Honoring Sexuality

Here is a link to my sermon from this past week. I shared the role of sexuality in the Life God Gives series here at Keystone Church of the Nazarene here in Okinawa Japan.

Just in case the link above doesn't work, here it is ready to copy and paste into your browser.

http://ftp.keystonenazarene.org/audio/2016-5-15.mp3

And here are some others if you are so inclined.

https://hospchap.sermon.net/main/main/20677191

Just Words

Mark 10:7-9

      There are few places where our culture clashes with the Truth of God than in passages like this. It lays out God’s role in creating man and woman, and the institution of marriage. There are no grey lines here, no dashes or dots, no easy escape, no get out of jail free cards.

      So many of us have had the words of our text read at our weddings. And yet, there are still so many broken marriages. So what goes wrong?

      To answer that question, we must look at the text. First, we must recognize that God made male and female, differences and all. Men are not rough, broken copies of women. Women are not weaker versions of men. God made us both. We are different. Each has strengths and weaknesses that God placed in us.

      When we come together we have a choice. We can either fight against those differences we see in the other, or we can see how our strengths complement their weaknesses and how their strengths complement our weaknesses. We make a matched set.

      I love really old furniture. One of the most beautiful sights are dovetail joints. This is where the wood on both sides are the joint are cut out to match the other side, like fingers intertwined. When the joint is done properly, it is almost impossible to break the joint. The overlapping of the fingers create an extremely strong bond. The best examples are found on the drawer front and side connections.

      In marriage we have the opportunity to find someone to match our strengths and weaknesses, to create a perfect fit. Almost everyone I talk to can tell me how their spouses are different than they are. It is those differences that make life interesting and sometimes challenging.

      Secondly, you must leave your parents. This isn’t simply physical leaving. In some cultures living with parents even after marriage is a normal thing, and yet they are able to make it work. When we leave our parents we must create a new bond with our spouse, one that will weather the storms of life as we lean toward each other as our primary support network. Our parents are still there, but we lean first and foremost to our spouse. Our ties of dependency get cut. We establish a new family and home. Financial and emotional ties are cut and new ones are formed.

      This can be a very difficult task, creating these new connections with your spouse. Life has a way of getting in the way. Work demands and the ever present bills mean that we must make sacrifices in order to continue surviving. And then a baby throws the whole balance to the curb. Their survival demands that we take a back seat, at least for the time being.

      Thirdly, we must become one flesh. This is more than the physical act of marriage. It is more than sex. It is this process by which we begin to move in sync with each other, like a flock of swallows undulating in the evening sky, no apparent leader, no apparent communication, but moving in sync with one another. Zigs and zags, swoops and loops. And they don’t bump into each other! They are one flock. We are one marriage, one couple, one unit.

      Finally, we must make sure no other person gets in the middle. Our ties must be to our spouse, emotional, physical, financial, and spiritual.

Exceptions

Mark 10:5-6

      One of the tendencies we have is to find the exception to the rule and then figure out a way to expand them so that we can do the thing we are told not to do. We put a meal on the business expense account, even though the ‘client’ we met with was just an old friend with no interest in the business. Or maybe we contact an old flame when relationship bumps seem too much just to see how they were doing. Or we get an extra email account just to make it less confusing. We tell ourselves ‘they wouldn’t/couldn’t/don’t understand’ so that we can build connections we feel we need.

      We also try to build in wiggle room by the way we define the terms of our discussion. If we say that the Bible culture was so different from our culture that things we read must be interpreted (dismissed), then we can rewrite the mandates of Scripture to say anything we want them to say and thus excuse our behaviors. Marriage no longer is between a man and a woman, but between any number of people who want to create ‘family’, because we all have the right to love whom we love. Or do we?

      The religious folks of Jesus’ day wanted to redefine marriage as well. They did this by expanding the command of Deuteronomy 24 which spoke about an undefined indecency that gets discovered after marriage and the provision to dissolve the marriage permanently. The point of the command is that there could be no reforming of the first marriage after a second marriage had occurred. The command was not about the dissolution of marriages, but about getting back together with your Ex.

      But the religious folks wanted to take this very specific command and expand it to allow the dissolution of marriage for any reason, or at least any reason on their very long list of reasons. They wanted to take the intent, the permanency of the marriage bond, and remove it from the equation. They wanted the ability to obtain a “get out of marriage” card that could be used at their discretion. And once divorce becomes an option, the permanency of the marriage bond becomes obsolete.

      Jesus takes them back to the origin of marriage, the LORD Himself. It was God’s design with God’s defines specifications. We have no right to modify those specifications. Male and female. Boy and girl. They are a matched set. Their parts fit perfectly.

      Male and female exist for one primary purpose: babies! The creatures of the earth teach us this. The LORD had Adam name all the creatures. They each had their match. Adam and Eve were such a match. They fit in with all the other animals, male and female. They could have babies, like all the other animals.

      As soon as we take this primary definition away from marriage, then we dismiss God’s voice in our lives. We must choose to stay within His lines. There is freedom there, and bondage outside.

A Lone Ranger

Proverbs 11:14

Being the leader can be a lonely task, but it shouldn’t be a task done alone. The leader bears the responsibility for the decisions made, but they shouldn’t make the decisions alone. The consequences for not having a group of advisors you trust to tell you the truth even when they disagree with you can be catastrophic.

And we need advisors who disagree with us sometimes. When we think our perspective is the only perspective we become myopic, unable to see beyond ourselves, beyond our small view of the world. We need to be able to see far into the future to see the second and third order affects of our actions. We need advisors, not “yes” men.

One of the downfalls of our political system, and especially in recent years, is the lack of true dialogue. We don’t have a way to talk through an issue. We state our points and the other nods their head and that is it. We so often don’t have any further understanding of why the other person is passionate about their perspective. So we get stuck.

This happens at every level of leadership. Even in a marriage we can get ‘stuck’ on an issue. We come back to the same points again and again without much movement. And usually the more we come back to the same points, the more we get stuck.

We get stuck at our workplaces. Unless you work in a very dynamic workplace, organizations tend to move slowly, change slowly, adapt slowly. The larger the organization, the slower and the more difficult the changes come.

We even have difficulty within ourselves when we want to change. The different parts of us have competing interests. Safety says to keep things the same even if they aren’t working very well. Pain relief says to make a change because anything would be better than the current situation. Echoes of the past enter the dialogue with all sorts of messages for and against the change.

So at every level we need some outside voices in our lives. We need advisors. We need people we trust speaking truth to us, even when truth hurts. We need alternative perspectives. They help us see blind spots and hidden things of which we were not aware.

We can’t afford to be a lone ranger. We need each other.