Sin Is Not About Sex or Dessert

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? 
Romans 5:1

In Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome, he argues that God’s grace is always greater than our sin.

Sin and grace are ancient words of the faith.  But they sound oddly out of place in modern life. “Amazing Grace” is not only the most popular hymn for Christians, it is probably the most popular song on the planet.  But that does not mean we are comfortable with grace.  And before we can really understand grace, we need to understand sin.

Contrary to what we see in the popular culture, sin is not about dessert and it is not about sex.

Paul Tillich, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth (or any other) century, argues that another word for sin is separation.  In his famous sermon, “You Are Accepted,” he contends that to be in a state of sin is to be in a state of separation: separation from God, from others, and from ourselves.

Just as we cannot be born without separating from our mothers, so we cannot exist without separation from our essence, which is with God.  Existence necessarily means separation and estrangement.  We are not only separated from God’s being, we are also separated from God’s will.  And we know that.  If we were not separated from God’s will, then we would never do things to hurt others and ourselves.

We know that we are also separated from others.  That is obvious physically.  But it is more than that.  

Immanuel Kant once said with courageous honesty, that there is something in the misfortune of our closest friends that does not displease us.  When something bad happens to someone else, we are sad, but we are also relieved.  Somewhere deep inside a voice echoes: “Thank goodness it wasn’t me.”  “. . . it’s not my child.”

But our situation is deeper than that.  Our separation is greater.  

One of the hardest things for those who have lost a loved one is that life goes on all around as if nothing had happened.  Even close friends soon go back to their own business.  

Those who have lost a parent, or a child, or a spouse, or a close friend are left alone.  Sometimes people ask why he or she doesn’t “get over it.”  When we are grieving, we feel as if the world should stop, at least for an instant.  But it goes on, as if nothing had happened.  We are separated from one another.  We are estranged.

We are also separated from ourselves, from our best selves.  Sometimes we experience this acutely and we say that we don’t know who we are.  Or when we do something which we know is wrong, we say, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”  In the story of the Prodigal Son, Jesus tells us that “when he came to himself” the son decided to return home.

Grace is the opposite of sin.  If sin is separation, then grace is union, or more accurately, reunion.  By God’s grace we are reunited with God, with others, and with our selves.

The word which Paul Tillich uses to help us understand the working of grace, is acceptance.  To experience God’s grace, is to be accepted by God.  God’s acceptance of us enables us to accept others, and even to accept ourselves.

For many years I have used this concept of acceptance as the basis of a benediction.  The general idea came from my late friend and mentor, Bill Ziegler.  To be honest, I cannot say precisely how what I say differs from what he said, and I don’t think that the differences are terribly important.

It begins with the proclamation of God’s grace:

I send you forth with Good News.

That God loves you.

And accepts you just the way you are.

This acceptance is not something we have earned.  It is not something which God will give us after we fulfill certain requirements, after we have been to counseling, or lost weight, or conquered our bad habits.  It is a gift.  And real gifts have no conditions.  God takes us as we are.

This does not mean that we should not change and grow.  I have a long list of things I want to change or improve about myself.  And my family could probably give me an even longer list.  There are plenty of things in our lives that we ought to change in order to become what God calls us to be, but that change and growth is not a condition of God’s acceptance.

The same thing is true in our personal relationships, with children and parents, with spouses and friends.  It is hard for people to change unless they are accepted as they are.  It is that unconditional acceptance, that gift, which gives us the freedom to change and grow.  The gift of acceptance makes me want to change and grow, and that gift also makes it possible.

God’s acceptance is personal.  God loves you and accepts you.  This is not just a general statement.  It is specific and personal.  It is addressed to individuals.

And by that love and acceptance,

calls to you and to me

to accept this day

and this life

as God’s gift.

This is the challenge.  God’s gift calls for a response.  As God accepts us, so we are called to accept, and affirm, and claim, the life that God has given us.

That is not easy.  Unless we are remarkably comfortable, it is not always easy to affirm life as a gift.  When I look out on Sunday morning and see the hurt and grief that people bring to church with them, and realize that there are other hurts that I don’t know about, it would not surprise me at all, if, from time to time, people looked up and thought to themselves, “easy for you to say!”

There are many times when life does not feel like a gift.  And at certain points in my life as a pastor, I have thought that perhaps I should send folks out with some other word.  When people are hurting, what right do I have to tell them that life is a gift?

I felt that concern acutely during the many months that a young friend was struggling with cancer.  But when we were planning his memorial service, he told me specifically that he wanted me to use that benediction.  “I love that,” he said.  “I want you to remind people that God loves them.  And life is a gift.”

We are often more comfortable with yesterday, and we may be more hopeful about tomorrow.  But today is what God has given us, and today is what we are called to live.

To live it to the full.

And we are called to “live it to the full.”  Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly.  The apostle Paul said that we are more than survivors.  Our challenge is not simply to endure.  He insisted that we are “more than conquerors” through God’s love.  The great Methodist evangelist, E. Stanley Jones, said that Christians are called to “victorious living.”

Several years ago Bishop Dale White gave a wonderful sermon at the Memorial Service at Annual Conference.  He used Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and his text was “Rejoice, and again I say, rejoice!”  

He recalled hearing Dr. Christian Barnard, the pioneering heart surgeon talk about joy and suffering.  Dr. Barnard spoke of visiting two children in South Africa.  One little boy had lost his eyesight when his father, in a drunken rage, threw a kerosene lamp at him.  Now the plastic surgeons were rebuilding his face.  The other little boy could not walk and had both legs in a cast after several operations.  

When he opened the door to the children’s ward, the nurses were out of the room and these two boys had commandeered a food cart.  One could not see and the other could not walk, but together they careened around the ward at high speed, to the squealing delight of the other children.  

Before Dr. Barnard could think of how to restore order, they crashed into the brick wall at the far end of the ward.  The dishes clattered to the floor and it was a mess.  But the boys were thrilled.  

As he pulled them up, they were laughing and smiling, and one of them proclaimed, “Did you see that?  We won!”

They were winning the race of life.  They were living victoriously, in spite of the odds.

To share God’s love and hope and joy 

with one another.

Finally, we are called “to share God’s love and hope and joy with one another.”  We do this poorly, even on our best days.  But it is still what we are called to do.  And we know that there are times, when we look at one another, when we listen to one another, that God’s grace comes alive for us. What more important work could we have than that?  What greater witness could we give to the Gospel?

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Sexuality, Celibacy and Ordination

Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. This I say by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind. 

To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.

I Corinthians 7:5-9

The Apostle Paul has a dim view of marriage. “It is better to marry,” he writes, “than to be aflame with passion.”

Even better, I would say, would be “to marry” and “be aflame with passion.”

Paul holds out celibacy as a higher status than marriage, but he concedes that “each has a particular gift from God.” Citing that passage, a clergy friend in another denomination once confided that she had told her bishop that “celibacy was not a gift that I had been given.”

She laughed as she told the story. It was typical of her joyful boldness in affirming the good gifts that God has given us in this life. And that joyful boldness is part of what makes her a wonderful pastor.

That scene came back to me as I read a blog post by Talbot Davis, an elder in the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Davis takes issue with an anonymous blog post by a United Methodist clergywoman on the Methodist Federation for Social Action website on the issue of universal access to birth control.

“I chose to go on birth control, she writes, “because I didn't want to get pregnant and I wanted to have sex. Because I am a clergy woman in The United Methodist Church, and I'm single, that information could get me brought up on charges, and I could lose my ordination. . . . It strikes me as ridiculous in 2016 that this is necessary, but being a person who is sexually active while single is against the rules.” 

Davis argues that the writer is endorsing an ecclesiology of “me” and “now,” and intentionally confusing the commandments of God with petty “rules” and regulations. And he worries about “a future for the United Methodist Church in which sacrifice-making, cross-taking, self-denying holiness has gone the way of garters and petticoats.”

“Garters and petticoats”? In this context, I find that reference wonderfully amusing.

But seriously, have we really come to a place where our witness of “sacrifice-making, cross-taking, self-denying holiness” is expressed in a sexual ethic of celibacy? No wonder secular people think the church is irrelevant.

Davis fears that if the prohibitive language around homosexuality is changed then we will be dismantling our whole understanding of sexual ethics.

We won’t be. The issues are fundamentally different. The “homosexual issue” is about civil rights and inclusion. It is not really about sexuality (in the narrow sense) at all.

The only change to our sexual ethics would be to apply those ethics equally to everyone. We could still maintain the ordination expectation of “celibacy in singleness and fidelity in marriage,” but apply it to gay and straight persons equally. Nothing else would need to change.

But let’s get back to the issue of sexual ethics.

The anonymous clergywoman says that she didn’t want to get pregnant, but “I wanted to have sex.” 

I think some of her critics have assumed she meant that she wanted to have casual sex whenever it suited her desires. And she could have meant that. But my guess is that she phrased it that way to make a bold statement and get our attention. She was more likely talking about wanting to have sex with someone whom she loves and to whom she is deeply committed.

Since my ordination in 1973, when everyone gave a wink and a nod to the notion that we would not smoke or drink, I have married hundreds of couples. It is possible that one or two of those couples waited until they were married before having sex. But I don’t think it’s possible that there were more than two. And I don’t believe that my clergy colleagues are any different.

And.

When we fuss about sex before marriage, what are we talking about? Do we mean intercourse, or are we including oral sex? And do we really want to go there?

Sexuality is a good gift from God. It is meant to be enjoyed. We receive that gift best when we exercise it in the context of a mature, loving and committed relationship. 

It's not that complicated.

Have You Heard the One about the General and the Biographer and the Socialite and the Other General and the FBI?

It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.
II Samuel 11:2-4

Raise your hand if you thought General Petraeus was a likely candidate for extramarital sex.

The story of King David is much more straight-forward than the story of CIA director David Petraeus. A woman in Florida complained to a friend in the FBI about emails she was receiving. The FBI friend started an investigation, which led to the discovery that the women sending the unwanted emails was having an affair with General Petraeus. Eventually, the FBI also found that the woman receiving the (allegedly) nasty emails was also having an (apparently or possibly) inappropriate correspondence with another general. In the meantime, the friend at the FBI was taken off of the case and then complained to a friend in congress because it was going too slowly. And maybe he is now also under investigation? You can’t make this up.

The whole story is tragic. It is especially tragic for the spouses and the families. It is always painful to have one’s trust betrayed, but to have that betrayal played out as the lead story in a never ending news cycle must feel like one has been sent to a special place in hell. But in a different light, it is also tragic for the principal actors. No one is immune to human frailty

Our modern David has no shortage of folks willing to make excuses for his behavior. An unnamed former colleague described Paula Broadwell as “a shameless self-promoting prom queen,” and apologized for the general by explaining, “You’re a 60-year-old man and an attractive woman almost half your age makes herself available to you – that would be a test for anyone.” News stories focused on Mrs. Broadwell’s wardrobe, her eyes, and her well-toned muscles in an attempt to rationalize the general’s fall from grace.

When in doubt, blame the woman.

One of the more remarkable things about the story of David and Bathsheba is that all of the blame, human and divine, falls on David. When we think about the patriarchal culture of those times, it is surprising that Bathsheba was not portrayed as the temptress and the seducer.

We blame the woman in part at least because we know there is no limit to the needs of the male ego. On the short list of powerful men who had affairs with worshipful younger women we find Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, and John McCain.

The problem is not new. Half a century ago when Allen Dulles was CIA Director and his brother, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State, the standards were quite different. According to his sister, Allen Dulles had hundreds of affairs, including Queen Frederika of Greece, and no one thought much about it.

The Book of Proverbs provides wisdom for married men in the form of a blessing:

Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
1a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
May her breasts satisfy you at all times;
may you be intoxicated always by her love.
Proverbs 5:18-19