A Good Gift

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

1 Corinthians 7:1-5

May 11, 2014 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

Well, it’s Mother’s Day. One hundred years ago, Anna Jarvis from West Virginia was successful in establishing a recognized holiday on the second Sunday in May to honor all mothers, and yet six years later she was already frustrated by the commercialization of the day. Cards, flowers and dinners out seem to be the order of the day—and I learned several years ago to make sure the Disciple class is finished by Mother’s Day! You don’t mess with moms! In this church, being good United Methodists, we always celebrate with food—our third “sacrament,” after baptism and communion! One breakfast, several years ago, blended this holiday with what we want to talk about this morning, believe it or not. I was the pastor at Brushwood at the time, and after the worship service on Mother’s Day, I noticed Jerry Stowers (some of you knew Jerry, he’s gone home to be Jesus) hurrying toward the breakfast line. “Jerry,” I said, “this is a Mother’s Day breakfast! Maybe you should let Merrie Etta go first!” Jerry turned around, smiled at me and said, “She wouldn’t be a mother if it weren’t for me!” And on to the front of the line he went. I couldn’t argue with that logic!

We’re in the midst of a series of messages on marriage and relationships, and this morning we come to a topic few people want to discuss in church. In fact, church is one of the few places remaining today (maybe the only place) where we’re uncomfortable talking about sex (cf. Hamilton, Love to Stay, pg. 56). Certainly, society is unafraid of the topic anymore. You can turn on your television any evening at 7:00 p.m., during what used to be called “the family hour,” and you’ll find dramas featuring it and comedies talking about it constantly. And the church sits quietly, afraid of entering the conversation, letting society set the norms and standards and meaning of this good gift from God. This is a very real issue for our home right now. Rachel has just recently been in that section in her health class, and she brought home a paper to “inform” us that they were going to be discussing sex. I told her I remembered when they did that at my high school (not middle school, high school), the whole community was in an uproar over it. They had to have specially signed permission forms from each parent; now it’s just an “informing” that happens. But, more than that, something that worried me was when she said her assignment was to ask Cathy and I any questions she had. So I asked her what questions she had, and she said, “None. I go to school, Dad. I learned everything there!” When did the church give over control of this good gift to the secular world?

Because we live in an overly-sexualized culture, and because sexual union is an important part of marriage, I want to explore this morning what the Bible says and what a Christian perspective is on this act that, in the last few decades, has seemed to become to many people what defines them. So, first of all, this morning, we’re going to look at what Paul had to say to the church in the midst of a first-century over-sexualized culture, that being in the city of Corinth, and then we’ll look at what a Christian view of sex is, and we’ll conclude by talking about how grace fits into all of that. So, that’s where we’re going this morning, and we start in the ancient Greek city of Corinth.

Corinth was a strategic city, having controlling access to two seas, east and west. They were located on a five-mile-wide piece of land that was easier and quicker to transport ships and cargo across than to go around. Today there is a canal there. So Corinth became quite wealthy in ancient times. Not only was sea trade a huge industry, they also became famous for their pottery and Corinthian brass. Corinth was a lively city, where all sorts of cultures and peoples jostled together, just like many places today. It was also a city with a reputation for loose living. One of the festivals that was held in Corinth centered around the goddess Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation. Her temple employed more than 1,000 prostitutes, and some people came to the city just for that. “Corinthian” came to be a slang term for “loose sexual morals” (Mare, “1 Corinthians,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, pgs. 175-179; Wright, Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians, pg. xii). Prostitution and sex were big business for this city. And into this setting, Paul came preaching the Gospel and established a church made up of Jews and Gentiles alike. Paul spent 18 months in Corinth, and then he continued to pastor them by writing letters, two of which we have in our Bibles.

In the passage we read this morning, Paul is directly responding to some of the things the Corinthian Christians had written him about. But just before this, he has been instructing them very strongly about some other issues. Incest in the church—he tells them to hand that man over to Satan (chapter 5)! Lawsuits between believers—he asks why they are letting unbelievers decide their disputes (6:1-11). And he deals with the issue of temple prostitution, telling them they should never unite their body with such a person, and that to do so is dishonoring to Christ (6:12-20). Now, what’s interesting is that these are issues they apparently didn’t ask him about. He says people have reported these things to him (5:1). It’s almost like they were saying, “We can’t ask Paul about incest or prostitution, so let’s ask him about safer topics, like, you know, marriage and divorce.” So Paul begins not with what they asked about, but with what’s really going on, as if to say, like a parent to a child who thinks they can hide what they did wrong, “I know everything. I have eyes keeping watch on you!” (cf. Bailey, Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes, pgs. 198-199).

So, in that context of setting clear boundaries of what is right and wrong, Paul launches into discussing the things they actually asked about, the first of which is sexual relations in marriage. It seems there were two extremes in the Corinthian church, much as there can be also today. One group we might call the “libertines,” the ones who insist that “anything goes.” This would be a large segment of our population today, as it was for Corinth. These folks generally believe that what you do with your body has nothing to do with your soul, so you can do anything and it won’t affect your relationship with Jesus. So you have celebrities who live hedonistic lives, abusing various substances and sleeping with this person today and that person tomorrow, then turning around at the awards show and thanking Jesus for the win. It’s the idea that what we do doesn’t affect our soul. Paul says that’s not true, and he has spent chapters 5 and 6 dealing with those folks in particular. The other group, the ones dealt with here in chapter 7, are the “ascetics,” or the ones who believe the body is evil. Physical matter is evil, and the truly spiritual person will forego all earthly pleasures, including marital relations. They are the ones who are saying things like what the Corinthians wrote Paul about, in verse 1 of this chapter: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman” (7:1). The text literally says, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” So the ascetics were even more radical than just worrying about intimacy; they suggested that all sort of physical touch be done away with (cf. Bailey 200), and they would have this apply even to married couples. These folks have existed throughout history as well, including fringe religious groups where even married men and women live separately. And they wonder why their group dies out!

Paul disagrees with that position as well. Even though, from all the evidence, Paul was not married at the time he wrote this (it’s possible he was widowed or he may never have been married), Paul still was brought up in the Jewish tradition that favored marriage and encouraged normal sexual relations within the marriage. So he is clear here that husbands and wives have a “marital duty” to one another that should be fulfilled (7:3), but lest that sound like drudgery, Paul goes on to use language that reminds us that it is a gift, a good gift, given to husbands and wives for a purpose (which we’ll look at in a few moments). The only reason to “deprive” each other, he says, is by mutual agreement so that you can spend more time in prayer, but it should not be forever. It should be for a short time, so that you will not be tempted to look elsewhere (7:5). “To be married, but to abstain from sexual relations, is to ask for trouble” (Wright 78).

So what, then, is this matter of authority? In verse 4, Paul says, “The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife” (7:4). This is one of those things that gets taken out of context, and “authority” is taken to mean demanding what we want, when we want it. When we hear “having authority,” we think of being the boss, being in charge. But Paul’s language actually refers to having “exclusive claim to.” Husbands and wives belong to each other in that sense, that they have chosen to “forsake all others,” as the marriage vows say (Mare 228). But notice the mutuality in Paul’s instructions. There’s an equality here that was way ahead of its time in the first century and, sadly, ahead of its time in some ways still today. We live in a world where, today in the “enlightened 21st century,” one in five women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape at some point in her life. Thirty million people are held in slavery, many if not most of them in the sex slavery industry. Two million of those are children (https://www.ijm.org/the-problem). Part of the reason for that is, as I shared a few weeks ago, the great imbalance in birth rates; in some part of the world, more men are born than women because girls are not wanted and are therefore aborted or abandoned. Men want sex, they’ve forgotten God’s boundaries and guidelines, and so they take what they want. There’s no equality, mutuality, choice or decency about it. What Paul describes between husbands and wives is giving a gift to the other, a gift given by a person’s free choice, without demands, in the boundaries of marriage where there is trust and equality. It has to be a choice; if it is coerced, it’s no longer a gift (cf. Bailey 201-202). And Paul’s perspective is that sex is a good gift, given by God at creation, for husbands and wives to give to each other. It’s not a place for power plays, for abuse, or for punishment. It’s a gift, a good gift. And so Eugene Peterson, in The Message, translates verse 4 this way: “The marriage bed must be a place of mutuality—the husband seeking to satisfy his wife, the wife seeking to satisfy her husband. Marriage is not a place to ‘stand up for your rights.’ Marriage is a decision to serve the other, whether in bed or out” (The Message Bible, pg. 2073).

So Paul says, in verse 2, “Each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband.” Within marriage, it’s a normal behavior. What we’ve done in our day is cheapened this good gift. We hear talk of “hooking up” or having “friends with benefits,” and we laugh at coarse jokes that usually make sport of women, and we bit by bit have forgotten that there is a purpose to sexual relations beyond our own personal (and dare I say selfish) pleasure. So what does the Bible say about the purpose of sex? There are three main ideas, according to the Bible, and the first one is simple procreation. Well, I say “simple,” but it’s not quite that simple. It’s an amazing process, actually, that we are allowed and called to be co-creators with God. I know when I stood in that delivery room during the birth of both of our kids, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the life that came out of the love between Cathy and I. It’s a marvelous mystery, and even if we can explain all the biology and map all the genetic material, it's still a marvelous, wonderful mystery that out of love comes life. And what a gift that God made the process of reproduction pleasurable as well, so that we would want to continue to perpetuate the human race (Hamilton 57-58). It’s that mystery, in many ways, that we celebrate today and also in June on Father’s Day. We can be co-creators with God.

Now, I also want to recognize that today and Father's Day can also be painful for some people. There are those who have tried and who would like to have children and, for whatever reason, have found that they are unable to. There are also some that have chosen, for various reasons, not to have children. And so, for some, even talking about Mother’s Day or Father’s Day can be difficult. I’ve known folks who would make wonderful parents and, for whatever reasons that I don’t understand, they haven’t been able to have children, despite their best efforts. Again, despite perhaps understanding and being able to explain the biology, we can’t make sense of that. There is mystery there, too. And that’s why procreation or reproduction is only one purpose of sexual intimacy. Having children is not the only end to the act.

The second purpose the Bible gives for physical intimacy is that it allows two people, as Genesis 2 describes it, to “become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). We looked at this passage two weeks ago, when we talked about the mission of marriage, and how couples are called to be united in mission to the world. I said then that this verse also tells us that husbands and wives are meant to be bound together in physical intimacy, a unity which creates a deep emotional bond between husband and wife. It deepens our love. It creates affection for one another (Hamilton 58), and this is where the way our society has trivialized this act becomes such a huge concern. Ideas like “hooking up” and “friends with benefits” cheapen what was meant to be beautiful because when we think of physical intimacy as simply a means to an end, a way of feeling pleasure, it becomes a purely selfish act, something centered on “me” rather than the culmination of a deep and meaningful relationship as it was meant to be (Hamilton 59).

Allow me to illustrate this idea with duct tape. Yes, duct tape can fix nearly everything, but it cannot fix relational wounds. It can, however, demonstrate what happens when we give ourselves away to person after person after person. Duct tape will stick to most anything, and it creates a strong bond. But it you tear it off and try then to stick it to something else, the bond is less strong. And every time you tear it off and re-use it, the bond is less and less until eventually it simply won’t stick anymore. That’s what happens when we cheapen sex, when we hurry too quickly into that bonding, when we have not yet made a covenant before God and with each other to love the other until we are parted by death. Our society seems to have the idea that “more is better,” but what actually happens is that, like the duct tape, we begin to lose our capacity to feel anything, to “stick to” or connect with our mate. There is biochemical evidence for this, as the chemicals in our brain that bond us to someone, oxytocin and vasopressin, are depleted as we chase after this next conquest and that so-called connection. We actually lessen our ability to bond with someone, anyone.

In fact, psychology has backed this up as well, telling us that couples who waited until their wedding night have 22% higher relationship stability, 20% increased levels of relationship satisfaction, 12% better communication and 15% improved physical intimacy. Now, maybe those numbers don’t sound all that high to you, but for many, many couples, those percentages can be the difference between marriage and divorce. As I said two weeks ago, couples who live together before getting married have higher divorce rates, and 50% of them will divorce within the first five years (Hamilton 15, 61). Rollo May, writing in 1969, put it this way: “The more we became preoccupied with sex, the more truncated and shrunken became the human experience to which it referred” (Hamilton 60). What we have trivialized, God meant to help husbands and wives become one flesh.

The Bible gives one other purpose for physical intimacy and that’s as a means of one person knowing another person more deeply. In fact, beginning in Genesis, particularly in older translations, you will often read that a husband “knew” his wife. Genesis 4:1, for instance, says, “Adam knew Eve his wife” (KJV). Modern translations will say, “Adam made love to his wife Eve,” which is certainly the intent, because the end result, Genesis says, is that she became pregnant, but the word used is literally “know.” Yada (yaw-dah) means to really see someone, to know someone on a deeper level than others, to be revealed, or to distinguish. It has the sense of knowing this person better than anyone else on the planet. It means that you become completely vulnerable, naked, open to your spouse. It’s a holy, beautiful thing, which again speaks to why the way we’ve trivialized it is so wrong and harmful. When we “hook up” after a second date, we’ve not given time nor have we given the commitment necessary for there to be true revelation, true knowing.

So…what if you’ve failed? What happens if we fail to follow God’s intent and direction for this good gift? Does it mean that God is done with me? Does that mean I’m a bad person? No, what it means is that you’re human. And because you’re human, that means there is ample grace for you and for me. Because of our culture’s obsessive preoccupation with this topic, we have tended to swing to one of those two extremes that Paul talked about with the Corinthians: believing that breaking God’s law on this topic is either no big deal or it’s the worst sin of all. As with most things, though, the truth is somewhere closer to the middle. Yes, God longs for us to listen, to obey, to follow his direction, but God did not give this instruction to take away anyone’s “fun.” It’s in the Bible because that’s the way God designed life and he knows how it works best. The boundaries God puts around sexual intimacy are not to destroy our joy but to enhance it, to help us live life to the fullest extent possible. It’s like when we set boundaries for our children when they are younger: you can go this far down the sidewalk on your bike, you must stay inside the yard, you can do these things and not those. We don’t do those things or set those boundaries to rob them of their fun, though they may accuse us of that. We set those boundaries so that they can live, so that they can have the fullest life possible. We set the boundaries because we know how life works, what’s dangerous and what is not, and children do not. The same is true with God and us. God sets boundaries not to hurt us but to help us, to bring us to life. Because he sees things we cannot, he knows the dangers we seem to either not see or don’t want to see.

But when our children break the rules or cross the boundaries, do we disown them? Do we tell them, “Sorry, you broke one rule, you’ll have to move out because you’re no longer welcome in my home?” Of course not. We offer grace and forgiveness. The same is true of God. Breaking boundaries when it comes to sexual intimacy is not the absolute worst sin in the world, but it does rob us of the full joy God intends and plans for us. And yet there is grace and forgiveness when we come to him in repentance, when we turn around and allow him to transform our hearts and lives. That “turn around” part is very important. Many years ago, in the weeks leading up to prom season, I had a youth in my church come to me and ask about having sex with her boyfriend. They were planning it for prom. I’m not sure if she was asking me for permission or why she was even telling me this, but she said to me, “If I do, God will have to forgive me, right?” To which I responded, “God will forgive you, yes, but the question is more if you really want to be forgiven. If you’re going to just keep doing what you know is not what God wants, do you really want to be forgiven? Do you really want to make a new start?” She didn’t have any answer for me, but a week or so later she contacted me to tell me she had given herself away to someone else at a party. It’s not an uncommon story, and this was many years ago. That girl, now a woman, has had difficulty connecting in any real way with others all of her life, and she’s still not sure if she wants anything to do with God. You see, there is grace and there is mercy and there is forgiveness—if that’s what we want. Is that what we want?

So let me say a word to all of of you who are single. It’s important to make up your mind how you want to live in this oversexualized society. What choices will you make in how you respond to others, and how you represent yourself? Despite everything that the media and movies and advertising and even the people around you tell you, you are more than a sexual being. You are a person created and designed to honor God. Just before our passage today, Paul reminds the Corinthians that “you were bought with a price.” Jesus died to save you, body and soul. It matters what you do with your body, which is why Paul goes on to say, “Therefore, honor God with your body” (6:20). That’s a good verse to memorize, and allow it to become a standard for the way you interact with others. Is what I’m doing in this moment with my body honoring to God? We can live better than the world around us. It is possible to live in a way that honors God, even with all the pressures around us. But it will take a lot of prayer and dependance on Jesus to give you strength and resolve. And it may require someone holding you accountable as well.

As for those of us who are married, here’s your assignment for this week. Plan a date, just the two of you, and decide ahead of time that there is no pressure for physical intimacy. Plan time just for the two of you to be together, to talk (put away those cell phones), to enjoy each other’s company. In a world in which sex is often the centerpiece, time just to be together without any pressure is often in short supply and incredibly valuable. With the pressure off, what might you learn about each other, what might you be able to focus on instead? Do you know that there are several factors which, research indicates, lead to a more fulfilling physical life? The first is conversation; couples who spend at least 30 minutes a day in conversation are more connected when it comes to physical intimacy. But the physical also depends on the spiritual. Those who worship together and those who pray together find much more satisfaction in their physical intimacy. Paul wouldn’t have been surprised at that. He was not telling the Corinthians not to “touch” each other. Instead, he’s reminding them husbands and wives should be together in sexual ways, but also that isn’t the whole of what life is about. For all of us, the important thing to remember is that though, as Paul affirms, this gift is a good one, given by God, it is not what primarily defines us. First and foremost, we are children of God, called into relationships to bless, encourage and fill the other with joy (cf. Hamilton 73-75). For husbands and wives, this good gift is one way to do exactly that, to be a blessing and an encouragement.

Now, I know this morning is uncomfortable. It’s at least as uncomfortable for me as it probably is for you. But, church, it’s time for us to speak truth into our culture in this area. It’s time for us to live relationally the way God intended us to, the way God calls us to. When we do that, when we live differently because we follow Jesus, then I believe the world will take notice. Living faithfully and fully in this area of our lives is just one more way we can love God, love others and offer Jesus to a world that is so broken is this area of life. So I challenge you to live this way, to honor God with your body. Amen.