1 Corinthians 6:12-20
There is more to Scottish literature than J.K. Rowling and Robert Louis Stevenson, though I tend to forget some authors are Scottish, like Arthur Conan Doyle, who I tend to place in the generic category “British.”
One author sadly overlooked by Americans is the late Alasdair Gray, a William Blake-like figure who combined the visual and written arts over the course of his career. I first picked up a copy of his unconventional 1981 masterpiece “Lanark” while backpacking across Europe in 1993, then went on to read the then recently published “Poor Things.” Both works might be categorized as “experimental fiction,” though I think a more accurate description might be “project fiction,” the sort of books that require your full engagement.
You may have heard about “Poor Things” in recent weeks, for it has been made into a feature film and there is a whole lot of “buzz,” to use Hollywood lingo. The film stars Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, and Willem Dafoe, so not exactly a B-movie.
The plot centers on conflicting accounts about Bella Baxter, who may or may not be a “Frankenstein-like” creature produced when an infant’s brain is transplanted into the body of a drowned woman. It is way more engaging than it sounds, though every bit as weird as it sounds.
The work explores sensuality and inhibition, as well as who gets to tell the story of a woman’s sexuality, for there are two primary narrators in the text, Bella’s nominal husband and Bella herself, a framing narrative from a fictional character named Alasdair Gray, and the actual Gray who received the actual royalties.
Not shockingly, even here, it is mostly men speaking for and about a woman.
And funny enough, “Poor Things,” the film, made the news and brought me back to “Poor Things” the novel just as we were approaching this week’s text, selected some time ago, dealing with the body, and especially fornication. Then, as sometimes happens, the Holy Spirit laughed, and I received a question about our church’s official position on polyamory.
So I guess we get a break from the hellish state of the world, and particularly the competing genocidal regimes in the Middle East, and can just focus on something simple: sex.
And for the record, we do not have an official position on polyamory.
We believe in the right of Christian conscience, which is to say that we are prayerful in our decision making on moral issues, in dialogue with one another, with scripture, and with our tradition, but in the end, we each have to make decisions about morality for ourselves.
There are limits, of course, around consent and violence and exploitation. And admittedly, I’m an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy who thinks two people is complicated enough and I tend to associate open relationships with cults, but I try to be a lot less judge-y and a lot more love-y. Quite apart from being gay, I watched Grandma shack-up with a partner for decades, unable to marry because of pension rules, and I have known many people who have faced loneliness as loved ones slipped into disability and dementia. I just don’t think God is that big of a jerk to punish people for seeking companionship. Though people certainly are, judgmental jerks that is.
Let me offer a quote from one of the most important figures in American culture that you might not know, Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” “Futurama,” and other generation-defining cartoons. Groening’s counsel is this: “When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.”
Jesus had siblings. It says so right there in the Bible.
Peter was married, also in the Bible.
Sure it was an ancient patriarchy, and the belief that blood was life created both kosher butchery and weirdness around menstruation. There is rape and revenge and miraculous babies in the Bible, just as there are in the myths of other ancient cultures. But the sum total is that the Bible is not anti-sex. That’s just Paul, and maybe not completely Paul, who famously said that we all have the same status when “in Christ,” neither male nor female, though he certainly scolded those who thought belief and grace were a hall pass for bad behavior.
With Paul, it isn’t just sex, but the body generally that is inferior. He is a constructive theologian working, like others of his faith and time, to explain the failure of covenant promises in this embodied life, imagining that if bad people thrive and good people suffer, then there must be some other life after the body in which justice is done. With no evidence that he was married and with his undertone of self-hate, I sometimes wonder if he wasn’t gay in a decidedly homophobic context.
Then along comes Augustine in the 4th century, who was most definitely not gay. Augustine is one of the towering figures in early Christianity after the Apostolic Age. He was from an upper-class family of North African Berbers who remained aspirational despite having climbed above so many of their own people. His mother, who was a Christian and a snob, insisted that he only marry a woman of his own social class. Augustine obliged, sort of, for he took a lover of many years and fathered a child while never marrying. He eventually converted to Christianity and became a priest, but he brought with him a disdain for the material world influenced by a philosophical school, Neoplatonism, and a religion, Manichaeism, with which he had been associated for a decade.
Of course, Christian weirdness about sex and the body couldn’t exist at all without the base of patriarchy, and as much as I appreciate anthropology and accept natural selection, I just don’t get it. Pandora’s box may be mythological chaos, but what we see as chaos is really just the randomness built into the complex self-ordering systems of creation, often on physical and temporal scales we find difficult to comprehend. Besides, there is the question of whether Pandora was the source of the chaos, whether it was Helen who caused the Trojan War, or whether that isn’t a bit like blaming the rape victim because she was wearing a short skirt.
So let’s simplify: You cannot believe in a good God and believe that creation is bad. You can’t even believe in a good God and believe that creation was originally good but somehow became corrupted, for our definition of God would mean that a corrupted creation would have to be God’s choice, which would not be good.
Creation is good. Bodies are good. Sex is good. We are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made as the psalmist declared, and people land and have always landed somewhere on spectrums of biological gender, emotional gender, sexual drive, and affectional orientation, and do not always stay in the same place on those continuums their entire lives.
We receive information about all that is not us in the world through our senses. We smell that morning coffee before we taste it, thanks be to the Almighty, but there is no Darwinian explanation for Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” or Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” no explanation for a canvas by Mary Cassatt which communicates nothing and yet everything about maternal love, no evolutionary explanation for the distillation of inter-sectional being in America captured in a poem by Audre Lorde.
Sex is a sensual affair, a celebration of miraculous bodies, young and beautiful and aging and scarred. It should only be given, never taken, by those who are capable of giving it, so we draw appropriate lines around age and power and consent.
The intersection of sex and marriage and property and reproduction complicates matters, culture being built on biological imperatives, evolutionary drives that maybe don’t make so much sense anymore. Sure the species had to survive and the tribe was in competition for seemingly finite resources, especially in places like the Ancient Near East, where drought and pestilence were all to common. But we most certainly do not need to impose a bunch of cultural norms to increase the population of our species today, for there are far too many of us already, nor do we need to promote the expansion of particular tribes, for it turns out that despite clusters of biological variation, in the end, we are all exactly the same, one species, and race and tribe are nothing more than powerful fictions.
It is not surprising that White Christian Nationalists are obsessed with the birthrate among those they meaninglessly define as white, for they live in primitive notions of competition and cooperation is our destination.
The notion that sex is only about reproduction was never a reality for homo sapiens ayways, even if the physical pleasure of sex is constructed on biological necessity.
Untangling that history of bad sex is tricky, but maybe we can approach things a little differently.
Even before the #MeToo movement, people were moving toward the idea of affirmative consent. A sexual partner must be capable of consenting and must explicitly do so. No one ever owes anyone else sex.
I am not a fan of some strung out trafficked teen turning tricks so she won’t get beat up by her pimp, but I am not sure that transactional sex is always wrong, and even if I was, it has existed for as long as we have recorded history and doesn’t seem likely to disappear.
Many other professions depend on the body, including those football players many of us are watching this three day weekend, who often destroy their brains and bodies for our entertainment. Bodies are destroyed in absolutely idiotic wars all the time, and we celebrate that, give state-ordered murder several holidays a year.
I’m not a fan of the grotesque misogynist content so many teenage boys are watching online, but I’m also not a fan of the grotesque misogynist content teenage girls are seeing on Tik-Tok or in Vogue.
They say that with pornography, you know it when you see it, but everyone sees differently, and if bodies are beautiful because creation is beautiful and sex in a celebration of sensuality, then when does art become porn? I mean by this, of course, only hetero-normative cisgender and patriarchal depictions of sex, because queer representations of sex, even queer representations of non-sexual affection, are always pornographic.
Just ask Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the anti-LGBTQI+ group Moms for Liberty, who has admitted to participating in a threesome with her husband and another woman, or her husband Christian, the suspended chair of the hate-group called Florida’s Republican Party, currently under investigation for sexual assault and rape in connection with that same relationship.
Porn addiction is bad. Sexual addiction is bad.
Addiction is bad.
And I guess I could go on, talking in circles forever, trying to parse all of the stupid around sex. And all of the good about sex. Even sex that is sanctioned. But maybe I won’t.
Maybe it is enough to say that nature is never evil, it is just nature, and sex is natural.
Love God. Love God’s good creation. Love yourself. When you share that love physically and appropriately, let it be a cause for praise. Amen.