Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:27-30:
After receiving the law from God on Mount Sinai, Moses came down from the mountain and said to the people, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I talked God down and there are now only 10 commandments. The bad news is that adultery is still one of them.” I’ve heard that joke from several clergy over the years, but the one that most surprised me was when conservative theologian and Anglican Bishop NT Wright told it. But I thought it perhaps maybe appropriate for today’s message when we talk about the sin of lust, which is one of the seven deadly sins, and compare it against Jesus telling us that those who are pure in heart are blessed.
Now if you were to just listen to what seems to be
emphasized in church, or talked to secular society about what the church
emphasizes as the primary sin, it would probably revolve around sexual
morality. And yet, Jesus has very little to say about it, especially when
compared to other things, like money. Indeed, Jesu eats with prostitutes and
says that they will enter the Kingdom of God before the more religious folks.
Now it’s not because there aren’t sinful attributes, but because of their
desire for salvation not being self-righteous. They know that they have fallen
short of the glory of God, and know they need God’s grace in their lives, and
so are seeking it out, and Jesus too is seeking them out as lost sheep. But,
what we also have to know about sexual morality in the church is that our understanding
of, and conversation about, sexuality is extremely narrow. We rarely, if ever,
talk about celibacy, for example, even though that was the preferred
arrangement in the early church, or at least according to Paul. But it’s
completely ignored today.
The other thing to keep in mind is that much of the church’s position about sexuality is not really scriptural, but instead comes to us from St. Augustine, who, to put it politely, had trouble controlling his own urges, his own lust, and so therefore felt that everyone needed to be controlled. Indeed, he even once prayed to God, “Grant me chastity and continence, just not yet.” And the final piece to keep in mind is that nearly all of the moralists over time have been men, and so their views about sex and sexuality have been limited, but have been applied to both men and women, and they harbor many of their fears about women, and we can even see that in the rules surrounding adultery that Jesus addresses in today’s gospel passage. But before we dig a little deeper into that, we need to step back a little bit to look at lust itself.
