Longing for God: The Sacredness of Sex

Part I of the Series “Redeeming Sex”

Redeeming Sex Logo2-01Let’s talk about sex.

That’s not a sentence you often hear from the pulpit. It’s so unusual that when I advertised a summer sermon series on sex while I was in Park City, UT, the local radio station called me and wanted to interview me. They thought that a local pastor had lost his mind completely. The church talking about sex? That has to be a story!

It was interesting, however, that in the middle of July in a resort town the church was packed for every sermon in that series. Clearly, people wanted to hear what the church, or at least its crazy pastor, might have to say on the subject. That’s one of the reasons we advertised this series during Christmas—sex sells, even when it comes to church!

The reason for doing a series like this, however, has a lot more to do with the need than with attendance. After all, our culture is talking about sex all the time. Sex does, indeed, sell when it comes to advertising, and you can’t open your computer or a magazine or drive down the highway without seeing someone’s body alluringly displayed for your inspection. Radio and TV commercials lead us to believe that erectile dysfunction has replaced heart disease as the most important health concern of our time. Sex talk and sexual adventures dominate our entertainment media.

And sex has even become a political issue. The Supreme Court made same sex marriage the law of the land earlier this year which was the culmination of a bitter debate over the role of sex and marriage in American culture—a debate that rages on in the church. Our quadrennial United Methodist General Conference meets this spring and the issue of same sex marriage and the ordination of homosexuals will be the hot topic—so hot that it may cause the denomination to split altogether.

Everybody’s talking about sex—but is there a way to talk about it that actually gets behind the issues and gets us thinking about it in a fresh way?  After all, sex and sexuality is something that is part of every person’s life in one form or another. It’s too important to ignore, and too important to leave the conversation to the culture. If there’s any place we should be talking about sex, it’s in the church—after all, we know who created it in the first place and we ought to be the ones seeking the Creator’s wisdom and truth about it.

Not that your preacher is an expert, mind you. Sex is as mysterious and puzzling to me as it is to anyone else. My birth was the result of sexual misconduct by a clergy person. As a teen, my parents never talked about it and the message I received about sex from nervous youth workers was, essentially, “Sex is dirty, save it for the one you love.” Marriage was the holy grail because it meant you could legally have sex. In health class they showed us a model of an erect penis and taught us how to put a condom on it—I remember being so shocked at the idea that I broke into a cold sweat and had to leave the room. I learned the complete opposite message from church while I was in the Army—not exactly a bastion of holiness—where the message seemed to be, “Sex is dirty, talk and think about it all the time!” In college, everyone seemed to be having sex. Many were the nights I slept on the couch because my roommate put a sock on the bedroom door. When I got married, I learned that marriage is about a whole lot more than sex. I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m no expert.

But I am a historian, a theologian, a student of Scripture, and most importantly, a pastor—so I do have some idea about how sex might be viewed through those lenses. I’ve seen the damage a distorted view of sexuality can cause in the lives of people—affairs, divorce, promiscuity, heartbreak, devastated families. I’ve learned that people will risk their whole lives and careers for a momentary orgasm, and they’ll fight like crazy to rationalize it and justify themselves in the process. But I’ve also seen the beauty of sexuality expressed as God’s gift to humanity—a gift that, when understood and used properly, can give us a glimpse of God’s own nature. And because we Christians are supposed to be good news people, I think that’s where I’d like to start today as we begin the series.

But first, a few questions. When I say the word, “Sex,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? My guess is that, for many men, the first thing we think of is genital contact. Women, on the other hand, might think about sex as part of a relationship. We don’t often mean the same thing when we talk about sex. And then there is the very recent idea of sexual identity—that we think of sex, or what or who we desire, as being our primary identity.

Point is, the word “sex” conjures up a lot of images, feelings, desires, questions, attitudes, and even memories that are part of all of us. That word can have good connotations or negative ones. So, rather than just start with sex, we might ask an even bigger biblical/theological question: What does it mean to be human and what part does sex play in our humanity?

Made in the Image of God.

For that, we go to the Scriptures where, right in the first chapter, we read that God created humans in his own image. Now, what does that mean? Theologians have been wrestling with that for a long time and there’s a lot to unpack there, but for our purposes today I want to argue that there are at least two key aspects of being made in the image of God that should inform what it means to be human:

The first thing we hear God say about humanity on day six of creation is, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us.” OK, you ask, who is “us?” Most OT scholars will tell you that this refers to the heavenly court—that even though the Israelites believed in one God, they also believed that there were other created beings attending to God. Christians, on the other hand, read this through the lens of Jesus and think that “us” refers to the Trinity—one God in three persons (we’ll explore the depth of that in our Lenten series on the creeds. Stay tuned!)

If we take the Trinitarian view, then the first aspect of being created in the image of God, is that we were created for community because God’s very nature is communal. Note verse 27—“in the divine image God created them; male and female God created them.” It’s not that we are merely individuals made in the image of God (though that’s true), it’s that together we reflect the image of God—both male and female. We were created to reflect God’s very nature—created for intimacy with God and intimacy with each other. Genesis 2 expounds upon that, talking about the creation of man and woman as partners (Eve is taken from the “side” of Adam) because God saw that it was not good for the man to be alone. We were created for community, for intimacy, for connection.

But that connection was not simply to be enjoyed, it was also designed for a vocation. Verse 28 – “God blessed them, the humans, and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it.” Not only were humans created to reflect the nature of God, they were also created to carry out the mission of God in caring for creation. They were to act like an angled mirror, reflecting God’s righteous reign and rule to the creation and reflecting the creation’s worship and purpose back to God. To be created in the image of God is thus to engage in the mission of the Creator God—the mission of making all things “good.”

To put it another way, being human, then, is to be an embodied sign that points back to God. A sign always points to something beyond itself. We are signs of God’s creative goodness and purpose. As the Westminster Catechism puts it, “The chief end of [humanity] is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Sex is a sign that points us toward intimacy with God.

Sex, our sexuality, is part of that sign—indeed, it might be the place where we experience that connection most intensely (certainly most physically). God gives the humans a mission to be fruitful and multiply but to do that together in a pleasurable way that they will want to do it again and again. In sexual intimacy, we experience the intensity of full union with another person which, in many ways, is a sign that points us toward intimacy with God.

Look at our New Testament lesson. In Ephesians, Paul uses the intimacy of husband and wife as a sign that points to the intimacy of Christ and the church. That’s not a coincidence. As we’ll see later, Paul understood that sexuality and spirituality are two sides of the same coin. Both take us into “ecstasy” (Greek root – “outside of oneself”).

When you think about it in this way, it’s no wonder we are so driven to pursue sex. It’s a good thing—a gift, a sign from God. Sex isn’t dirty in and of itself. It’s a foretaste of being in perfect union with God. Can I get an amen!

The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was convinced that buried in our pursuit of sex is an implicit pursuit of God. He believed that sex is likely the closest most people will come to a genuine spiritual experience. “It’s no accident,” he wrote, “that even atheists and agnostics will, at the moment of orgasm, routinely cry out, ‘O God!’” G.K. Chesterton put it even more succinctly, saying that a man knocking on the door of a brothel is actually looking for God.

See, sex isn’t just about sex. It was never designed that way. It was designed to be a sign that points us to something even greater—full, intimate, communion with God. Deb Hirsch, in her marvelous book Redeeming Sex, which gave me some great background for this series, points out that in the King James version of the Genesis story, the way that sex is expressed verbally is that Adam knew his wife, Eve—a word that is truer to the Hebrew word, “yada” which means to know intimately. It refers to sexual intimacy but also to intimacy with God. It’s not merely knowledge about, it’s experiential knowledge. It’s the fullness of knowing God and knowing another. (Side note: I wonder if this is where “yada, yada, yada” comes from—as in, “Mom, what were you and dad doing upstairs?” “Well, we went to bed and, yada, yada, yada.” I don’t know, but it works!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Does all this mean that the kingdom of God will be like one long eternal orgasm? That would be so much better than the eternal church service I thought it would be when I was growing up. I think theologian Christopher West actually puts it best: “The union of the sexes as we know it now will give way to an infinitely greater union.” Sex is a sign that points us toward God—that’s why it’s part of being fully human.

That’s such a different view than most of us were taught. We either get the message that sex is something vile to be avoided or, on the other hand, that sex is something fun that we should pursue with unbridled passion with as many people and as often as possible. Neither view is correct. When we understand sex in light of our creation in God’s image, it points us to something much greater.

Sex as Sacrament

In fact, I think one of the ways we might think about sex is as a sacrament. Sacraments are outward signs of inward and spiritual things. We Methodists have two sacraments—baptism and communion—where we use physical elements as signs that point to deeper spiritual graces. In the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, marriage—and by extension, sex—is considered a sacrament. I think the Reformation lost something when it put a limit on what acts are considered sacred. The argument is that Jesus instituted baptism and communion by participating in them, but he also went to weddings and talked about marriage and sex. They were a pretty important of his agenda, even though he never married. As we’ll see later in the series, Jesus understood sex to be a sign pointing to something much greater—which is why using it in its proper context was a big deal to him.

I don’t see us changing our official list of sacraments any time soon, but I do wonder how our attitudes toward sex would be different if we thought about sex in a sacramental way. Genesis tells us that male and female were designed for each other, to engage in full intimacy with one another as a sign of their full intimacy with God. It’s sacred space and sacred space requires reverence, fidelity, commitment, vulnerability, and worship. It is sacred space that also needs to be carefully guarded and kept holy. An older couple I heard about got it right when they prayed every time they prepared for sex: “Lord, for what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful.”

SERIES LOGO

In this series we’re going to explore sex and sexuality through this foundational lens. When we talk about sex, we’re really talking about God. And God has a lot to say about sex—not because God wants to be a cosmic killjoy, but because God wants us to enjoy sex in a way that truly lifts us to the heavenly places as a foretaste of what is to come. That’s the good news—it’s where we should begin.

Next week, however, we’ll talk about how our view of sex has become distorted from God’s original intention—that’s the bad news. It only takes a couple of chapters in Genesis for it to happen and its been happening ever since. We’ll discover how we got to this point, why all of our sexual orientations are disoriented, and how God’s grace can begin to lift our eyes from the signs toward the destination. The following week we’ll talk about sexual identity and how that’s an inadequate marker of who we really are. Our real identity is found in Christ. On week four, we’ll talk about marriage. There’s a lot of talk about defending “traditional” marriage, which usually means marriage as we understood it in the 1950s. The Bible is less concerned with tradition than with marriage as a mission. Week five will be about “Sex and the Single Savior” where we’ll explore Jesus’ approach to sexuality and how living celibate and single and yet being in community is also a sign that points us to God. Lastly, we’ll dive into the sexual issues that seem to be dividing the church and, I hope, offer a way to get beyond the debate and reengage the mission of helping sexually broken people—in other words, all of us—experience God’s grace.

I hope you’ll make it a priority to be here and to invite others to come. You will find things here that you agree with, some things that may challenge you, others that may puzzle you. What I hope for most, however, is that we can change the conversation from talking about sex and sexuality as an issue and, instead, begin considering our own sexual lives. I pray that you will be open to how God wants to teach and change you during these six weeks.

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