Part II of “Redeeming Sex”
A few years back there was a media report going around about the rock singer Sting who, according to the report, claimed that he was a practitioner of an ancient eastern form of Tantric sex and could “make love for eight hours a night.” This was big news in the entertainment world, where sexual prowess is seen as one of the keys to success. Sales of books on the Kama Sutra and other eastern forms of spiritualized sexuality soared. Everybody wanted to know the secret.
Awhile later, though, Sting made a cheeky confession. Apparently, he had bragged to Bob Geldoff, singer for the Boomtown Rats and organizer of the Live Aid concerts, about his ability to have sex for eight hours a night. Several years after the story broke, Sting confessed that he had “sexed up” the story to impress his fellow musician. “I think I mentioned to Bob I could make love for eight hours,” he explained. “What I didn’t say was that this included four hours of begging and then dinner and a movie!”
When it comes to sex, there is the fantasy and there is the reality. I love this story because it’s so honest—that while the culture is fascinated by tales of sexual fantasy, it’s the reality of relationship that gives us the real thing.
Last week in our introduction to the series I started with the premise that sex is a sign that points us toward intimacy with God; that it’s a kind of sacrament, an outward and physical sign of an inward and spiritual grace—a union that points to an even greater union to come. As human beings created in the image of God, we are given the gift of sexuality but within a context—the context of intimate community with God and with one another and in the context of mission—that we are to reflect God’s righteous reign and rule in creation. Sex isn’t just about sex, in other words. It’s about something much greater than ourselves.
What happens when sex is separated from the context of community, mission, and intimacy with God?
But what happens when sex is separated from that context? What happens when it is detached from community, from mission, and from intimacy with God? What happens when the fantasy begins to trump the reality? What happens, in other words, when our orientation toward sex becomes disoriented?
That’s what I want to focus on today and to do that I want to take us back to the beginning. As I said last week, it only takes a couple of chapters into Genesis before this archetypical couple, Adam and Eve, who, you will remember were “naked and unashamed” in chapter 2, are suddenly hiding in the bushes ashamed of that same nakedness. What happened?
Well, what happened is the root of almost all human brokenness and sin—when we make a god out of something other than the God. God created humans for relationship—a relationship of deep and abiding intimacy. As we said last week, God blessed the sexual union of these humans, but within the context of their deeper relationship with God—a relationship marked by covenant, fidelity, and commitment. To that end, God gave the humans the ability to choose, knowing that love is only authentic when it is chosen and not coerced.
Genesis 3, however, tells us that the first humans exercised their gift of choice by choosing to reject God and the gifts God had given them. The snake, who merely reminds them that they have a choice, suggests that Adam and Eve could be gods themselves. They have it all, yet they want more and so they violate the only rule that God had given them. Notice what happens. Immediately, says the writer of Genesis, “their eyes were opened and they realized they were naked” (v. 7). In other words, they now see their world and each other differently. Before, they were in intimate community with God and each other “naked and unashamed”—not comparing themselves to each other and to God. They were fully open and intimate with each other. Now there was a secret. They now compared themselves to each other and hid from God. In some sense they now saw their bodies as being separate from their spirits—something to be ashamed of rather than celebrated. They covered their nakedness but exposed themselves. They had exercised their choice to worship the creature over the creator and the results have been devastating ever since.
Sex, out of God’s created context, would now be potentially problematic. Notice how things begin to run backwards. Rather than being mutual partners, reflecting God’s own nature, the husband would dominate the wife. Rather than naturally reflecting the image of God together, the mission of fruitfulness and multiplication would only come through pain. Rather than being at one with the creation, the humans would be at odds with it. Separated from the context of the image of God, humanity runs at cross-purposes to God, and we’ve been doing it ever since.
Indeed, it seems endemic to our nature to settle for idols other than God. Maybe that’s why the first commandment God gave to Moses is,”You shall have no other gods before me.” First of all, there aren’t any others and, secondly, this is the sin from which all the others will emerge. Paul says as much in Romans 1, our New Testament reading for today. God’s nature has been revealed in creation, but even though humanity “knew God, they didn’t honor God as God or thank him. Instead, their reasoning became pointless and their foolish hearts were darkened… They traded the truth of God for a lie and served the creation instead of the creator.”
As a result, Paul says, God gave them precisely what they wanted. They became prisoners of their own desires and paid the price for their self worship. Most people will point out that Paul famously talks here about homosexual practice as one of the outcomes of this idolatry—those are the verses that get all the press. But we are often guilty of avoiding our own sin by pointing out someone else’s. There’s a whole list here of things from greed to gossip, to slander, to jealousy, to even disobeying parents. See, for Paul, all sin is the result of idolatry and there is no hierarchy of sin. When it comes to sin, and, for our purposes, sexual sin, we’re all in the same boat. As he will say in chapter 3, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” All of our orientations are disoriented. There is no glass house of moral superiority from which anyone can be chucking stones. We’re all sinners; all of us idolaters; all of us in need of redemption.
Sex was created as a sign pointing us toward intimacy and union with God, but when sex itself becomes the object of worship we have a major problem. You don’t have to look far to see how that’s played out. The ancient Israelites were tempted by the sex gods of Canaanite culture, and they are still with us. When you look at the Canaanite idols one of the things you notice is their oversized genitalia—kind of like ancient porn, in many ways. You’ll read a lot in the Old Testament about Asherah poles, for example, which were idols shaped like—well, let’s just call them “Viagra poles.” Many of their rituals involved having sex with sacred prostitutes as a way of getting the gods to do what you wanted. You can see the appeal and why the Israelites were fascinated.
That fascination continues. Pamela Paul says that we now live in a “pornified” world—a culture where sexy images and titillating talk dominate the landscape. You can’t escape it, really. Everywhere you look, body parts are on display for our inspection and entertainment. The annual revenue from the porn industry in the U.S. is more than that of professional football, baseball, and basketball combined. The “industry” says that this is just harmless fun—it’s just bodies, after all—but God warned us that it is so much more than that. Idol worship always exacts a cost—addiction, a distorted view of humanity, treating people as objects, broken families, broken lives. Adam and Eve, the people of Israel, all paid the price for their idolatry. God gave them what they wanted and they soon discovered it wasn’t what they were looking for.
Indeed, the word “pornography” comes from the Greek word porneia, which is often translated “fornication” in the King James Bible, but its meaning really encompasses any sexual activity or expression outside the context of the marriage covenant. Using that definition, we begin to see how prevalent porneia is in our culture at large, not just on web sites and seedy video stores. A pornified view of sexuality sees people as mere bodies and love as a naked contact sport where the winner receives a pleasurable prize.
When sex becomes an idol, it disorients everything. Jesus understood this, about adultery was very clear—sex outside the marriage covenant was (and is) a sin against God’s created order. Violate that covenant and you pay a steep price, not only spiritually but also in terms of brokenness of families and relationships. But Jesus takes the prohibition against adultery even further, saying that just looking at another person with lust is the same as committing adultery with her or him. But notice the location of the lust—in the heart. It’s not only the physical act of adultery that makes one guilty, it’s also the intention of the heart—what we do with our bodies affects our spirits and vice versa!
Jesus isn’t talking here about natural sexual desire. That is, after all, part of what brings us together. But, again, that sexual desire is to be enjoyed within a covenant relationship—a relationship that points us to the deeper relationship we are to have with God. When we allow porneia to dominate our hearts and minds, we’re moving off the road to wholeness that God has mapped out for us from the beginning.
Name Your Idol
How do we deal with all this distortion and begin to change it? Well, it begins when we humbly name our own problems with sexuality. It’s interesting that in the ancient pagan worldview of many gods, knowing and invoking the name of that god meant that you could somehow manipulate him or her. Naming the god put you in a position of power. The Hebrew God, by contrast, would not give a name—“I am who I am,” is the name God told Moses to refer to when talking about God. The one God could not be controlled like the pagan gods could. The point? When we name our idols, when we name our addictions, it is then that we begin to have power over them and it is also then that we begin to see that they have no power in comparison to the one true God, the God who created and cares for us.
Share Your Struggles
Whether you’re married or single, it’s important for all of us to have someone to whom we can confess our deepest needs and fears. I have personally been blessed with good counselors and, even more so, with a wife with whom I can share the tough stuff going on within my spirit. Cultivating intimacy, openness and honesty with a significant person or people in your life is essential to our spiritual, emotional, and even sexual health. Even more than that, we must come to realize that the only one who can truly fill the deep holes we have in our spirits is God, who created us for relationship with him. When I cultivate my relationship with God, spending intentional time every day confessing my sins and hurts, learning God’s promises, and relying on God’s grace, it’s there that I find those deeper needs met.
We were made for relationships, not for disconnection. When sex gets distorted, it becomes an isolated event instead of an integrated part of being human, created in the image of God. God created sex to be enjoyed within the context of relationship and community. What we have to remember when we talk about sex is that our cultural fixation on privacy is not a biblical value—community is. What we do with our bodies affects our spirits, and what we do as persons affects our communities.
I like how Lauren Winner puts this in her book Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity: “Sex is communal because it is real. Sex has consequences. Sex is dangerous and delightful and tempestuous and elemental, and it matters. What we do with our bodies, what we do sexually, shapes who we are. If we believe that sex forms us, then it goes without saying that it is public business, because how we build the persons we are—persons who are social and communal and political and economic beings—is itself a matter of concern.”
When sex gets disoriented, it affects all of us. I’ve met with many people who have felt the betrayal of adultery. On TV and in the movies, adultery is inconsequential. In real life, it is devastating. When people will risk the destruction of an entire family system or their career just to experience an orgasm, we have a community problem. When people spend hours using exploitive sexual imagery to get a high instead of dealing with their inner lives, we have a community problem. When our children are exposed to day after day of sexualized talk, images, and behavior everywhere they turn and no one is there to speak the truth to them about it, we have a community problem. We need to expose the idol, name it, and bring our worship to the one, true God who loves us and makes us whole.
My friends, we need to talk about these things with each other, with our children, and especially with God. We need to be honest about our own sexuality and perceptive about the ways in which God’s good gift has been distorted. We must peel back the layers of secrecy and bring our brokenness to the who can heal us. We need less discussion about sexual technique and more discussion about sexual theology. It’s not about how long we can make love every night, but about making true love last a lifetime.
Rely on God’s Grace
And we need to hear a word of grace. There is pain in the room today as people have experienced the results of sexual brokenness. Some may feel as if they are so broken as to be beyond repair. That’s another lie that needs to be exposed. The God who created sex as a powerful gift is the same God who offers us forgiveness, redemption, and new life when we confess our brokenness, when we offer him our hurts and desires. Our failures are not final, our past does not determine our future. You are not damaged goods in God’s eyes. God wants us to be fully in relationship with him. If you are hurting today, if you are struggling with a sexual issue, if you are broken—I want you to hear the good news. God is here for you. You can be whole again, made clean, made new.
That, my friends, is the real thing.
