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“Sexual Ethics”

April 17, 2005

If you read Janie’s Email notice you would know that the title of my sermon today is “Sexual Ethics.” Since giving Janie the topic several weeks ago, I have asked myself why in the world anyone would chose to talk about such a thing. Perhaps I was afraid I hadn’t offended enough people lately, or perhaps I’m paying for some sin from a previous life.

I’ve also wondered whether or not I had anything to say about this, anything of help, at least. I often lecture on the topic at college as a part of my religion courses, and my discussion of the topic is well received. But to be truthful, any lecture that includes the word “sex” is well received in college.

But let me begin by laying out the situation we find ourselves in today, at least as I perceive it.

To begin with, a lot of the old rules are gone, and gone for a reason. For instance, when the rule forbidding premarital sex was put in place, the average person married within a few years of reaching sexual maturity. Now, children reach puberty about ten or twelve and marry, on average, at twenty-seven. The rule didn’t work very well when people only had to wait two or three years; but now people face, on average, fifteen years between reaching sexual maturity and marriage. Is it possible any more to just say, “Sex is a wonderful gift from God, don’t do it till you’re married.”

Our situation is also rendered more complex because of our growing understanding of homosexuality. In medieval times, no one was gay. Sure, people had homosexual relations, but such acts were viewed as a surrender to human weakness, not the result of sexual orientation.

The medieval view may seem hopelessly narrow and today we have come to recognize that some people are gay and are not just giving in to temptation. Still, the people in medieval times may have had a better grasp than some of us do of how widespread homosexual desires are. Psychologists tell us that while some people are strictly gay and some are strictly straight, a large portion of the population lies somewhere in between; most people exist somewhere on a continuum between straight and gay. This creates an enormous amount of confusion for many.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that sexual identity fluctuates, especially for young people. Many don’t know who they are sexually, but are pressured to decide whether they are straight or gay long before they are ready. Others are tormented by secret desires that they are afraid to share.

I always tell my college students that their sexuality is like a loaded pistol falling down a stairway. The bullets are going in every direction. “See where gun is pointing when it hits the bottom,” I tell them, “Before you decide who you are.”

If all that wasn’t enough, the picture is complicated further by the fact that there are as many different variations in sexual expression as there are people. I think that’s the price you pay when you combine a powerful sex drive with intelligence. I like to call this the “Bill Clinton Factor”. People who are creative and dynamic in one area of their life are usually creative and dynamic in other areas as well. It’s the price you pay for having intelligent sexual beings. People get creative.

So what do we do with what you might call, “the facts on the ground”? What do we do with the fact that our children and grandchildren will probably be sexually active long before they marry? What do we do with the fact that many people live confused about their sexuality? Do we continue to repeat the mantras of past ages or do we simply abandon any attempt to guide sexual behavior and leave our children and grandchildren without any moral guideposts? Should we try to develop a sexual ethic that recognizes the reality that people deal with today?

But what principles do we use to guide our behavior through this minefield and what do we use as an ethical measure?

For a long time Christianity and, as a result, western society as a whole, have lived with a rather ambiguous relationship to sexuality, an ambiguity that reflects on a societal scale what many individuals experience in their own lives. We live in a kind of tension, where on the one hand, we recognize sex as necessary and normal, and on the other hand, we view our own urges with a certain suspicion or shame.

This tension is expressed in Christianity’s appeal to and interpretation of several Biblical texts. The first has to do with the story of Adam and Eve. If you remember the story, Adam and Eve are placed in the midst of a beautiful garden and ordered not to eat the fruit of a particular tree. Of course, being the mythical equivalent of teenagers, they immediately eat it and humanity is cursed and driven from the garden.

And here the issue of sexuality inserts itself into the story. The first result of their sin is that they know they are naked. And immediately after their expulsion from paradise, Adam has sex with his wife and she gives birth to Cain and Abel.

One lesson that early Christianity drew from these texts is that sexual awareness (and the resulting desire) is the direct result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. And since Adam and Eve don’t have sex until after humanity has fallen, the second lesson they derived from the story was that sex is an expression of humanity’s sin and the loss of our original spiritual nature.

This fit in well with the popular philosophy of the day, Neo-Platonism, which claimed humans were spiritual beings who had fallen into the world of matter and were now trapped in bodies. They taught that for humans to find their way back to the spiritual realm they had to avoid indulging their physical desires and spend their lives in contemplation.

The early Christians saw the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise as a narrative version of the neo-platonic theory of the descent of the soul into matter. And like the neo-Platonists, Christianity soon demanded that Christians resist the desires of the flesh as much as humanly possible. Accordingly they preached withdrawal from the world and espoused the spiritual value of virginity and celibacy. Eventually, a powerful movement arose in the church that advocated banning sex altogether, even for married people (and you thought our religious conservatives were crazy).

But this put the church in an awkward situation. Its leaders not only recognized that people couldn’t do this; they also realized that such a demand would threaten the future of the Christianity itself. Of course, had the proponents of universal celibacy succeeded, we probably wouldn’t have Christianity to complain about, since religions that ban all sex rarely survive very long.

To counter this demand for universal celibacy, the church turned to another verse found early in the Bible, which they used to justify Christians having sex. They turned to the first chapter of Genesis, where God commands the first humans to be fruitful and multiply. And sex for married couples was saved, and the church was saved as well.

The problem was that given the negative attitude people had towards sex, the command to be fruitful and multiply was seen as a very narrow exception to the general ban on sexual expression. In fact, the only sexual act that was permitted was the one that could result in procreation, intercourse.

And the narrowness of that concession shaped the sexual ethics taught by the church and the values of the culture it influenced from that time forth. It impacts the church’s teaching on and society’s acceptance of such things as masturbation, oral sex, and homosexuality (they’re out). It also impacts the church’s teaching on issues like birth control and abortion (they’re out too).

While this may seem terribly restrictive, it was an enormous success for the church. In fact, some church historians believe that the miraculous growth of the church in the first centuries was not so much the result of good preaching, but was actually the result of the fact that Christians didn’t practice birth control or abortion (both of which existed at that time in primitive forms), didn’t frequent prostitutes, didn’t have concubines; but expended all their considerable sexual energy in a manner that produced a lot of babies.

At the same time, the church’s teaching left out an awful lot of people and numerous forms of sexual expression. It measured sexual practices by their potential to produce children, not their potential to address other human needs. And ultimately, the fact that people find it impossible to follow these rules, may explain why so many have abandoned sexual rules altogether, and so many wander in an uncharted sexual wilderness.

But is there a way out of the wilderness? Are there any principles that can guide us? I think another look at the story of Adam and Eve may help us.

If we look closely at the story of Eve’s creation, we find some curious things, things often overlooked by Christian exegetes. The first thing we find is that the first act of sex actually takes place before they disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit, not after they are expelled from the garden. When Adam first sees Eve he says, “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” The text continues, “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

It is obvious to a non-Christian reader that this is the point where they first have sex. First of all, Adam’s statement, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” is chocked full of sexual metaphors, which I need not explain here. Second, their initial meeting is clearly intended as the model for sexual relations between men and women and to establish a pattern for marriage. To pretend that sex doesn’t happen here, is to completely ignore the implications of the passage.

But that means that sex isn’t some shameful by-product of the fall. Nor is it a concession to a humanity distorted by sin and disobedience. And it is not a denial or rejection of our spiritual nature.

The fact that Adam and Eve have sex in paradise, before they disobey God, means that sexuality is an integral part of what it means to be human, it is an essential and glorious aspect of our nature as creatures and as spiritual beings.

But there is a second surprise in this story. Adam is not given Eve because he is sexually frustrated and beginning to harass the other animals. God creates Eve because Adam is lonely. God says, “It’s not good for the guy to be alone. I’ll make him a companion.”

That moves sex away from being a concession to our physical needs or from being a mere instinct to propagate the species. It means that for human beings sex is about our emotional needs; our need for love and companionship, our need for intimacy. It is not just about procreation, nor is it primarily about procreation. It’s about our need for love.

And the fact that God doesn’t give Adam a chess partner, but answers his loneliness with a sexual partner may indicate that sexual relations are not only intended to meet our need for companionship and comfort; but that sexual relations are the best way to meet those needs. Somehow the openness of sex, the vulnerability we assume, are the very things we need to overcome our personal isolation. Sex is the antidote to the fact that we live our lives as separate and individual beings, being who have to work at relationships; who struggle to build relationships of trust and love. It is the point at which we give ourselves openly and completely to another, where we physically care and love something other than ourselves.

And that might provide us with a guidepost in the sexual wilderness. Is what we are doing an expression care? Is it love for the other? Is it love for ourselves?

This is a little counter-cultural. I often told the guys I mentored that if they are only having sex with a girl so they can brag about it in the locker room, then they have missed the point of sex. I also told them that if they are just using a girl to satisfy themselves, then their action is nothing more than masturbation with a foreign object. And if they were doing it to make themselves feel like men, I would remind them that dogs have sex, and they don’t become men.

Sex has to be about love, it has to be about caring for the other and the measure of whether a particular sexual act is right or wrong is not “will it create a baby” but does it meet you and your lover’s need for intimacy and companionship; does it open you to the other and make you both less alone?

And this applies, I think, even to self-love, or what the old Irish priests use to call, “Interfering with yourself”. That can be an act of self care or it can be an act of self-denigration. It depends upon what is in your heart.

And what about homosexuality? Surely the Bible is opposed to that. But let’s not overlook the strange way they had of evaluating things in those times. Basically, if anything acted in what they consider an unusual fashion, they decided there was something wrong with it. For instance, birds were supposed to fly. Ostriches are birds, but they don’t fly; so something is wrong with them. Likewise creatures in the sea are supposed to swim, but lobsters don’t swim; so you better not eat them.

Even more bizarrely, they decided that since most edible animals have cloven hoofs, you can only eat animals with cloven hoofs. Now pigs have cloven hoofs, but they don’t “chew the cud” like other cloven-hoofed animals, so you can’t eat pork. Anything or anyone that differed from the norm, was viewed with fear and suspicion. If you touched something that was different or did something that was different, you became unclean or spiritually polluted and maybe brought a curse on yourself or the whole community.

In an age when no one understood anything about homosexuality except that it was different, is it any surprise that it was banned? They killed homosexuals to ward off the curse they thought their behavior would bring on their villages. Now we just ban them from marriage because of the curse they might bring on the institution of marriage.

The funny thing about the story of Adam and Eve is that God wants to meet Adam’s need for companionship and intimacy. Is it really consistent with the lesson of this story to insist that homosexuals are not allowed to know love or companionship? Is it really in keeping with the character of God in the story to say that God wants gays to live their lives frustrated and alone; that somehow their emotional needs don’t count, while everyone else’s do? Should anyone be denied the right to love just because they are gay? I don’t think so.

Now all this may seem terribly open ended, like it allows anything, but I don’t think it does. It means that sex can never be about using the other or about thinking solely in terms of your own gratification. It can’t be about denigrating yourself or the other. And it can’t be about taking advantage of another’s emotional vulnerability or using another to make yourself feel whole. After all, sex is about giving and receiving, not taking. And it certainly is not about getting your sixteen year old girlfriend pregnant or taking the chance of passing on sexually transmitted diseases or picking one up.

What is most remarkable about this story in Genesis is that it doesn’t portray God as someone who sits around figuring out reasons to limit our happiness or our human pleasure. That’s what pope’s are for. Instead it shows a God who is concerned about meeting our emotional needs, who desires our happiness, who wants us to have a good time. Perhaps the best guide we can find for our sexual lives is to make certain that whatever we do, we are really loving ourselves and we are really loving our companion.

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