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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 28, 2014
What does sexual integrity look like? What is the history of our sexual mores?
This morning I’m going to talk about the next Commandment in the sermon series, and I have to say I’ve gotten a lot of comments along the lines of “I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say about this one!” I found myself saying “I can’t wait to see what I’m going to say too,” since it is one of those commandments that feels to me to be based on something we say we don’t believe any more, yet it also seems sensible. What am I saying? Here is the part that makes me mad about it, the part we say we don’t believe any more.
In those ancient times, a woman was the property of her father until she was married, then she became the property of her husband. It was important to the laws of inheritance that a man pass his property on to his own sons. Knowing whose children your wife was bearing was a matter of knowing whose blood lines were being perpetuated, knowing your family wealth was going to blood family. Punishments for sex outside of marriage were severe. In the laws set down in the first five books of the Bible, if a new bride were found not to be a virgin, she was dragged back to her father’s house and stoned to death by the men of the village. If she were raped, the man who raped her was forced to marry her. Having intercourse with your neighbor’s wife was an offense against your neighbor, a violation of his property rights. Married men could have sex with prostitutes; that was not considered adultery. The purpose of marriage was for rearing children. A man could marry more than one woman. King David had several wives. His son Solomon had thousands of wives and more concubines. Romantic love was not what it was about for most people. I’m sure there were many couples who loved one another, but that wasn’t the center around which the relationship turned.
From Jesus’ day we have the story of the woman taken in adultery.
But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If anyone of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Was Jesus soft on adultery? He said
Matthew 5:28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. and Matthew 5:32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.
Mostly what he seemed to try to do was to get people to look at themselves and their self-righteousness, to try to get the sinners to do better and the righteous folks to be kinder.
What might this Commandment have to say to people who don’t believe a wife is property?
In relatively recent history, romantic love became a reason for marriage. The ideal (at least here in the States) is that you will find someone with whom to be in love, and that you will love that person forever. People are expected to be faithful to their partners, and according to the studies about half of us are.
Most Americans, and most UUs, expect faithfulness of themselves and their partners as well. For some, there are other arrangements people make for marriage and partnership. Some have “open marriages” where both are allowed to have relationships outside the marriage, with the promise that there will be no deceit or lying about it. They say it’s the lying that adulterates, changes or destroys the relationship. The folks who name themselves polyamorists make committed relationships with more than one person at the same time. What is most important is that couples agree on what the situation is, and that it be fair to both parties.
It is not the Commandment that keeps most religious liberals faithful. It’s a sense that, if you have promised to be faithful you should keep that promise in order to honor and strengthen the trust you have with your partner. That trust is the surround within which vulnerability, intimacy and growth can take place. Also, having more than one sexual relationship at a time seems to most people to be spreading your energy too thin. One relationship of intimacy and engagement is demanding of time and energy.
An old Yiddish proverb says “You can’t ride two horses with one butt.” What makes sense in terms of ethical sexuality is what we talk about to our kids in the “Our Whole Lives (OWL) curriculum, and to ourselves.
Here is what I think:
I think there are many promises in a relationship that can be broken, and many things that, added to the chemical mix of an intimacy, can adulterate it, change it, or ruin it. For some couples, work is the adultery. Your partner’s energy, charm and good will are being spent elsewhere. You are not getting enough attention and all the work issues seem to take your partner farther away from you. For some couples, porn is the adultery. If one of you is spending more energy having sex solo with porn than you’re your primary person, something is wrong. Energy they could reasonably expect to be flowing toward them is flowing in another direction. You may find yourself comparing the real partner you have with an unreal dream, and reality may suffer. For some people, it feels like their partner is spending all their energy on their family of origin, or on an addiction that takes them away from the relationship. There are emotional ties outside of the relationship that hurt the relationship, there is emotional abandonment, when the person is there in body but not in other ways. There is sexual abandonment. Some people seem to believe that they can stop having sex with their partner and expect their partner not to look for sexual intimacy elsewhere. When I worked as a couples counselor, now and then I would run into people who had decided they didn’t want to have sex with their partner. Then they would be outraged and betrayed when s/he found sex elsewhere. The old rabbis had strict rules about what breaks the marriage covenant, and no sex was high on the list of things that killed the covenant. There are lots of ways to avoid showing up for your relationship. There are lots of ways to shred a covenant that has been made between two people.
I think couples should talk about their expectations of one another, about what arrangement they want for the relationship and not assume that there is only one way to go about things. If you make a covenant with a partner, try to keep it. If the covenant is broken, try to be engaged in renegotiating it so it is authentic again. In my opinion, if you are in a relationship where you would rather be alone than be with that person, then you should go on an end it. If you are in a relationship you wouldn’t want your children to be in as adults, YOU could change it. That’s a sermon about divorce, though, and that’s for another day. What matters is being loving to those you are with, as well as to yourself.
The UU stance toward sex is that it is healthy, healing, sacred, to be celebrated, but that its destructive side is equally powerful. The abuses of sexuality are hurtful. Several of my clergy colleagues have been removed from ministerial fellowship because of unethical sexual behavior within their congregations. One thing to know is that, in Texas, if a minister behaves sexually with a congregant, it is rape. Period.
I am one of the signers of an interfaith Religious Declaration on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. Part of it says: Our culture needs a sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts. All persons have the right and responsibility to lead sexual lives that express love, justice, mutuality, commitment, consent, and pleasure. Grounded in respect for the body and for the vulnerability that intimacy brings, this ethic fosters physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It accepts no double standards and applies to all persons, without regard to sex, gender, color, age, bodily condition, marital status, or sexual orientation.
We are fragile beings, my friends. Sometimes adultery is carelessness, sometimes it’s communication. Let’s love one another the best way we can.
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