BLOG 4/12/15. “THREE THINGS WE DON’T TALK ABOUT IN OUR CHURCH …”
… Then there was the dude who boasted: “There are three things we don’t talk about in our church: sex, politics, and religion.” That would be sort of funny, if not ridiculous, if we lived in a morally and ethically neutral setting, but not so. As a matter of fact, (setting aside the laughable contradiction of a church not talking about religion), we live in a media culture that is deluged with news reports, and programing about religion and politics. Yet in some Christian communities, where it is acceptable to trade political interpretations, there is a strange silence on the subject of sexuality. Question: How can the church equip God’s saints/people to be salt and light, to be mature in Christ, if we assiduously avoid equipping them to deal with the powerful presence of human sexuality in our calling to be conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29).
Churches can get all lathered and engaged in endless debates about the GLBT issues of our society, and yet turn a blind eye, or deaf ear to recreational, adulterous, outside-of-marriage sex, … and never see the contradiction. It is not a new issue. The Greco-Roman world was one where there were hardly any moral constraints on sexual relationships, inside or outside of marriage, pedophilia was a normal and acceptable practice, i.e., grown men had their ‘boy’ and no one gave it a thought. Brothels were as common in that culture as fast-food franchises are in ours. But we may be the inhabitants of a corrosive culture of permissive sexuality that is more omnipresent than theirs was. Television, pornographic web sites, morally indifferent culture, and … the church remains silent?
As the Christian mission moved into that culture, sexuality was an issue. Paul would write to the Christian folk at the new church in Thessalonica: “This is the will of God for your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality (fornication).” Does that mean that God’s New Creation men and women lost their hormones? Not at all. But it does mean that they are a whole new race of humans, who understand God’s purpose in creating us sexual, and giving us our genital equipment, and are disciplined in using it to the glory of God in intimate love and in creating family units.
When Paul writes to the Christian folk in Galatia, he does his graphic cataloging of the works of the Spirit, which they were to be exhibiting, … but he also catalogs the works of the flesh (the without-God behavior) and begins with sexual immorality, impurity, and sensuality. Christians were to demonstrate a whole New Humanity, of which their sexuality was to be exemplary. This is what the watching world saw, and which caught their attention. In his second century Letter of Diognetus, the author responds to the request by his pagan overseer to comment on the character and conduct of this new sect who were called Christians. The author is obviously somewhat amazed and puzzled by such a different kind of community, and among the things he notes is: “They marry and have children just like everyone else, but they do not kill unwanted babies. They offer a shared table, but not a shared bed. They are at present ‘in the flesh’ but they do not live ‘according to the flesh.’”
In the unfolding of the re-creation of all things by Jesus, there is that fulfilling of the prophecy that in his New Creation the law of Moses would be written not on tablets of stone, but in a new heart, and by a new spirit (Ezekiel 36:26), which law includes the seventh commandment about human sexuality, and its sanctity. When the church becomes casual, and does not confront aberrant sexual behavior among it adherents, the church become more salt-less. Such confrontation and discipline, of course much be done with grace and love by those who know and love the offender, and it is never easy. But it is essential. Even as a husband is to delight only in the breasts of his own wife (Proverbs 5:19), so also a wife should delight only in the manhood of her own husband. A critical dimension of the church’s witness has to do with the sacredness of sex. (It could thin out the ranks, alas!)
