16 Jan 2012, Posted by admin in Ellen's Sermons,Sermons,Sermons & Resources, 3 Comments.

Sermon by Archdeacon Ellen Clark-King – Jan 15, 2012

January 15th, 2012 – The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Archdeacon Ellen Clark-King

Christ Church Cathedral

To listen to an audio Mp3 version of this sermon, click here.

One of the parishioners of a friend of mine sent him an email last week suggesting that today’s reading from 1 Corinthians was ‘not suitable’ for their congregation. We weren’t sure whether this was because he felt that sex shouldn’t be talked about in church, or because he thought that his fellow congregation members were too old for it to be relevant to them. Whatever his thinking, he was right that it does seem to stick out like a sore thumb in the midst of today’s readings – we have two well-known stories of call and, in between them, a warning not to indulge in fornication, especially not with prostitutes. So this morning let’s take the epistle as our focus and think together for a little while about sex.

I may have told you before about a friend of mine who, while he was a curate, famously began a sermon with the lines: ‘People are often asking what do priests and church leaders think about sex? Well, we love it.’ And that’s the right place to start any discussion of sex within Christianity – sex is good, it is a blessed and holy gift of God meant to bring joy and build intimacy and love. It is one of the great tragedies of the Church’s history that we have caused something so inherently good to be a source of shame to so many and have managed to transform a blessing into a curse. As Bishop Greg Nickels of Olympia, who grew up in the Southern US says he was too often taught that ‘sex is the nastiest thing ever, and you have to save it for the one you love’!

However, that sex is intrinsically good is a starting place but not the whole story. Sex is good when it’s doing what God intended it to do – building bonds of love and intimacy between adults – gay or straight – who are committed to one another in trust and mutual respect. If these adults are heterosexual, and open to the gift of parenthood, then sex also, of course, offers the wonderful creative possibility of bringing new life into the world.

Sex is not good when it is taken out of this context and used as a weapon, imposed without consent, or with force. I would also argue that sex is not good when it is trivialized, or used to objectify others, or when it becomes detached from all forms of real relationship.

St Paul offers some understanding of why this is so. Now his view of sex was probably not as positive as most of ours. He did teach that husbands and wives ought to give themselves to each other physically as part of their marriage bond, but he also clearly thought that celibacy was a higher path than sexual activity. This was partly because of his misunderstanding about the times he was living in – he believed that all relationships would soon be ended, or consummated, when Christ returned in glory to usher in a new age. With only a little time left for this world sex was seen as a distraction from the crucial work of preparing for the return of Christ. He also, as a typical religious man of his patriarchal times, had no tolerance for sex outside marriage, whether heterosexual or homosexual.

There is a lot about sex that we would disagree with St Paul about, but he did teach clearly why it should be considered important, and why such a bodily function should figure as an element within spirituality. It’s there in the question he asks the Corinthians ‘do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?’ Sex matters because our bodies matter and our bodies matter because they are one of the places where God dwells. We cannot consider what we do to and with others, or what we do to and with our own bodies, as trivial matters when we know our bodies to be in-dwelt by God.

Bodies are at the heart of Christian spirituality, they matter to God and they should, therefore, matter to us. This clearly has implications for social ethics – we should never let bodies be starved or brutalized or tortured or killed. But it also has implications for sexual ethics – we should never let bodies be trivialized, or objectified, or exploited for other people’s pleasures. We should also never dismiss our bodily and sexual actions as of no importance spiritually. Christianity is a radically incarnate religion – God is here in me and in you. We need to remember that when we make decisions about what to do with our own bodies and when we behold the bodies of others.

This is not to say that we will all come to the same decisions – or that we should. We all of us need to explore what is right for us in our particular circumstances and relationships. We certainly do not want the church to get any more dictatorial about what people should get up to in their bedrooms! However we should also not buy into a culture which tells us that sexual gratification is a right and that we should seek sexual pleasure wherever we can get it – even if we add the proviso ‘as long as no-one is hurt’. That last bit makes it sound all right – if we’re not hurting anyone then it should be ok – but it’s fairly problematic for us to decide what ‘hurt’ amounts to.

Of course some hurt is obvious – rape and the sexual abuse of children head the list. But some hurt is hidden, sometimes even at the time from the individuals who are undergoing it. There is the hurt of feeling that only your body is valued, while the truth of who you are is unseen or, worse, rejected. There is the hurt of learning that you will only find success and social acceptance if the way you look makes others feel good. There is the hurt of trying to make a connection with another human being only to find that sexual intimacy does not always mean true intimacy. And there is also the hurt of being alone in a society which values couples and idolizes romantic sexual love.

If we are to honour the presence of God within our own bodies and within the bodies of those we encounter then we need to nurture an attitude, and build a society, where bodies are taken seriously. That means all bodies – the beautiful and sexually attractive, the old and the very young, those who are disabled or differently-abled, those which smell as well as those which are showered and shaved and deodorized. Bodies, and what we do with them, must be seen to matter, or our spirituality will never be rooted and grounded in the God who is the ground of all being – physical as well as spiritual. In the words of one writer – God is in our cells as well as in our souls.

Perhaps if we could become more comfortable with our bodies, if we could truly value them as God-filled, then we might also become more relaxed and mature about our sexual lives. If sexuality was seen as just part of us, a part of the gift of being embodied, it might find its proper proportion in our lives – neither dominating them nor being hidden away as a shameful secret. Accepted as an element within all our relationships and not just the special romantic ones. Maybe then, like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, we could be naked and not be ashamed.

In order to reach that goal, or return to that original blessing, we need to continue to talk about sex within the church and to integrate our spiritual and our sexual selves. We need to put away the language of shame and embrace the language of honour and incarnation. We need to continue to explore the wonder of a God who dwells in our cells as well as in our souls and to take delight in our physical as well as our spiritual blessings.

Let us close with a prayer of Janet Morley’s:

Loving Word of God, you have shown us the fullness of your glory in taking human flesh. Fill us, in our bodily life, with your grace and truth; that our pleasure may be boundless, and our integrity complete, in your name. Amen.