Bob Kaylor

Sacred Sex: Part III - Sex and Shame

John 4:1-18, 27-30, Hebrews 12:1-2

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot contains a wild and tragic character named Nastasia Philapovna. She is a temptress who enjoys seducing men of all sorts with her charm and intoxicating beauty. After spending only an hour with her, each of these men fall madly in love with her, but Nastasia takes even more delight by teasing them with her presence. She sleeps with the men during the night, but leaves them by morning, leaving them hopelessly pining for her love and attention. Naturally, she is despised by the other women in the town who are both jealous and afraid of her.

Prince Mishkin, who is the hero of the story and whom many readers of Dostoyevsky believe is a kind of Christ-figure in the story, sees more deeply into Nastasia’s soul. He understands what drives her—a “ferocious, self destructive sense of shame.”

The story reveals that Nastasia was abandoned and homeless as a child. She was eventually taken in by a wealthy patron who abused her and “kept her around like an ornament on a shelf that he could take down and occasionally fondle.” The shame of being abandoned, abused, and misused in this way had scarred her soul. Mishkin explains her plight to others in the story like this:

“Oh, don’t cry shame upon her, don’t throw stones at her! She has tortured herself too much from the consciousness of her undeserved shame…She had an irresistible inner craving to do something shameful, so as to say to herself at once, ‘There, you’ve done something shameful again, so you’re a degraded creature.’…Do you know that in that continual consciousness of shame there is perhaps a sort of awful unnatural enjoyment for her, a sort of revenge on someone?”

Dostoyevsky wrote his novel in 1868, but his insights into the human experience are timeless. He understood that shame, growing out of deep-seated and long-lasting human hurt, is the root of much self-destructive behavior. Much of that shame is connected to sexual secrets or experiences from the past and are especially destructive since, as we have said, sexuality is a significant part of the core of who we are as beings created in unity of body and soul.

Sexual shame has been with us from the beginning. As we have been talking about in the first two sermons in the series, the first humans were created to be “naked and unashamed” according to Genesis 2. When humans violated God’s law by seeking to be like God, eating from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, their eyes were opened and they suddenly realized that something was wrong. Instead of responding to God with repentance, however, they were overcome by shame. They no longer saw themselves, their souls and bodies, as beloved but as something to be hidden.

Adam and Eve were guilty, to be sure. We are guilty when we make mistakes and when we willfully disobey God. But shame is even more destructive than guilt because it attacks the core of who we are. Guilt says “I made a mistake.” Shame says “I am a mistake.” When we believe that we are a mistake, whether we get that message from within or from someone who treated us badly, then we, like Nastasia, are prone to treat ourselves accordingly. Shame causes us to hide the true self, the people we were created to be.

The story of the woman at the well is not technically about shame—we don’t know the details of the woman’s exploits like we do that of Nastasia Philapovna. She has often been portrayed as a kind of prostitute figure in some sermons and commentaries. We don’t know much about her, but I think from the text we can infer that she is dealing with some kind of shame.

Jesus encounters this Samaritan woman at a well. For a Jewish man to talk with a woman he didn’t know in public was one thing…that she was a Samaritan, a people group hated by the Jews, was quite another. Not only that, John tells us that their encounter took place “about noon.” Typically, water was drawn in the morning and evening as women came to the well and used the time as a social gathering. Clearly, this woman—coming alone in the heat of the day—was not one of the crowd. Was she being ostracized? We don’t know, but we do know that she is alone.

There’s a lot of richness in this passage, which talks about “living water” and the identity of Israel’s true Messiah, but what intrigues me is the way in which Jesus goes beyond theological arguments to address this woman’s deeper needs. Abruptly, Jesus asks her to “Go, call your husband and come back.” But she has no husband—in fact, Jesus somehow knows that she has had five husbands and the man she was living with was not her husband. There may have been many reasons for this and not all of them salacious. Life expectancy was short, wives were property given to the next brother in line when a husband died, we don’t know exactly. But the fact that she is alone at the well in the middle of the day seems to indicate that she has been shamed in some way, put outside the fellowship of the community. That Jesus asks about her husband in the midst of all this theological talk about living water would appear to somehow address the state of her life.

Shame is incredibly isolating and is usually an outcome of long-kept secrets. If we have felt rejected, abused, unloved, unwanted, exploited, or used in ways that damage our personhood, we can experience what John Bradshaw calls, “toxic shame.” Says Bradshaw:

“Toxic shame, the shame that binds you, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that I am flawed and defective as a human being. Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits, it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self within the self.” He goes on to say that toxic shame is what fuels all addictive behaviors. Because the painful self-exposure is too much, people turn to drugs, work, food, sex, or something else in order to find relief and acceptance.

My 25th high school reunion was last year and while I was not able to make the trek to Slippery Rock, PA, I did get some email addresses of my classmates and started to catch up on people’s lives. It was fascinating to me to learn things I didn’t know was going on with the people around me in the hallways each day. One of the girls wrote about her alcoholic father and her fear of going home each day. Another wrote of being abandoned emotionally by his parents. Another friend shared that she was sexually abused by an older brother and told that if she said anything he’d kill her. Now, as adults, all those teenagers who wore Members Only jackets and feathered hair in the 1980s bear the shame and scars of the past. I had my own pain to deal with—my mother had passed away, my father was absent, my stepmother verbally abusive—but we all tried to compensate by being cool or by overachieving or, for some, by engaging in risky or promiscuous behavior.

When shame goes deep, it alters our sense of who we really are and we construct a “false self” in order to hide it. I used to be afraid of the kids who smoked in the bathrooms between classes, wore big railroader boots and bullied people in the hall. I now know that that’s likely not who they really were. I can’t imagine what they may have dealt with at home. I used to be jealous of the jocks and cheerleaders, but now knowing some of their stories I see that many of them were hiding things, too. Then there were the kids that nobody talked to—what kind of pain did they feel? I found myself being profoundly sorry that I didn’t know then what I know now. I hope that any high school students here today would think about this and cut their classmates a break. You have no idea of the burden that person walking past you in the hall is carrying.

Many of us have lived life to this point believing that we are a mistake. Very recently I found out that, in a very real sense, I was a mistake. I was adopted as an infant, and I have been working with the court system in Pennsylvania to try and find my birth family. I’ve always wondered where I came from, whose eyes I have, what my genetic origins might reveal about who I have become. I was assigned a caseworker who actually tracked down my birth mother. The father’s name appears on none of the records. The caseworker contacted her to see if she would be willing for me to contact her. My birth mother refused. The caseworker told me that she is an older lady, well-established, and that her family has no idea that I exist. My birth was an accident, a mistake, and a deep, dark secret.

I can’t imagine what it must be like for her to have carried that secret all these years. I know that it’s been hard for me to not know my origins. In one of the books I’ve been reading for my doctorate, Steve Seamands, who is one of my professors, points out that “no matter how early or smoothly adoption occurs, every adopted child interprets being separated from its biological mother as personal rejection.” He goes on to say that “children of divorce generally perceive the split up of their parents as rejection, too.” I read that and it really hit me—I’ve spent much of my life trying to measure up, trying to make something of myself, trying to be the best, all as a way of trying to prove that my existence isn’t a mistake.

I imagine there are some of you here today who know what I’m talking about. Many of my high school friends and others whom I have encountered over the years, deal with this shame through anger—anger at those who rejected or wronged them, anger at themselves, anger at God. “How could God have let this happen to me?” is an often repeated question. It seems as though God is silent, distant, uncaring when we’re experiencing the deep wounds of shame. Why should we bother with God at all?

I’ve wrestled with that question myself, but a few years ago—even after many years of being a Christian—I was preparing a sermon and it hit me in such a way as to take my breath away. It was something I knew theologically, cognitively, but something I had yet to believe deep in my spirit. What happened? I really began to study the Cross.

The reading this morning from Hebrews urges us to “fix our eyes on Jesus” the “pioneer and perfecter of faith.” But look at the rest of it. “For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” When we look at the cross, we begin to realize that God not only understands our shame, but has participated in it.

In the first century Roman world, people dreaded the shame of crucifixion even more than the physical pain of it. Roman citizens who were condemned to death were usually beheaded, quick and relatively humane. Crucifixion was considered to be too horrible and degrading, something reserved for the most wretched people in society. Crucifixion was done in public. Victims were always crucified naked (not with a loincloth, like many paintings depict), fully exposed and humiliated. Often the dead were left on the cross for days or weeks, crucified low enough to the ground that animals could slowly devour the carcass. There was not a more shameful way to die.

Jesus was subjected to the shame of the cross—all of it. He endured humiliation, nakedness, pain, scorn, derision, horror—the worst evil that humanity could visit on another. Yet, somehow, the early Christians said that Jesus’ shame was the way toward healing from our own shame. For the typical Roman or Greek, the Christian belief that someone who had been crucified was really a Savior and Lord was sheer madness. How could God allow that to happen? Well, if Jesus was God in the flesh, we have to ask an even greater question: Why did God allow this to happen to himself? Indeed, why did God willingly submit to human shame and suffering?”

Here is the answer. I like how Steve Seamands puts it in his book Wounds That Heal: “Because Christ willingly endured shame on the cross, we are able to find healing for our shame at the cross. Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating fruit from an alluring tree in a garden. As a result, they were naked and ashamed. Jesus obeyed God while nailed to a shameful tree on a hill. As a result, we can stand before God, naked and unashamed. ‘A tree had destroyed us,’ said [the early church father] Theodore of Studios. “A tree now brought us life.”

In Jesus, God did not heap shame upon us. In Jesus, God did not ignore human shame and sinfulness. In Jesus, God did not condemn us. In Jesus, God instead took on our shame, participated in it, understood it, lived it. This is a God who loved us enough to go all the way for us. No matter what shame we have experienced, we now know that God has been there first and goes through it with us. I am not a mistake—I am beloved by God.

Let that thought hold you for a second. No matter who you are or what you’ve done or what has been done to you—you are beloved by God. That’s what this cross means. It was the ultimate symbol of shame—now it is the ultimate symbol of love.

We are broken and wounded people, but we are loved by a God who became broken and wounded on our behalf. If we want to be free from shame, we need to follow Jesus’ example. What must we do?

1. Name the shame. We said this last week, but it bears repeating. Naming what hurts us most deeply is the first step toward healing. Back to the story of the woman at the well: When the woman admits her situation, I think it’s very telling that Jesus doesn’t condemn her. He has simply helped her name the shame. Freed from the secret, the woman boldly runs into town proclaiming, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” Naming what we have done and what has been done to us, is the first step toward breaking the chains of shame.

2. Stop the blame. Many of us were shamed by circumstances and people who were beyond our control. We have been hurt, victimized, wounded. But while we cannot control what happened to us or through us, we can control how we react. Jesus did not blame those who crucified him. He chose not to react with vengeance or self-pity. We must not use our shame as a weapon to punish others or ourselves. We must accept responsibility for our lives and ourselves.

3. Practice forgiveness. Not only did Jesus not blame those who crucified him, he forgave them. This sounds counterintuitive, but the truth is that there is no healing of our shame without forgiveness. David Seamands, Steve’s father, was one of my professors at Asbury and in his book Healing for Damaged Emotions he writes this: “Facing responsibility and forgiving people are really two sides of the same coin. The reason some people have never been able to forgive is that if they forgave, the last rug would be pulled out from them and they would have no one to blame. Facing responsibility and forgiving are almost the same action…Jesus made it very plain that no healing occurs until there is deep forgiveness.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we forget or gloss over what happened. Forgiving means let go of the anger and pain we feel about the past and, instead, embrace the wonder of God’s grace and potential for our present and future. We cannot change what happened, but we can change what happens now. When confronted with hate and humiliation, Jesus chose love. It’s not an easy choice, nor is it often a popular one, but it is the only way we can begin to find healing for our damaged selves. We cannot often escape the consequences of our actions or those of others toward us, but we can choose to let loose the shame and guilt we feel by nailing them to the cross. The cross reveals what lengths God was willing to go to in order to forgive us. Can we then learn to forgive others and, even more so, ourselves?

I don’t know what shame you might be wrestling with today but my suspicion is that, for some of you, you’ve been carrying that burden for a long time. Today, I want to invite you to release it. The woman at the well became free after Jesus named her pain—we can be free, too. Remember that what we do with our bodies affects our spirits and vice versa. Sexual shame, or shame of any kind, can be deeply painful, but Jesus understands our pain, our humiliation, our brokenness. He himself was rejected, despised, forsaken, but chose to love. By his wounds, we might be healed.

I’ve set up a cross in the chancel this morning. In your bulletin are slips of paper. Rather than just talk about healing spiritually, I think its important that we do something with our bodies, too. I want to invite you, as we sing the hymn, to think about the shame you may be carrying—something that was done to you or that you have done that has kept you from experiencing the freedom of life that God created you for. I invite you to write that on that slip of paper. No one else will read it. It’s between you and God. And then I invite you to come forward and lay it at the foot of the cross. Offer your shame to Jesus, the one who understands it better than anyone.

Hear the good news: you are beloved. That’s what this cross means. May we bring our shame to the one who can bear it and heal us forever.

Sources: Seamands, David. Healing for Damaged Emotions, Chariot Victor Publishing, 1981.

Seamands, Stephen, Wounds That Heal, Intervarsity Press, 2003.

Sacred Sex: Part II - Pornified and Prude-ified: When Sex Gets Distorted

Genesis 3:1-13; Matthew 5:27-30

A few years back there was a media report going around about the rock singer Sting who, according to the report, claimed that he was a practitioner of an ancient eastern form of Tantric sex and could “make love for eight hours a night.” This was big news in the entertainment world, where sexual prowess is seen as one of the keys to success. Sales of books on the Kama Sutra and other eastern forms of spiritualized sexuality soared. Everybody wanted to know the secret.

Awhile later, though, Sting made a cheeky confession. Apparently, he had bragged about his ability to have sex for eight hours a night to Bob Geldoff, singer for the Boomtown Rats and organizer of the Live Aid concerts. Several years after the story broke, Sting confessed that he had "sexed up" the story to impress his fellow musician. "I think I mentioned to Bob I could make love for eight hours," he explained. "What I didn't say was that this included four hours of begging and then dinner and a movie!"

Fantasy vs. reality. When it comes to sex, our culture is all about the fantasy. Last week we talked about God’s design for sex—that it is part of our whole created being in God’s image, that it’s good when put in the context of committed relationships. Today we look at how that image got distorted and how we turned from the beautiful reality to the airbrushed fantasy.

To do that, we have to begin with a little history. The ancient world was no less sex-obsessed than we are today. In fact, ancient pagan cultures essentially constructed their theologies around sex and fertility. Most ancient near eastern religions were polytheistic, with many gods who were considered to be both male and female. Sex between the gods was a given and was seen as benefiting humans in some way. If an ancient near eastern farmer needed rain for his crops, for example, he knew that the sky god and the earth goddess would have to get together sexually somewhere in the spirit world (the rain was the, well, the “byproduct” of their sexual union). In many ancient cultures, getting the gods together involved the human intercessor enacting a sexual ritual in order to make it happen. There were temple cults in ancient Greece and Rome, for example, which housed sacred prostitutes who offered ritualized sex to worshippers of that particular god or goddess.

When the Bible talks about idol worship, then, it’s primarily talking about the human obsession with sex and fertility. Ancient cultures worshipped their fertility gods and made wood and stone representations of them, often with oversized genitals. Read the Old Testament and you see a lot of references to “Asherah Poles,” which were objects of worship that looked like…well, let’s just say that if they were being put up today they’d be called “Viagra Poles.”

The Hebrew people and their Bible landed in the midst of that ancient worldview and claimed something quite different—that there is one God, not many, and this God is neither male nor female nor does this God need a divine sexual consort in order to be creative. This God is not able to be manipulated by rituals, nor is this God represented by wood or stone. This God, the one God, is personal and relational, creating the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing). This God created humans not for manipulation or control, but for relationship—a relationship of deep and abiding intimacy. As we said last week, God blessed the sexual union of these humans, but within the context of their deeper relationship with God—a relationship marked by covenant, fidelity, and commitment. To that end, God gave the humans the ability to choose, knowing that love is only authentic when it is chosen and not coerced.

Genesis 3 tells us that the first humans exercised their gift of choice by choosing to reject God and the gifts God had given them. The snake, who merely reminds them that they have a choice, suggests that Adam and Eve could be gods themselves. They have it all, yet they want more and so they violate the only rule that God had given them. Notice what happens. Immediately, says the writer of Genesis, “their eyes were opened and they realized they were naked” (v. 7). In other words, they now see their world and each other differently. Before, they relied on God to care for them and enjoyed a face to face relationship with their creator—now they saw what life would be like when they had to decide and do everything for themselves. Before they were “naked and unashamed”—not comparing themselves to each other and to God. They were fully open and intimate with each other. Now there was a secret. They now compared themselves to each other and hid from God. Their bodies were now seen as being separate from their spirits—something to be ashamed of rather than celebrated. They covered their nakedness but exposed themselves. They had exercised their choice to worship the creature over the creator. We’ve been doing it ever since.

It was at this point, Genesis tells us, that the purity and mutuality of sex became distorted. First, the man and woman engage in blaming—Eve blames the snake, Adam blames Eve. Instead of self-giving love they engage in self-preservation and self-interest. Next, a hierarchy emerges—the woman will be tasked with pain in childbirth and the man will “rule” over her. A lot of Christians think that male domination was God’s intent, but here we recognize that it is the family of the Fall. Instead of giving themselves to one another, the humans would learn to use each other for their own gratification. Sex, out of God’s created context, would now be potentially problematic. It’s little wonder, then, that humanity drifted toward worshipping sex as something that we do with our bodies apart from our souls. We’ve been like this from nearly the beginning.

The Asherah Poles and objects of sexual worship may be more sophisticated than they were in biblical times, but they are no less prevalent. We’re still very focused on bodies. We live in what author Pamela Paul calls a “pornified” world — a culture where sexy images and titillating talk dominate the landscape from TV to the Internet to billboards to the magazine rack at the Gas & Sip. Everywhere we turn we are confronted with someone’s body parts (often surgically enhanced) in full view for our inspection and entertainment. Sex is a product that sells and sex products sell just as well.

How pervasive is pornography in our culture? Says Paul: “Imagine if Starbucks offered a shot of alcohol with your morning coffee. Then there was beer in the office and at lunchtime we all automatically ordered a bottle of wine rather than sparkling water. If alcohol were that available we’d all start drinking more and any stigma would gradually disappear. And that’s how things are developing with porn.”

Just a note here—I’m using the word “porn” in the broadest sense of the word. The word actually appears in the Bible—it’s the Greek word porneia, which is often translated “fornication” in the King James Bible, but its meaning really encompasses any sexual activity or expression outside the marriage covenant. Using that definition, we begin to see how prevalent porneia is in our culture at large, not just on web sites and seedy video stores. A pornified view of sexuality sees people as mere bodies and love as a naked contact sport where the winner receives a pleasurable prize.

Interesting statistic: revenue from various forms of media pornography totals $10-12 billion in this country every year. That’s more than the revenue of professional football, baseball, and basketball teams combined. Sexual addiction is on the rise and affects just about every part of society and, increasingly, both men and women. The effects can be devastating in terms of broken relationships, shattered families, and distorted views of humanity. Truth is that many, if not most of us, in this room have had to deal with the affects of a pornified culture in very personal ways.

Advocates for the porn industry and even those who put sex in the forefront of prime time TV say that all this is simply harmless, healthy fun. We said last week that God’s gift of sexuality is just that, a gift—something to be enjoyed. But these media moguls are promoting a dangerous half-truth. What we do with our bodies affects our spirits and when we separate sex from the deep intimacy of committed relationships we, like Adam and Eve, suffer the consequences.

Jesus understood this very clearly and warned his disciples about it in the Sermon on the Mount. The Old Testament Law about adultery was very clear—sex outside the marriage covenant was (and is) a sin against God’s created order. Violate that covenant and you pay a steep price, not only spiritually but also in terms of brokenness of families and relationships. But Jesus takes the prohibition against adultery even further, saying that just looking at the spouse of another person with lust is the same as committing adultery with her or him. But notice the location of the lust—in the heart. It’s not only the physical act of adultery that makes one guilty, it’s also the intention of the heart—what we do with our bodies affects our spirits!

Jesus isn’t talking here about natural sexual desire. That is, after all, part of what brings us together. But, again, that sexual desire is to be enjoyed within a covenant relationship. When we allow porneia to enter our hearts and minds, we’re moving off the road to wholeness that God has mapped out for us from the beginning.

Sexual addiction has become more and more prevalent in our culture and the easy availability of pornography, particularly the internet, has fed the problem. Part of it has to do with physiology. The physical act of orgasm releases a chemical in our brains called oxytocin, which results in a feeling of well-being, a “high” if you will. That “high” is enough to burn a pathway in our brains and creates a significant physical and spiritual bonding experience. When that bonding occurs within the context of a committed relationship, it can strengthen the relationship itself. Outside of that relationship, however, the “high” can become as addictive as alcohol or drugs. When that happens, sex becomes a way of medicating ourselves; a way of escaping or avoiding the issues going on deep inside us.

Problem is that medicated “high” wears off quickly and is replaced with a lower “low”—a feeling of guilt and disgust. It becomes a vicious cycle. Guilt creates bad feelings which addicts then medicate with the behavior that caused the guilt in the first place. When you’re feeling bad about yourself, it’s too easy to just go boot up the computer and re-medicate.

A lot of you here today, especially the men, know exactly what I’m talking about. Because we’re wired more visually, pornography can hit us where we’re most vulnerable. And because many of us have not had role models to show us that it’s okay for a man to think about and address our deepest emotional and spiritual needs, it’s too easy for us to seek a way of medicating the stress and anxiety that we feel. Some in this room are fighting a secret war within themselves today.

Sexual promiscuity has also lost its stigma in our culture. When we fail to see sex as a bonding experience and simply as recreation, we distort the gift. When I was a youth pastor I used to do an exercise where I’d draw circles on a chalkboard representing different people with whom one might have a sexual experience, then I’d take a ball of tape and stick it on each circle. Eventually, the tape wouldn’t stick anymore. When we don’t use sex within its intended boundaries, eventually we aren’t able to bond with anyone. We can become slaves to sex instead of enjoying the freedom God gives us within the boundaries of covenant.

Cohabitation—living together in a sexual relationship before marriage—has also become standard practice in our culture as people assume that it’s better to “try out” the relationship before making a commitment. The statistics, however, prove that the Bible’s prohibition of pre-marital sex is not only theologically but sociologically sound. Cohabitating couples, for example, are twice as likely to experience infidelity in the relationship, and they are 46% more likely to get a divorce if they do get married. Why is that? Well, it’s putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. Without commitment, sex is an activity, not a deep and abiding bond. Despite popular opinion, long-term, committed, married couples have the best sex lives, hands down. That shouldn’t be surprising—we were created this way!

How do we deal with all this distortion and begin to change it? Well, it begins when we name our problems with sexuality. It’s interesting that in the ancient pagan worldview of many gods, knowing and invoking the name of that god meant that you could somehow manipulate him or her. Naming the god put you in a position of power. The Hebrew God, by contrast, would not give a name—“I am who I am,” is the name God told Moses to refer to when talking about God. The one God could not be controlled like the pagan gods could. The point? When we name our idols, when we name our addictions, it is then that we begin to have power over them and it is also then that we begin to see that they have no power in comparison to the one true God, the God who created and cares for us.

Whether you’re married or single, it’s important for all of us to have someone to whom we can confess our deepest needs and fears. I have personally been blessed with good counselors and, even more so, with a wife with whom I can share the tough stuff going on within my spirit. Cultivating intimacy, openness and honesty with a significant person or people in your life is essential to our spiritual, emotional, and even sexual health. Even more than that, we must come to realize that the only one who can truly fill the deep holes we have in our spirits is God, who created us for relationship with him. When I cultivate my relationship with God, spending intentional time every day confessing my sins and hurts, learning God’s promises, and relying on God’s grace, it’s there that I find those deeper needs met.

While our culture has certainly bought into the ancient pagan worldview and largely “pornified” sex, the church has most often gone the opposite direction and prude-ified it. Separating the body from the spirit is something the church has been guilty of, too. While the culture puts too much emphasis on the body, the church has often eschewed the need for bodies and their activities in favor of a purer spiritual state. As we said last week, however, God gave us bodies and gave us sexuality—not just as a utilitarian way of procreation, but for pleasure. We need to see ourselves as God sees us—as a unified, whole person whom God created for a purpose—to love and be loved.

We were made for relationships, not for disconnection. When sex gets distorted, it becomes an isolated event instead of an integrated part of the whole human experience. God created sex to be enjoyed within the context of relationship and community. What we have to remember when we talk about sex is that our cultural fixation on privacy is not a biblical value—community is. What we do with our bodies affects our spirits, and what we do as persons affects our communities. I like how Lauren Winner puts this in her book Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity: “Sex is communal because it is real. Sex has consequences. Sex is dangerous and delightful and tempestuous and elemental, and it matters. What we do with our bodies, what we do sexually, shapes who we are. If we believe that sex forms us, then it goes without saying that it is public business, because how we build the persons we are—persons who are social and communal and political and economic beings—is itself a matter of concern.”

When sex gets distorted, it affects all of us. I’ve met with many people who have felt the betrayal of adultery. On TV and in the movies, adultery is inconsequential. In real life, it is devastating. When people will risk the destruction of an entire family system or their career just to experience an orgasm, we have a community problem. When people spend hours using exploitive sexual imagery to get a high instead of dealing with their inner lives, we have a community problem. When our children are exposed to day after day of sexualized talk, images, and behavior everywhere they turn and no one is there to speak the truth to them about it, we have a community problem.

My friends, we need to talk about these things with each other, with our children, and especially with God. We need to be honest about our sexuality and perceptive about the ways in which God’s good gift has been distorted. We need less discussion about sexual technique and more discussion about sexual theology. It’s not about how long we can make love every night, but about making true love last a lifetime.

Next week we’ll talk about how we can be healed from the shame that often accompanies distorted sexual experiences. There is a way to mend our brokenness and enjoy the health and wholeness God intends for us. In the meantime, I urge you this week to have some good, open, and honest conversations in your house. Maybe you have some questions to ask, maybe you have a confession to make, maybe you need some extra time working on your primary relationships.

Sex need not be pornified or prude-ified. Instead, may it be purified when we enjoy it as God intended.

Sources: Paul, Pamela. Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. New York: Times Books, 2005

Winner, Lauren, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity, Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005, p. 50.

And God Said, "Just Do It"

Interesting how God works. I started the "Sacred Sex" sermon series yesterday and after worship several folks pointed me to an article in the most recent issue of Time magazine that reports on churches teaching about sex. That was completely serendipitous, but very cool. I didn't know my preaching was part of a trend, but based on the feedback from yesterday I'm glad for it. I've had a lot of positive response from different folks to the idea of the series and already some have told me that it has stimulated some good discussion at home (and even some additional "practice").

I've also added a reading list page to the blog with some additional resources you may find helpful. You can access that from the link in the column to the left of this post.

"Sacred Sex" Sermon Series: Part I - God's Good Gift

Genesis 2:18-25, Ephesians 5:21-33

I served a church once where every week we put up the sermon title on the church sign by the road. Here in Park City, we aren’t allowed to have that kind of sign, but if we were I’d have put up “How to Have Really Great Sex” in big bold letters. I imagine people driving by would want to stop just out of curiosity, because the last place any expects to hear about the topic of sex is in church. This new sermon series is designed to change all that.

It’s been interesting to see the reaction of both folks in our church and in the community to the title of this series: “Sacred Sex.” I was interviewed on Tuesday on KPCW because a pastor being bold (or stupid) enough to use the “S” word in something so sacrosanct as a sermon title has to be newsworthy. After all, it might lead to a good old fashioned running of the preacher out of town on a rail and all that. Some folks in our congregation winced when I told them what I was doing, asking that I change the title or stick to one of the two sermons I normally preach in a different form each week.

Interestingly, though, the response I’ve received from our advertising this has been overwhelmingly positive, even if that support has been offered with blushing cheeks. Sex is one of those topics that we’re confronted with every day in the media as bodies are increasingly more on display. Sex talk is everywhere in the culture, but the church has largely been silent on the matter except when talking about same sex marriage and abortion—which are really political issues (another thing you’re not supposed to talk about it church). Those issues aside (and we won’t be addressing them directly in this series), there are few places in our culture where people can talk openly and honestly about human sexuality without it being titillating on the one hand or castigated on the other. We’re bombarded with images and talk about the physiology and psychology of sexuality, but not about the theology of it. That’s where I want to take us over the next four weeks.

I want to take us there because sex and sexuality is something that affects our whole personhood and because it was one of the first gifts given by God to created humanity—a gift that fully expresses the unity of our bodies and souls. If you were to ask most people what the Bible’s view of sex is, they’d probably tell you that it was pretty negative—maybe a utilitarian way of procreating the species but certainly the biblical view of sex is anything but holy. Unfortunately, the church has largely contributed to this view by focusing its energy on the “don’ts” of sexuality and trying to pretend that it’s a peripheral, unimportant and largely unnecessary part of our lives.

I remember as a teenager being in church and hearing our youth leaders talk about sex but usually in very dire terms. Smoking and drinking were vices, to be sure, but given the amount of time they spent warning us about premarital sex you’d have thought that it was a one way ticket straight to hell. The message I got from church growing up was essentially this: Sex is dirty…save it for the one you love. You can be sure I abstained but, then again, when one is 5 foot 7, 120 pounds with thick glasses and playing in the marching band there wasn’t a whole lot of temptation. I do remember hoping, however, that Jesus wouldn’t come back before I got to experience it!

Most of us are also the product of generations where parents didn’t talk about sex with their children. An informal survey—how many of you never heard a word about sex from your parents? How about rarely? Yeah. It’s like the little girl who was asked to write an essay on “birth” She went home and asked her mother how she had been born. Her mother, who was busy at the time, said, “The stork brought you darling, and left you on the doorstep.”

Continuing her research she asked her dad how he’d been born. Being in the middle of something, her father similarly deflected the question by saying, “I was found at the bottom of the garden. The fairies brought me.”

Then the girl went and asked her grandmother how she had arrived. “I was picked from a gooseberry bush,” said Grandma.

Armed with this information the girl wrote her essay. When the teacher asked her later to read it in front of the class, she stood up and began, “There has not been a natural birth in our family for three generations ...”

Many of the people in my generation learned about sex in school. I was a junior in high school before I actually understood what intercourse involved and I remember being shocked (I broke into a cold sweat and had to leave health class to get a drink of water). Many more learned about it in books or movies or in the pages of some illicit magazine hidden under a mattress somewhere. For many people, sex was and is a great mystery. It’s the reason Victoria still has a secret.

But it wasn’t always this way and the Bible tells us that from the beginning. Whether you see it as historical or not, Genesis 2 expresses a very different view of sexuality than most of us were raised on. God places Adam, the first man (that’s what the name means in Hebrew) in a luscious garden but then, wonderfully, realizes that it was not good for him to be alone. God had created man for relationship with himself, says Genesis, but in his own relational nature knew that the man needed another relationship with one like himself. So God creates a woman as a partner, one taken from his side not as a servant or an inferior but as an equal and intimate companion perfectly crafted so that they fit together and could enjoy the deepest kind of intimacy.

Sometimes when we read this we miss the obvious—that God gave the first humans bodies—bodies that were God-designed and God-endorsed. Perhaps the most telling verse of Genesis 2 is verse 25—“The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”

Why did the writer of Genesis drop in this little detail? Well, to understand that we have to understand the difference between the biblical worldview of the nature of humanity and that of the ancient world (a worldview which, I would argue, hasn’t changed that much over thousands of years). In the ancient world, most cultures assumed that there was a distinct difference and separation between the body and the soul (the spirit or mind or will). Several centuries after Genesis was written, the Greek philosopher Plato would define this dualism in such a way that it remains the dominant view of most Western people even today. It’s a worldview that goes something like this: the human body is material, corrupt, weak, subject to illness and decay, prone to lust and fleshly desire. In Plato’s view, having a body was a limiting thing, a necessary evil. The body was something to be studied, even sculpted (to which Greek art testifies), but ultimately it was of no real value. The soul or spirit, by contrast, was good and free. For Plato, the body was the enemy of the spirit. Spirits inhabit bodies but must overcome the bodies’ fleshly needs and desires. If they can do so, then at death the spirit is separated to a higher spiritual place (the world of ideas) while the body (part of the material world) is discarded like a husk.

This should sound familiar, even to those who have been going to church and hearing sermons for a long time. St. Augustine, one of the fathers of the early Christian Church, unwittingly based much of his theology on Plato. Before he became a Christian, Augustine was a voracious playboy in the ancient world, indulging the lusts of the flesh. After he became a Christian, he renounced his fleshly existence as a hindrance and a temptation and instead advocated for a life of the spirit over and against the body. It’s out of this philosophy that the modern idea of heaven that many Christians adhere to was born. Many Christians today believe that life in the body is merely something to be tolerated and overcome while awaiting a spiritual existence in heaven at death. The separation of body and soul is the goal.

But that’s not the biblical view of human existence (nor is it the biblical view of heaven or the resurrection, but that’s one of my other sermons). From Genesis we learn that we were created “in God’s image” as one unified whole—body and soul together as one whole person. Notice that God creates the animals before humans (a sequence which is true regardless of whether you believe in creation or evolution). The animals have bodies, too, but Genesis does not say they were created in God’s image. The meaning of God’s image is that we were created to be in relationship, physically and spiritually. What we do with our bodies affects what we do with our souls and vice versa. “Our sexuality, then, is part of our total being—not merely a physical, fleshly, or ‘evil’ part of us.” Note that Genesis says that they were “naked and unashamed,” not “naked yet unashamed.” The bodies and spirits of those first humans were integrated, open, and good.

Notice, too, that the first word from God to the humans was a blessing and a command—“Be fruitful and increase in number” (Genesis 1:29). God’s first instructions were to reproduce—a sexual function. But procreation was not the only reason for this instruction. Sexual union was also a function of relationship. Look at Genesis 2:23—When Adam awakes, and sees Eve for the first time, he breaks out in song: “This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’ for she was taken out of man.” Not exactly something you’d put in a Valentine’s Day card, but a celebration nonetheless!

The writer goes on to explain it further: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (2:24). Becoming “one flesh” is another way of talking about sexual intercourse—a joining together of two people in deepest intimacy.

Many of us grew up in religious traditions that could not imagine God having anything to do with something so base and vile as sexual intercourse. I’m here today to tell you that’s one of the great lies that has led to so much confusion and suffering. Hear the good news: God created sex and commands us to enjoy it! Can I get an Amen?

It’s not only in Genesis that we see God’s blessing of sex. The union of husband and wife is used as a metaphor throughout Scripture as a example of God’s relationship with Israel and Christ’s relationship to the Church. The Old Testament frequently refers to Israel as God’s bride, though in most of these cases the bride is unfaithful. God desired an intimate relationship with his people, the kind of intimacy and oneness husbands and wives were created to enjoy, but Israel would often forsake God and worship idols. That pervasive problem is one we’ll address more next week when we talk about how God’s good gift of sex gets distorted.

In the New Testament, however, the image is more directly and positively affirmed. In Ephesians 5, Paul gives instructions to husbands and wives in the church at Ephesus and while many Christians use this passage as justification for male domination in the home, a close reading reveals that it really reveals instructions about the kind of union and mutual submission those first humans were created to enjoy. Wives were to submit to their husbands but Paul gives even more submissive responsibility to the husbands, who were to love their wives “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). That’s a bold statement about families in the midst of a male-dominated world, but the implications are even greater given the context. What Paul is really talking about here is a great “mystery”—that the union between husband and wife, that “one flesh” relationship, is the most expressive and accurate symbol of the relationship between Christ and his church. Not only does God affirm our sexuality within committed relationship to each other, but God also sees it as a reflection and symbol of the kind of deep intimacy and connectedness God seeks to have with us.

Notice too, however, that this image and, indeed, the whole biblical view of human sexuality is bound up in terms of another relational term: love. Love is the guiding principle of the relationship between Christ and the church, between God and humanity, and it is love that is to govern the sexual behavior of husbands and wives. Sexual intercourse, according to the Scriptures, is not just a function of bodies getting together, but a union of whole persons, bodies and souls, who are committed to one another in love.

A word here about what the Bible means by “love” before we go further in the series. Love is a word that we use interchangeably in English to mean good feelings, desire, commitment and even lust. We can say, “I love my car” and in the next breath say, “I love my wife.” It’s a word that’s tough to define. In ancient Greek, however, there were three distinct words that could be used for love: Phileo (friendship), Eros (romance), and Agape (unconditional, sacrificial love). Interestingly (and tellingly) Paul uses agape most frequently in his letters and in this passage from Ephesians. The kind of love that the Bible talks about is not merely hearts and flowers, nor is it the kind of “love” that seeks its own pleasure—it is an act of self-giving and sacrifice. I talk about this a lot when I do weddings. Every married couple knows that the intoxication of romance can fade over time (there are actually physiological reasons for that), but that’s where commitment becomes even more important. When we agape someone, we engage in a relationship where we are no longer the center. We give ourselves away. This is the kind of love within which sex finds its absolute best expression. That’s why the Bible is also so adamant that sexual union take place within the covenant of marriage. It is commitment, and nothing else, that is the basis of healthy relationships and great sex. We’ll talk about that some more, too, as we move through this series.

Of course, the most famous passage of Scripture that would appear to be pro-sex has to be Song of Solomon. I remember when I was an adolescent sitting in church and discovering this book while leafing through my Bible during a particularly boring sermon. I noticed then that it’s right in the middle of the Bible, kind of like a centerfold. It’s amazing in its erotic imagery as two lovers pine for each other. Listen to some of the phrases: “On my bed night after night I sought him whom my soul loves…His lips are lilies, dripping with liquid myrrh…the curves of your hips are like jewels…your two breasts are like two fawns…” I could go on, but I said I’d keep these sermons “PG!” We’ll come back to this biblical centerfold in the last sermon in the series (saving the best for last), but I bring it up now to reinforce the point: the Bible is very enthusiastic about sex. It is a good gift…OK, a fantastic gift with plenty of benefits. I read recently that for men over 50, having sex 3-4 times a week can their risk of heart disease by more than half (look, they just woke up!). Sorry, ladies…I had to mention that. But like any gift, its only as good as we treat it.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll explore what happens when we don’t use the gift of sex within its proper covenant boundaries. Next Sunday we’ll discover the problems that arise when humans separate body and spirit and begin to use sex for selfish instead of self-giving purposes. We’ll then move to discuss how we can deal with the shame that many of us carry from sexual issues in our own pasts and in our families of origin. Sex and shame were not originally designed to go together, as we have learned. How can we be healed of shame and move into healthier relationships with God, with others, and even with ourselves? On the last Sunday, July 27, we’ll end on a high note as we look at ways to have a holy and wholly amazing sex life, using Song of Solomon as our guide.

Each of these sermons will be online in two forms: streaming audio will be available on our web site at parkcitychurch.org and the text of each sermon will be posted on my blog each week, which can also be accessed from the web site. I hope you can be here in person for this important series but, if not, I hope you’ll listen in and join the conversation.

I hope that today you have heard an affirmation, even for the first time, that sex is a gift from God. My prayer is that we will all learn to better use it for our benefit and for God’s glory. Let us pray…

New Sermon Series: "Sacred Sex" begins July 6

I’m fresh back from Annual Conference where one of the highlights, interestingly enough, was our quadrennial clergy sexual ethics training. The conference initiated this mandatory training a few years ago and I have to recertify every four years. Usually, it’s pretty straightforward and a bit dry (which is fascinating, given the subject matter). This year, however, the training was conducted by Rev. Dr. Karen McClintock, who’s a UM clergy and psychologist who is kind of like our church’s version of Dr. Ruth. Her presentation was interesting, funny, and poignant all at the same time. One of the points she stressed was that we, as clergy, need to be talking openly about issues of sexuality from the pulpit. When the church is silent on God’s design for sex, the culture is more than willing to step in with its own views. When we talk about the goodness of God’s creation and sexuality, and the distortions humans have imposed upon it, we begin to break down barriers for many people in our churches who have questions, struggles, and longings in this deeply personal and important area of our humanity.

To that end, I decided to take up Dr. McClintock’s challenge and am in the process of writing a four-week sermon series entitled “Sacred Sex” that will begin on Sunday, July 6. It will be a great chance for us to think critically and spiritually about human sexuality in light of Scripture and God’s Spirit. In considering when to do the series, I realized that this is a great time of year to preach it. Summer is usually a time of down attendance and, well, the fact that “sex sells” might draw more people to hear about it from a biblical perspective!

The four week series breaks out like this:

July 6 – Sex: God’s Good Gift – We’ll look at the creation story and at God’s gift of sexuality. The Bible is more “pro-sex” than you think!

July 13 – Porn-ified or Prude-ified: When Sex Gets Distorted – What happened to the gift? We’ll explore how humanity has distorted God’s gift of sex and how we can reclaim it.

July 20 – Sex and Shame – Many of us suffer from shame over issues of sexuality in our own lives or from our family of origin. How can we be healed of shame?

July 27 – Sacred Sex – Discover how to have the holy and whole sex life that God intends

Some of you are probably wondering about this and whether it’s an appropriate topic for Sunday mornings. Sex and money are usually two topics that can get preachers into trouble! I really believe, though, that talking about this is vitally important to the health of our bodies, our souls, and our community. The discussion will be frank, but as “PG” as I can make it. Older elementary children and youth are not only welcome but encouraged to be in worship with their families for this series. My hope is that it will spark some important discussions for you at home. Sunday School will be available for younger children at 9:00AM each week, but not at 10:30AM. Parents can decide what level of participation in the service they want for their children. Just wanted to give you a heads up!

We’ll be promoting the series in the community, too, so please invite your friends and neighbors. My guess is that some will be surprised (perhaps pleasantly) that we’re talking about sex in church!

N.T. Wright on the Colbert Report

Just found out that Bishop N.T. Wright, whose work on the resurrection has been a big influence on me, was a guest on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report this past Thursday. You can see the interview on the Colbert Report site.

I think Colbert's funny (Jennifer can't stand him), mostly because he plays the pundit parody so well. He does, however, have an annoying habit of talking over his guests. Bishop Wright is able to get a word in edge-wise here. I have to say that I'm really amazed that he was on the show in the first place and that even a discussion about the resurrection of Jesus (particularly from a more orthodox perspective) found its way into the mainstream popular media (particularly Comedy Central).

It's especially interesting given the kinds of conversations I was having with fellow clergy during annual conference last week. We had Diana Butler Bass in to talk with us about her book A Church for the Rest of Us, which claims that the assumed decline of liberal to moderate mainline churches is a myth. She points to churches who have adopted and adapted to the postmodern mindset (no absolute truth, relativity, individualism, etc.) that are vital. When I listened to her, however, I was struck by the fact that her theological approach, like that of many of my colleagues, tends to shift with the cultural stream. She used the metaphor of a village connected to the mainland by a bridge over a river. After a great flood, the river changed its course and a new bridge was needed. Her message to us was that we live in a time of a 500 year cultural flood, that the river is shifting, and we need to build new bridges over it. On one level, I get that. Forms of church and the language we speak need to change. What I had trouble with, however, is the assumption that our views of Jesus and the Gospel also need to change. She talked a lot about the importance of human stories, but Christians have long believed that there is one Story, one overarching narrative, in which we find ourselves. Our stories only matter in light of the story of God's engagement with the world.

To put it bluntly, I was shouted down in one conversation as being a "modernist"--too much stuck in the old paradigm. To proclaim that there is such a thing as universal truth, that the facts and evidence of history matters, that Scripture has timeless authority, etc. is strictly passe among many United Methodist clergy, who are very proud of their "progressive" views. Me, I'd still rather have a confessing view--that Jesus Christ is Lord. If that's true, then nothing else really matters. If that's true, then I'm subject to his Lordship and my life is not my own. If that's true, then the resurrection of Jesus is the pivotal point in all of history, not simply a metaphor for change. The resurrection matters because Jesus matters--not as a theological love guru, but as the one who saves the world through his sacrificial death and through his overcoming of death itself.

I'm looking forward to engaging my colleagues more in this conversation. I think that Bishop Wright has provided some wonderful tools for that discussion.

Reporting from Conference

I'm typing from the hotel lobby here in Denver on Day 3 of the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference. Some highlights so far:

• I attended our mandatory quadrennial clergy sexual ethics briefing and the training was excellent. It's the kind of training I'd recommend for everyone and the presenter, Dr. Karen McClintock, was outstanding. One of her recommendations was to preach on sexuality with our congregations because it's an area of concern/struggle/mystery for most people. Sounds like a sermon series for the near future!
• Our legislative committees are dealing with the reality of a conference budget crunch. We voted to sell one of our conference camps and are looking at other financial realities. It's time of challenge but also opportunity for re-visioning mission and ministry.
• We've had several sessions with Diana Butler Bass, who's done some work on congregational development with mainline churches. Nothing new here, but she's a good presenter. I'm still under the belief, however, that having a cohesive theology is vitally important. If we can't agree on the target, we'll miss it every time.
• We have more legislation to plow through today. We also celebrated Bishop Brown's ministry with us over the last 8 years. We will very likely be getting a new bishop in the fall.
• And, yes, I have hit a couple of ballgames in the evenings. The Rockies swept the Indians in some good games. 
• Off to breakfast. Have a great weekend!

Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale

I went hiking yesterday morning with my friend Jeff and when we got back to his place he showed me a great poem that he had received yesterday entitled "Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale" by Dan Albergotti. It was printed in yesterday's Writer's Almanac (you may have heard Garrison Keillor doing this daily feature on NPR). I love this poem because it's about looking at opportunities in the midst of tough circumstances. The Jonah story speaks to redemption and Albergotti captures it here in spades. Since the poem is copyrighted (and, as a writer, I'm especially sensitive to that issue) I'll not reprint it here. Check out the Writer's Almanac link to read the poem. I hope it blesses your day.

I'm off to Denver for Annual Conference today and will blog from there. Have a great Tuesday!

Cruel Irony

This morning I've been working on writing the Christmas Eve sermon for Homiletics, which is always a little surreal to think about in June. Surreal, that is, until I look out the window this morning and see that it's SNOWING here in Park City. While the rest of the country is beating the heat, we're dreaming of a white Flag Day (or, more accurately, having nightmares). One of my parishioners tells me he is still skiing in the high country on the weekends and Snowbird might be open for skiing until the Fourth of July.

A little localized warming would be a good thing!

Good News for Nobodies (Sermon for 6/8/08)

Texts: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26; Romans 4:13-25

When I was a kid, right about my son’s age, I was involved in the Cub Scouts. We met in a little Lutheran Church in Prospect, PA and it was in that church basement that I first learned how our culture understands success. You understood it because everyone wore their success on their uniforms—you could tell immediately how many merit badges someone had achieved and you could instantly compare yourself. Sure, there were a lot of cool things about the Cub Scouts—romping in the woods, playing with a pocketknife, being authorized to start a campfire—but for me it was all about the badges.

In high school, we didn’t have badges but we did have grades and organizations to chart our worth. Class rank became important—the difference between an A or a B might mean the difference between which colleges you could get into. I was in the band, and where you sat meant everything. It wasn’t good enough to just play, it was important to be the “first chair.” After high school I joined the Army, which largely works on the same principle. You look at someone’s uniform and can instantly discern their worth because of the badges and insignia—rank, qualifications, where they’ve served, even whether or not they had been in combat. Within 10 seconds of meeting another soldier you knew whether they were squared away or a tent peg.

In the civilian world people are ranked less with badges and more with the outward trappings of success. Your worth is gauged by how much money you make, what kind of car you drive, which neighborhood you live in, the prestige of your job title. People go into debt, work themselves to death, sacrifice the love of family to achieve some status. The bar keeps rising and the effort keeps increasing.

Our culture tells us repeatedly that we have to do something, achieve something, prove something in order to be somebody. We look at those who’ve achieved some material success and say, “Well, that person really made something of himself.” We honor those who came from nothing and who have really become something. Notice how the presidential candidates all try to paint themselves as coming from humble backgrounds.

Here’s the thing, though…all this striving to be somebody really exposes one of the deepest of human fears—that we’re really a nobody. The feeling that “I am nothing” is often what drives us to try and prove ourselves. We don’t want our lives to go by unnoticed by others, so we’re constantly comparing ourselves to them. So we work harder, climb over others, deal with stress and anxiety all because we’re driven to overcome our assumed insignificance. But we weren’t created to live this way. In fact, if we read the Scriptures closely we come to realize that God’s desire for us is not to make ourselves into something, but instead God is always inviting people to embrace their nothingness.

Start with the Old Testament, which Paul references in this morning’s text from Romans. Abraham, the great patriarch and father of the Israelites, was chosen by God and made right with God not because of anything he had achieved. Abraham had no land of his own and no children in an ancient culture that marked those two things as the primary gauge of success. Abraham was, in other words, the quintessential nobody. Yet, God chose Abraham and made something out of nothing—giving him land and a family and a future, not through his own striving but through the grace of God. Paul says that God “credited” Abraham with “righteousness”—not because of his achievements but because of his faith in a God who makes something out of nothing.

Read through the Old Testament and you see that time and again God chooses people who live in obscurity, people who are nobodies, to do major tasks. Moses was a fugitive and a stuttering shepherd, Gideon was timidly hiding in a hole in the ground, David was a young shepherd boy, Jeremiah was just a youth—the list goes on and on. Over and over again God seeks out the least, the last, and even the lost.

But that’s not even the most shocking example in Scripture. Move to the New Testament and we learn that not only does the Bible say that God works among nobodies, but that God himself is a nobody. In Jesus, God chose to break into human history in person, in human flesh and blood. Paul writes about this in Philippians 2, saying of Jesus, “he made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” In Jesus, God became a “nobody.”

Consider the evidence: He was born in a barn in a one horse town to a family of peasants. He grew up in another obscure village far from any city. He worked as a contractor until he was 30 years old, doing nothing that was noteworthy. Then he traveled for three years, spending most of his time in tiny towns with people no one in power ever knew about. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a house. He did not go to college. In fact, he spent most of those three years dealing with criticism. Why? Mostly because he befriended other nobodies.

The Gospel text this morning is a prime example. The three people that Jesus encounters are all nobodies—a tax collector, a chronically sick woman, and a dead girl. According to Jewish law, Jesus, as a good Jew, should not even touch these people. They’re all ritually unclean and, in touching them, Jesus himself would become unclean. The religious elite classified all these people as “sinners”—nobodies deserving nothing. But Jesus, as a nobody himself, felt right at home with them. “It is not the healthy that need a doctor but the sick.” Jesus understood that God, the God of nobodies, “desires mercy and not sacrifice.” Jesus hadn’t come to bless the self-righteous striving of religious somebodies. He had come to bless the nobodies, the sinners, the outcasts. He came to make something out of nothing.

What’s the requirement for making something out of nothing? Well, first you have to be nothing. What’s the main requirement for being a disciple of Jesus? The Scriptures offer only one unusual qualification. You have to be a sinner--a nothing. Somebodies need not apply. It’s important to remember that all the somebodies of Jesus’ day had nothing to do with him.

Even today, being a somebody may, in fact, be a barrier to following Jesus. It’s interesting to me that Christianity is growing like wildfire in the third world—in South America, Asia, and Africa especially. The largest Christian church in the world is in South Korea—not in the West. The largest Methodist church in the world is also there. At our last United Methodist General Conference, the number of delegates from the third world had increased to the point that their voting influence rivals that of the U.S.-based conferences. Africa is sending Christian missionaries to the U.S. and Europe in a reversal of the evangelism stream. Christianity is exploding among people whom the world has seen as traditionally having nothing. In western Europe and even in the U.S., though, Christianity is declining. Why is that? Well, my theory is that it’s because people here are so focused on making something of themselves that they have little room for God.

I meet people all the time here in Park City who are very satisfied with their lives. They’ve reached the top of the heap, they have it all, are able to do whatever they please. When you’re in that mode and mindset, it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve done it on your own and that you don’t need God. People construct theologies that bless their own materialism instead of giving thanks to the God who created everything. They become blinded by their comfort and security. They’ve made the classic human mistake of believing that being, doing, or having something can save them.

Bishop Will Willimon says this: “The Christian faith has historically had such bad things to say about the sin of ‘pride.’ It is not that a positive self image is a bad thing. It is rather that, in our pride, we are tempted to be gods unto ourselves, to solve the problem of our sense of inadequacy through our own efforts rather than reliance on the grace of God. That’s what’s wrong with our pride—the attempt to earn for ourselves, through our own efforts, a strong sense that we are, by our own efforts, somebody.”

But there’s a reality we have to face and it is this. No matter how much you’ve managed to become something in the world’s eyes, no matter how much you have achieved or acquired, there is but one guarantee—and we will all face it—that there will come that day when you will have nothing and you will be nothing. Death is the great equalizer. All the productivity and things you’ve achieved will be taken away. Everything you’ve strived after will be but a memory and your possessions given to someone else. Standing before God, you will have nothing and you will be nothing.

I know that we’re not taught to think this way about ourselves. Most of us were taught to believe that life is some kind of assignment to be completed through our own efforts—that our worth and meaning in the world is based on what we produce. But the Scriptures make a radically different claim—that our final significance, the verdict on who we are and what we mean is God’s and not ours. We are not saved by our own efforts, we are made right with God through God’s grace alone. When it comes right down to it, we don’t have that much to be proud of on our own—it’s all temporal and temporary. All we have, in the end, is God’s mercy and grace to fall back on.

Hard news? It is if you’re trying to be somebody. But if you’re already a nobody, it’s good news because that’s where God wants us—with nothing—so that God can give us everything. When we empty our lives of the need for things, of the desire for greatness, of the search for significance, it is then that God can fill us with his best for us. When we say to him, “Lord Jesus, I need your salvation. I need your love, grace, and forgiveness. I need you because I am a sinner. I am nothing.” When we say that, when we admit we are nothing, we are given everything—a life no longer striving after our own achievements, but a life made into something precious and eternal by God. The more we become nothing, the more God is able to make us into something.

Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges. We need Christ!

Following Jesus means that we remember our nothing-ness in comparison to his own. We remember that in the end the few friends he had deserted him. He was falsely accused of a crime and sentenced to death between two death row inmates. He died naked and nailed to a stake. While he died, others gambled for his clothes—the only possessions he had. His body was laid in a borrowed grave offered in pity. You can’t be much more of a nobody than this. Yet we also know that in this ignominious end was the ultimate beginning. The empty tomb is the ultimate statement that God makes something out of nothing. How much more can he make something out of us, if only we’d embrace our own nothing-ness?

In I Peter 3:10, the writer says this as a result of Christ’s sacrifice and example for us: “Once you were no people (you were nobodies), but now you are the people of God.” The only mark on us that matters is baptism and the only achievement that matters is gaining Christ.

We live in a place populated by more than our fair share of somebodies. Can we, as the people of God, dare to be nobodies? Can we admit that we need Christ? Can we empty ourselves of pride, materialism, achievement, and all our badges of earthly distinction and allow ourselves to be filled with God’s grace and love—the only things that really last?

I read about an artist that created a statue for the hallway of a church—a statue of Jesus kneeling before a basin with a towel in his hand. Jesus is looking intently downward as if he is about to wash someone’s feet. When the artist was asked why he put Jesus in such an unsual posture, he said this: “You have to kneel down, or be down low already in order to look at the face of Jesus.” We have to go low in order to see him.

“He made himself nothing” and spends time with nothings. May we learn to be nothing—to give our lives to the only future that really matters, one with Christ. Maybe you’ve been feeling like a nobody lately. Hear the good news—God can use nobodies for great things.

Or, maybe you’ve been beating yourself up trying to climb the ladder of success and make yourself into somebody. Jesus invites you to a different kind of effort—to be empty of yourself instead of full of yourself, to realize your spiritual poverty and get down low to see the face of Jesus.

Some of you have been fortunate enough to learn early on that we are, indeed, nothing. An illness, a great loss, grief—something has laid you low. The good news is that it puts you in a marvelous position to receive the gift of everything—the gift we call salvation. It’s a gift and not a badge we earn. Grace is God’s ability to make something out of nothing. Will you receive that grace?

Source Material: Willimon, William, “Something of Nothing,” Pulpit Resource, April, May, June 2008, p. 41-44.