Good Sex

This sermon was originally preached on January 15, 2006. It has been updated.

A while ago my wife and I were channel surfing and stopped on a news show. A reporter was apparently ambushing these guys in the kitchen of an average looking home. At first we weren't sure what these normal-looking middle-aged men were doing. Then it became clear. They had all been invited over by someone they met on the internet, someone they thought was a 14 year old kid. Some were there to see a girl, some to see a boy. But the person who invited them was really an undercover cop. The show was To Catch a Predator.

They had excuses. They were merely checking on a lonely teen. They were offering love but not, they insisted, “that kind.” But they had said what they wanted to do to the kid online. And they weren't what we think of as lowlifes. One was an emergency room doctor. Another, who had sent nude photos of himself, was a rabbi. One even fell for another internet assignation the very next day, only to be caught by the same reporter.

A few years ago the police used a similar set up to catch a man who had written a book. What caught the media's attention was the same thing that had made me buy his unique volume on world history years earlier. It was the now ironic title: The Story of Stupidity. We often hear about seemingly smart people—writers, scientists, politicians, businessmen—doing really stupid things. And we wonder “What were they thinking?” The answer is usually “They weren't!” Not everything we do is logical; a lot of it is psychological. We are not only motivated by our needs, like food, shelter and love, but also by our fears and our desires. And one of the strongest desires, so strong that it is often mistaken for a need, is sex.

Isn't sex a need? Not really. You need to eat and drink or you will die. But despite what teenage boys tell girls, nobody dies if deprived of sex. In fact in many species, nobody gets to mate but the alpha couple. Or the alpha male and his harem. In praying mantises the female kills and eats the male after mating with him. So for them sex kills.

Sex is essential for the continuation of the species. It is not essential for every individual, however. Some people have no sexual desire. They are asexual and today call themselves “Aces.”

But for most of us, the urge is strong. It has to be in order that enough individuals mate, ensuring that the species doesn't die out. But it is so powerful that people commonly mistake it for something else, something that really is a need: love. For instance, infants not given love usually die, even if all their physical needs are met. If they do survive, they will suffer from crippling psychological problems. Love is a need. But there are different kinds of love: familial, divine, friendship. Sex is only appropriate in connection with romantic love.

Contrary to what many people think, sex is not a sin. Sex was created by God and is good. The very first commandment he gives us is “Be fruitful and multiply.” (Genesis 1:28) He could have made us reproduce non-sexually as one-celled animals do, or as the New Mexico whiptail lizards, who are all female, do. He could have made sex for humans as impersonal as it is for deer, who rut and then part. But God made it so that humans must attract one another, come together and then want to stay together. You may have heard of the chemical oxytocin that is released during sex and binds the couple together emotionally. In Genesis we are told that the man and the woman become one. (Genesis 2:24) This makes sense because God is love and we are made in his image. (1 John 4:8; Genesis 1:27) God is more than one person; God is Father and Son, united in the Spirit of love. We most resemble God when we are united in love, as a couple or as a family or as a community. Sex is just one biological expression of that love.

So how did we get the idea that sex is bad? Part of the fault lies with the church. Tainted by Gnostic spirit-matter dualism and Eastern philosophies that denigrate the body, the church eventually came to see celibacy as the only pure way to live as a Christian. But if you read Paul, you see that neither the body nor sex is evil. But like all good things, they can be used for evil.

God created all things and pronounced them good. (Genesis 1:31) So where does evil come from? If good is the original state of things, then evil is parasitic. Evil is a parody of good, a pale imitation of what God originally intended. Evil is a distortion or diminishing of good. Practically speaking, evil is the misuse, abuse or neglect of what is good. For example, if I give my kid a baseball bat, I wish him to enjoy the bat. But I want him to use it as intended by its makers, to play baseball or softball or T-ball. If instead he is hitting other kids with the bat, he is using the bat improperly. The bat isn't evil; its misuse is. Similarly, if I buy my kid a video game, I intend for him to enjoy it. But if he spends all day doing literally nothing but playing games, that's not how I intended him to use it. Gamers have actually died after they went days without eating because they couldn't stop gaming. Their obsession with the game and their abuse of it ruined and in some cases ended their lives.

In the same way, God gives us the gift of sex. He intends for us to enjoy it in the way he designed it to be used. But we can take his good gift and misuse it. We can use it to hurt. We can use it to dominate. We can let it take over our lives. We can try to divorce the pleasure of it from its intended purpose: to facilitate and enhance a loving relationship that may, if God wills it, provide a nurturing environment for children.

And because sex is so powerful, it can do a great deal of good or a great deal of damage. And so we see marriages destroyed by the misuse of sex. Like selfish sex. Read Paul: the body of the wife is not exclusively hers but belongs to the husband, he says. “Ah ha!” say his critics. “He's a male chauvinist!” But in the same verse he goes on to say that the husband's body is not just his but belongs to his wife. (1 Corinthians 7:4) That was radical in the first century! Too bad people only read part of what he wrote. The point is that spouses are to be attentive to each other's bodies and to each other's pleasure. Neither selfish nor painful nor abusive sex are what God intends.

Another way that sex can be abused is through promiscuity. Remember how sex releases a chemical that binds the couple? That's telling us that when relationships get to that level of intimacy, we were meant to settle down together. But some people seem to be immune to the effects of oxytocin. How else are they able to bounce from partner to partner to partner without regret? If someone at a restaurant ordered meal after meal after meal, chewed up all the food and then spat it all out, you'd know that something was wrong with them. Yet folks who extract the pleasure from sex without committing to the people involved have become so common, that we just shrug. Unless you're one of the people who got chewed up and spat out. Some promiscuous men are considered heroes, like Hugh Hefner was. A recent documentary series with interviews from many of the women and the men who worked for Hefner revealed that he was just as much of a sexual predator as those middle-aged guys on To Catch a Predator. Except he reveled in being in the spotlight. And he used drugs and his power and influence to get his way.

Sadly for some folks sexual promiscuity continues despite broken homes, damaged children, ruined reputations, and its financial, psychological and even physical costs. A doctor once defined an addiction as any behavior a person persists in despite mounting negative consequences. Someone else said that addiction is giving up everything else for one thing. Recovery is giving up one thing for everything else. It seems like there really are people addicted to sex. Liked that guy who risked everything twice in a row to meet a 14 year old potential sex partner.

This leads us to what Paul is talking about in today's passage (1 Corinthians 6:12-20). He says “'All things are lawful for me' but not all things are beneficial. 'All things are lawful for me' but I will not be dominated by anything.” Paul preached freedom in Christ. The Christian is not bound by the cumbersome ceremonial and ritual laws of Judaism. But some took this to mean that Christians aren't bound by moral laws either. They were following the Spirit, not rules, they said. But what Paul was saying is that the Law, which was a good thing, could be misused to become an oppressive tangle of rules that could actually come between God and us. Think of how many people raised in overly strict homes with lots of rules that didn't make sense have left their childhood faith because they were told it was the source of those rules. Paul points out that the Law could even be used to tempt people by giving things mystery and the allure of the forbidden. (Romans 7:7-25) And Jesus had no patience for any rules that stopped him from healing on the Sabbath or touching the sick and outcast or teaching women. (Luke 13:15-16; Mark 2:27-28)

In our passage Paul uses some logical judo against his critics. He takes some of the things people are saying, their oversimplifcations of freedom in Christ, and shows that they cannot justify immorality. Just because something is legal doesn't make it good for you. It may be legal to buy and then eat an entire 10 pound bag of Halloween candies by yourself. It would be unhealthy, though, if not lethal for some who are diabetic.

Paul also points out that things that are legal can take over your life. Some people think that if we legalize recreational drugs, all the problems we have with them will be solved. Yet the two recreational drugs that are universally legal, alcohol and tobacco, kill more people than all the illegal drugs combined. So do we need to add more addictive substances which will be manufactured by big companies and marketed and made to look cool to everyone, including kids? Remember Oxycontin? Tell the addict who spends all day looking for his next fix that his biggest problem is the illegality of what hooked him. That's the least of his problems. What started out as a pleasure has now become his master, and it punishes him if he tries to get free. Legalizing slavery doesn't help the slaves.

Similarly we have a culture that thinks it has discovered that all problems regarding sex can be solved if we just get rid of all the rules. This is like trying to make driving better by repealing all the traffic laws. Exploitation, abuse, unfaithfulness, STDs, inequality of the sexes, AIDs, human trafficking, jealous murder-suicides and sadism aren't caused by rules, but by human beings misusing God's gift to hurt themselves and others. Again it is not flesh that is evil—God's Word took flesh in Jesus—but our flesh cannot be left in charge of how we live our lives. (John 1:14; Romans 8:3-5)

The solution, Paul tells us, lies not in more rules but in a change of heart. Rather than let our desires and fears rule us, we need to remember that God lives in us and let his Spirit lead us. We need to be so full of his love and wholeness that we aren't tempted by the caricatures and knock-offs of God's gifts that evil presents to us. We need to do what we were meant to do: reflect God's glory in our spirits and in our bodies through love. We are to mirror his divine love in every other one of our loves, whether for family, friends or our romantic partner. As he is both creator and redeemer, we need to be creative as we redeem all aspects of this world and our lives.

So much of what the church has said about sex is negative. And that hasn't helped a world in which people have just about given up on love as anything more than just a temporary episode with sex as the reward. And people don't need to hear more sentimental claptrap about the kind of love that only exists in fairy tales. What the world needs to see is flawed people transforming their flawed love into the mutually self-giving love we see in the Triune God. The world needs to see people who dare to not only say out loud what they say in their hearts—that they love each other so much that they will stick with one another through thick and thin until the day they die—but who then actually keep those promises and don't just leave them at the altar. We need to see people who find in sex not only the interlocking of two physical organisms but the embodiment of the melding of two lives into one. And we need to keep our minds and hearts open to the Spirit of God, who is the only force that can liberate us from all that is less-than-good and help us find and rightfully and joyfully use the gifts of God, which he so generously offers us in this world, in this flesh, in each other.