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God problems 2: IN THE CULTURE in which the early Church grew up, sexual permissiveness and experimentation were just as common as they are in ours, and Christianity’s teaching about sex was just as unpopular. The biblical vision of the place of sex, like its understanding of the place of money and power, is one that no society is ever going to hear with joy, because it requires us to live unselfishly, and to assume that instant self-gratification is not our main aim in life. Equally, no society can pretend that sex is unimportant. It is not just the Church that appears to be obsessed with sex. If you read any newspaper, watch any television programme, listen to people talking, it is clear that our whole culture is fascinated by the subject. The results of the abuse of sex are all too clear, in broken families, fragmented societies, rape, child-abuse, the AIDS pandemic. Sex does matter. Yet it is equally clear that the abuse of wealth and power devastates societies, both at the national and the international level. Look at the burden of debt that is crippling so many African economies and killing people in their millions. Look at the way in which a dictator such as Robert Mugabe will do anything to hang on to power. Yet these are not the issues that are threatening to split Christian Churches apart. The two things that have posed the greatest threat to Christian unity in the modern era have been the ordination of women and that of gay people. The problem with this anomalous response to biblical teaching is that it makes the Christian stand on sex sound arbitrary rather than be part of a whole vision for the world. It seems that Christians are insisting on biblical faithfulness in relation only to sexual sin and nothing else. It is as though sexual sin has become the only kind of sin we recognise, and, even then, we are not consistent in our responses. When we are talking about cohabitation or divorce, as opposed to homosexuality, we continue to hold an ideal of lifelong marriage in tension with a pastoral reality that can include forgiveness and the chance of a new life. Our inconsistency stems, perhaps, from our unwillingness to look at our life as Church. The emphasis on monogamy and fidelity in sexual relations is not just some arbitrary fancy on God’s part, but part of how we learn about him. Fundamental to it is the assumption that this learning must be done through our relating to others. God seeks to build a distinctive community, who can witness to his life by the way we behave. The Christian witness about sex is that it must involve commitment, but also repentance and forgiveness. God commits himself to the world he has made, and never gives up on it. He gives himself to it with constancy and creativity, coming to share our lives as the Son and to live with us and in us in the Spirit. He doesn’t do this out of a sense of grim drudgery and determination. On the contrary, he does it because he loves us, and because he created us to be like him, sharing his life. God’s life is shared action, shared love, shared joy, because God is Trinity. We are designed to be like that, to be complete only when part of a unified whole, where our diversity is valued and given meaning by being one vital ingredient that we bring to another. Of course, a faithful, committed, joyful sexual relationship should not be the only way in which Christians demonstrate the life of the Trinitarian God. Our whole life together as God’s people should contain those elements of fidelity and wonder at our complementary differences. In much current Christian talk, sex is being made to carry the whole weight of a theology that should be being borne by what we want to say about the Church. It might be just because we have such a weak theology of the community, of the individual, of a just society, and much else besides that we have such a poor lived example of it, and so can’t make people see how sex fits in. We can’t find an easy answer in the current debates because we have no context for the questions. Suppose we were to put the energy that we are now pouring into discussions about homosexuality into building a witnessing community? A community where we don’t give up on each other, where we forgive and are forgiven, where our differences are a chance to learn rather than a threat. The life of such a community might then teach us how to live our private lives better, too. God is asking us to demonstrate, in all our embodied relationships, a picture of joy, of commitment, of unity through difference. It is, potentially, a picture of relationships so secure and abiding that they have love to spare, as God the Trinity does. Their stability and excitement spills out around them, encouraging others to take that risk, creating a secure place from which they can venture out, as God the Trinity does. God knows — who better — the importance of incarnational symbols. If we could begin to see the point of this one, perhaps we would get better at the others, too, and truly begin to embody our God. Lent task READ the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). What kind of a community is envisaged here? If you started from such a vision, what might you want to say about cohabitation, divorce and marriage after divorce, and homosexuality? Find out what your own Church’s policy on marriage after divorce is, and why.
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