Leave & Cleave: Sex, Singleness & Marriage

“Leave and Cleave”

Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church –Sunday, April 19, 2015

Text: I Corinthians 6: // Series: Messy Church

Good morning.  Happy Mother’s Day.  This past week, I came downstairs and our daughter was on the computer doing some homework.  I came up behind her and asked what she was doing because I noticed that she had Google’s search page up and she had more than filled the entire search bar with text.  She informed me that she was work on a sample test for her social studies class to which she didn’t know all of the answers and so she had typed the whole of the questions from her sample test into the search bar and the Google was going to give her the answers that she needed.

Sometimes getting an answer to your questions is a more complicated than typing a few key words or a lot of words into a search engine.  So where do you go turn when you need advice?  Advice that is more complicated than an answer a search-engine could retrieve for you.  Because some questions are just more nuanced or morally challenging or messy than the Google can assist us with.

Here at Jericho Ridge, we are teaching through a series this spring called Messy Church as we study the New Testament book of I Corinthians.  This whole part of the Bible is a series of letters written to churches under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit by a man named Paul who was an apostle and leader in the first century Christian movement.  And these early Christians in the city of Corinth has questions.  Lots of questions.  Good questions.  Complicated questions.  Which is normal, because their world, like ours, is a complicated place.  And they were wrestling with what it meant to follow God, to live with wisdom in a culture with very, very different ideas on issues of morality, marriage, singleness, what it means to be a good husband or a good wife or mother…  So because Google wasn’t’ invented yet, they did the next best thing.  They wrote a letter to the Apostle Paul to ask him a series of vexing questions that were on their minds. And he wrote back to them with a whole bunch of advice and teaching that has benefit not only for them in their day and time, but also for you and me today.  That’s the origin of the books of I & 2 Corinthians Today we move into a section in the book where Paul begins to answer these questions they asked him. Just so you don’t get confused, they didn’t ask him any questions about Mother’s Day. So while I will be speaking at points to mothers, this is primary a message about sexual immorality.  Happy Mother’s Day ☺  I was sharing with a friend what I was preaching on and they said “isn’t that more of a Father’s Day topic?” I asked them why they thought that and they said their observation was that on the second Sunday in May the church lifts up women to tell them how awesome they are and then in June say to guys how pathetic they are and tell them to stop looking at porn.  So this morning we’re just evening the playing field a bit here this morning at Jericho Ridge.  But in this section of I Corinthians, Paul is going to point out a series of things to embrace and cling to or cleave to, and some things to leave behind or to get rid of in their lives and ours.  Let’s look together at I Cor 7:1-7.

The first question they ask Paul is a question about marriage and sexuality…  Should a person marry of stay single?  So Paul replies to them and says “It’s a good thing to be married, BUT…”    

It’s also an incredible gift to be single.  Their question to Paul is “should we get married?” and he says “well, if you want to get married, I guess that’s not a SIN!” ☺.  Paul begins his discussion on marriage and sexual ethics by elevating and giving credence to people who are single.  Let’s talk about this for just a minute, church, and let’s be frank.  In this season of Jericho Ridge’s life, it can be a very hard to be a single adult here.  There are families everywhere.  Babies in the info sheet every other weekend.  And this can send of a subtle or not so subtle signal as to who is welcome here.  The suburban North American church, Jericho included, has been guilty at times of orbiting around and bending everting toward families with kids.  This is in some ways a product of our demographics and environment here in Willoughby, but it also can become something that verges on idolatry if it placed too high in our minds and hearts.  Some of this elevation of family is what can make Mother’s Day so hard for some people.  By elevating one category – families or women who have children – we can inadvertently make others feel marginalized.  Those who struggle with fertility issues. Those who have lost babies. Those who choose not to have kids.  Those who are in the process of adoption or want to adopt but the financial hurdles are significant.  Those who are single – by choice or by life circumstance.  For all these and other categories of people, Mother’s Day can be hard.  So hear me out for a moment if you find yourself feeling less than on Mother’s Day…  The church doesn’t intentionally want to hurt you by celebrating mothers.  We don’t want to be glib.  Know that we love and value you and that you are welcome here.  This is NOT a place where you are not a whole person unless you have a ring on your finger and a minivan.  You are loved and valued even if we don’t’ always do the best job of communicating that.  

Part of this is that our culture can send pretty strong messages about marriage and family but looking I love how Paul begins his discussion on marriage – he The Bible elevates singleness, not as a burden to carry but as a gift to be embraced.  (Granted, some of you are trying hard to return that gift to sender and find someone to date and marry and that’s OK if that’s what God has for you).  But some elements of our culture tell you that if you’re single, you are not a whole person.  Look what Paul says

“It is good to abstain from sexual relations” (1 Cor. 7:1) – celibate life.  Some people have been given this as a gift from the Lord – it should he honoured and not continually asked of them “so… when are you going to find Mr. or Mrs. Right?”  Paul says

“I wish everyone were single, just as I am”  (I Cor. 7:7).   He says this because there are advantages and benefits to being single, just like there are to being married.  In Paul’s case, he had the freedom to live out his calling as a missionary more fully as a single adult than if he were married and had to think about the concerns of others (look at 7:32 and following).  

We don’t have time to go into his interesting reasons as to why and when someone who is single should get married or what happens if you marriage dissolves or if you are married to a person who doesn’t share your faith, all of which are packed into chapter 7 so read those this week.  What I want us to see here is simply and clearly that the Bible affirms and not only affirms but elevates singleness and elevates and calls us to a live of sexual purity.  Our culture tells us very much the opposite: Our culture tells us “you can’t possibly live a healthy, meaningful life without sex!”.  So this is where Paul turns his attention next – to the topic of sex.  We’re just going to talk about all of the traditional mother’s day topics today ☺.  The text   

2) It’s a good thing to have sex BUT…

Only within a certain context.  

What context is that?  Genesis 1-3, God sets out an ideal template for human flourishing.  In Gen 2:24, immediately after God has crated both man and women, He says “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.”  One flesh is the Bible’s polite way of saying they have sex.  

I don’t know about you, but growing up, I missed this message that sex was good.  I think part of this is that the church has often defined the Christian life negatively… We don’t do this. Don’t do that.  This has tainted the attitude and teaching of the Protestant church on human sexuality.  I know for me that this was the primary message I heard growing up about sexuality – that sex was bad.  (Ring off – bad, bad, bad, bad…. Good!).  While this is true, the church has not done a great job of explaining why sexual intimacy rightfully takes place only within a covenant marriage relationship intended to unite a man and a woman for life” (Article 11).  

To understand the response that Paul is giving to their question, it’s helpful to us to do a little bit of thinking about history and to understand life in the first century in the city of Corinth.  If you asked anyone in the ancient world what Corinth was known for, they would have responded with one word: SEX.  Corinth was a place to indulge any passion that came into your head.  Fully.  With no restrictions or restraints.  It was a place of sexual perversion that would make 50 Shades of Grey look like a children’s book.    

One of the main things Corinth was known for was prostitution – both same and opposite gender.  Men in Corinth were completely free to express themselves sexually at any time they felt any urge or need to do so.  This led to a profoundly de-humanizing place for women.  They were treated as property and were disposable.  When Paul says “one wife, lease.  Husbands, fulfill your wife’s’ sexual needs… and “the husband gives authority over his body to his wife.” (7:4) This was radical, radical stuff!  Christians in Corinth are trying to live out in that setting God’s design for marriage – a relationship characterized by fidelity, by mutual love, by trust!  It was an incredibly hard lifestyle change for a person to make to become a follower of Jesus.  

Here’s Paul’s point in this part of the discussion: when you choose repentance and faith in Jesus, that affects every single part of your life.  It doesn’t just create a category called “religion” where you pencil in spirituality for 90 minutes on a Sunday morning.  Christianity is not a set of principles to which you give mental assent and then move on with your life the way it was.  When you come to that place of saying yes to Jesus, of opening your life to Him, your relationship with God becomes your primary relationship.  It shapes and defines who you are.  First and foremost, you are not a wife or mother you are a follower of Jesus, a disciple first, a child of God – bellowed and cherished and loved by your heavenly Father.  And that shapes all other decisions, actions in the present and it will ultimately shape your future.  If you are here today and you are living in a place where religion is one compartment of your life, sexuality is another, motherhood is one, job is one, etc… my deepest prayer for you would be to have a category destroying experience and today would be the day you reframe your identity not in terms of who you are but WHO you belong to – that you would submit the whole of your life to Jesus and allow Him to form and shape every part of who you are.  This is a process that begins right now with a prayer of faith – say “yes” to God, and continues on into eternity.  Meg and I would love to pray with you following the gathering if that is your heart’s desire – to give your life to God.  To allow Him to shape your identity and you can begin to experience what it means to be fully alive, fully human in relationship with a loving God.

When we think about identity, we have a lot of ways in our culture of expressing this, don’t we?  We have our little descriptors we put on Facebook profiles or Twitter handles.  We like to broadcast this in various ways.  One way is those little stick figures people put on their cars – you’ve seen those?  Some of them are quite hilarious – like this one broadcasting they are unhappy with their marriage “position available” (some inappropriate).  But what we put on our cars and even our cars themselves can actually be very powerful statements of identity.  You see a purple W on Pastor Keith’s’ car and you know he is a Huskies fan.  You see on large flag with the number 12 on it and you know the person is a “Seahawks fan”.  Our little slogans or icons or bumper stickers have a fascinating way of revealing our connections and beliefs.  This was no different in the ancient world.  In Corinth, they had little expressions that summed up what they believed about the world.  Flip back with me to I Cor 6:12-13…  

The people of Corinth were no different than you and I in this regard.  They had little expressions or slogans that declared identity & revealed what they believed.  

One of them you see in quotation marks there in vs 12 - “I am allowed to do anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12) Makes sense in their permissive culture.  Modern equivalent “If it feels good, do it!”

Paul challenges this and says “really?  If you simply follow every whim or desire, you are actually not free at all.  You have been mastered by your impulses.  This is why Paul teaches so directly on sexual ethics.  Because sex is a powerful thing.  This is why the Bible says so much about it – In Chapt 7 we are reminded that you do not use it in marriage as a reward or punishment.  Sex is not to be about power or control.  Sex is not about meeting my own personal psychological or emotional needs.  This is a BIG challenge to individualist and autonomy.  That there is notion in our culture that I should be free to express myself how I want to.  But using both sex and also eating, Paul says essentially, “Just because you can do something, doesn’t’ mean you should do it.”   It may be technically legal but spiritually inappropriate.

The stakes are high in this conversation.  Look at what Paul says just above this in I Cor 6:9-11

This is where I want to point us in our time today.  Not to places of guilt or shame.  But to remind us that we are called to live out our identity as those who have been cleansed, made holy.  No matter what your sexual past, the mistakes you have made, the wrongs that have been inflicted on you by others, you have the possibility of living out a new story.  Of being made right with God but calling on the blame of Jesus.  By living in such a way that you honouring God with your body.  But we don’t just will ourselves there.  We need to invite the work of the Holy Spirit and the gift of a trusted community to walk with us in that journey.     That’s the real truth about Sex.  I love how Lauren Winner puts this in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity”

“We are all guilty. We all sin…  But the fact that we fail to obey Christ doesn’t disqualify us from leading or serving. It qualifies us. Because the church is the place of repentant sinners where we gather together to fight the good fight of faith!”

We are going to move into a time of responding to God in worship in song.  Sometimes we call people for prayer; my sense is that this is a time where each of us can do business with God in prayer – you may want to express your desire to follow God by using your body – raising your hands.  Kneeling as you are able.  As the worship in song team comes to lead us in two songs that speak to our desires to live in this way, I want to pray a pray for you and me that comes to us from our friends in Episcopal Church has a prayer called the collect for purity: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires know, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleans the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify they holy name; through Christ Jesus our Lord.”  

Let’s respond to God in worship together.