BLOG 3/28/13. THE SUPREME COURT, THE CHURCH, AND HUMAN SEXUALITY

BLOG. 3/28/13: THE SUPREME COURT, THE CHURCH, AND HUMAN SEXUALITY

For the past couple of weeks the news media have been focused on the two cases before the United States Supreme Court having to do with same-sex marriage. I feel like living dangerously today (I may regret it tomorrow), so I think I’ll take a stab at entering this discussion. Why not?

First of all, the Supreme Court is the final court for the United States, not for the Christian church, though the United States is the scene of our incarnation, albeit as “pilgrims and strangers” or “aliens and exiles.” In its integrity, the church is always a counter-cultural community. But the church all too often forsakes its prophetic calling in the moments of cultural uncertainty, and retreats into silence. I’ve watched this happen during civil rights days, during the restive youth culture rebellion of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, and during questionable wars in which the nation was engaged.

It is my own (note) observation that the church has long been totally unrealistic about the whole area of human sexuality. It has been cowardly, escapist, superficial and irresponsible in coming to grips with the whole beautiful meaning of our creation as sexual creatures, and our creation in the image of God. As I read the Biblical account, as a Christian-theist, I see from the very beginning God bringing into being this whole creation, including the human community and declaring it very good. The crown of that creation was the human community—originally that first man and woman—created in his own image and likeness. God created them in beauty and joy and freedom and with the capacity to reflect the intimacy of the Trinitarian community.

And one of the awesome dimensions of that creation was their capacity for sexual intimacy, and reproduction. God created them, not as solitary creatures, but as creatures designed for relationships with each other and with the Trinitarian community. God created their genitalia, their hormones, their explosive and ecstatic experience of orgasm (don’t blush) … and declared them all good. They were to be mutually affirming, to seek the welfare of the other, to be interanimating, to rejoice in each other, to live without secrets or shame. Their bodies were gifts. He created them (to put it another way) with the gift of sensuousness. Sexuality was a beautiful gift, and it was sacred. It was a quintessentially fulfilling relationship.

But … then something went badly awry. When those two succumbed to the temptation to defy God and to seek to be their own gods, a devastating self-focus entered—maybe brute selfishness. Rather than being beautiful and mutual and sacred, their sexuality became exploitive and controlling and self-focused. Suspicion and accusation ensued. And it went downhill from there.

But Easter says to us that Jesus has come to deal with all of the negative effects of the human rebellion, and to inaugurate a new creation, and that God in Christ is alive and powerfully at work in the world … and part of that new creation has to do with the recreation of true sexuality. Yet when the church countenances sterile, loveless, sometimes destructive heterosexual marriages, and too often condones adultery in its leadership, or pedophilia in the ranks—even when it seeks to avoid the true sexual dimension of God’s creation by requiring the celibacy of the priesthood—it has a difficult time when its comes to dealing with so many of the more exemplary, loving, and and caring relationships within the gay-lesbian community.

For too much of the church, dealing honestly with sexuality is avoided as not appropriate to talk about in church. All of this in a culture obsessed with sex in the media, in on-line pornography, in the seriatim affairs of entertainment and sports personalities.

Have I answered anything? Not really. I only wanted to raise the church’s confusing behavior (silence?) in the face of such a compelling issue that confronts us.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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