“The Hope, Love, and Joy of Sex”

Exodus 20:14

October 27, 2009

McAfee Chapel

Brett Younger

For the last couple of weeks whenever I’ve thought about this verse, the same question has popped into my head—“What was I thinking?” I’m in charge of chapel this semester. I could have given myself, “No other gods before me” or “Remember the Sabbath” or “Thou shalt not kill.” Those seem easy. Don’t worship money. Take a nap on Sunday afternoon. Don’t shoot anybody. How tough is that? As commandments go, adultery may be the last one a thinking preacher would choose to preach. What was I thinking?

It’s awkward to preach about chastity and purity, because when it comes to sex, the Bible itself is all over the place. The patriarchs are polygamists that would fit right in on Jerry Springer. At Sarah’s insistence Abraham has sex with Sarah’s handmaiden. Sarah yells at Abraham for having sex with her handmaiden. Abraham seems surprised by this. Lot has sex with his daughters after they get him drunk for the purpose of getting pregnant. Tamar has sex with her father-in-law Judah in exchange for a goat—and she is the heroine in the story.

You might guess that the Bible would be a good place to look for help on how to find the one person with whom you will share this holy gift, but you would be wrong. Have you noticed how husbands find wives in scripture? Boaz buys some land and gets a wife as part of the deal. God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute. King Solomon thought quantity was the way to go. In the Book of Judges, the men in the tribe of Benjamin are instructed to go to a party and hide in the tall grass. When the women come out to dance, they are to grab one and carry her off. One law in Leviticus says that if your brother dies and you’re a male then you have to marry his widow. A few of you are now imagining that and the hair is standing up on the back of your neck.

And yet somehow in the midst of this disconcerting behavior, Moses comes down the mountain with a holy word, “No adultery.” It’s the surprising truth that sex matters to God more than you would think and should matter to us more than it does. In our best moments, God’s people have understood that sex is one of God’s best gifts.

If it’s awkward to preach about infidelity, it’s because the church has also embarrassed itself with its prurient interest in sex. Since St. Augustine the church has usually deserved its reputation for being against sex. The churches in which I grew up taught me that sex is a little shameful and dirty, so you should only have it with the one person you love the most. Among the great variety of acts of rebellion against God, sexual immorality has often been placed first on the list, if not in a special category. Churches often give the impression that this sin is the only one that marks you for life. That’s not the Christian message, not the gospel, and not true to God’s grace. It’s a sign of progress that ushers no longer pass out scarlet letters.

The realistic approach is to pay less attention to the seventh commandment, to downsize the Decalogue. This rule seems old-fashioned, because our society is increasingly reluctant to make judgments about sexual behavior. What’s the fuss if it’s between consenting adults? What business is it of anybody else?

Back in the 1970s Cosmo magazine—a primary source of research for preachers—claimed that 75% of married men and 54% of married women had had an affair. This sent church people into a panic. More recent, more scientific and slightly more reassuring surveys report that 10-15% of married women and 20-25% of married men have committed adultery (Lorraine Ali, “The Secret Lives of Wives,” Newsweek, July 12, 2004, 47-54, and James MacDowell, Seven Words to Change Your Family, Chicago: Moody Press, 2002, 142). The future doesn’t look promising. The youth ministers among us know that the numbers for teenagers having sex are frightening. According to one 2008 survey, on average, girls in our country lose their virginity at 15 (Laura Coffey, Todayshow.com, November 14, 2008).

In about half of the United States, adultery is still technically a crime. In Rhode Island the penalty is life in prison. In Maryland adultery is a misdemeanor punishable by a ten-dollar fine. If they raised the fine and enforced the law they could get rid of their state income tax.

When Judge Roy Moore was breaking several of the Ten Commandments by posting them in the courthouse, one Alabaman said, “Don’t worry about anybody in the state legislature wanting to hang the Ten Commandments in the legislative chamber. Until they can figure out a way to do something about that thing on adultery, the senators want to keep those commandments as far away as possible.” (Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, The Truth About God, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999, 93).

If this commandment seems unrealistic, it’s in part because for a long time our society had an unrealistic view of marriage. For years, every married couple on television was happily married. The truth is that faithfulness is hard and complicated. People get married for the wrong reasons. They marry the wrong people. They become the wrong people. People get bored, lonely, and angry. The excitement doesn’t last.

Scientists tell us that what we call “falling in love” can be attributed to the presence in the body of a drug called phenyle-thylamine a natural amphetamine. The problem is, according to the research, we build up a tolerance for this chemical in two to four years. Love at first sight is easy to explain. It’s love after forty years that’s the miracle.

So now the pendulum has swung. Our society, which used to have an unrealistic view of marriage, now has an unrealistic view of sex. Stories of perfect families that live happily ever after have been replaced by new fairy tales with sizzling, fiery sex. Soap operas, romance novels, blue jeans commercials, and used car advertisements that feature women in bikinis whose connection to the pick-up trucks is tangential at best glamorize sex.

This is how Robert Capon describes the temptation to commit adultery: “This woman is all women, and when you chose her, you embarked on a life of imagination, which adultery cruelly violates, and breaks up the music in your head, and also it’s a lot of work to scout up something inferior to what you and she can create at home. You have roamed the Western world in search of the perfect tuna sandwich; your wife makes a good tuna sandwich; your powers of imagination are what make it perfect.”

The typical person who gets involved in adultery is in search of the perfection and magic that they’ve been told is out there somewhere. There’s a remarkable irony in naming this activity “adultery” since so much of the behavior is more juvenile than adult (John Holbert, The Ten Commandments, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002, 87). The new view of sex is no more real than the old view of marriage. Adultery is a fraud. Promiscuity isn’t sophisticated or smart. And after awhile, far from being bright red, it turns out to be dingy gray.

Part of the pain of sex outside of marriage is that the full cost usually isn’t known until much later. The fabric of a community is forever torn, and the process of reweaving is sometimes slow, sometimes impossible. Those who say that what goes on in our bedrooms is nobody’s business are naïve fools. Sex with the wrong person unleashes forces that threaten to destroy the world, or at the very least to chew our part of it into a messy pulp (John Holbert, The Ten Commandments, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002, 97-98).

Even so, the way promiscuous sex turns out circumstantially is finally less important than what it does to our soul. When Jesus talked about this commandment he warned against the damage done to our hearts. Jesus’ point was that we destroy ourselves when we treat anyone as an object. Jesus’ standards go way beyond legality.

Lewis Smedes said, “We cannot take our bodies to bed with someone and park our souls outside in the car to wait.”

We need to remember that sex is God’s idea. God came up with sex for procreation, communication, and connection. God created sex with its wonder, oddness, and fun. God blessed our sexuality, warned us of its immense power, and told us how best to enjoy it.

It shouldn’t be possible to grow up in Christ’s church or attend a seminary given to Christ and never hear anyone say, “My spouse and I didn’t have sex until our wedding night. We’ve never had sex with anyone but one another, and it’s been wonderful. Anything else would have been less.” That’s been the experience of many and we think of it as an amazing gift of God.

The problem in our sex-saturated society is not that we talk too much about sex, but that we talk about it so superficially. Our culture completely misses the sacred nature of God’s good gift.

In a rabbinical story God discusses the Ten Commandments with the angels before giving them. Some of the angels think the commandment not to commit adultery is too stringent and ought to be deleted. The angels argue that it’s unnatural, “Why should men and women be restricted?”

God replies, “Humans were created for meaningful relationships with one another and with me. They were made for love. If they can’t learn to be faithful to one another, how will they ever learn to be faithful to me?” (John Killinger, To My People with Love, Nashville: Abingdon, 1988, 82-83).

Faithfulness is recognizing the sacredness of the people we love and the goodness of a genuine commitment.

We see this commandment through the lens of our own experience. Some have been deeply wounded by someone they love who committed adultery. Others have been to the edge, but haven’t gone over, and know the real possibility of this happening in their life. Still others have been there. They know first hand the damage of their actions, and their need for God’s grace and healing. Others may be in the midst of a mistake and are wondering how they could be so unlucky as to stumble into chapel on this particular Tuesday.

Most of the people in this room are single—single by choice or circumstance. You deal with unique joys and challenges in faithfully nurturing your important relationships.

The best way to live is with love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things, love that never disappears, never falls down on the job, and never gives up. Love never ends, because ultimately nothing defeats love—no disillusionment, no bad choices, no disappointment, no adverse circumstances, no tragedy. We can put our heart and soul into our relationships and treat the ones we love with attention and respect. We can choose not to behave in ways that bring pain, fear, or insecurity to the people we love. We can teach our churches that there is nothing casual about sex. We can give ourselves to the possibilities of hope, love and joy. We can celebrate the holiness of God’s gift of sexuality even in a world doesn’t understand.

In 1997, the graduating class of East Stroudsburg University heard this story: A minister and scholar in South Carolina wanted nothing more than to be president of a particular college. All his life he worked for the position and finally attained it. But just as he was beginning to fulfill his dream, Alzheimer’s struck his wife. Her health degenerated rapidly to the point where he couldn’t possibly take care of her and work his full-time job. He decided to give up his position as president of the college. His friends were stunned.

They asked, “What are you doing? Your wife doesn’t even know who you are.”

He answered, “She might not know who I am, but I know who she is. She’s the woman I made a promise to love and care for until death do us part” (Stewart Vogel, The Ten Commandments, New York: Harper Collins, 1998, 2340.

The rule he is following is unrealistic. The love with which he lives is unreasonable and holy.