Sex, Sex, Sex!

"Sex, Sex, Sex!"
Genesis 2:20-25
Song of Solomon 4:1-7


I was going through confirmation class as a junior high kid.  The Associate Pastor who was leading the class was boring and dry.  As socially awkward as he was around adults, he was even more so around kids.  I’m not sure why he was put in charge of the youth program.

We had just finished up one of the chapters in the book he was running us through.  The next chapter was about human sexuality.  My friends and I, 12 and 13 years old, were anxious to get to that chapter ever since we thumbed through the table of contents and saw it.  But the youth pastor said, “Just read through the next chapter, talk about it with your parents this week, and for next week we’ll do the chapter after that.”

An audible groan went up from the boys in the class.  The girls just smiled.  My mother asked what we were studying in Confirmation Class and I told her about the chapter about sex.  She said, “Well if you ever have any questions about that, you can come and ask me anything.  We’ll talk about it.”  I took that as she meaning the opposite--she didn’t want to talk at all about it.  And what 13 year old boy is going to go ask his mom anything having to do with sex?

The message clearly was, “We don’t talk about this in church, and good luck getting anything useful out of your parents.”

Fast forward a bit to when I was a sophomore in high school.  We had a new Youth Pastor at the church, up from California.  He was cool.  He set up a couple of youth group sessions on the topic of sex, got all our parents permission, and we couldn’t wait.  The boys were split off from the girls and we had the sex talk.  But it was mostly about body parts and what they did.  We didn’t get into the morality of it, what’s appropriate and what’s not, and especially not the spirituality of sexuality, which believe-it-or-not, is what I wanted to talk about.  Again, the message was, “We’ve gone a step forward in talking about sexuality in church, but we’re still not comfortable talking about everything about sexuality.”

Fast forward again to the late 1980’s.  I’m a pastor up in Colby.  I was asked by the middle school principal to be on a select team that would write sex education curriculum for the middle school.  At that time, the state of Kansas mandated sex education be a part of all middle school curriculum, but it was up to the school how they decided to do that.

Our team worked for several weeks putting the sex education curriculum together.  During that time my fellow ministers, all left off the team, were badgering me constantly about what I was supposed to make sure got into the sex education curriculum.  Most of what they were bringing up were sexual morality issues they wanted to make sure the school was going to include--and these other pastors felt it was my personal mission to see to that happening.  I finally got sick of all their weaseling, and at a ministerial association meeting said, rather forcefully, “I’m done listening to you all.  Why are you demanding the school teach all this stuff!?  That’s your job as pastors and spiritual leaders.  Why don’t you include it in your youth group teaching at church?  That’s where it belongs, not in school curriculum!”

They got all huffy and puffy, but the comments they made back to me were along the lines of, “We can’t do that in church; we’d rather not do that in church; etc. etc.”  Again, the message, starting all the way back to when I was in Confirmation class hadn’t changed much over the years.  Clearly it was, “The church isn’t the place to talk about sex.”

So here I am today, confessing to you, that even though in all my youth groups we have talked about sex, talked about the sanctity and spiritual link with our sexuality, I have never preached about sex.  This is the first time.  I’ve never taken my own advice, at least during a sermon, and tried to explain some of the biblical and spiritual teachings about how God has designed us as sexual beings and what that means.

So, let’s jump in.  I want to start out by offering a prize.  Here’s a $20 bill.  I will give it to the first person who can tell me what the picture is on the back of this bill.  (Guesses.)  Well, the answer is a bit tricky.  Because I asked about the picture on the back of this bill.  If this were an authentic $20 bill, the picture would be the White House.  But since this is not a real $20 bill, there is white on the back, but not a house.  It’s a counterfeit.  Printed it on our own church copier in living color.

Most of what our culture displays, teaches, and inundates us with about our sexuality is just as counterfeit as this $20 bill.  If you’re getting your information about human sexuality from TV, the movies, magazines, books, and God-forbid--porn, then you are getting a counterfeit, you’ve been misled, and the sexual side of who you are as God’s human being will be tainted and skewed.

Most of what we see or read in popular media, displays sexuality as a tool or a weapon.  Sexuality in the media is used to sell, to seduce, to titillate, to entertain, to empower, and to disempower (especially through the violence of rape or sexual misconduct).  In popular media, sex is pretty much defined by our female and male body parts and what they do, and how vividly they can be displayed.

A family got together for a bit of a reunion.  There was lots of food and conversation.  Some of the conversation gravitated towards politics.  One side of the family was staunchly Republican and the other side was staunchly Democrat.  The conversation was spirited, but fortunately didn’t get too much out of hand.  As the day came to a close it was bath time for the kids.  A couple of young cousins were thrown into the bathtub together, a little boy and little girl.  The little girl looked the little boy over and said, “Boy, you Republicans are different aren’t you!”

There certainly are differences in how males and females bodies are created and how they operate.  But our sexuality, as God designed it in our humanness permeates or influences much of who we are--in the way we think, in the way we act, in the way we handle our relationships, and who we are physically.  Sexuality has everything to do with how we fully live out our lives as women and as men.  It’s this all-encompassing view of our human sexuality that is totally missing in what’s thrown at us everyday in the general media.

A psychologist was in a session with one of her patients.  The psychologist was leading the patient through the Rorschach Test--the one with those weirdly shaped ink blots.  The psychologist showed the patient the first picture and asked, “What is this?”
The patient replied, “That’s sex.”
The next picture was shown, and she asked, “What is this?”
The patient replied, “That’s sex.”
The psychologist went through all the pictures with the patient and each time he had the same answer:  “That’s sex.”
After the test was over, the psychologist said, “Well, sir, you seem to have an obsession with sex.”
To which the patient replied, “Me!?  You’re the one with all the dirty pictures!”

That’s what sex is in our culture:  dirty pictures, revealing as much skin as possible, only about our bodies, and the sex act itself.   But sexuality is so much more, and the spiritual dimensions of sexuality are totally irrelevant and unheard of in general culture.

There are at least two ways that Christian spirituality and sexuality are in relation to each other.  First, sexuality is a symbol of our call by God to have deeper communication with each other.  The problem with strip joints and sex in the media and pornography is not that they emphasize sexuality too much but that they don’t emphasize it enough--to its fullest extent.  They totally eliminate relationship and thereby narrow sexuality to the confines of body parts.  They have made sexuality trivial.

How much richer and fuller is the biblical perspective of sexuality as relationship.  To chat over a cup of tea, to discuss a book together, to view a sunset together--that is sexuality at its best because it is about relationship.

There are so many great themes in the book, Song of Solomon.  One of which is the true mutuality of a loving relationship.  Nowhere in the book is there the dull story of a man simply sexually acting out and the woman being acted upon.  Both are intensely involved; both initiate; both receive.

The emphasis is upon the loving relationship.  The man speaks.  The woman speaks.  The choir heightens the joy of the relationship.  Both are giving and receiving in the act of love and love’s mutual relationship.

Lust produces bad sex, because it denies relationship.  Lust turns the other person into an object--a thing, a nonperson--to satisfy your desire.  Both Jesus and Paul condemned lust because it made sex less than it was created to be.  Lust--sex without relationship--creates a counterfeit.  For Jesus, sex is too good, too high, too holy, to be thrown away by cheap and lusting thoughts.

The second way that Christian spirituality and sexuality form a union is that sexuality is a symbol of our call by God into communion with him and each other.  Sexuality and communion are intimately related.

I like the word “intimacy.”  It’s a word that is rooted in the Latin word, intimus, which means innermost.  Intimacy is that connection between two people in the innermost parts of themselves.  It’s deeper than relationship.  The only word that suffices is communion.

Because, what is the innermost part of us?  From Genesis we learn it is the image of God.  In intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, between two people there is the deep connection with the image of God in each of those people.  It is two people, opening up the deepest part of themselves, “naked and unashamed,” giving each other access to the very image of God within them.

The mystery of our human sexuality is the mystery of communion where the holy and the physical come together in the image of God and is united between those two people.  When Genesis describes Adam and Eve coming together sexually, it says, “Now Adam knew his wife Eve…”  We may run over that statement, saying to ourselves, “Well of course he knew her; she was his wife.”  But the word “knew” in Hebrew means to know someone intimately, deeply, to the very soul of a person, to the depth of the person’s image of God within them.

The same word is used to describe our relationship with God.  That our communion with God is described in sexual terms, of “deep calling out to deep.”  It gives a whole new meaning to that part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is describing people who said they did all kinds of great things for God.  But those people are turned away at the judgement, because, as Jesus said, “I never knew you!”  In other words, I never had communion with you, you never really connected with me in the depth of God’s image.  It was all surface and no depth.  No communion.  No intimacy.

Sexuality’s intensity, sexuality’s restraint, sexuality’s mutuality, sexuality’s permanence--all of these are amazing windows onto the communion and intimacy God intended not just for man-woman relationships, but also our relationship with God.



Christian ethics writer, Lewis Smedes wrote, “There are two situations in which people feel no shame.  The first is in a state of wholeness.  The other is in a state of illusion.”  Wholeness in sexuality has to do with communication and communion as I’ve described them.  But illusion in sexuality has to do with the counterfeit of communication and communion, which only create lust, pornography, sadism and sexism.  The counterfeits only dehumanize and destroy.  But the real thing, the wholeness of human sexuality takes us directly into the heart and image God.