[31 August 2008]

1 Cor 6:18-20, Tobit 8:4-8

A little boy returning home from his first day at school asked his mother, “what is sex?” His mother had prepared herself for this question and gave a simple but detailed answer that she had rehearsed. She even included God in her answer which she was particularly pleased about. When she had finished the young lad produced an enrollment form which he had brought home from school and said, “yes, but how am I going to get all that into this one little square?”

Sex fascinates us and yet the reality is that behind much humour there is an uneasiness. We laugh at sexual jokes but underneath very few people have got their sexuality sorted out. We certainly live in a culture that hasn’t got it sorted. The flouting of sexual images at every opportunity and the loss of any sense of sacredness with regard to sexuality is in my eyes a real concern. ‘Boobs on bikes’ draws vast crowds, but I’m afraid I’m old fashioned – I think it devalues us as human beings to have such displays. But before we take the high horse in our sexually confused culture I think we need to remember the church is about the only place you can go these days that doesn’t talk about sex, and that isn’t healthy either. Country singer Butch Hancock tells of growing up in Texas where he learned two main things: God loves you and he’s going to send you to hell; and sex is bad and dirty nasty and awful, but you should save it for the one you love. I think many of us will resonate with his experience. It leads me to wonder why we aren’t crazier than we are.

How the church got its reputation as the enemy of sex is I think a long story that has its roots in the context of the early church. Against the background of pagan Roman and Greek culture that had become sex crazed with temple prostitutes, multiple divorces and remarriages, wild parties and the like, the early church set boundaries and formulated ideals that often represented an over reaction. The apostle Paul seems to me to struggle in this area with some confusing advice. On one hand he tells us about the wonder and sacredness of our bodies, but a few verses later he gives some clear signals that men and women should keep apart, but you can marry if you can’t control yourself. (see 1 Cor 7:9)

The Christian theologian Augustine who lived in North Africa from 354-430AD helped formulate many Christian ideas. But when it came to sexuality Augustine had some real issues. His own sense of guilt about his early life where he was a wild and sexually active young man pervades his writings. He connected the transmission of sin with the act of intercourse and proclaimed that sex for any other purpose than conceiving a child to be a sin. He struggled with why God had created sex in the first place.

Following on from Augustine was another hugely influential person called Jerome. His great contribution to our heritage was that he produced a Latin translation of the Bible called the Vulgate and this translation was used in the church for the next thousand years. But Jerome was plagued by sexual fantasies. “I often found myself surrounded by bands of dancing girls,” he writes. To beat these fantasies he took to fasting and he was pretty serious in his attempts to the point of almost starving himself to death. He writes, “my face was pale with fasting, but although my limbs were cold as ice my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling before me when my flesh was as good as dead.” Jerome developed some interesting but I believe quite misguided ideas. He assigned spiritual values to women, so you scored 100 points for being a virgin, 60 points for being a widow without a husband, and just 30 points for being a married woman. Marriage was praised because it produced virgins, and husbands were told that if they were too passionate in love making they were committing adultery. Modern psychoanalysts would have a field day with both Augustine and Jerome, but both were hugely influential in the shape of the Christian church which followed.

The church authorities issued edicts forbidding sex on Thursdays, the day of Christ’s arrest, on Fridays, the day of his death, on Saturdays in honour of the blessed virgin, and on Sundays in honour of the departed saints. Wednesdays sometimes made the list too, as did the forty fast days of Lent and Advent. The forty days before Pentecost were also included as were the feast days of the apostles. The list escalated until only about forty days were left as allowable days for marital sex. As you can imagine many Christians ignored the rules, but harder to cope with was the sense of guilt the Church engendered. Priests of course were expected to remain celibate, and one Pope assigned a painter “Daniel the Trouserer” to clothe the nudes of the Sistine chapel. When women were banned from singing in church, legions of castrati volunteered to forego a normal sexual future for the sake of the higher octaves, and I believe one was still singing in the Sistine Chapel at the beginning of the twentieth century.

One thing we can give thanks to Martin Luther was that the reformation of the church that he participated in abandoned these rules and returned to a view of sexuality founded much more in the earthy and life affirming teachings of the Bible. The reformers partly through personal experience and partly because of the scriptures said clergy could marry and that sexual desire was not something to feel guilty about but was part of our God given being. I am wary though of portraying Luther as a model in this matter as he too seems to have some rather bizarre ideas about sexuality. I recall reading a rather lengthy diatribe in which Luther claimed that repressed sexuality led to a distinctive body odour.

I’m sorry to dwell on some of the historical realities of our faith but I believe our heritage on the issue of sexuality has often been far from helpful. In our own day the issue of sexual abuse amongst the clergy hangs over us all, as does the Victorian ethic of repression that shaped many of our childhoods. Often it seems that there is still a strong sense that sexuality is wrong and bad in Christian circles, and hypocrisy and guilt rife not only amongst clergy but amongst us all. While Jesus treated those who had fallen into sexual sin with compassion and forgiveness and reserved his harshest criticism for those who practiced greed, hypocrisy, pride, and legalism we still so often link immorality as Christians with just one thing -sex.

I wonder how many of you have read the book in our Bible called Song of Songs. I bet you haven’t heard it read too many times in worship because it is an erotic love poem. I must admit it is a bit flowery for me, but I’m so glad its there. For a glimpse of sexual sanity I love another Bible book called Tobit. Tobit was a popular book in Jewish households where it was seen as a book a little like Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress - a story book that contained some wonderful teaching about life. For some reason that I’m not sure of Protestants like ourselves and Jews removed the book from the Bible while Catholics and Orthodox Christians kept it in, so now in my Bible it is part of what is called the Apocrypha. That probably means most of you will never have read the story. For those of you who like dogs you should as Tobit is the only book of the Bible that says nice things about a dog.

We haven’t time this morning to tell the story of Tobit and his son Tobias, but suffice it to say it is a very human story of suffering and love. Things are tough for Tobit, who ends up old, blind, and poor. But things look up when God intervenes to lead the young son, Tobias, to the home of Sarah and it is love at first sight. Sarah is beautiful, but there is one problem – she is oppressed by a demon who kills any man that wishes to make love to her. Before Tobias she has buried seven men who have married her but died before their wedding could be consummated.

On the night when Tobias makes the wedding contract, Sarah’s parents escort the young couple to their bedroom. In a touch of humour Sarah’s dad instructs the servants to prepare a fresh grave. Tobias and Sarah get ready for their first night together. After burning special incense, the aroma of which banishes the demon that threatened to destroy Tobias, they shut the door and jump into bed. Suddenly Tobias straightens up and says “oops we forgot something.” The couple climbs out of bed and stand together as Tobias offers a dedicatory prayer basing their relationship firmly within God’s blessing. They then jump back into bed, make passionate love, and sleep soundly for the rest of the night.

From this prayer I think we learn at least three things about our sexuality that I want to leave you with:

(1) sex is a gift from God
In fact sexual love , eros, is how we got here. One of the saddest features of our heritage is the linking of sex with something dirty or shameful. Our sexuality is sacred and special. It is a means by which we share the deepest parts of ourselves with another, and I’m not just thinking of sexual intercourse because our sexual sharing with another is far more than this.

(2) the soul is a major sexual organ
Our postmodern culture is one of the most unloving cultures that has been. It is rife with sex as it is rife with anger, envy, and bitterness. It feels to me like we are living in a global nudist colony with sexual innuendo rampant. I suspect more kids these days can define ‘oral sex’ that they can ‘chastity’ or ‘fidelity’. At issue is the reality that sex has become a commodity and an ego booster. There is little understanding that in sharing sexually we are sharing something of our soul, our deepest parts, and the there is deep and deadly damage being done in our failure to recognize this. For disciples of Jesus good sexuality will be soul centered sexuality. It will involve as Tobias prayed, faithfulness and sincerity. Disciples of Jesus don’t mistake the crotch for the brain or the crotch for the soul. They are happy to have one of each and they know they each is important..

(3) sexual activity is good for you.
Some epidemiologists from Queens University in Belfast tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who had most sex enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards. Other studies purport to show that having sex regularly reduces the risk of heart disease, strokes, produces weight loss and improves overall fitness. You wouldn’t expect that a gift from God would be other than good for us would you?

So let us as disciples of Jesus dare to be both spiritual and sexual. Let us make love with joy and thankfulness to God just like Tobias and Sarah.

Dugald Wilson
31 August 2008

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