How to have really great sex…from a kingdom perspective
1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Song of Solomon 2:8-17
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 about his ability to have sex for eight hours a night to Bob Geldoff, singer for the Boomtown Rats and organizer of the Live Aid concerts. 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!”
Fantasy vs. reality. This week, as we close our series “The Rest of Life” we’re talking about the reality and theology of sex, which you don’t often hear about in church, even though we live in a Western culture that is sex-obsessed, with sexual imagery, fantasy, and talk dominating the airwaves, cyberspace, and even our daily commute.
A recent study in Britain, for example, revealed that 2,252 car crashes every day are caused by drivers ogling an alluring billboard or checking out someone of the opposite sex—that’s 921,840 crashes per year caused by sexual fantasy!
We have legislative debates about sexuality and increasingly define ourselves by sexual preference. Sex trafficking has become a major world issue.. Heck, you can’t even watch a ballgame without seeing commercials of couples in bathtubs hawking another pill that will increase your sexual ability.
How obsessed is our culture with the fantasy of sex? In her book Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives, author Pamela Paul puts it like this: “Imagine if Starbucks offered a shot of alcohol with your morning coffee. Then there was beer in the office and at lunchtime we all automatically ordered a bottle of wine rather than sparkling water. If alcohol were that available we’d all start drinking more and any stigma would gradually disappear. And that’s how things are developing with porn.” The fantasy world of sex seems to permeate our lives.
Despite all this, the church has been largely silent on the issue of sex, unless it’s about same sex marriage or abortion. Otherwise, the church has approached the issue of sex in ways that are at turns confusingly ambivalent and puritanically negative. I remember as a teenager being in church and hearing our youth leaders talk about sex but usually in very dire terms. Smoking and drinking were vices, to be sure, but given the amount of time they spent warning us about sex you’d have thought that it was a one way ticket straight to hell. The message I got from church growing up was essentially this: Sex is dirty…save it for the one you love. You can be sure I abstained but, then again, when one is 5 foot 7, 120 pounds with thick glasses and playing in the marching band there wasn’t a whole lot of temptation. I do remember hoping, however, that Jesus wouldn’t come back before I got to experience it!
Most of us are also the product of generations where parents didn’t talk about sex with their children. An informal survey—how many of you never heard a word about sex from your parents? How about rarely? Yeah. It’s like the little girl who was asked to write an essay on “birth” She went home and asked her mother how she had been born. Her mother, who was busy at the time, said, “The stork brought you darling, and left you on the doorstep.”
Continuing her research she asked her dad how he’d been born. Being in the middle of something, her father similarly deflected the question by saying, “I was found at the bottom of the garden. The fairies brought me.”
Then the girl went and asked her grandmother how she had arrived. “I was picked from a gooseberry bush,” said Grandma.
Armed with this information the girl wrote her essay. When the teacher asked her later to read it in front of the class, she stood up and began, “There has not been a natural birth in our family for three generations …”
Many of the people in my generation learned about sex in school. I was a junior in high school before I actually understood what intercourse involved and I remember being shocked (I broke into a cold sweat and had to leave health class to get a drink of water). Many more learned about it in books or movies or in the pages of some illicit magazine hidden under a mattress somewhere. For many people, sex was and is a great mystery. It’s the reason Victoria still has a secret.
But it wasn’t always this way and the Bible tells us that from the beginning. The book of Genesis expresses a very different view of sexuality than most of us were raised on. God places Adam, the first man (that’s what the name means in Hebrew) in a luscious garden but then, wonderfully, realizes that it was not good for him to be alone. God had created man for relationship with himself, says Genesis, but in his own relational nature knew that the man needed another relationship with one like himself. So God creates a woman as a partner, one taken from his side not as a servant or an inferior but as an equal and intimate companion perfectly crafted so that they fit together and could enjoy the deepest kind of intimacy. The two become “one flesh”—a beautiful expression of the power of sexual union and human bonding. They are to “be fruitful and multiply”—their sexuality resulting in new life in God’s good creation.
So, hear the good news: God created sex and calls it good. Can I get an Amen?!
But humans have tended to distort what God has created good. That’s what sin is, and much of that distortion, biblically speaking, concerns the misuse of sex. When sex is taken out of the context of God’s design, when we make sexuality center of our being and identity instead of identity as people created in the image of God, then sex becomes an idol that we worship instead of a God-given gift.
This is Paul’s point as he writes to the Corinthians in our first reading. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” Paul writes. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For your were bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God with your body.” Paul writes this to Christians in a place that was really like the Las Vegas of the first century world—a place where sailors from the Mediterranean went looking for a good time and where sacred prostitution was everywhere. Sex was a form of pagan worship in Corinth, and our culture views it not much differently. Paul says, no, put it in perspective. The core of your identity is in Christ, not in sex. Sex is a gift, but one to be used for God’s glory and not merely for our own self-gratification.
Indeed, Paul lived a life consistent with this ethic. Paul wasn’t married (so far as we can tell) and in fact told many of the people to whom he wrote that marriage and sex were not the most important parts of the Christian life. Indeed, Paul encouraged people to only get married if they had to as an alternative to giving into their burning passions. For Paul, staying single and celibate meant being better able to serve the Lord and prepare for the arrival of his kingdom.
For that matter, Jesus never married, either (despite what the DaVinci Code and others have tried to say). In fact, at the only wedding the Gospels tell us that Jesus attended, he stayed at the bar instead of officiating or becoming the groom. For Jesus, marriage was designed for this world, but only as a pointer to the greater kingdom of God to come. When some Sadducees asked Jesus about marriage after the resurrection, Jesus told them that when the kingdom comes, people are “neither married nor given in marriage.” Marriage (and sex) will no longer be necessary because we will fully be remade in God’s image and made whole. I heard a story about a Bible study in which one of our members, hearing that sex would not be part of God’s coming kingdom, turned to his wife and said “Well, we’d better get busy while we can!”
In the meantime, marriage and sex point to that reality when used within God’s prescribed context, but they are not the ultimate reality themselves. Sex and marriage are the realities of our present, however, and we need to live them out within ways that point toward God’s new creation.
Song of Solomon reveals a kingdom perspective on sex
That’s why we turn to one of the most exciting and, sadly, least appreciated books of the Bible—Song of Solomon or “Song of Songs.” It’s here that we see the most powerful expression of sexual passion in the Bible, but even more so we see the amazing freedom that can be enjoyed when sex takes place within its proper context.
Now, if you’ve ever sneaked a peak at Song of Solomon, you know that it is anything but ambivalent about sex and, in fact, seems to promote a wild and free view of love and sexual desire. Interestingly, God is mentioned only peripherally in the book, there’s no mention of procreation, and no legal prescriptions discussed. If most of our culture’s focus on sex is the detached and two-dimensional kind found in magazines and on computer screens, Song of Solomon promotes a view of sex that is wholly three-dimensional and placed in the context of a committed-but-uninhibited relationship between people deeply in love with one another. It is a lengthy and lusty poem about two lovers pining for each other and imagining the joy of their union.
Scholars have long debated as to whether Song of Solomon should be in the biblical canon at all, while some have suggested that it is simply an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel or Christ and the Church. While we don’t know if the author had that in mind specifically, we do know that in these verses we see the kind of intimacy that God intended for us to have with God and with one another from the beginning — a relationship where desire and commitment win out over self-gratification. I want to suggest that what we see here in this little known book is a three-fold prescription for the kind of sex that is worthy of God’s good creation. Think of that prescription as three C’s: Commitment, communication, and cooperation.
Commitment
First, commitment. One of the things you notice when you read this book is that the writer of Song of Solomon is not as concerned with the consummation of a physical relationship as he is with the desire and commitment that create a dynamic sense of anticipation for the couple.
In 2:8-9, for example, the female anticipates the coming of her lover to be near her. She desires him to come to her quickly, like a “gazelle” or “young stag.” Verse 16 lets us know that they are committed to one another: “My lover is mine and I am his,” but the female sends her lover away in verse 17. Consummation of their love and sexual gratification are delayed in favor of a playful and passionate sense of anticipation. Throughout the Song the lovers move toward and away from one another, in a sense revealing that desire and anticipation are often more intoxicating than instant gratification!
Waiting and longing are not forms of punishment to these lovers. There is no sense of “wanting it all and wanting it now” with them. Instead, the lovers are willing to wait for one another because they know that each is fully committed to the relationship. They can dream of one another, wax poetic about each other, search for one another, even risk harm for one another (5:7) all because each knows that the other is waiting. This is no one night stand, no dark alley tryst—it is about unbridled passion found within the bonds of committed love and marriage.
The truth is that real intimacy (and really good sex, by association) is the result of a lot of time and energy invested in commitment, loving our partners with our hearts long before loving them with our bodies. Song of Solomon itself ends without a resolution, the lovers still anticipating being fully with each other. That lack of resolution leads us to remember an important truth: the more we learn about one another, the more we spend time moving toward one another and even spending time apart, the more we intertwine our brains and spirits before intertwining our bodies, the deeper and more long-lasting our love becomes and the greater the sex that follows!
It’s now commonplace for couples to live together and have a sexual relationship before marriage these days. Our culture accepts that as the norm. But study after study shows that cohabitation before marriage leads to higher rates of divorce. Why is that? It’s not the way we were designed. Sex is a byproduct of commitment, not a subsitute. There’s a reason the Bible warns against pre or extramarital sex. It’s not “natural” for us!
Commitment is not the opposite of freedom, it is the basis for it. If I am in a mutually committed relationship, then I know that no matter what happens, no matter how tough things get, I am going to be loved and I know that I am going to love. There’s no stronger bond than that. Within the bounds of that commitment I am free to give and receive everything, holding nothing back. There’s a reason that according to survey after survey long-term married couples have the best sex lives (despite what you see in beer commercials where singles seem to have it all). The first step toward great sex is commitment. If you skip that and go right to the sex, you’ve missed the most important step.
Communication
The second “C” is communication. In all of culture’s focus on bodies there’s very little about the inner dynamic—the ability we have to communicate with each other. Song of Songs is a poem with both the male and female lovers taking turns playfully communicating with each other. There’s a mutual give and take. Many sex therapists say that a couple’s ability to share the deeper desires and thoughts in their hearts with each other is an absolute key to sexual intimacy. When we’re open with our thoughts and our communication, we invite the other person to come closer.
This is tough for us because we live in a sound bite culture where people try to economize words and minimize feelings. Even at home, many couples communicate through short burst transmissions of information—coordinating schedules, getting kids here and there, what’s for dinner, etc. Real communication, however, takes time and energy. Read Song of Songs and you see these lovers writing out their deepest thoughts—that didn’t get text messaged in two minutes!
Setting aside time for communication is vital for healthy relationships. One of the things that Jennifer and I do most evenings in the summer, for example, is go for a walk. That’s our time for just being with each other, talking about everything, focusing on each other, really listening. We find that we both need it and it enhances our marriage. I also think it sends a message to our kids that we love each other and want to spend time together. I think the old adage is true—you love your kids best when you love your spouse even more. The gift of a great marriage relationship is a gift to your children, too because it teaches them healthy dynamics. Show them how to love and communicate so that when they meet that special person in the future they’ll have good role models to follow and can make good choices.
Cooperation
The third “C” is cooperation. This one might seem out of place, but hear me out. I once had a senior pastor who preached a sermon entitled, “Sex Begins in the Kitchen.” He got letters (oh boy, did he get letters—just like the ones some of you are composing in your heads right now!) but I’ve never forgotten that sermon. This is especially important for all the men to hear. Guys, if you want to know the key to really awesome sex, here it is: Do the dishes (more than once)! You won’t find that tip in “GQ” or “Esquire,” by the way…only here.
I was talking to someone this week whose wife once told him that the one sound that made her more sexually aroused than any other was the sound of the vacuum cleaner running, knowing that her husband was pushing it. Ooooh, baby! I was reading another article a while back that said “A husband can expect smoother sailing at night if he helps his wife clear her ‘to do’ list that evening.” Otherwise, he’s just another thing to do on that list!
It’s in the mundane, daily tasks that we do that we best experience the deepest intimacy and care. When you back communication and commitment up with a servant attitude and do your share of the work in the relationship, you’re making a huge step toward a great sex life. Taking the kids out for ice cream while mom has a few minutes to herself may not seem like a relevant sex tip, but it is.
Song of Songs doesn’t have all that in there, but it does reveal that the dynamics of a relationship are the most important key to great sex. I like to look at this biblical book as a “purified” view of love and sex. When partners are committed to one another and have taken the time to develop a passionate desire for one another, then sex becomes a wonderful expression of a deeper intimacy. In a “purified” world, sex itself is neither prize nor product, but one dimension of a three-dimensional relationship. Within a “purified” relationship, sex is not about self, shame, or a magazine subscription — it’s about pure, unbridled, guilt-free passion with the one person you know through and through.
Theologian Helmut Thielicke, in his book How the World Began, made this observation: “I once knew a very old married couple who radiated a tremendous happiness. The wife especially, who was almost unable to move because of old age and illness and in whose kind old face the joys and sufferings of many years had etched a hundred lines, was filled with such a gratitude for life that I was touched to the heart.
“Involuntarily, I asked myself what could possibly be the source of this kindly person’s radiance. In every other respect they were common people, and their room indicated only the most modest comfort. But suddenly I knew where it all came from, for I saw those two speaking to each other, and their eyes hanging upon each other. All at once it became clear to me that this woman was dearly loved. It was not because she was a cheerful and pleasant person that she was loved by her husband all those years. It was the other way around. Because she was so loved she became the person I saw before me.”
Commitment, Communication, Cooperation—these not only deepen our relationships with each other, but with God. When we love in this way, we are transformed and we reflect the joy of God’s good creation and the new creation to come.
I’m convinced that we need to continue talking about sexuality in our churches and in our homes. Whether you are married or single, young or older, realize that sexuality has been God’s good gift from the beginning. When we use it wisely, within the bounds of commitment and covenant God has created us for, we can experience a purified and powerful sex life that trumps the fantasy every time.
