Sex and holiness

Rachel Held Evans and her prolific comment posters have a fascinating conversation going on sexuality and holiness.

Perhaps instead of virginity…or even purity (which carries something of an either/or connotation, I think)…we ought to talk about the path of holiness.  Holiness, to me, means committing every area of my life— from sex, to food, to time, to work—to the lordship of Jesus. It means asking how I might love God and love my neighbors in those areas so that the Spirit can grow love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in the sacred soil of everyday life.

Holiness isn’t about sticking to a list of rules. It isn’t something you either have or don’t have, keep or lose. It’s a way of life, filled with twists and turns, mistakes and growth, uncertainty and reward. And, (to make matters even worse for the fundamentalists), a holy lifestyle often looks different from person to person, though the fruit of the Spirit is the same.

We’ve been here before

From the first decades of the church, controversy over doctrine has troubled us. In the New Testament we have evidence of a deep and divisive debate over what followers of Christ should and should not do.

We find this in many places, but some of the evidence can be found in Acts 15 and 21, Galatians 2, and Romans 14. We see here the church and its leaders wrestling with and disagreeing over what food to eat, among other issues. And we see, especially in Romans 14, Paul’s pastoral wisdom in living within a church divided over doctrine.

Some people might think sex and food do not have a great deal in common, but they are both personal and bodily in ways that are quite intimate. (Maybe these are the words of a fat guy.) They also are both items on the list of particulars of the Acts 15 council.

I don’t know what we would learn from these biblical texts. Perhaps we would all be trapped by our original commitments. Peter and Paul had a tough time working through their differences. James and Paul appear never to have agreed.

Can we learn from the apostolic controversies or merely repeat them?

Rankin: Sex and the UMC

Steve Rankin writes a book review that  serves also as a critique of our denominational conversations about sex. His central point? We miss the boat when we spend all our time talking about boy-boy and girl-girl sex.

This paragraph by Rankin reminds me of Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas:

We’ve been told again and again by a thousand different means that it’s none of our business; that it’s none of the church’s business. How dare we try to impose our Christian morality on the young?  But someone’s morality is being imposed.  And it is not good.  Just open your eyes and look around.

Where is male chastity?

One of the great pleasures of reading things written long ago is the way it knocks holes in my easy assumptions, for instance the assumption that our culture is somehow unique in its obsession with sex. We act as if we are the first people ever on earth to adopt as a universal standard the sexual attitudes of teen movies and frat houses.

This was not so, of course, ever. Go read about Greece and Rome. Or for a more on point take for my blog, here is John Wesley in the midst of a litany of woes about the morality of his native England.

Indeed, where is male chastity to be found? among the Nobility, among the Gentry, among the tradesmen, or among the common people of England? How few lay any claim to it at all! How few desire so much as the reputation of it! Would you yourself account it an honour or a reproach to be ranked among those of whom it is said, “These are they which are not defiled with women: For they are virgins”? And how numerous are they now, even among such as are accounted men of honour and probity, “who are as fed horses, everyone neighing after his neighbor’s wife!”

The two quotations are taken from Revelation 14:4 and Jeremiah 5:8, if you are interested.

You don’t need Hollywood, apparently, to live in a culture that scoffs at virginity and lauds adultery.

Everyone is talking about sex

Adam Hamilton reports a 50% increase in worship attendance for the first sermon in a series on sex and marriage.

Ed Young plans a 24-hour “bed in” with his wife on the roof of his church.

Mark Driscoll and his wife write a headline-grabbing book about sex and marriage.

It feels like I’m living in Corinth.

What is going on here?

 

Link

Timothy Dalrymple: The Young Christian’s Guide to Sex at Seminary

No, we don’t have that right

Jay Voorhees pointed to an interview with Amy DeLong about her opinions about the United Methodist Church and her plans for the future. Jay’s first post caught him some flak and he revised his initial statement in a second post.

Jay’s post was about a statement by DeLong about grace meaning people do not have to change. The push back was from people who said DeLong was not making a claim about grace in general, but only about the limited case of homosexual orientation.

It was another comment in the interview that grabbed my attention. DeLong said:

As an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, you can’t be a “self-avowed practicing homosexual.” This language is reductionist. It reduces the breadth and depth of my relationship with my partner to only what happens in our most private and intimate moments.  I was asked during the trial if I’ve had sexual genital contact with someone of the same gender; I refused to answer that question, particularly because it was asked by someone who meant to do me harm.  The charge was dropped because I refused to answer. My hope is that we have established the right of every couple to maintain the privacy of their most sacred and intimate moments.

My hope runs counter to  DeLong’s.

Pastors in the UMC are under vow to maintain sexual abstinence unless married. They are also expected not to commit adultery, among other things. They do not, in fact, have a right to keep secrets about their sexual conduct. If a person in authority over or in covenant with me asks whether I have violated my baptismal or ordination vows, I do not have a right to refuse to answer.

It may be the case that in a church trial I can resort to such evasions. It may be that in the United States I have a civil legal right to privacy. But the church – to raise the obvious – is not the United States of America. It is the church.

It would be foolish for the UMC to adopt a position that says pastor’s sex lives are their own business. They are not.

Theology of sex

A recent post on fornication and adultery has generated some interesting comments and commentary in other places, but reading the responses reveals that I was not careful enough in making one of my points. So, I will try again by asking a question.

Does God care what we do with our genitals?

Much of our conversation about sex in the church acts as if such a question is beside the point. Our sexual theology tends to devolve into sexual ethics. We talk a great deal about sexual behaviors as “bad” if they hurt us or hurt others and indifferent or “good” if they do not. We take a “first do no harm” approach but measure harm entirely in social, physical, and emotional terms. Or frame of reference is human and only human.

Of course, theology is concerned with how humans treat other humans. But it is concerned with human relations within the wider context of the relationship between Creator and creature. We tend to ignore the context when we talk about sex.

This, I asserted without much argument, is why most people condemn adultery — although in our culture we commonly have movies or other entertainment that suggest adultery can be redemptive or healing — but find fornication much less objectionable. We might worry about “the risks” of pre-marital or promiscuous sex, but absent any harm to people, we see it as natural, good, healthy, and part of who we are as people.

What I struggle with in this conversation is the absence of reference to God.

Many resist the use of biblical injunctions on sexual behavior to guide our theology, which is why in matters sexual we become atheistic. We end up with no theology of sex because absent Scripture and tradition we are left without any materials from which to construct a theological understanding of sex.

The oddity of this, of course, is that the Bible seems to deal a great deal with sex. It deals with it in conflicting ways at times, true, but to judge from Scripture, God cares. Shouldn’t we?

Fornication, adultery, and the UMC

Traditionally, the Christian Church has considered both fornication and adultery sinful.

Fornication is sex between two (or more?) people who are not married. Adultery is sex by a married person with someone who is not his or her spouse.

In our culture, we tend to frown much more on adultery than fornication. My theory is that we do this because we don’t really consider either a sin. What we object to is the broken promise. Cheating on your spouse hurts that person and violates a commitment. We almost never speak of it as an affront to God, though, which explains why we find adultery easy to condemn but speak hardly at all about fornication – unless it is concern about diseases and pregnancy.

In matters relating to sex, we buy into the cultural standards. If two (or more?) people consent to a sexual relationship and they don’t have an obligation to someone else then we act as if it is really no concern to anyone else.

But does such an attitude comport in any way with Scripture? Whether we can agree on the exact outlines of a biblical view of sex, it is pretty hard to argue that the Bible expresses no interest in the topic. On the contrary, it gets repeated attention. The Bible – at least – appears to believe that God cares about who we have sex with.

The conduct of United Methodists as a whole, however, suggests to me that we do not consider such behaviors as affronts to God. We do not believe that the adulterer or the fornicator is placing his or her salvation at risk. We don’t fret about God’s righteous judgment on those individuals. We are practical atheists on matters of sex. So long as no one is hurt, we say, it does not matter.

How did we come to this position? How can it possibly be biblical or loving to our brothers and sisters who get caught up in such sins?

Sex and marriage

Gavin Richardson had a good article in the Dec. 22 UM Reporter about the proper appreciation of sex and marriage.

The trigger is a response to Pastor Ed Young’s challenge to his congregation to have sex every night for seven days. Gavin thinks Young is buying into the culture’s misunderstanding of sex.

Let me suggest we should not be talking about sex as a “foundation” for our marriages. Before we should be having sex, we should figure out how we are friends with our spouses and others. If we are to “reclaim sex” as God’s great gift from the seduction of culture we have to start at the deep core, not the symptom. The deep core we need to address is how we are friends in love, not lovers in bed.

(ht: Andrew Thompson)