sermon excerpts: "Sex & the Church"

(Luke 6: 37-42, Genesis 3: 1-13)
This is one of my soapboxes, a keystone of my ministry: I am compelled to try and undo and speak against the damage the church inflicts against the emotional, spiritual and even physical well-being of people when it comes to sex. How can such an important element of our personality and spirit be ignored or condemned by a church authority that claims to nurture and care for all?

... We’ll begin at the beginning, in the garden of Eden where the serpent tempts Eve and Adam. This is the story of scripture commonly referred to as The Fall. And when we ask, the fall from what? We answer, from grace, from paradise in Eden.

All because humanity wanted to know more, to have answers, to understand what the difference is between good and evil. Is that so wrong and misguided? Regardless, God finds out that Adam and Eve disobeyed and is displeased.

It’s an automatic reaction: Adam points to Eve, Eve points to the snake. The snake points to … well, the snake has no fingers and bears the brunt of humanity’s fall from grace. This is why our life is so hard, because someone else messed up long ago. So we have the common lesson from this scripture: obey God or there’ll be hell to pay.

Underneath all the fuss and fretting is the idea that it is wrong to be naked and that civilized and evolved people have decency, covering their shameful parts with fig leaves and Ralph Lauren. From the very beginning, we are taught to cover up and hide our bodies, ourselves, from each other.

Before knowing the difference between good evil, to be in the Garden of Eden was to not know shame. Adam and Eve were happy to be themselves and to not worry about what is normal, or right, or proper. It was a time of innocence, or ignorance, but it was a time of being close to God.

Reading about Eve and Adam’s reaction to their nakedness has me wondering if clothing a metaphor for hiding ourselves from one another? Not that I’m promoting nudism! Our true selves are covered up with a wardrobe designed to make us look slimmer, trendier, sexier, to project an image of something that we’re not? We rarely get to see and meet the real person behind all the appearances and screens that we hide behind. So maybe “The Fall from Grace” as read in Genesis 3 is a fall from true community and honest relationships, a fall into relying on appearances and judging books by their covers.

In a healthy sexual relationship, there is the mutual sense of intimacy and vulnerability. We expose so much of who we are, not just in a physical, anatomical sense of connecting body parts, but of our souls delighting in one another.

Sex is a natural and essential and wonderful part of our createdness. But because Adam and Eve suddenly feeling that they have to hide themselves from one another, we carry centuries of baggage with us when it comes to sex. We all have our stories, some simple and straightforward, others horrifically tragic, we all have had to make sense of difficult questions and deal with consequences. And under the disproving eyes of church and society, we can feel incredibly alone and unanchored.

So maybe the lesson is to withhold judgment as Jesus so often preached, to look to oneself before digging at the splinter in our neighbour’s eye. Certainly the church could do that. If we, as a church, can’t be forthright and truthful about something as common and universal to the human experience as sex, then how can we expect people to listen to what we have to say about complicated spiritual matters like our purpose in life, the state of our soul or addressing the crises of faith.

Meg Hickling is a stalwart United Church member and a highly praised woman in circles of youth ministry. She is the author of The New Speaking of Sex (Kelowna, BC: Northstone Publishing/Wood Lake Books, 2005). She’s written a chapter that speaks directly to the need of faith and sexuality and I’ll conclude with her words: p. 218 “Why Bother?”