Let's Talk About Sex

Let’s Talk about Sex

Leviticus 15

This sermon was written as part of my study group’s project on the book of Leviticus.  It was intended to be preached at a retreat and later at a conference on emerging understandings of sex and sexuality.  Unfortunately both were cancelled. 

Many of my closest friends have, as their lives have progressed, chosen not to live as a part of the church.  At least not the church visible, as Calvin referred to we who gather on the Lord’s Day for worship and every other day for committee meetings.  Some grew up in households where the church was not a priority and faith was little more than a generic background score for childhood.  Others grew up as churched as I and many of you did, yet in adulthood they have drifted in some cases and run in others away from the church.

There are two chief reasons I hear for people to stay away from the mainline protestant churches of their youth.  First, the church is not relevant anymore.  We, as a body, fail to speak out about the things that most occupy human society today.  While the world deals with important social issues, we debate the number of angels standing on the head of a pin.  The second complaint I often hear is that the bible, the record of God’s ongoing story with humanity, is antiquated and has little to say to us today.  WWJD and all that aside, the bible is just an old book that has had its day.

These complaints are not unique to my friends.   They are likely true of many of yours and of scores of our contemporaries.  And they are not unknown to the community of the church.  Go to any Christian bookstore and you will find shelf after shelf of books on preaching, evangelism and community ministry that purport to have found the answer to making the church “relevant” again.  Inevitably these books focus on overcoming objections and persuasive means of convincing the un-churched to become the churched.  They are sales manuals for the gospel giving advice on talking around rather than against objections.  Like a creative technician facing a glitch in the works, these books don’t fix the problem but find a work around.

I propose to take a somewhat different tack this morning.  I would like to spend some time with you discussing a topic that is at the center of our contemporary world and do it through the lens of a truly outdated and antiquated portion of scripture.  This morning we talk about sex and we read from the book of Leviticus.  Standing here saying that sentence, I think I finally realize how uncomfortable my father was when he came to give me the talk!

The book of Leviticus is divided into two general categories: instructions to the priests and instructions to the people.  The text we have today, Leviticus 15, is the concluding word of the priestly code.  The priests were responsible for preparing the people to come to the temple and for the preservation of the temple as a holy place.  This text concerns cleanliness and uncleanliness and preparation for entrance to the temple.

When it comes to this text, I have to confess that I too find it antiquated and outdated.  We no longer worship in the temple.  Ritual cleanliness is not a condition of entrance to this place.  And I for one would rather go back to managing department stores than follow the detailed instructions for the priestly class found in the first 15 chapters of Leviticus.  I leave your ritual cleanliness to you and need no further information.   There is not much that this text has to say to us today. 

Not directly, at least. 

However, like so many other parts of scripture, this text has something to say beyond what it says.  In other words, in its very irrelevancy, could this text have something to say to us?

It is no mistake that this chapter on ritual cleanliness follows immediately the chapter on leprosy.   The fear of all things physically different is not terribly surprising.  Keep in mind that this text was written nearly 3000 years before medical science had evolved to such advanced techniques as bloodletting and leaches and the drawing of impurities from the bodily humors!  

Although we live several millennia after these words were first put on paper and in an era of medical science that is based more on, well science, some part of us still resides in this Levitical mindset; this relationship of sex, disease and uncleanliness.   Despite the fact that we now know that this relationship is based not on science but superstition, some part of us clings to it.  Some part of us still sees sex as dirty.

Perhaps nowhere in our contemporary society has this enduring belief in the tenuous relationship between sex, disease and uncleanliness been revealed than in the reaction of the Christian community to the reality of AIDS. 

It seems like a lifetime ago that the word AIDS entered our lexicon.  Throughout the mid 1980’s debate raged over whether AIDS was a public health issue or just punishment for the gay population who were, in America at least, its most visible victims.  In the early days of the disease, AIDS patients who were often in frequent need of medical attention could often not find it.  Their IV medication would go unmonitored because no one wanted to risk exposure to their blood.  They would lie helpless in bed because the nurses did not want to come near them.  And far too often they died alone because no one would risk sharing the air in the room.

We know better now.  We know that AIDS is not a gay disease any more than it is an African disease.  We know that it is an equal opportunity killer.  We know that it cannot be spread through casual contact- a hand shake, a shared glass, a toilet seat.  We have seen significant portions of the church move from a posture of judgment and even revulsion to one of compassion and grace.  To be sure there are still corners of the Christian community where ignorance and hate still reign, but thankfully those are the exception rather than the rule.  For most of us, that Levitical relationship between sex, disease and ritual uncleanliness has been supplanted by knowledge of medicine and public health and we are the better for it. 

Here we find the witness of this text in its very antiquity.  It presents an idea, a concept, a prejudice that has no place in our contemporary society.  In witnessing against itself, the text speaks to the community of faith reminding us that it is to the Word of God and not the words of the bible that we owe our faith and our allegiance.  Though the words on the page tell us one thing, the word of God written on our hearts and in our midst by the Holy Spirit has shown us a different, but no less faithful path.

Is that the only message this text has for us today?  Is there perhaps something lurking beneath the words that will, if we allow it, speak a good word to us today on the topic and question of sex?

When churches do talk about sex theologically, we normally turn to the Song of Songs.   Let’s face it Song of Songs is a lot more appealing than Leviticus when it comes to a vision of sex.   “My beloved is to me a bag of myrrh that lies between my breasts” sounds much better than “all who touch the one with discharge from his member must wash their clothes and bathe in water.”   Like so many themes of human life in scripture, if we spend all of our time on the pretty parts and none on the difficult bits, we risk missing the point.  

Taken together, the Song of Songs with its poetic, romantic and often erotic image of love and sexual congress and the Levitical admonitions to keep our bodies holy bear witness to God’s vision that sex should be sacramental rather than merely recreational.   That is the message of scripture.  The message of society is exactly the opposite: sex is meant to be recreational rather than sacramental.  It is little more than an enjoyment or an indulgence. 

We who occupy the church today must have the same courage as the writers of the Levitical law and the Song of Songs to bear witness to God’s care for the fullness of how we use and care for our bodies not only as physical beings but as sexual beings as well.  God has something to say about sex and because God does, the church should as well.  In a culture that glorifies sex in ways that demean rather than affirm, there is both room and need for a word on the holiness of sex and sexuality.

Unfortunately, when we do broach the uncomfortable topic of sex in the community of faith, we do so in one of two general ways:  the guilt model that seeks to shame young people from having sex at all and brands sex something dirty or dangerous and the don’t let this happen to you model that seeks to scare them by being focused on preventing bad consequences rather than making good decisions.

If we are to engage and encounter this important part of what it means to be human and to be a child of God, we must shed the comfortable veneer of our Puritanical avoidance and think beyond terms of “should I or shouldn’t I.”  The very nature of our sexuality is central to who we are and who God calls us to be.  

Before this sermon becomes more uncomfortable for you or for me, let me make clear that I do not plan to talk about my own sex life or ask you about yours.   What I do want to do is pose a question to us all, is the way we are living our lives, sexual and otherwise, honoring God and who God has created us to be?  Is the role of sex and sexuality in our lives being lived and practiced honestly and with respect for our own lives and bodies and those of a partner?

That is, I believe, what this text from Leviticus is really about: honoring and respecting the gift of sex and sexuality and remembering that God does not turn away from this part of our lives and being just as God does not turn away from any other part. 

Honor and respect are not words frequently associated with sex and sexuality in our culture.  In tv and film and even in our daily discourse, sex has been reduced to recreation and entertainment.  It has become about fulfilling my needs, my desires, my wants.   What is valued in a partner is frequently not a sense of the unity of two people or two spirits but the fulfillment of base and purely physical desires.   Here in this old and dusty Levitical code, we are reminded that even the physical has a dimension of the holy and the holy deserves better than we often give it. 

While the detail of the code of cleanliness and holiness may have had its day and passed from both practice and relevance, the message of the text that how we treat or mistreat our bodies and the body of a partner is very much of concern to God.

What do you know?  This tired old useless disposable text had something to say after all.  And as long as the world remains as focused and centered on questions, issues and debates on sex and sexuality, so does the church.

Amen.