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Swipe Right: This is the One About Our Brains
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
In this series, what we wanna do is pull back the camera just a little bit. We wanna talk about more than just dating and marriage and sex. We wanna talk about more than just do this, don't do that. We wanna talk about who we are as human beings and what it might mean to be fully integrated persons with brains and bodies and souls. Welcome to the Commons cast.
Speaker 1:We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome to commons today, and welcome to 2020. It's hard to believe that we are starting a new decade together.
Speaker 1:Although, I don't know about you, but I am extremely glad to have a proper decade again. I mean, the odds and the teens, that was just too hard to talk about. It just sounded silly. So the twenties are a breath of nomenclatured air. However, today we are into our new decade and we're gonna start that with a new series called Swipe Right.
Speaker 1:And this is not a series about Tinder, although I think it is going to be a good one. But before all of that, there are a couple things we need to talk about. First of all, my name is Jeremy. If we haven't met IRL, then I'm really glad that you're here with us to start the new decade. We don't take your participation with us for granted, so thank you for journeying with us.
Speaker 1:And speaking of journey, we've just come to the seasons of Advent and Christmas and Christmas time. And so I wanna say thank you for everyone making this an incredible experience again this year. We welcomed over 1,500 people into our parishes on Christmas Eve. And more importantly, this Advent, we successfully raised together $50,000 for those in need. That was scholarships for young moms, Christmas hampers for our neighbors, refugee resettlement, and benevolent care funds for the year.
Speaker 1:All of this was made possible by your generosity, so thank you for that. As we look at the New Year and new patterns and habits, and if generosity is on your radar for this year, then I would love to also ask you to consider setting up a recurring donation if that works for you and your budget. You can set that up. You can manage it. You can edit it yourself whenever you need to directly from commons.church.
Speaker 1:But automatic donations are a really great way for you to plan and budget your generosity, but at the same time, they're actually also really helpful for us as a church as we budget and forecast for the coming year. And by the way, our annual general meeting is coming up on sorry, March 11. There, our 2020 budget will be presented, but along with our 2019 financials. Everyone is welcome that night. All the documents will be posted when they're ready thirty days before the meeting.
Speaker 1:But if you'd like to become a member before that, then First Steps classes are up and running again every month. Membership is the fourth class in that series. We'd love to have you complete those classes and make your way through them before March. Now, one last thing before we jump into our new series today. Today is actually the twelfth day of Christmas.
Speaker 1:You probably don't celebrate Christmas for twelve whole days. That's okay. I think that the intensity that we put into Christmas morning makes it almost impossible to sustain. But, this week on our YouTube channel, I talked about the importance of the twelve days of Christmas and how there was something really incredibly meaningful about choosing to slow down and drag things out a bit. Sometimes we want to move fast.
Speaker 1:We wanna celebrate hard and then get on to the next thing. But often for these moments to really impact us, for grief to be processed in your life well, for joy to really sink deep into your bones, we really do need to learn how to slow down. And choosing intentionally to hold on to joy, remembering to celebrate for a little bit longer than is necessary, These are actually life skills that will serve you well. And I know you're back at work. I know that we're moving on to new ideas and topics already today, although that is fine.
Speaker 1:But just as the waiting and the anticipation are important for us during Advent, so is that open ended extended celebration and joy of Christmastide. And so in the words of the often underrated theologian Tom Haverford, treat yourself to one last day of Christmas this year. Now, today we're on to a new series. It's called Swipe Right. If you are an extremely online person, then you know exactly where this term comes from.
Speaker 1:But this year, I want to do more with swipe right than just talk about sex. Now obviously, sex is a fundamental and powerful part of our humanity. There's no getting away from that, and I don't think we should try to. Often what happens is that in our reverence for sex, actually lose sight of our humanity. I mean, how often does it seem that the church's teaching on sexuality finds itself reduced down to what we do with our genitals?
Speaker 1:That is an extremely incredibly impoverished imagination for what the God of the universe might be interested in when it comes to human flourishing. I mean, on the surface it seems kind of absurd that a God that big would be concerned with something so small. That's not a joke, so don't laugh at that. But in this series, what we wanna do is pull back the camera just a little bit, and we wanna talk about more than just dating and marriage and sex. We wanna talk about more than just do this, don't do that.
Speaker 1:We wanna talk about who we are as human beings and what it might mean to be fully integrated persons with brains and bodies and souls. So today, it's swipe right, and we need to talk about reading the story well, sexy songs, when things end, and how to move forward together. But first, let's pray. God of all connection and love, God who created our bodies and desires, God who created our minds and motivations, God who created us as integrated beings bound to you and tied to each other. God who shows up with us always in order to comfort and heal and welcome us back into right healthy relationship.
Speaker 1:Would you be present to us today exactly as we need you to be reminding us that in our sexuality and our embrace, in our confusion and our searching, we have never been worth more or less than we are in this moment right now. Would you help us to know that we are always fully loved, always fully welcomed, embraced completely in your arms as we immerse ourselves in that love. That you call us to the trust, the respect, the kindness, and the affection that we see extended in you toward us today. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. Apologies. Today is all about our brains. How do we think well about sexuality in relationship? Next week, as about our bodies, what does it mean to be human with all of our needs and desires.
Speaker 1:And then finally, we wanna wrap up this series by talking about our souls, which is really about that hard work of intimacy and learning how to open ourselves up to each other. But if we want to start with our brains, and if we want to think well about sexuality as Christians, we need to start with the realization that the Bible is not particularly clear on very much at all when it comes to human sexuality. In fact, the bible is written over such large periods of time in such disparate cultural context that the specifics of the biblical stories seem to contradict each other wildly. At times, polygamy is okay. At times, prostitution gets a pass.
Speaker 1:Other times, marriage is little more than a financial transaction between two men, one who needs a wife and one who happens to have a daughter available. At other times however, sexuality in the bible becomes the culmination of desire and longing and deep deep love. Marriage becomes a commitment that two people make to each other as they journey and grow and learn what it means to be united. Sexuality becomes an expression of almost a sacred metaphor for our human longing for the divine. Some linguists have even argued that our English word sex comes from the Latin root, which means to be cut off or split through.
Speaker 1:The very language of sexuality then is caught up in this tension of feeling deeply disconnected and aching for healing. In the Bible, as a collection of text that reach toward the very heart of what it means to be human, they reflect all of this confusion and this longing, and it really is beautiful. As doctor Jennifer Wright Noost says in her book, unprotected text, which by the way gets full points for that title. She says, the bible does not offer us a systematic set of teachings or a single sexual code. It does, however, reveal sometimes conflicting attempts on the part of peoples and groups to define their sexual morality and to do so in the name and light of God.
Speaker 1:This is fascinating to me because what it tells me is that even though the bible doesn't hand us easy answers, even though there is no chapter and verse we can flip to in order to find some of our most cherished assumptions about sexuality, the bible is to all of its complexity inviting us, compelling us even to do the work. Because the bible may not give us easy answers, but it certainly does not allow us to shirk the responsibility of integrating our sexuality with our spirituality. So the people of God, as they have done for thousands of years, our job today is to read the story so well that we can, as Wright Neuss says, define our sexual morality in the name of God. See, I really do believe that God cares deeply about our sex. But not because God is a prude, because God has created us as integrated beings.
Speaker 1:Most fully alive when our emotional, mental, spiritual, and sexual experiences as humans align with each other, support each other, and point us in the same holy direction. So the question is, how does one, even one such as God, do all of this over such disparate periods in cultures and context and times? And the answer is, the same way God has always guided us. One small step at a time. See, one of the most important things that we have to understand when we come to the Bible is that it is an unfolding tale.
Speaker 1:The scriptures are this collection of stories and histories and poetry and prophecy. Each page relating to its particular moment in time, but over time, as those stories are collected and compiled and collated and compared and they're gathered together so that the big story is able to unfold in front of us, we slowly begin to see the narrative. See, when you read a novel and the characters grow and change over time, you don't see that as a contradiction. In fact, if you didn't see that, you probably wouldn't bother finishing the book. But this is actually a core Christian idea when it comes to the scriptures.
Speaker 1:That we believe that God has slowly revealed God's self to us until the time that we were able to see God in flesh in Jesus. For Christians, everything before Jesus, everything both in the bible and in history, everything before the incarnation was like seeing God through a glass darkly. It was really God and every word of the bible speaks to God, but it was hints of God and glimpses of God, moments where we were slowly one step at a time brought to the place of being able to recognize God with us. And now that we do, now that we see Jesus, we don't look back and see the moments where the worship of God was centered on a sacrificial system. Or the moments where God seemed to be primarily concerned with a particular group of people.
Speaker 1:The moments where God appeared more aloof or distant or where God appeared more violent or angry. We don't see this as a contradiction to what we ultimately see in Jesus. We understand this is part of the story that leads us to Jesus. As the first page of your journal says, the scriptures themselves lead us to the realization that Jesus is the only exact representation of the divine, and that God has always looked like Jesus even when we didn't see that clearly. In the Christian story, Jesus came not to change God's mind about us, but to repair, to heal, to complete, to fulfill our imagination of God.
Speaker 1:And so, this is how God guides us, slowly, gently, one step at a time. As Rob Bell writes, God meets people where they are and invites them to the next stage of their enlightenment. And when they reach that stage, God invites them to the next. That goes for you, that goes for me, that goes for all of human history. But it's not a symptom of God's confusion or sign of some changing priority within God because God isn't the one that's changing throughout the story, we are.
Speaker 1:And even this is an image of God's grace. That God stoops down to speak to us in whatever language we need to hear. Also that God can slowly, steadily, gently, lovingly invite us forward one small step at a time. Now, none of this is easy to parse and Christians often disagree about how to make sense of all this. But this in itself is core Christian theology.
Speaker 1:If not, we would all still be following the religion of second temple Judaism. By the way, our Jewish neighbors absolutely understand this. They are no more stuck in the second temple than we are. But it's why when it comes to the bible, this is often about that. And what I mean here is that often stories that seem to be very bound to their specific moment or circumstance are really about helping us to understand principles that transcend the particular and enable us to think well about the universal.
Speaker 1:And so what I want to do today is look at two examples of texts that are on their surface addressing very isolated moments in the story, but I think can actually help us to begin to think well about our sexuality if we pull back the curtain a little bit. And the first comes from a pretty standard source. The Song of Solomon is a notoriously sexy song. I'm gonna read you a few choice selections, all of these chosen for a family friendly audience because this book does not fit nicely into that category. By the way, Jewish communities in New Year, you were not allowed to read this book before you reached a certain age because they knew what was going on here.
Speaker 1:But here we go. I'm reading from Eugene Peterson's translation. The message, it says, kiss me full on the mouth. Yes, for your love is better than wine, headier than your aromatic oils. Take me away with you.
Speaker 1:Let's run off together. Yes, for your love is better than vintage wine. When my lover laid down beside me, my fragrance filled the room. His head resting between my breast, the head of my lover a sachet of sweet myrrh. Oh my dear friend, you are so beautiful.
Speaker 1:You, my dear lover, so handsome. This bed we share is a forest glen. We enjoy a canopy of cedars enclosed by cypress fragrant and green. So the story here in the opening chapters that a young woman sneaks into her lover's room, convinces him to run away with her, they dash out into the forest and they get it on. But what do we do with that in the context of the bible?
Speaker 1:I mean this book doesn't really mention God. It's not particularly well suited for Sunday reading. I mean unless you're looking for some romantic tips, what is the spiritual value to us? Now in the past, these questions have been asked and answered as well. At Jewish communities began to see this as a metaphor for God's love for Israel.
Speaker 1:Not sure about that one, but the early Christians followed suit by flipping it around to be about God's love for the church. Not very creative. However, one of the most interesting interpretations is actually one of the oldest. You see we call this book the Song of Solomon or sometimes the Song of Songs, but that's because the first line is actually the Song of Songs which concerns Solomon. So what does that mean?
Speaker 1:Well it probably does not mean it was written by Solomon, in fact that's probably the one thing it doesn't mean. So it leaves us with two options. The first is that it was a song written for Solomon. Perhaps a court poet. Someone who wanted to honor the king.
Speaker 1:Someone who wanted to present this poem as a gift to Solomon. And that's very possible. It was a highly praised text. There is even Jewish commentary in the Talmud that calls this the best of the Hebrew songs. But there is another interpretation.
Speaker 1:You see Solomon is perhaps best remembered for his wisdom. He is also though well known for his folly. The bible actually tells us that he was extremely wealthy and he had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Now in the days, back then, the wealthy and the king in particular could marry basically whoever he wanted and apparently he did. But there were also those who the king could not marry for political or perhaps religious reasons.
Speaker 1:Marriage was largely transactional at the time, and so the king may still want to sleep with someone, but they couldn't for some reason and those would become his concubines. This was strictly a sexual employment situation. In fact, the story of Solomon sounds absolutely nothing like the love and the affection and the devotion and the mutuality that we see expressed in this song concerning Solomon. I read earlier where the poet says, oh, my dear friend, you are so beautiful. You, my dear lover, so handsome.
Speaker 1:And you notice as you read the poem that it moves freely between the language of friendship and eroticism comfortably, Something that is almost antithetically opposed to the history of Solomon's court that we know. And so throughout the years, both in Jewish and Christian thought, many have inferred that the title of this poem is not a tribute to Solomon at all. It is in fact an indictment of the systems of sexual oppression that dominated the king's day. This is sexual poetry as social protest saying that everything the king embodies is wrong. See, this is really about that.
Speaker 1:And, yes, this book is a reminder of the beauty of our sexuality. It teaches us to celebrate our desire and pleasure. It guides us to enjoy our bodies and our connection to each other when that is bound up in mutuality and love. This book, this poem is also about ensuring that there is voice in our scripture that sits alongside all the praise and the admiration of Solomon and chooses to dissent. See, it's actually learning to read this poem in dialogue with other scriptures as a corrective to other ideas that it really begins to come alive for us today.
Speaker 1:Because this is a book that forces us to do the work, to encounter this profound celebration of healthy sexuality, but to encounter it intentionally set against the image and the example of Solomon that we are conditioned power and prestige to accept. This is a book that challenges us to say that maybe we are called to do more than perpetuate the sexuality that has been handed to us. Maybe we are called to do better than what we were given. Another example. Matthew five, Jesus is giving his sermon on the mount and we went through the sermon on the mount this fall.
Speaker 1:We left out this portion because well, planning. But let's look at what he says here in Matthew five verse 31. It has been said anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce. But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife except for sexual immorality makes her the victim of adultery. And anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Speaker 1:Now, we're gonna find our way back here next week. We look at the larger section, but a couple things here today. On its surface, this seems to be Jesus telling us about when we can and cannot get divorced, and this passage has definitely been used that way. There are still Christian groups that hold to a very rigid interpretation based on this passage. I wanna suggest however that is actually missing the larger point.
Speaker 1:Because just like the Song of Solomon, understanding what Jesus is responding to is key to understanding what he is saying. We have to remember here, Jesus is not, he's never teaching in a vacuum. It's not how Jewish theology worked. It was always a dialogue. It was always a debate between partners.
Speaker 1:And so what's happening here is that Jesus is once again wading into one of the hot button debates of his day. If you remember back to the fall, we talked about Hillel and Shammai, two of the most influential rabbis of the era. Hillel, if you remember, wanted to be more liberal in his approach to the law, allowing for more interpretation and nuance as he read the scriptures. Shammai was more strict in by the book. And you might think based on that you're on team Hillel, but hold on to that because in the Hebrew scriptures there are no particularly clear grounds for divorce.
Speaker 1:In fact, the section that Jesus refers to here comes from Deuteronomy and there it says that if a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him, he must write her a certificate of divorce and give it to her before he sends her from his home. Now, this certificate of divorce would then prove that she is no longer the property of her husband, freeing her to be remarried. Cards on the table, we are talking about a very patriarchal moment in history with incredible structural injustice. So be warned, we have to wade into all of that to understand the context here. But the bottom line was that a woman had no grounds for divorce.
Speaker 1:She could not initiate one. She could not even ask for one, even if her husband had kicked her out of the house. And what this meant was that any woman who was discarded in this way could not even find a new husband to take her in without being branded an adulteress. Well, for Hillel, who wanted to be more liberal with his interpretations, Deuteronomy simply says that a man can initiate a divorce because he finds something pleasing about his wife, and the most open liberal interpretation of that is basically anything goes. According to Hillel, even a burnt dinner was grounds for divorce.
Speaker 1:Shamae on the other hand, he wanted to be more strict and literal while he went about looking for actions that were clearly spelled out as being indecent in Torah and he created a long list of offenses that a woman could be divorced for. Not exactly a paragon of feminist virtue, but certainly better than leaving things solely to the capriciousness of men. But that is the debate that Jesus wades into. And he does two really important things here. First, at the very least, he reduces the list of acceptable offenses down even smaller than shame I did.
Speaker 1:He steps in to protect those who are at risk of being victimized by our cultural sexual mores. That in itself should be instructive to us as we develop our sexual ethic. But perhaps, even more importantly, what he really does is he reminds us again that this is often really about that. See, Jesus teaches us here that the specific ethical question of his day is barely bound up, not in some purely antiseptic reading of scripture, but at the intersection of our earnest pursuit of God and profound care for each other. See, the debate in his culture is being framed as if it was purely about scripture, but what Jesus knows is that ethics are always about people.
Speaker 1:In fact, what he shows us here is that sometimes our pursuit of purity at the expense of another is actually what creates this thing we think we despise. He says, divorce a woman, you send her away without papers, and you make her the victim of exactly what you've accused her of being. And what he's illustrating here, and so often our attempts at purity are bound up in our desire to justify ourselves at the expense of another. Because when it comes to the most vulnerable moments of our human experience of which sexuality is certainly one, the bible is trying to do far more than simply create a list of checklists to follow or give us some kind of license to pursue our selfish desires. The scriptures are instead are inviting us toward each other slowly, gently, one step at a time in ways that begin to care deeply for each other.
Speaker 1:And so, when the Song of Solomon challenges the sexual status quo, and when Jesus shifts the focus from finding loopholes to actually caring for each other, even at the point where a relationship is dissolved, what we get here are glimpses of the story of a God who continues to embody today sexuality where our deepest, deepest desires are bound up. They are tied to our care for each other. And whether you have been married for decades, whether you are in the thick of your dating life, maybe you are in a fulfilling committed relationship, or perhaps you are exploring your sexuality. Seeking wisdom and making choices about who you want to become. To recognize God's faithful, persistent, gentle presence in and through all of our relationships.
Speaker 1:Calling us simultaneously to pleasure, but also to commitment and mutuality and care to repair and healing even when things don't go well. This is where we begin to see the heart of a God who cares deeply about our sex because this is a God who cares deeply about us as human beings. Now, there's a lot more to be said. And, we still have two weeks left to talk about our bodies and our souls when it comes to our sexuality. But before that, we need a robust hermeneutic that helps us to read the scriptures well and orients us, yes, toward God, but also toward each other.
Speaker 1:So may your reading of scripture this week come alive in new ways. May your awareness of God's presence be transformed as it does. May your spirit begin to reach out and reconnect with the God who desperately wants to encounter you today. And may your sense of being, including your sexuality, slowly, steadily come to glorify the God who loves you always. Because all of this is always about that.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God, as we begin to speak about what it means to be human, to integrate all of the disparate aspects of who we are, our emotional and mental health, our relationships and sexuality. Would we begin to understand a narrative that points us not only toward you, but back toward each other. May we see in the Christ the expression of a humanity that puts others above self, that submits our desires and pleasures to the care and the kindness, the affection that we extend towards those around us. It knows that ultimately our longings are bound up in the ways that we care for each other.
Speaker 1:Not simply to gratify what feels good to us, but what creates mutuality and love among us. God, may our sexuality slowly, steadily be transformed into the likeness of Christ. And may every choice we make in all of our relationships come to glorify the God who is the source of all love. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.