Sermon: Glorify God in Your What?

Texts: Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20

Date: January 15, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

I remember when I first heard or read that our Jewish brothers and sisters teach that it is a special spiritual blessing for husbands and wives to make love on the Sabbath. I had a couple of reactions. First, I thought, “That is so cool.” Then I got to thinking about the contrast between that attitude and the way Christians often teach about sex—even sex between spouses. Christians don’t seem particularly apt to celebrate sexual union as a spiritual blessing even when it falls within the boundaries of church-sanctioned relationships. We’re a bit squeamish about it. Not that we are necessarily squeamish about sex itself, but we are pretty reticent to talk about the relationship between our sex lives and our spiritual lives.

Our general silence about sex and spirituality is especially weird in our current social context where sex talk and sexual imagery flood virtually all the media. If religious folk are keeping quiet about sex, we’re the only ones! My kids have liked watching the TV show “Friends” over the years, and for better or worse, we’ve allowed it. That’s one show that has various sexual relationships at the core of at least 8 out of every 10 plot lines. Once in a while when the girls were watching it, I’d say something about how I probably shouldn’t let them, and they’d look at me like the dinosaur I am and ask why I would feel that way. I’d tell them I just didn’t want them to grow up thinking it’s normal for people to jump into bed with someone after the first or second date. I didn’t want them to grow up thinking most real people do that as a matter of course. Oh, Moommm.

I don’t really want my kids, either those who are mine through biology or those who are mine through our relationship in the church, to think that “anything goes” sexually. That seems to be the spirit of the times, at least you’d think that when you watch TV. But the notion that “anything goes” is far from a new idea—it has gained and lost favor any number of times during the course of human history. It pops up in today’s reading from 1 Corinthians, for example. I was struck by what St. Paul says, apparently quoting his opponents. “All things are lawful for me;” that was one of the slogans of some of the new Christians Paul is trying to straighten out. The situation in Corinth, without going into too much detail, was this: Paul had been teaching people that under the new era that was inaugurated by Christ’s ministry, believers were no longer compelled to follow the Jewish law. The law, he taught, had been a custodian designed to keep people of faith living God’s way over the years. Christ replaced that custodian Law with new life. Now Christians would submit to the guidance of the indwelling Christ rather than the external Law.

This was great theological teaching. However, some of the new Christians decided to take the liberty that was offered and do whatever they wanted. They went from liberty to licentiousness with no stops in between. Their belief about sexual relationships, evidently, that having sex with somebody was on the same level as scratching an itch or getting a cheeseburger when you’re hungry. “All things are lawful.”

You heard in Paul’s response how eager he was to correct the “anything goes” crowd. He starts out with a very calm response: “All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial.” But then he gets kind of wound up and eventually exclamation points come into play as the text shouts, “Shun fornication!” If he had been speaking rather than writing, you can imagine his neck getting red and then his ears and then his bald spot glowing like Rudolph the Reindeer’s nose by the time he gets to the exclamation point.

I’m definitely with Paul as he tries to teach the Christians “all things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial.” I’d like to include that message in what I would teach my daughters or people of any age as they consider how they will make choices. I’m not so sure I want to go with him as far as winding up in a red-faced squawk about what to shun! I think the heat behind this paragraph and others like it have communicated down through the ages more clearly than what the words were actually trying to communicate, so that many Christians have been left with the impression that shunning sex in general is what the truly pious person will want to do. I was talking with a friend of mine whose teenaged sons have, for complicated reasons, gotten involved with a Christian Alliance church youth group. Alliance churches are quite conservative theologically, and my mainstream Presbyterian friend is sometimes appalled at what they are trying to teach her sons. She talked about the speakers they had address the teens’ sex lives in youth group, saying that they had scared them half to death with their dire warnings about STD’s (sexually transmitted diseases) and unexpected pregnancies and, more to the point, going to HELL for engaging in fornication. At least one of her boys came home and said he was never going to have sex before he got married. She laughed at herself as she said that hearing that made her think that having fundamentalist teenaged sons wasn’t all bad.

She wants her boys to be safe. I want my girls to be safe. We both want our children to be good. But what does that mean when you are deciding how to operate your flesh? I think it’s a cheap cop-out to just yell at people about how they are going to hell if they don’t confine their sexual experiences to heterosexual marriage, implying that even in marriage it’s preferable to carry on only in one or two dignified positions, mainly for the purpose of having children. How can we take a more reasoned, loving, and faithful approach to decisions about our sex lives?

In spite of what I hear winding up as near apoplexy from Paul’s words, he did try to make a reasoned argument about why a Christian ought not give the world’s oldest profession (prostitution) your business. I have to admit I don’t quite get the logic of the middle part of the argument when he is talking about how if we are members of Christ’s body that getting our “members” in a clinch with a prostitute’s “members” was like dragging Jesus along with you into that bed, ICK! So SHUN FORNICATION!! He loses me there, but I’m intrigued again when he gets around to talking about how the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. He urges Christians to glorify God with their bodies.

Glorify God with what? Our bodies?? You mean your body is more than a boat anchor dragging you down into sin? For a variety of reasons, including other teachings of Paul himself, during the 2000 years of church history the body came to be seen by many Christians as a liability in the spiritual life. Paul seemed to think celibacy was the highest calling for a Christian, and he recommended marriage only if a person couldn’t stop burning with lust---not exactly a positive view of the flesh. But this caution in regard to the body is counterbalanced by his own image of the body being a temple of the Holy Spirit, which evokes beauty and holiness in the flesh itself.

How are Christians to view our bodies? Not that we can get along without them, but do we see them as a help or a hindrance in the spiritual life? Flora Slosson Wuellner has written a reflection on this that asks, “Who Is My Body?” Some of her ideas: “I am the truth-teller. I witness to you your unknown self.” “I am the faithful messenger and recorder of your memories, your powers, your hurts, you needs, your limits.” “I am the stored wisdom and hurts of the ages and generations before you.” “I am a gift-giver. Through me, you live and move in God’s creation. Through me, you have your vital link with the rejoicing, groaning, travailing universe.” “I am your partner in stress and pain. I carry much of your suffering, so your spirit does not need to carry it all alone.” “I am the frontier you have barely explored and the eager companion who speaks to you every moment.” “I am the visible means by which you relate and unite with others.” “I am one of the major ways by which God abides with you, speaks to you, touches you, unites with you.” “Far from separating you from your spiritual life, I open it to you.”[1]

Wuellner’s line about the body helping us carry pain so that our spirit does not have to carry it alone is thought-provoking. I think we could go a little further and say that the body also carries joy so that the spirit need not carry joy all alone. That’s certainly one element of physicality—we derive joy through our bodies, and that joy is a gift of God. God had to have had a twinkle in his eye when we were created with equipment not just to procreate but to enjoy ourselves along the way.

But there’s a deeper spiritual dimension even than the simple joy of what Vernard Eller, author of The Sex Manual for Puritans calls the “bump-vibrate-boinng” of sex. Various theologians have tried to wrap words around the spiritual meaning of sexual union. James B. Nelson wrote a pretty comprehensive book called Embodiment years ago. Let me share one passage with you that was meaningful to me, from a section titled “Communion”:

In its deepest experience sexuality is the desire for and the expression of communion—of the self with other body-selves and with God…Communion does not mean absorption, however…[There is a] polarity [which] is the creative difference and creative tension between elements bound together in communion….The physical intertwining of selves is accompanied by an emotional and spiritual intertwining. But this communion retains its polarity. It is an experience of unity, but not unification. Each self respects the other’s identity, not confusing it with its own wishes or fantasies. In the ecstasy of mutual giving and receiving, uniquenesses and creative differences remain. But such sexual communion furnishes more than an analogy for the human communion with God. If God is the in-betweenness of self and self, the occasion itself is the communion with God. And it becomes that which nurtures such communion in other types of human experience. [2]

Other people have written about the experience of the timeless transcendent that accompanies sexual ecstasy as a means of touching the divine. Yet others have spoken of the grace of sexual union drawing humans out of isolation into community as an essential element of the spiritual journey. Vernard Eller writes about the universe being strengthened by the commitments such as those made by people in a long-term marriage, in which sex reinforces the commitment and the commitment improves the sex.

The fact that sexual expression can be a good and joyful thing, a healing and spiritually expansive activity, doesn’t mean that all sexual expression is good. The fact that we need and enjoy food doesn’t mean that all eating is good, either. There’s some food that just plain bad for you physically and spiritually and the same goes for some sexual activity.

Making choices about what one will or won’t do in expressing their sexuality is complex. Lots of good people recommend simplifying the choices available by teaching that the only sexual union that qualifies as “good” or “holy” is within the confines of a legal marriage between a man and a woman. I hesitate to end the ethical conversation there in this day and age, for several reasons. For one thing, not all sexual expression within a marriage is good or holy; marriage doesn’t automatically sanctify every sexual act within it. Further, marriage is not accessible to all people. It is not, as yet, legally available to gay and lesbian people. Marriage is not always advisable for some people, like very young people or widowed people who have good reasons not to remarry even though they are in a healthy, committed relationship. So in my opinion, marriage alone is not going to be the yardstick for measuring the goodness of all sexual activity.

Nelson lays out a more nuanced approach to making Christian judgments about sexual ethics. He suggests that sexual expression should be evaluated in regard to “motivations, intentions, the nature of the act itself, and the consequences of the act, each of these informed and shaped by love.” Let me unfold that a bit further. First, the motive—why should I do, or not do, this? Each act should be motivated by love—love for one’s partner and love of oneself, and celebration in love for God of this gift of communion. Second, the intention. At what am I aiming in this act? Each act should aim at human fulfillment and wholeness, God’s loving intention for all persons. The intent should be the engagement of the whole person—body, mind and feelings. Third, the act itself. Are certain sexual acts inherently right and good, and certain others intrinsically wrong and bad? It’s difficult to paint with too broad a brush because moral quality hinges on what is being communicated in the context of a particular relationship. But acts that are by their nature loveless—coercive, debasing to the other’s sensitivities, utterly impersonal, obsessed solely by physical gratification—such acts are excluded. Finally, consequences. What will most likely result from this act, and in what ways am I willingly accountable? The willingness to assume responsibility for the results of a sexual act is also one of love’s marks. This accountability includes not just the possibility of a child being conceived, but also person’s and their partner’s needs in the relationship, and the probable effects for the wider community.[3] On this last factor, consider a decision made to have an extramarital affair within a church family. I was in a church once where there was hanky panky between two married people who sang in the choir together, and when it became public, it not only blew apart the marriages but tore the fabric of the church in such a way that it was a long time mending. That’s the sort of thing Nelson means by being accountable for the probable effects for the wider community.

Now after all that theological and ethical verbiage, there are probably some of you in the congregation who wish the preacher would have stopped with Paul’s simple and dramatic “Shun fornication!” That may be all the guidance some people need when they are trying to make moral choices about sexual expression. I’ve a hunch that some of us can use some more nuanced guidance than that, and I hope this has been helpful.

Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. Some temples larger, some smaller; some more ornate, some plain and simple; some shining and new, others sagging and leaking here and there; all temples revealing God’s glory. May each of us find ways to thank God for this magnificent gift and find ways to glorify God in our bodies as well as our souls.

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[1] Wuellner, Flora Slosson “Knowing the Wonder” Alive Now November/December 2003, p. 24-25

[2] Nelson, James B. Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology Minneapolis: Augsberg, 1978, p. 34-35

[3] Ibid, p. 127-28