Last Tuesday I spoke about sex under the new sermon series, "A New Conversation." I have to admit that while I believe that the sermon hit a lot of good points, it was not one of my strong ones. As a Pastor we always want to be confident and we need to appear sure of ourselves when in truth that's not always the case. I wish I could preach the sermon all over again. I think one of these Tuesday's thats just what I'll do.
I want to clarify some important and lost points that I was trying to make on Tuesday night. My hope in writing this blog is to bring clarity to what may have seemed blurred in Tuesday's message.
I would like to give you a table of contents of sorts so that that you can go ahead and scroll to the part that you need clarity on and to save you time from what can be a long blog. I know you have classes to take and papers to write. But still, I thank you for taking the time out to read this.
Finally I will give you a chance to post questions that I will be happy to answer if you still feel a bit unsure about what this all means.
Final note: Alot of my ideas have come from scripture reflection, Lauren Winner's "Real Sex" and time spent studying the issue through Itunes U, Podcast, Sermons and personal experience. But I rely heavily on Lauren Winner's book. You should read it! Heck I'll buy it for you if you let me know you are interested. Promise.
Here is the table of contents.
1. What I hope this sermon series does not do.
2. What is the purpose behind the title, "A New Conversation."
3. Is sex practiced outside of marriage a sin? Biblical Proof
What I hope this sermon does not do
I have to be honest. I am both afraid and feel boldy called to preach on all of these issues. One reason I am afraid is because I do not want to create separation in our community or build controversy in such a way that we build walls between one another. I am often frustrated and saddened by the way that people with different opinions cannot be in community together and attack one another in such a way that we create "others," we create hate and more dissension in an already broken church.
I have a strong conviction that I am a coward if as a leader I am not talking about "hot" topics. I believe that communities in the local church seem superficial. I feel as though not many people in the church are seeking true holiness and so we have become a place where we are having fun, we are making friends but there is no transformation. A place where we are not seeking God's best for one another and we are just another social club.
Note: that I love the fact that our community and the relationships made here are strong, but I believe they can be stronger. I believe they can be stronger if we begin to open up to one another about our true hurts, our true struggles in such a way that we are always helping one another overcome the sins that prevent us from growing closer to God.
I don't know everything, Im young in the ministry and I want to be better. Truthfully, seminary does not talk a lot about the very practical ways in which we can become better preachers. There are a lot of things that you have to figure out on your own. When it comes to sex I don't know a whole lot. I have read, I have prayed and I have also fallen. I have had pre-marital sex both as a Christian and as a non-believer and know personally the repercussions and the pleasures of living in both worlds. So, I do not have all the answers. Neither will I pretend to. Yet, I still feel that as your pastor if I am not willing to struggle in front of you and talk about sex, why should you? I want to lead by example.
SEX IS NOT A BAD THING. I do not hope to make you feel guilty about sex. Because sex is good...real good. I do hope that you will see sex as crucial to discipleship. If you have had sex before, if you are having sex now the concern is not so much with sex itself. The concern is whether you are defining your own holiness or are you allowing God to be your Lord. Is Christ Lord over your entire life, even the way you think about sex? If not I know that it takes time. Discipleship is about making Christ the center of your entire life and it about slowly, daily, giving to God every aspect of your life. So don't feel guilty, I believe that as Christians we are called to walk through the difficult path that it is to follow Christ and lay it all at the foot of the cross.
Finally, you can believe what you want to believe. What I write here is what as a church we believe to be orthodox, right thought. You don't have to believe this, but I do ask you to pray about it and have conversations regarding this topic and allow the Lord to have say in your life.
What is the purpose behind the title, "A New Conversation."
The title of the series has a three-fold purpose.
1. I am hoping that we will bring topics such as sex, suicide, being gay, drugs alcohol into our conversations with one another. I believe that if we ignore these topics we lose a very valuable part of what it means to be a community. So if your old conversations were only about Harry Potter, the NFL or Breaking Bad my hope is that your new conversations will be about the ways that you are growing in Christ. My hope is that you will have a conversation about your questions on self worth, suicide, sex, LGBTQ communities, and what it means to be a person who find holiness strenuous.
2. I want to, in some ways, update what we believe about sex. This does not mean that you will not hear the same thing over. You will hear the same conclusions in some of these ideas. Partly because we have a high respect to tradition and those who have come before us and still hope to uphold the values and the piety that the church has passed down. So updated does not necessarily mean erasing or accepting new controversial or immoral ways of living. So you will not hear from me that having sex before marriage is ok. But you will hear that kissing is ok, being alone if you are strong enough is ok, and that if you do have sex God loves you the same.
Is sex practiced outside of marriage a sin? Biblical Proof
Finally I know a lot of people have been saying that they are still not sure if sex before marriage is a sin. The short answer is YES. God created sex for marriage. And I will tell you how Christians have come up with this answer.
Often times Pastors have given 1 or 2 texts for a person to read when someone confesses that they have had sex. But as United Methodist that's not the way we read the bible. We do not always take 1 text and follow it blindly. We look at the Bible as an entire story and make logical sense of topics that seem to be isolated from the entire story of God.
The Body Metaphor
As Lauren Winner explains, "To be sure, scripture has plenty to teach us about how rightly to order our sexual lives, but as the church, we need to ask whether the starting point for a scriptural witness on sex is the isolated quotation of "thou shall not," or whether a scriptural ethic of sex begins instead with the totality of the Bible, the narrative of God's redeeming love and humanity's attempt to reflect that through our institution and practices."
The first point that I tried to make is that "Christ made us with bodies, that is how we being to know that he cares how we order our sexual lives." Further more, "God created us with bodies, God himself incarnated in a human body, Jesus was raised again from teh dead with a body, and one day we too will be surrected with our bodies. That is the beginning of any Christian ethic--any moral theology--of how human beings in bodies interact with other bodies."
In the end what I hope you hear from these texts is that GOD CARES ABOUT WHAT WE DO WITH OUR BODIES. God cares enough that he came in a human body to redeem us.
Returning to Eden
The second point I was trying to make is the point of RETURNING TO EDEN. Pastors, theologians and scholars mostly agree that Genesis 1 is the starting point for understand God's vision and plan for humanity (You should read Genesis 1 and 2 just in case it's not fresh in your mind). Lauren Winner explains, "Genesis is only the starting point for understanding God's vision of the body. And just as scriptures vision of bodies begins in Genesis, scriptures story about sex also begins in Genesis. God's vision for humanity is established in the Garden of Eden and the uniqueness and one-ness of the marriage realtisohip between Adam and Eves is inagurated in Genesis 1-2."
This is where God speaks of Adam and Eve becoming "One Flesh." "One fleshness is and is not a metaphor. It captures an all encompassing, overarching oneness- when they marry (couples) enter an institution that points them toward familial, domestic, emotional and spiritual unity. But the one flesh of which Adam speaks is also overtly sexual, suggesting sexual intercourse, the only physical state other than pregnancy where it is hard to tell where one person' body stop and the other's starts."
This is the beginning of God's plan for sex and marriage. To be one flesh with one person that you are committed to for the rest of your life familial, domestic, emotional and spiritually under God's covenant.
The ongoing logic for sex before marriage continues with the ethical language of "Memory" coined by Stanley Hauerwas. We believe that even though we are fallen, we remain part of God's original creation. Even though we sin God still has his image in us. God still believes, hopes and calls us to remember who we are, what we are intended to do. And so Hauerwas explains that ethics, or Christian living, is an attempt to keep us faithful to the character (the story and skills) of our community lest we forget who and why we are." When we forget whose we are, what we have been created for, and the story and hope found in the book of Genesis we sin. Hauerwas writes, "In theological terms, we call such forgetfulness 'sin,' as we literally forget what we are about as people who have been created by a God who sets our way."
And so the laws that we have been given, the ethics that we are trying to live into. And by laws I mean the way the Bible seems prude and tells us how to live out life. Those laws are "articulating boundaries and regulations that protect God's original intent that sex can be expressed in marriage..they are efforts to protect and perpetuate the ordering of things that was established in the Garden of Eden."
The Mosaic Laws, found mainly in the Old Testament include avoiding incest and bestiality and they are "protecting, point to guarding and helping us retrun to Eden--to God's created order, the world as God meant it to be." RETURNING TO EDEN.
Now Paul uses a very important word in the New Testament, Porneia. The greek word is believed to be a category of sexual immorality So Porneia is sexual immorality. The Bible then says that Porneia is a sin. And then it lists in different text what is included in the category of sexual immorality. So if you believe that sexual immorality is a sin, this is what is included under that category. And we know these topics are included in this category because the word Porneia is used specifically to refer to the specific immorality. The term Porneia in the New Testament includes, prostitution, adultery, incest, and sleeping with your father's wife.
Then we see that Porneia is also included in sex outside of marriage. Lauren Winner explains it best when she says, "In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul invokes porneia when he is forbidding Corinthians from patronizing prostitutes. In the next chapter Paul uses porneia again, this time telling the unmarried and the widows that it is better to marry than to burn with desire. In this secon passage, logic tells us that porneia must mean sex outside of marriage--if the only two options are marriage or smoldering with desire, it follows that sex outside of marriage is not an option."
So here is the logic "Porneia is sin, intercourse by unmarried people is porneia therefore intercourse by unmarried people is sin."
1 Corinthians use of porneia as sex before marriage is also strengthened by something else that Paul says..." In the middle of his first letter to the Corinthians, right after enjoining the Corinthians not to sleep with prostitutes and right before instructing the unmarried that it is better to marry than to burn, Paul quotes Genesis 2:24: 'The two shall become one flesh." Paul's quotation is something of shorthand--it tells the reader to flip back to the second chapter of Genesis to find both the basis for and the elaboration of Paul's words on sexuality. Paul understands sex as part of the ordering of creation." For Paul sex as found in Genesis is the way God intended us to have sex...within marriage.
This is where my brain got blurry...so I'll stop.
I hope this helps, and please feel free to drop me a comment here, or an email Erwin.Lopez@flumc.org
