Don Friesen
In preaching this series of sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins, I've tried to convey the broad meanings of these sins, but not without covering some of their specific applications. For example, when speaking on gluttony, I focussed on food, though gluttony may include over-consumption of a number of other things. When speaking on greed, I focussed on money and material possessions, though greed may also include an compulsive need to acquire non-material things. Similarly, the notion of lust is also broad and may include, for example, lust for power or lust for fame. However, if you paint the Seven Deadly Sins in broad strokes only, they all begin to look the same! They all meld into one sin, the sin of being too passionate by a half or more--with a touch of craving and the loss of balance and perspective--in which case the antidote to all of them may simply be the old maxim, "In all things, moderation".
Today, however, I won't be speaking about lust for power or for fame. I'm talking about sex, the pleasures of the flesh. If you want to apply any lessons learned to other types of lust, please do, but this sermon is about sexual lust. You may remember that the first bulletin cover in this series used the word, lechery, from the Latin word, luxuria. It's a good word, even stronger than lust, meaning "unrestrained indulgence in sexual activity". Unfortunately, in current use it conjures up images of old men whose lechery may be more wistful than willful. Lust works as a more inclusive term.
The "Weeds of Sex," or "There but for the Grace of God Go I"
Many years ago our congregation sponsored a Polish refugee who had a Ph.D. in entomology, and on a visit to our place she took a look at our lawn, not because of insects, but because of the large mushrooms growing there. Our lawn has never yet qualified for a "Better Homes and Gardens" award, but she liked the mushrooms, and took home a bagful to eat! I don't know the first thing about mushrooms--I only appeared to have a knack for growing them--and if one doesn't know one mushroom from another it's wise not to eat any of them. I've read, for example, that the world's deadliest mushroom, Amanita phallides, otherwise known as the "death cap," is also the world's most attractive mushroom. It's deadly because there is no antidote for its toxin and those who survive the initial onset of symptoms often succumb to liver or kidney failure. Ironically, many of those who have eaten it have said, with their dying breath, "It was the tastiest mushroom I have ever eaten!".
The deadly sin of lust has a similar nature. At its core is one of life's great pleasures, but its power is so great that many have succumbed, not to liver or kidney failure, but to brain failure. It can make otherwise sensible people do the silliest things. Leonard Cohen, whose poetry reveals not a little knowledge of romantic and erotic love, also uses a horticultural image when talking about lust; he writes:
("Closing Time," from The Future album)
Lust has the power to destroy lives, devastate entire families, and cripple individuals. Its power and ill-effects cannot be underestimated. No one, however humble or great, is immune to its snare. Jimmy Carter, when he was running for President of the United States, caused quite a furor when he admitted to lust, but he named it as a sin, and considered it something requiring God's forgiveness. One of his more recent successors appeared to have no such compunctions, and will pass into history largely known for the last most public act of lust of the millennium!
Many otherwise sensible people have been caught in the weeds of lust and sex, and are willing to take enormous risks to satisfy their craving. Lust promises to heighten one sense, but it appears to dull all the other senses. In the recent court case of the Ontario teacher in England charged with inappropriate behaviour with her students, I was predisposed to her innocence and was hoping that her own story, when told, would exonerate her. Unfortunately, her own story revealed a shameless lack of perspective and decency. When the 4th century Evagrius (364-399) first suggested the concept of deadly sins, he named eight sins. It was soon reduced to seven, but I like to think that the eighth sin may have been stupidity! And if so, perhaps it should have been left in!
Even biblical saints have been caught in the weeds of sex and lust. King David, a wise king in all other respects, was too good-looking for his own good. (1 Samuel 16:12) When David and his men returned home from an early victory, the women went out from all the towns of Israel to meet King Saul with singing and dancing, helping him to celebrate his victory, and Saul quite enjoyed it until he heard what they were singing! "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands!" (18:7)
The attention to David was not lost on Saul or on David himself! Soon we read about his intriguing liaison with Abigail. (25:2-39) Then there was the unseemly behaviour in front of the servants, for which his wife rightly upbraided him. (2 Samuel 6:20) And then there was the beautiful Bathseheba, whose charms completely entranced David. (2 Samuel 11) He was smitten! And fell to what Aldous Huxley calls "the imbecile earnestness of lust". By now David should have been well acquainted with the pattern of his own destructive behaviour, and caution lights should have started flashing, but David didn't even let the fact that Bathsheba had a husband stop him. In fact, his brain went on massive shut-down, and to get Bathsheba's husband, Uriah out of the way David sent him into a battle where Uriah was sure to be killed! Adultery covered up by murder! A real winner, that David! It fell to Nathan, a prophet of God, to cleverly bring David to his senses--always a delicate matter in sexual matters. (2 Samuel 12)
Lest you think that lust is a problem only for men, consider the even older story of Joseph, who did so well in Egypt that he attracted not only the attentions of the king and his senior advisors, but also that of the wife of one of the advisers. She lusted after Joseph, says the book of Genesis (39:6-7), and when Joseph refused her lurid suggestions, she accused him of rape! (39:11-18) Lust is a very old sin and no respecter of gender.
The weeds of lust and sex can wreck anyone, and none of us should consider ourselves so upright or sophisticated as to think that it could not happen to us! Any one of us! C.S. Lewis recalls, in his spiritual pilgrimage, when he first gained a glimpse of what was going on inside himself; he writes, "For the first time I examined myself.... And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds." (Surprised By Joy)
No one is immune to lust's enticements. In his recent novel, Rudy Wiebe tells of a visiting preacher speaking to the Waskahikan Mennonite Church and telling them the first story of the Bible. The story was indelibly imprinted upon the young mind of Adam Peter Wiebe, not because he had the same name as the first Adam, and not because of the story's fundamental message about sin, but more for the way the preacher dwelled a mite too long and a tad too graphically upon his description of the creation of Eve! (Sweeter than all the World) When you see otherwise sensible men and women--even holy men and women--fall to this sin, one can but say, with humility, "There but for the grace of God go I."
The Sexual Ethic of our Time
To say, "There but for the grace of God go I" is not to condone sexual sins, but rather to encourage some caution. Caution, however, is not in the temper of our times. If ancient monks once cautioned that lust could destroy your soul, actress Elizabeth Hurley has no such concern; in fact, she told an interviewer that lust "does wonders for ...your skin." (Andrew Duffy, "The end of lust...," Ottawa Citizen, December 27, 2000) That's a fairly serious devaluation of lust, from one of the traditional "deadlies" to a Hollywood home remedy!
A 1987 study (by Planned Parenthood) indicated that 65,000 sexual references a year were broadcast over television during prime afternoon and evening hours and that the average television viewer sees 14,000 instances of sexual material every year. My guess is that those numbers have only increased! One can hardly tune in any show--especially sitcoms--without hearing repeated sexual references.
A friend of mine noted that if television were our only reference point, what a warped a sense of sex and love we would have. We might also have a very warped sense of marriage. In an episode of the television show, Emergency, two paramedics out of town at a convention discovered that their host had arranged dates for them. When one of them informed their host that he was married, the response was, "So am I, ...you're not that married, are you"?
Alternate perspectives on lust and marriage appear to be the exception. A week ago our family rented the movie, The Insider, a rather long movie, and noted with some surprise that the gripping movie went on for almost three hours without any sex! A few nights ago I caught part of a movie entitled The Silence of Adultery, not a particularly good movie but one that held my attention simply because it accurately revealed the corrosive effects of adultery on family life, and even more shocking, the main character chose not to follow the siren call of personal freedom and sexual fulfilment; she chose to return to her husband and family!
What the ancient monks considered grave sins we now consider incentives. Indeed, lust is one of the more profitable deadly sins. Someone has pointed out that if lust ceased tomorrow, we could be plunged into a serious economic depression; the Internet would certainly suffer a great loss of revenue, and I imagine that advertising people would be completely disoriented.
It would be easy to conclude that our society is completely without ethics with respect to sex. Hardly true. We live in an era that has a definite sexual ethic, at times a very inflexible one, and ironically, one that people can be quite puritanical about enforcing.
Joseph Stanford, who entered medical school at the University of Minnesota in 1984, recalls that his first direct encounter with secular doctrine on sexuality was a required weekend seminar called a "Human Sexuality Attitude Reassessment" seminar. The seminar included several hours of hard-core pornographic films, intended to "broaden" the students' perspectives on human sexuality. (Joseph B. Stanford, "Sex, Naturally," First Things, November, 1999) Stanford tried to persuade the powers-that-be that there must be some other way to convince them that he could treat all patients with respect, whether or not he approved of their sexual proclivities.
Michael Linton, a professor of music who studied at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, notes that the postmodern creed, which includes significant doctrines of sexuality, has even entered the highest reaches of Western culture, citing with regret its appearance at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Citing two of the few works premiered at the Met, Linton laments, "Sex is the core of the postmodern homo erectus appetitus, a thing--not a creature, for no creator is acknowledged--who walks and talks like a human being but whose ethic is but appetite and whose language the syntax of brute feeling. (Michael R. Linton, "Redemptive Sex at the Met," First Things, December, 1996)
All of the encumbrances of Western tradition regulating sex--"the discipline of contracts, the dance of courtship, the love of marriage"--have been jettisoned. The new sexual ethic is no longer on the fringes. It has made its debut at the Met! It has triumphed Up Town! "The postmodern aesthete, that homo erectus appetitus, this featherless biped possessed of desires and wants, who makes contracts of convenience and who is vacant of love but vibrant with lust--this is very much the man of the hour," laments Linton. ("Redemptive Sex...")
Today's world is a world of feelings, of desires, of wants, with the time and power to grasp satiation. There have been many other periods in history when the prevailing sexual ethic was rather loose. What is particularly troubling about the current sexual ethic, however, are its philosophical underpinnings. (Philip Turner, "Sex and the Single Life," First Things, May, 1993) These include a notion of benevolence--not to be confused with the biblical notion of compassion--that focusses on individual freedom. Nothing should be done to inhibit an individual's growth and self-development.
The new sexual ethic is also undergirded by an understanding of justice--not to be confused with a biblical understanding of justice--that emphasizes the guarantee of individual rights. Each self has dignity and as such should be accorded rights that protect that dignity and allow the self to pursue its good without undue impediment.
The new ethic also includes the idea that suffering can be and ought to be eliminated from daily life. While this would strike people of previous ages as wildly utopian, it has become a major social imperative, and runs quite counter to the biblical notion of redemptive suffering.
Is There a Christian Counter-Cultural Sexual Ethic?
Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the French philosopher who wrote a book entitled, The History of Sexuality, notes that sexuality now serves the same purpose as did the word "soul" in the Middle Ages. At that time the idea of the "soul" provided its users with a way to unite the various aspects of human identity; it is now the function of the word, "sexuality" to do the same thing. (Foucault, cited by Philip Turner, First Things, May, 1993)
This may seem someone removed from a discussion of plain old lust, but I'd like to suggest that our response to lust is a function of our sexual ethic. And I wonder where the Church stands with respect to the current ethic. Do Christians have a counter-cultural ethic with respect to sexuality, like we do with respect to various other aspects of our experience, or have we bought into the current notion that our sexuality and our sense of personal identity are so closely linked that any discussion of inhibiting sexual desire is seen as an assault on the core of another person's being?
In the movie, The Big Kahuna, Kevin Spacey plays a cynical salesman who is told by a potential client that Jesus once said that looking at a woman with lust is the same as committing adultery. "He did?" asks Spacey's character, incredulously. Jesus' words in Matthew, chapter 5, seems quite out of tune with our times. As he did with respect to other sins, Jesus invited us to look within ourselves to see what would cause one to commit adultery. The solution that Jesus advises seems even more removed from the current sexual ethos, though one should allow some room for hyperbole. And while it is addressed to men, one should also leave some room for its application to both genders.
The Church hasn't always known what to do with these words. Sometimes it's been over-zealous about sexual sins, to the neglect of other sins. I have never experienced a fellow believer having to confess to the whole church the sin of greed! However, I do recall people called on the carpet for sexual sins, which is interesting, given that the Bible has much more to say about money than about sex! The Church has also been somewhat selective about whom to punish for sexual sins. While Jesus's words about lust are directed at men, the Church, at least in recent memory, has preferred to punish women for sexual sins.
While one can find lengthy biblical passages on money and greed, I had a hard time finding an extended passage on lust! Nonetheless, there's no doubt that the Bible is against it! Our reading from 1 Thessalonians warns against lustful passion. (4:5) Colossians asks us to put a lid on those things that belong to our "earthly nature" (3:5, NIV), namely impulses of a sexual nature, though greed is also mentioned. 1 John warns against "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes" (2:16), though again "pride in riches" (NRSV) is included. 1 Peter warns believers that they've already spent more than enough time on "debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies," and the like. (4:3, NIV) The Apostle Paul urges his young associate, Timothy to "flee youthful lusts" (2 Timothy 2:22, NASB), suggesting, perhaps, that there are seasons of life when lust's promises lose their lustre.
One might conclude from these cautions that the Scriptures frown upon sex, that sex is little more than some "nasty but necessary procreative chore". (Ken Gehrels, Calvin Christian Reformed Church, Nepean) Hardly! And if you think the Bible is squeamish about sex, read Old Testament Song of Solomon! Sexuality is a significant part of that created reality on which God looked and said, "This is very good." God created it for our enjoyment.
Similar to its treatment of gluttony, the Scriptures aren't as interested in developing a negative ethic as they are in issuing a positive call to holy living. We are told, in 1 Thessalonians, "This is the will of God, that you should be holy: ...each one of you must learn to gain mastery of his (or her) body, to hallow and honour it...." (4:3-4, NEB) The human body is the temple of God's Holy Spirit and the Scriptures encourage us to glorify God not just with our spirits but with our bodies as well. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)
The Scriptures have a high view of the human body, a high regard for human relationships, a deep respect for each human being, and a high regard for the sanctity of marriage, which explains why its approach to sexual matters is not a casual one. Whereas lust reduces another human being to a sexual object, debasing him or her, love builds up trust, faith, and hope. It enhances another person's dignity.
It is within the context of marriage that sexuality finds its most meaningful and comprehensive expression. I tell couples with whom I meet for marriage preparation that Christian marriage includes all three of the main New Testament words for love--the Greek words, eros, philia, and agape, representing the erotic, companionship, and the sacrificial aspects of love. Eros attracts, philia deepens that attraction to friendship, and agape gives marriage that enduring quality of which a woman of forty-seven who had been married for twenty-seven years spoke when she said, "Love is what you've been through with somebody." There is a beautiful verse in the Apocrypha in which a man says, "I now am taking this kinswoman of mine (in marriage), not because of lust, but with sincerity. Grant that she and I may find mercy and that we may grow old together." (Tobit 8:7)
May God grant us grace to grow in love, to deepen our experience of love, and to focus on things that are lovely and honourable.
"And I loved you when our love was blessed
It's a wonderful image to describe the power of this sin to destroy many relationships. One young man who went into the ministry did so because of the lust of his earthly father. His dad took up with his secretary, eventually moving in with her and divorcing his wife. A wonderful wife, three fine children, and a fine home and community of friends suddenly paled next to the attraction of the forbidden. His son, already in college, was devastated with disappointment, but by the grace of God emerged out of that experience of helplessness and confusion with a call to Christian ministry.
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
... By the winds of change and the weeds of sex
looks like freedom but it feels like death...."
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.