Sex and Sin
Fifth Sunday in Lent, 25th March, 2007
The Rev'd Dr Craig D'Alton
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Is it just me, or is the Church, and the Anglican Church in particular, obsessed with sex at the moment? I mean, even more than usual.
I don't think that I'm alone in feeling just a little bit tired of the constant harping on about human sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular. It seems that every time I log on to an Anglican news website or read an Anglican church paper I am confronted with a torrent of articles, comments, letters, documents and opinion pieces which are actually about power, but where the presenting issue is sex: whether those who engage in sex in any form in any context other than the matrimonial bed ought or ought not to be allowed to be bishops, to be ordained, to hold church office, to work with children, to be active members of parishes, even to be regarded as fully human, or to be welcomed fully as part of the Christian community.
There is no doubt about it. The Church is obsessed with sex.
And so – sorry, but even from the pulpit I have to ask the obvious, and perhaps naïve question – why?
. . . . .
Have you ever played the word-association game? You know the one: I say "green", you say "grass", I say "fish", you say "chips". That sort of thing. I've got one for you now: I say "sin", you say . . .? More often than not, I fear, the blank is filled with "sex".
The equation of sin with sex and sex with sin is a very, very old one. It is there in the first chapters of Genesis. And throughout the Old Testament sexual morality and fidelity are highly valued, albeit constantly undermined. It is, of course, a different form of sexual morality from that which we generally understand as Scriptural. Marriage, for one thing, may involve one husband but many wives. Concubines are common and tolerated. For wealthy and powerful men to have sex with their female slaves is acceptable. Marriage is largely about property. Sex occurs within and without it. Sexual fidelity is almost always about women's bodies and about legitimate child-birth, it's rarely about men and what they do.
But Old Testament views on sex, and the Hebrew employment of sexualised language and imagery, are much more complex than they might first appear. The language of fidelity and adultery in the Old Testament, for example, is much more often about fidelity to God, than fidelity within marriage. When the prophets accuse Israel of playing the whore, they do so because she has gone after other Gods, not because the nation is sexually depraved. Sex is a metaphor for religion – and here, I think is, the root of at least some of the current issues.
So, it is easy to see how sex equals sin in the popular mind. It has been read theologically, and for a very long time, as the ultimate sign of our fallen state, rather than, as Genesis also describes it, part of our God-given creation, part of our humanity, part of that which God made, and which is very good. Sex has been defined as betrayal, violation, violence; not love, not joy.
But why are we so obsessed with it right now?
The church is, I believe, presently engaged in what will most certainly be a long and bitter struggle to re-think its views on sex. Much of the Scriptural witness on sex and sexuality, particularly within the Old Testament, is predicated on a patriarchal world-view which sees women as chattels and objects of desire, and which sees sexual sin as something women commit, and something into which men are tempted. Since the 1960s, however, at least in the West, the objectification of women, the patriarchal world-view, and the idea that women's sexuality is inherently dangerous, have been under challenge and, I would suggest, are no longer acceptable to many people, including many within the Churches.
And so, forty years late, we in the Church are beginning to catch up.
The church is in a time of re-thinking its views on sex. We are, at last, re-reading the Scriptural witness, reassessing the tradition, and applying our post-feminist reason to pre-feminist texts. And that scares a lot of people. If the "sex equals sin" equation is challenged through this process – and it is – then so much of the way in which we conceive what is right and what is wrong is also up for challenge. The very manner in which we conceive of sin will need to be reassessed. Yes, indeed, we might have to THINK about how we act, rather than merely to obey a set of rules. There will still be sexual sin at the end of this great re-thinking, of that I am quite sure – rape, assault, abuse, will still be deeply wrong. But the moral shape of other some actions presently defined as sexual sins may well be very different.
And that is very challenging. And it makes a lot of religious men, and even some religious women, feel powerless and threatened.
And there is nothing new here.
Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, [a woman – where was the man??] 'Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women [not men!]. Now what do you say?' They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, 'Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.' And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' She said, 'No one, sir.' And Jesus said, 'Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.'
The woman's sexuality and sexual practice challenged the Pharisees, but it does not challenge Jesus.
Jesus did not say, "do not have sex". He said "do not sin". Sin was not defined. But whatever hers was, it was no greater than anyone else's. Jesus, in this story, presents a challenge to re-assess traditional view on sexual morality, and traditional views that sexual sin is always the woman's fault.
It is a challenge, two thousand years later, that the Church faces anew. It should not scare us. It should not break us apart. Instead we should take it for what it is – a God-given opportunity to explore more deeply who we are as human beings, as children of God, and to rejoice that we are saved from sin, and welcomed into the Kingdom.
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