• "CHRISTIAN SEXUAL ETHICS"
• Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent
• March 7, 2004
• The Reverend Stephen C. Scarlett

It has been a few years since I have preached on the epistle for the Second Sunday in Lent (1 Thess. 4:1f.). The woman of great faith in the gospel always seems to be a bit more compelling-or perhaps a bit easier. For the epistle is a straightforward restatement of Christian sexual ethics, a topic with which we are most comfortable when we say nothing about it.

But St. Paul says something very strong about it. "For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication." The word fornication refers to sex outside of marriage. It is a biblical companion to the word adultery. Adultery is a specific violation of one's marriage vows. Fornication expands this to include all sexual acts outside of marriage, before and after.

The common contemporary objection to the biblical teaching seems to be the claim that it is old-fashioned and outdated. The implication is that people, way back when, used to accept this teaching but modern people can be expected to have a more "enlightened" view.

Actually, the biblical teaching has always been radical. God commanded the Israelites not to commit adultery because they were, in fact, committing adultery. The Thessalonians, to whom St. Paul wrote in the epistle, lived in a city where promiscuity was part and parcel of the worship of pagan deities. Then, as now, the biblical teaching about chastity challenged the sexually licentious status quo.

If we look beneath the surface of the objections to the biblical commandment, we discover that the real objection is simply that the teaching is difficult. We find in the word of God a strict teaching and standard and we find within ourselves many desires that run contrary to God's word. We resolve the tension by compromise and rationalization. We change, or soften, the biblical teaching to make it fit more with the reality of our nature.

Many people wrongly view the moral law as a series of rules that we must obey in order to please God. According the New Testament the primary purpose of the moral law is to show us that we are sinners who need to be saved. The moral law reveals God's perfect will for mankind. The fact that our behavior and desires fall short of it reveals that we fall short of God's perfect will. We are sinners who need to be saved. St. Paul sums it up when he says in Romans, "The law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin" (7:14).

In this tension between God's law and our fallen nature, something must change. The human answer is to change God's law to make it accommodate human nature and to change the image of God so that he comes to look like a fallen man. God's answer is to change us by the gift of the Holy Spirit; it give us new hearts and a new nature so that we come, increasingly, to look like God.

Change begins with honesty and confession. For many people, being religious means pretending that they are someone they are not. It means pretending that they love people towards whom they really bear great malice; it means pretending that their motives are pure when in fact they are governed by greed; it means pretending on the surface that they are "good" when in fact there are torrents of contrary raging desires about an eighth of an inch beneath.

But God, "unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid" knows who we are and what is within us. What he wants from us is not the pretense that we are good but the honest admission that we are not. Honesty leads to genuine confession. Genuine confession leads to the grace of forgiveness and change. By God's grace we become what we are not by nature. This is the ongoing work of transformation in the Christian life. This is why we return, again and again, to the altar of God.

With sexuality as with all the wrongly ordered desires of our fallen nature, we need to take into account another truth. When we relax the standard to let our desires have free run, we discover a paradox. The more we let desire loose, the less satisfied it becomes. We can observe this in our culture. Sexual desire has been let loose for about forty years now. The result is a less contented, more sexually obsessed culture.

We can observe this in our own lives. When we let our fallen desires have free reign in any area of our lives, the result is that we become less fulfilled and more captive to the desire. As 2 Peter says, "Whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved" (2:19, ESV).

The devil is a liar. He tells us that we can be fulfilled in that quick and easy way by merely giving in to the desire but he only leaves us with greater hunger and guilt in the long run. Here we should reflect again on the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1f.), which is a model for Lent and for our lives. The devil offered Jesus things quickly, by way of shortcut. Jesus resisted because he knew that what he wanted could only be obtained with patient obedience, by way of the cross.

Fallen desires need to be confessed and redirected toward their proper God-given end. We must remember that God gave mankind sexual desire in the first place. And he has ordained a proper means to fulfill it. Apart from that proper means, it will never be fulfilled.

The proper means of fulfillment, ultimately, is in our union with God. Heaven is portrayed in the New Testament as a great wedding feast (cf. Rev. 19:7). In our union with God and in our union with each other in him-what we call the communion of the saints-somehow every desire of our souls will find its true fulfillment. The best of this world can merely point to the glory and joy of the new creation (cf. Rev. 21:1-5).

In this life, God has ordained the marriage of a man and a woman to be an image of the eternal wedding. We point our desires toward their true end by being faithful in our marriages and abstinent outside of marriage.

This sanctification of desire is God's work in us. God takes us in our unclean state and makes us clean. We will be clothed in white for the heavenly feast, not because we are pure by nature but because Christ has washed us in his blood and made us clean.

As the epistle says, "For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication...For God has not called us unto uncleanness but unto holiness."