Lust: "I And You"

Lust: "I and You"

Seven Deadly Sins Sermon Series—Lust
February 24, 2008
Romans 13:8-10

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has
fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not
murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are
summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a
neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

I’m going to continue this Lenten sermon series on the Seven Deadly Sins by looking at
the sin of lust, one of the more uncomfortable sins to talk about, and certainly to preach
about. I think anything having to do with sex or the possibility of sex, or even
sensuality, is difficult, especially in a church setting. If we were a different kind of
church, perhaps one that was more fundamentalist, it would be easier for us to
dispense with the subject—don’t do it, and don’t do anything sexual, or sensual outside
of marriage, and that would be the end of the sermon. But, of course, we are
congregation that embraces people who are denied the right to marry, and so its not so
simple as that, really, but it was never really all that simple to begin with, if you look at
the New Testament texts themselves, especially 1 Corinthians, and how it understands
the role of sex in the life of the early Christians. To be honest, that subject is whole
different sermon, and something I may teach a class on at some later date.

But I think the other layer of complexity is the problem we preachers have in standing
up here and admitting to be a sexual person, and how uncomfortable that makes other
people, and even us, because pastors are supposed to be just a little bit holy than the
rest of us, right? Even pastors like me have this discomfort, someone who adds a little
bit more complexity to the picture, especially within a church context. So, a few weeks
ago, I may have hinted that I too have struggled with pride, another one of those sins,
and certainly last week, I shared with you a very personal struggle with envy, especially
in my professional life, and because I don’t want to break a pattern, I’m going to admit
to this week’s sin as well. Not that you wanted to know that, or that you wanted a
confessional from me every week, but because it is important that before I get up here
to speak against these sins, I need you to know that I have struggled with that very
thing that most of you have probably struggled with in your life. To be so confessional
about something like that before you, it’s a bit scary, because we live in a culture that is
both highly sexualized—we see sex and sexual images all over the place—and yet we
are highly uncomfortable talking about sex, or admitting to our sexual failings, so to
speak.

And to that point: do you remember years ago, in the late seventies, when then
President Carter admitted to Playboy magazine that he had, in his words, “lust in his
heart” for women other than his wife? I mean, even I remember something about that,
and I don’t think I had made it to the age of 10 yet, and how scandalous it seemed for a
sitting American President to admit to such a thing! But the worse part of it, in many
ways, was the derision Carter got for it from people in the media, as if it quaint to say
such a thing, at best, and, at worse, it was ridiculous that one should ever admit that
our sexual wants might sometimes, somehow become a negative thing, The people
who were making fun of him for his honesty, well, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t ever
committed this particular sin—its just that they didn’t think it was such a big deal, at the
very least. Of course, Playboy magazine is probably going to ask that kind of question,
just as Bon Appetit magazine might have asked him about food, so it wasn’t any
surprise that the subject came up. I am counting on you not being like the media on
this issue—so condemning, so mocking—but there is good news: there won’t be any
details in my confession, at least not from me.

But Carter’s experience with the press is awfully telling about how uncomfortable we are
with this issue, with sex and sexuality, and with this thing called lust. To begin with, we
Christians have a terrible legacy when it comes to matters of the bedroom, to be frank.
Unlike our Jewish forbearers, we’re a mess when it comes to sex, and it mostly has to
do with our OVER EMPHASIS on our sexual failings as the worst kinds of failing, the
worst kinds of sin. I think one of the reasons the reporters and commentators reacted
so negatively to Carter’s comments is because of the negative impressions we
Christians have left behind on our young people, as if the church was ultimately
obsessed with sex and its regulation. And for many centuries, the church was
seemingly obsessed with sex, because, well, we humans are obsessed with it. Even
Paul gets into the act in the middle of 1 Corinthians, so it has been there for quite
awhile, though one could argue that the teachings of the church, however complex they
sometimes became on this issue, became an obsession, because, as I said before,
sexuality is a very human obsession. Still, we, the church, has overdone it, and it has
come back to bite us, so to speak, like it did with the situation with Carter—people don’t
take us very seriously because, well, so much of what we have said has sometimes
been wrong, or we just somehow made the management of our sexuality or worst, the
management of other people’s sexuality, the centerpiece of what it meant to be a
disciple of Jesus Christ…and that, my friend, is crazy talk: it was then, and it is now,
whomever you hear it from.

And because of all that crazy talk deep in the history of the church, and even in our day
and age, we can’t seem to talk about issue like lust, one of those places where the
wisdom of Christ can show us another way of seeing the world, and seeing other
people. And there is wisdom, deep wisdom about why this sin is so destructive, as
destructive as pride and envy are, and certainly all the others, though not more so—
gluttony is as deep a flaw as lust, so don’t get wrapped up in the negative messages we’
ve often heard in the past. Lust is something as ancient as Adam and Eve, and even
St. Augustine, in his confessions, shares his deep struggle with desire gone astray—he
once said that men’s sins are sins of the eye, and that is certainly true. Pornography is
an almost uniquely male phenomenon and prostitution is the same kind of
phenomenon, so perhaps Augustine was right. Still, this is not just a male
phenomenon—females also struggle with this sin, though I suspect it’s a little bit more
complex than what you find in the male half of the population—watching the TV show
SEX AND THE CITY and talking with some good female friends has convinced me that
this lust business is not just a one-sided affair.

Still, the question needs to be asked: what makes lust wrong? I’m not one of those
folks that believes that something is automatically wrong or right because the tradition
of the church or the Bible says its wrong, or right, for that matter. The Bible says
slavery is morally doable, is morally OK—and I don’t believe that to be right, so I think
its fair question to ask, this question about what makes lust a sin. Well, I think it goes
back to some of the deep wisdom from our ancient Jewish forbearers, some wisdom
that a modern Jewish interpreter spelled out in one of his great books. Martin Buber, a
man whose influence is great in both Jewish and Christian Circles, once wrote an
important little book he called I & THOU—he said that we humans must see the other,
other humans beings, as Thou’s—that is, we must see each other as fellow human
beings, worthy of respect like I am worthy of that respect—that I must see a You across
the table from me, maybe even in our beds. I must see them for the precious child of
God they are, the same as I am. And for Buber, the mistake we humans so often make,
the sin we so often commit, is that we don’t see a “you,” a “thou” across the table from
us, or in the bed with us—instead, we see an it, a thing, an object, whose sole purpose
is for our use—we treat people like things, like an “it,” as if their sole purpose was for
our use, or for our pleasure, or even for our emotional needs. We treat people as if
they were objects, things, whose purpose was their personal usefulness to us, sexual,
emotional, or otherwise. You know, in Matthew 5 Jesus told us not to lust—in fact, he
says that if we look at someone as with lust, we might as well have committed the
adultery we’re already thinking about. Do you know what I think the difference between
lust, on the one hand, and sexual desire, which is a normal and good and wonderful
thing, on the other hand? Desire sees a human being, someone whose humanity I can
see, an “other” who is as real as I am, and worthy of the respect I expect from others.
But lust doesn’t see a person, lust sees a thing, an “it”, whose sole purpose for
existence is my pleasure, whose body is simply there for my usefulness, and whom I
don’t see as another human being, worthy of my best wishes and my respect.

The tradition of the church has been that the opposite of lust is self-control, but to do
be honest, I think tradition has gotten it wrong, at least in this case. In reality, I think the
opposite of lust is desire, a desire that wants to share and who sees the beauty and
goodness that God sees in that person. And one of the other reasons I think the
opposite virtue of lust is desire is because of something else in our tradition, and that is
the absurd, but probably true, idea of the incarnation, this idea that God so desired to
connect with human beings, to save them, to give them wholeness, that God came to
us as one of us. It is the messy doctrine of the incarnation that challenges all those
awful moments in Christian history when the church seems to dismiss or denigrate the
human body, and even sexuality. To save us, to make us whole, to redeem us, God
did not stay in the heavens, but instead God came to us as one of us, in the person of
Jesus of Nazareth. Speaking of crazy talk, this is one of those doctrines, but it seems
awfully true, at least to me, and if it is true, that desire for us humans was strong within
God that God chose to share our experience of being bodied selves…well, I think it
says something about the value of this flesh and blood we carry with us in the world. If
the body is the place and space that God connects to us in Jesus Christ, in being
incarnated thousands of years in Christ, then maybe it remains that important place of
connection even now. And that is why when we humans look at each others bodies as
if they were only “things” or “its,” we fail to see what God sees in them: places where
God and humans meet in this world, which makes our bodies a sacred space.

So, when we lust after the body, we also sort of dismiss the incarnation, and we fail to
see the God underneath the skin, the soul beneath the flesh, the divine within the
body, of that particular person. You know, some of early doctrinal battles of the church
were over how to understand the body, and every time in the past the church said “no”
to elements in its midst that wanted to dismiss or punish the body, and it refused to go
down that path, at least early on, because it knew to do so would be to turn our back on
the very instrument God used to save this world, the body of Jesus Christ, hanging on
that cross, and later resurrected in his body. Even now, there is a strand in our
tradition that says we will one day spend eternity in our bodies, a new kind of body, but
a body nonetheless. Our Christian faith places that much emphasis on the body
because it really is a good place, a place where desire and goodness can meet and do
meet all the time. And the measure of its goodness is determined by the value we
place on our partner, that person who has a soul beneath their skin, the divine
underneath their flesh, someone who is not an “it,” or a thing, but someone that God is
deeply in love with, as much as God is deeply in love with us.

The passage before us today is a reminder of where desire should ultimately be rooted
in, and that is the same place we talked about last week when we were struggling with
envy. Love is the moral fulcrum for determining whether or not something is right or
wrong in this world and that includes sex and sexuality. Now, when I say love, I do not
mean emotional love, or romantic love—I mean love the way Paul and the ancients
meant love, as something we do in this world, something we show in our actions,
whatever our feelings towards another might be. We seem to assume that Paul’s
famous chapter on love in 1 Corinthians has to do with romantic love—you know, love
is patient, love is kind, etc—but it simply doesn’t have anything to do with the heart. He
really does mean love that is grounded in community and in the very practical ways we
treat each other, whatever we may feel in a given moment. And so this love begins,
ironically enough, with advice on not what we should do to or for others, but what we
should not do to another human beings—and he lists them out, and then he says that
“love does no wrong to a neighbor,” one of those ideas that has become the first rule of
ethics, especially medical ethics. The sin of lust tempts us to do wrong to our neighbor
by first dehumanizing them, by seeing them not as a person but a thing, an it. And yet
there is another way, and that way is to love as God loves us, and that means
embracing that same desire that torn open the heavens in order to be with us. To want
connection, deep connection, with another human being…that is a good and wondrous
thing. We begin our embrace of that goodness, that desire, by following the principle
that we will do no wrong to another, and that means we don’t ever forget that the one
we wish to connect with is as human as we are, full of the mystery and goodness that
God has placed within each of us. The measure of a life, as I’ve said in another
settings, is not who we love but how we love in this world, and so we begin with this
work with doing the right thing by those are who others that matter, that matter to God,
and to other people, like family and friends, and who ought to matter to us as well.
Amen.