Sex and the City

Leviticus 20:10-21, Galatians 5:13-26, John 8:2-11

July 18, 2010

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Try to think of another time Jesus was quiet when confronted by the religious leaders challenging him. Try to think of another story where, when asked a question, Jesus sat silent, drawing in the dirt with a stick. The woman, disheveled and terrified, stands before him. The religious leaders full of quotes from the Bible stand around him. Everyone waits. Jesus draws in silence.

The subject here was sex. No other time that I recall in the gospels is Jesus asked a question directly about sex. There’s one about marriage, but that has to do with the ownership of a woman. This is the only question about sex. And while we all wait with baited breath in a society full of religious people absolutely obsessed with sex, Jesus is silent.

What does he believe about adultery? About sex outside of marriage by single people? About homosexuality? We have absolutely no idea, just a couple of vague hints from this story, a story, by the way, that does not even appear in the most ancient gospel manuscripts. His message to the religious people on this particular case is so clear as to be completely unambiguous: don’t judge and for God’s sake, don’t kill in judgment about sex. A word to our Christian kin in Uganda who are supporting the passage of laws making homosexuality punishable by death, as Leviticus instructs.

The only other hint we get of Jesus’ feelings about sex comes in his words to the woman after the angry men have dropped their stones and slunk away. “Go and sin no more.” Which would indicate that he does at least see adultery, sex with someone who is married to another, as wrong, and I think you’d find pretty common agreement about that across many religious traditions. The sin, of course, is not the sex itself, but the breaking of vows, the lies, and the pain caused to another person.

But on all other matters involving sex, this Son of a woman herself accused of fornication, sex before marriage, remained enigmatically silent. He had lots to say about other sin: greed, neglect of the poor, holding grudges, exploiting the weak, neglecting prayer, being self-righteous, quarreling, among others. But on sex, he remains silent. How odd it is, then, that his churches seem to argue about nothing but matters of sex, as though it were the most important thing about being a faithful Christian.

Because Jesus is silent on this, many church folk turn to the apostle Paul, who does speak a little bit about sex, but very, very little compared to what he says about those other things Jesus taught. Usually his references to sex are in lists, like the one we heard from Galatians. “Works of the flesh: fornication!” Everyone jumps on it. So in a list of 15 things Paul identifies as impeding a Christian’s ability to fully receive the gifts of the Spirit and enter into God’s kingdom, 1 thing has to do with sex. Hatred, strife, jealousy, quarrels, anger, dissent, factions, envy….oh yeah, those too.

But here is where I think we really get good teaching on the Christian’s attitude towards sex. Paul goes on to describe a Spirit-filled Christian as one who exhibits these signs: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

So here’s what I take from all this: when we are trying to discern whether or not a sexual relationship or act would be in line with the will of God, we might ask ourselves if the people involved exhibit signs of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. As Paul says, there is no law against such things. We might go on to ask if the people involved in condemning sex from a Christian point of view also exhibit those signs of the Spirit, since that’s how Jesus handled those oh-so-righteous Pharisees in the story. Word to politicians and preachers who live in glass houses, sexually speaking, and yet throw stones.

A colleague of mine from Australia had occasion to preach on this gospel text during World War II. It appears a young woman in the parish had a sexual relationship with a young American soldier on R&R that resulted in a pregnancy. The soldier was out of the picture, as was the man in the gospel story. People in my friend Ian’s church were loudly condemning the young woman for her sin and seeking to cast her out of the parish at a time when she most needed their help and support. Like Jesus, Ian decided the fewer words the better. He simply stood in the pulpit, read this story from the large pulpit Bible, then slammed the book shut and sat down, instructing the organist not to play for quite some time.

The gifts of the Spirit are these: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. That’s a sexual ethic we can all live with. Amen.