.
The topic for today is one that I have never devoted a whole sermon to in my 37 years of preaching every Sunday. I treat that as a confession because it is wrong that we, in the church, have not taken time to look at what scripture says about our sexuality and our bodies. When we do take time to look, we can see that our faith helps us get a better perspective than TV and movies and magazines usually do.
We have just heard one of the most moving texts about love in the entire Bible, and I imagine that most of you have never heard verses read from the Song of Songs/Solomon in a worship service. That is mostly because church leaders have been embarrassed by how frank and intimate this short Bible book is. It is a collection of tributes from two lovers to each other and describes why they love each other and what they love about each other. Some of the analogies may be a real stretch for us who read it 2500 years later. We men would probably not say to our wife, “your nose is as lovely as the tower of Lebanon.
Church leaders have been embarrassed by this book and have tried, over the centuries, to gloss over the book and allegorize it into a relationship between Christ and the church which is a REAL stretch of the imagination.
Here is what my friend Adam Hamilton says about Song of Solomon in his book on Making Love Last.
The Song of Solomon gives us a beautiful and graphic picture of sensual love between a man and a woman. This book’s presence in the Bible serves to counter a tendency among religious people to believe that sex is bad. Sexual intimacy is not bad. It is a thing of beauty. It is not meant to produce guilt. It is meant to produce joy.
Most of us in this congregation probably believe that. As a student of the Bible, I believe that and as a pastor and as a husband, who is happily married, I believe that. But for many, many centuries church leaders have taught something very different and have taught some values and images that are just wrong and superficial and non Biblical.
You have probably been exposed to some of these wrong teachings and you can think right now about what they are.
Church leaders have taught that the only purpose of sex is for procreation and not for anything else. They have taught that sex is dirty or bad. They have taught that our bodies are not a good gift created by God but are something to be ashamed of. One example of that shameful attitude about our bodies and our sexuality is mentioned in Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book about marriage and commitment. She cites, Brother Cherubino, a monk in seventeen century Florence who wrote in a book for Christian husbands and wives, that sexual activity should never involve the eyes, nose, ears, tongue or any other part of the body that is in no way necessary for procreation. He said that women should never allow themselves to be seen nude by their husbands and that spouses should never try to make themselves smell good in order to be attractive to each other. He also advised that you should never kiss your spouse using your tongue, not anywhere, and he wrote that even to think about such things caused him to be overwhelmed with horror, fright and bewilderment. (Elizabeth Gilbert in “Committed,” pg. 262)
All that advice is very bad of course, but with that history, it is not difficult to see how the church has encouraged a profoundly unhealthy approach to God’s good gift of sexuality. It is the wrongheaded thinking behind the really funny scene in the great movie “Marley and Me.” Marley is a dog and when his parents are about to be intimate together in an unfamiliar house. They cannot do anything until they have taken down the all the images of God and Christ. The bad theology is that surely sex is not something God approves of, except of course, God is the one who invented sexuality and called it good in Genesis 1!
There have been other misconceptions fostered by church leaders. Misconceptions like being celibate is more pure and holy than being married. This is certainly an ignoring of history since for the first thousand years of the church most priests were married. Most of Jesus’ disciples were married as well, including Peter.
Some church leaders seem, in my opinion, to be somewhat obsessed with sex and have portrayed sexual sins as the only ones that seem to be important. That is radically different from what the Bible actually teaches and from what Jesus teaches. Jesus does speak about the danger of sexual immorality but it is only one concern in a list of other sinful behaviors that include greed, envy, gossip and slander, pride/arrogance and self righteousness. So I have to wonder why some church people have chosen only the sexual sins to concentrate on and have ignored the behaviors that Jesus seems to be more concerned about!
Finally in this list of how the church has been wrong in the past about God’s good gift of sexuality is the attitude that our bodies are inherently shameful, that our bodies are bad and that it is only the soul and spirit that are good and pure. It is not a scriptural notion, and instead, plays into the theology of an early church heresy called Gnosticism that said Jesus could not have really been a person, a human being, because being a bodily person-incarnate-is in itself sinful, and Jesus was really just a ghostly, spirit figure that just sort of floated around. This was declared to be a heresy or wrong thinking by the early church leaders. But, the discomfort with our bodies and Jesus’ body is still very strong.
There is a wonderful discussion of the theological truth that our bodies are good, and are a good creation by God, in a chapter on Incarnation in Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor’s new book, An Altar in the World. I wish we had time to spend on that chapter but you can look at it on your own. The chapter title is “The Practice of Wearing Skin.”
When we compare some of the wrongheaded teaching of church leaders (this is not an exhaustive list, you know of other examples) with the insights from scripture about physical love and our bodies and God’s good gift of sexuality, we get some much needed correctives.
- In the FIRST chapter of Genesis, on day six, God creates man and woman and calls this part of his creation VERY GOOD-everything else so far has just been good.
- In chapter two of Genesis, in the second creation story, God places the man and woman in the Garden of Eden and gives them the ground rules and then the writer says, “the man and woman were both naked and they were not ashamed.” Is that comfort with our bodies, that lack of shame about our bodies, part of your theology? Were you taught something different? That lack of shame about one’s body is in the Bible in the very first book.
- Later on in Genesis there is another reference to God’s good gift of sexuality that most of us have missed. I missed it until I saw it in Adam Hamilton’s book on love and marriage. He quotes an Old Testament scholar, Dr. Elizabeth Achtemeier, in talking about the story of Abraham and Sarah, the couple who through their offspring, are the patriarch and matriarch of all of Israel, all of Judaism. Abraham has been given a promise by God that even as old as they are, Abraham and Sarah will have a son who will begin this line of descendants more numerous than the stars. You and I are some of Abraham and Sarah’s descendants, by the way. When Sarah hears this message about becoming pregnant as old as she is, what does she do? She laughs of course (their son is named laughter-Isaac/Yitzhak). But here is how she responds. She says, “Now that I am old and my husband is old, shall I enjoy sex/shall I have pleasure?” Dr. Achtemeier says that the Hebrew word that is used here, shall I have pleasure, is the same Hebrew word for paradise! The Bible has a very positive view, a very high view, of God’s good gift of sexuality!
- In Exodus 20 there is a list of the Ten Commandments, Letterman might call it God’s Top Ten list. One of the commandments prohibits adultery. Why? Because the absolute best way to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality is in a committed trusting relationship with a partner with whom you have a covenant of love and faithfulness. Anything else is less than good.
There is more insight from our Book. We have heard the celebration of erotic love in the Song of Solomon and while we might use different metaphors and analogies other than comparing a lover’s breasts to two gazelles, the poetry there is a celebration of God’s good gift of sexuality!
Finally, not an exhaustive list but an impressive one, you might be surprised by some of Paul’s eternal insights. Paul has an undeservedly bad reputation based on some letters that were not truly his and based on some insertions in his letters that were put in after he wrote them.
There are three references in I Corinthians and one might surprise you. In that letter he is trying to help these new Christians understand what it means to follow Christ in a city of enormous temptations. Corinth had a population of 600,000, was a cosmopolitan crossroads, then the largest city in Greece, and sexual promiscuity was rampant. Paul urges spouses to be faithful, urges singles to be celibate, and is trying to help people have integrity and faithfulness in a city whose temple of Aphrodite had 1000 male and female temple prostitutes.
Paul warns against sexual promiscuity and tells people this. Your body is a temple of God’s spirit, so do not dishonor your body in promiscuity. Your body is sacred. It is important for us to believe that, not only with regard to sexuality, but in disciplining ourselves not to overeat, not to be lazy or slothful, but to find a program of exercise and movement that helps us control our weight.
Your body is a temple of God’s spirit, so do not abuse it through promiscuity or overeating or abuse of alcohol or drugs or tobacco—you can complete the list. Your body was created for movement and not to be obese. I want to reinforce any of you who have made a new year’s promise to yourself to get healthier by eating right and moving more. Our book tells us that this is a spiritual issue.
Next, Paul says something unheard of for a first century Jewish male in a male dominated culture. He is speaking to husbands and wives in chapter 7. He tells them that each of them has equal sexual rights. “Do not deny yourselves to each other. Do your duty to fulfill each other’s physical needs. You might expect that advice to wives, but Paul gives it equally to husbands, a radical thought from 2000 years ago. “Husbands, you are not the master of your own body-your wife is.” Thus, fulfill her needs. He gives the same counsel to wives, we would expect that, but we are taken aback by his egalitarian advice to husbands! He sees marriage here as an equal partnership-as he should.
Let me conclude that like every good gift from God, our sexuality can be misused and abused. Being sexually promiscuous is wrong and unhealthy and counterproductive. The best way to enjoy this gift from God is in a trusting, committed, long term, covenanted relationship which we have called marriage.
Pornography is wrong because is objectifies another person, because it is addictive, because it is a tawdry substitute for healthy love and companionship and mutuality. It is a huge problem, a billion dollar industry in our country. One of the books I have been reading calls it “counterfeit sexuality.” There are people who are addicted to pornography and there are support groups and counselors to help people out of this addiction. Some of those groups, a twelve-step group, meet in our community.
Let me talk about a related topic. Does being in a committed, covenant relationship means that you will never look at another person and find them attractive? I don’t think so. Adam Hamilton gives good advice-don’t look long. Don’t dwell on that person. Don’t think you can spend much time with a person who you find attractive or it will likely lead to something else that is dangerous. It still means that for half of us you can enjoy seeing Brad Pitt or George Clooney in his latest film-or for the other half, seeing Jennifer Anniston or Michelle Pfeiffer. I find Meryl Streep most inspiring, most versatile and try to see any film she is in.
By the way, we can use the new George Clooney film, Up in the Air, as an example. It is about trying to get through life without really connecting or having a relationship with anyone. That is what his character trains people to do-not to have any emotional entanglements at all which includes having sex only as a physical act and not a deeply loving and emotional act. He tries to do that in the movie and then sees how empty and hollow that is at the end. It is R rated for language and a flash of skin, but has, in my opinion, a very moral and spiritual lesson.
Healthy sexuality, for a covenant couple, is not just about being physical. It depends on the quality of our, during the day, relationship. We men sometimes think we can just jump in bed at the end of the day when we have not paid attention to our loved one during the day. One church member told me that whether her husband has helped with little household chores at the beginning of the day, something so simple as his taking time to unload the dishwasher at 8 AM when they are all trying to rush to school or work, makes a difference in how romantically inclined she is at bedtime. All of us, male and female, need to understand that and talk about it. Our intimacy is more than just a physical act, it is based on how we treat each other all day long.
Some words to our adolescents. You are in a time when feelings of attraction and sexual interest are very strong. What is the research about how often male teenagers think about sex? The feelings are always there. My counsel is, don’t act on them as an adolescent. Channel that energy to other activities. Let your relationships be based on mutual respect and conversation and not on physical actions. Wait to become sexually active—this is a potential act of procreation and it is highly charged and to become sexually active as a teenager is to risk letting a friendship become only physical. One in four sexually active teenagers will contract a sexually transmitted disease. According to data in Rev. Hamilton’s book, there are in our country, fifteen million new cases of sexually transmitted disease each year. ( Hamilton, “Making Love Last a Lifetime,” pg. 89)
One other observation from my reading. I can’t remember the source but there are studies showing that couples in their fifties and sixties have a higher degree of sexual fulfillment together than couples in their twenties and thirties—that should break some stereotypes.
I am recommending two books at the end of the printed copy of the sermon for couples who want resources to build and strengthen this part of their relationship. Please be forewarned-they are frank and are written by physicians or psychologists. We will not have them on our bookshelves but they are readily available through bookstores or Amazon.
Finally two things. This subject is one of the most tender and most controversial parts of human life. If you have been offended I apologize but I felt that it is time that church leaders help counter some of the falsehoods and misconceptions about God’s good gift. And because this is so tender and emotional, this is why one counselor said there is really no such thing as “safe sex.” The counselor was not talking about protection. She was saying that to be in a committed romantic relationship with a spouse means being vulnerable, being exposed, taking a risk of opening our heart and deepest self to another person in trust and commitment-and that is risky--and potentially life giving.
Also, if you have made mistakes in this area of life, if you have crossed boundaries that you can see were wrong, you can always ask for forgiveness, for a new beginning, for a chance with God to rebuild and turn in a new direction. The Bible word for that is to repent and start anew.
Gracious God, here we are again talking about grace and forgiveness and relying on your compassion to help us do better and be better and grow into the people you dream that we will become. We thank you that you love and accept us right where we are and that you love us too much to let us stay where we are. Amen.
Recommended books:
Sex Over Forty by Saul H. Rosenthal, MD
Sex Over 50 by Joel D. Block, PhD