Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Sex

We start a new sermon series this weekend at The Water's Edge. It is a teaching on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, specifically chapter 5. Jesus talked about some of the most pressing issues of his day which happen to be some of the most pressing issues of our day: sex, integrity, relationships, and money. We start with the issue of sex this Sunday.

Frederick Buechner writes about sex:

Contrary to Mrs. Grundy, sex is not sin. Contrary to Hugh Hefner, it's not salvation either. Like nitroglycerin, it can be used either to blow up bridges or heal hearts.

At it's roots, the hunger for food is the hunger for survival. At its roots the hunger to know a person sexually is the hunger to know and be known by that person humanly. Food without nourishment doesn't fill the bill for long, and neither does sex without humanness.

One common view is that anything goes as long as nobody gets hurt. Sex is sinful to the degree that, instead of drawing you closer to other human beings in their humanness, it unites bodies but leaves the lives inside them hungrier and more alone than ever before. Who is to say who gets hurt and who doesn't get hurt, and how? Maybe the injuries are all internal. Maybe it will be years before the X-rays show anything. Maybe the only person who gets hurt is you.

Jesus was actually pretty soft on sexual misbehavior. Some of his best friends were hustlers. He saved the woman taken in adultery from stoning. He didn't tell the woman at the well that she ought to marry the man she was living with.

But he did have something to say about lust (Matthew 5:27-30, our text for this weekend) and he told the adulterous woman to go and sin no more. (Wishful Thinking, 107-109)

Sex is God's idea. Like many other things in life: it can be profane, ugly, and divisive or it can be beautiful, sacred, and holy.

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